WordPress started off as a blogging platform a long time ago and now powers over a quarter of the Internet.
How did it get here? Well, there are actually two ways you can use WordPress:
- WordPress.org allows you do download the source code and host it on your own, which means you get full control over how everything works. In that sense, WordPress.com is an open-source CMS (Content Management System), with the downside that you also need to worry about upgrades, security and everything else that could go wrong with hosting a website and managing the code.
- WordPress.com is where you get the website builder experience: you create an account and they take care of everything for you (for a fee or for free on the ad-supported version). It used to be that WordPress.com was the cleaner, sanitized version, where you could only install plugins and themes that were carefully selected and vetted by the WordPress team (very few compared to the vast WordPress plugins/themes universe).
Recently WordPress.com has decided to allow any custom plugin and theme to be installed on the $25/month plan. This is huge, because if there's one thing that sets WordPress apart from all the other website builders it's the ocean of plugins and themes it taps into. Basically, almost anything a website can do, there's a plugin for that. Most niches and needs are covered, and lots of the plugins and themes are also free.
One area where WordPress stands behind the competition is the usability. This is somewhat to be expected given the sheer power WordPress has, it's very tough to hide away all that complexity. Plus, all those custom themes and plugins each have their particular way of doing things, which can get very messy when you have dozens of plugins installed.
Another reason WordPress is a bit cumbersome to use is it's not a drag and drop editor, but content is entered in forms. This separates the design from the content and makes everything less enjoyable. If you have previous experience with the WordPress admin area you'll be ok, otherwise prepare for a bit of head scratching at first.
There's a free version available if you want to test the waters. Paid plans start at $4/month
Powering over 100.000.000, Wix is the most popular website builder out there, not counting Wordpress, which threads the line between a CMS and a website builder.
Wix excels at being accessible, both from a user friendliness perspective and price-wise. It has one of the most easy to use editors and the next steps seem to be logical throughout the building process.
Wix also has very strong blogging and ecommerce features, and it's always adding more features. There's also a huge app store available, which can augment your website should you need any niche features.
You can hire a web designer that specializes in Wix, right from the wix platform. You can also see a list of their previous projects in the portfolio section.
There's a forever free plan available that is ad supported (the ads promote the Wix platform) and plans start at $8.50/month, free domain included.
While Wix is the Swiss Army knife of website builders (lots of features but looking a bit clunky), Squarespace is like a chef's knife (elegant, very focused).
All the templates look great on desktop and mobile and can be edited in depth with the style editor (each text, link or icon can be customized to look just the way you want). If that's not enough, you can jump in the CSS code and geek it out until the cows come home.
Unlike some competitors, Squarespace doesn't allow for backups.
There are also some great ecommerce features available, should you need to sell a few items through your website. Blogging is also available for all plans, and it's very polished.
There's no free plan but a 14 day free trial is available. Paid plans start at $12/month (for the yearly plan), which also includes a free domain.
Weebly comes of as very user friendly, even playful. The drag and drop editor is very intuitive and the templates are modern looking and fully responsive.
There is no undo and there are no backups, so be careful with what you delete!
There are apps for iPhone, Android phones, tablets and even smartwatches. You can easily edit your website on the go and follow stats and form entries.
There are also some great membership features available, making Weebly a strong competitor if you're looking for a membership website.
Other features like the form editor, blogging and ecommerce are also well done and show that Weebly is a well-rounded website builder.
There's a forever free plan available with 500MB of storage and a weebly.com subdomain. Email and chat support is available to all plans and phone support is available with the $12/month plan.
Strikingly specializes in creating one page websites, which means all the different sections are on the same page and you can scroll between them. The templates are very well done and work great on all resolutions. Speaking of which, you can use the iOS or Android apps to update your website on the go or just check the analytics.
There is a blog section with all the standard features included and a very basic contact form.
There is a free plan available which allows for unlimited websites, 5GB bandwidth and even a "store" where you can sell one product per site. You won't be able to sell digital products through the store though.
For $8/month you'll get 50GB bandwidth, a free domain and 5 products per store.
I would recommend Strikingly if you want great looking one-page websites that are not very information-heavy.
Voog has a clean and intuitive interface and it's very well suited for small websites or blogs. You can even sell a few products with the handy ecommerce features, but I wouldn't recommend having a large inventory with them or you'll get frustrated pretty fast.
The blog is pretty standard, with the possibility of posting in the future. You can add a contact form that emails you the entries.
There is a lot of support for multi-language pages: each page can have different language versions.
There are not a lot of themes, but they look good and are fully responsive.
There's no free plan, but a free trial is available and paid plans start at $6/month.
Ukit is a relatively new website builder, it comes from Russia and it puts up a decent fight against the established leaders like Wix, Squarespace and Weebly.
There are over 250 templates available to choose from, but most of them look alike and the best ones can only be used on the Premium+ plan ($8 / month)
Another shortcoming on the templates front, not all of them have the same functionality (widgets) and you kind of have to guess what works where.
There are a few translations available for the admin area (English, Portuguese, Romanian and Russian).
There is no membership functionality but a nice surprise is the unlimited SMS notifications for contact form entries, available for all the paid plans.
Speaking of which, there is not free plan available, only a 14 days free trial. After that you'll need to choose a paid plan, starting at $4 / month, which is very competitive with no ads and unlimited storage.
For $9.60 per month you get access to the Ecommerce functionality, which keep getting better, lately they've added in-house payment processing, which means visitors don't leave the site when they make a purchase.
One other nice feature is the ability to undo/redo almost any access and more importantly, you can save the whole website instance (10 backups available), which means you can restore the whole website in a previous state.
There is also a service where they build a website or landing page for $100, in 10 days. I wouldn't expect anything spectacular, but it could be a good starting point.
With Ucraft you need to pick one of the three plans: Landing Page (Free), Website ($6/month) or Ecommerce ($13/month).
There is a 14 day free trial available, but you need to enter your credit card details to access it.
Ucraft is a much newer addition to the website builder world and that's reflected in the template collection (which is fairly large). Most if not all templates are very trendy, with large resolution photos and lots of white space.
You can add a whole team to edit your website and you can grant them roles (like Designer, Editor, etc) as well as specific privileges.
There's also a image editor available and you can easily import images into Ucraft thanks to their integration with Unsplash.
They even give you access to a logo creation tool, which is nice, I guess.
There's also an Ecommerce plan and it has most of the features you'd expect, especially at the low price of $13/month.
Duda is a website builder that power a lot of hosting companies with their whitelabel offering. 1&1, 123 Reg, Register.it are among the many hhosting providers that also resell the Duda Website Builder under their own brand.
They also have a "retail" option that feels a bit pricey, at $14.25 per month.
Among their best features are a very well done form builder, lots of styling settings for the templates and especially their "personalization rules". That means that you can customize the content on the page according to certain rules like what time it is or where the visitors arrived from.
The Enterprise plan allows you to export the full website in a zip archive.
Notably there is no live chat or phone support number available.
The editor throws a lot of buttons and menus at you and it's a bit overwhelming for beginners.
There is a free plan available and paid plans start at $4.95/month. You need to pay $9.95 to get rid of the Yola branding in the footer and more importantly a mobile-ready website, which should really be included in every package by now.
Yola tries to upsell you at every corner and it's not always useful stuff either, like an SEO package that consists of a bunch of tools you could find for free with the help of Google.
The templates look two decades old, enough said.
The Good
- On the plus side, they have a small dialogue pop-up in the corner where you can enter a query like "How can I ad a map?". For the most common questions it seems to find answers automatically, but for the more complex ones you'll need to go to Chat or Email. Email was the only option available for me during testing. It didn't help that they asked for my name and email while I was already logged in.
The Bad
- Yola tries to squeeze some dollars (29.95 monthly to be exact) for SEO optimization, which is just a SEO scanner with suggestions. You can find many good ones for free online, so this seems just a way to make a quick buck from less technical users.
The Ugly
- The editor feels unstable and the interface consists of throwing together random buttons together, adding to the confusion of a first-time user.
- You can add an online store to your site, which has some decent options but nothing to write home about.
Overall Yola seems a bit confusing, backward but stable solution to build a site. I wouldn't recommend starting a new site with Yola now, given the fierce competition they have in the likes of Squarespace or Weebly.
ImCreator (formerly XPRS) has lots of slick looking, responsive themes. You also get to play around with the menus and arrange it just the way you like it.
Unfortunately aside from the nice looking templates there's not much to recommend it. The editor is very glitchy and confusing (although it does look nice, it's not very intuitive) and the website elements are pretty basic (forms, blogs, store) are all lacking. There are no membership or multilingual options either/
There's a cery limited free plan, with only 50mb of storage available. Also, when you switch a template you lose your content and have to enter it again.
A big plus is that you can export your website and move it elsewhere, which is unfortunately not that common in the website builder world.
Simvoly is a newcomer in the website builder world and it seems to focus on agencies and developers that want to build websites for their clients. That doesn't mean you can't use it for yourself though.
Simvoly has a couple of feature it does very well: blogging and ecommerce. They also offer a membership option so you can create private content.
The form builder is decent and covers most needs.
Unfortunately that's about it for Simvoly, there are is no app store and barely any 3rd party integrations to speak of, which puts it in the bottom of the list, way behind the likes of Wix or Squarespace.
There's no forever free plan but there is a free trial available, no credit card required. Website and Logo design is also available for a decent price.
Overall I'd say Simvoly is a good option for beginners if you only need a fairly simple website where you can even sell a few products. You'll probably outgrow it quickly and find yourself looking for a more developed alternative.
SnapPages is a website builder made for small sites and is friendly to beginners. It doesn't have too many advanced features and the ones it does have are well presented by the editor interface.
There are just a handful of templates but they look good and can be customized pretty heavily.
The editor is slick and it has a nice feel overall, but it can be confusing at times, for example when adding a section. You get a bunch of images dropped on the page (presumably the way the sections will look), but no titles and no descriptions of the sections, so you sort of have to squint and try to understand what each section is about.
On the plus side, pages have page versions, so you can restore them to certain states in the past.
The form editor is well made, it has some elements that other simple website builders lack, like checkbox, radio and even a map item.
There's no free plan but a 14 day free trial is available. Paid plans start at $4/month but for a custom domain and no Snappages branding you'll have to pay $10, which is still not bad.
Zoho is a huge cloud software company and the website builder is just a small (and somewhat ignored) corner of their empire. As such, don't expect to find anything impressive with their offering, it's just a standard website builder that may have been a hit 10 years ago but now is just another drop in the ocean.
While the form builder and the blogging tools are well done, it's not enough to convince in such a competitive market.
Zoho does allow for header and footer code to be added, so you can include some javascript plugins and widgets from third parties.
An interesting features is the possibility to add 301 redirects, which is especially helpful if you switched to Zoho from another host and you want to redirect the old links to your new website.
The paid plans start at $5/site/month for 1GB storage and 10 GB bandwidth which is not a lot, especially if you plan to post pictures on your website. There is a limited free plan available.
Zoho does shine in one aspect, it's well integrated with the rest of their offering like databases and CRM. So if you plan on building a data intensive website it may still be a good choice, otherwise, the boring themes and the stale feature set won't make any heads turn.
With Webstarts it's win some, lose some. Some features, like the blogging options (set post time, decent formatting) and the form builder are well done, while in other areas it's really lacking.
The editor is particularly confusing, with a "Pages" button on the left that is actually meant for SEO and a drop-down on the upper left side that is where you can switch and edit pages. It takes a while to find your bearings and this can be a big hurdle for newcomers.
There is a membership option where you can set pages that can be seen by certain members only, which is a welcome surprise.
Another minus is with the mobile experience. Webstarts allows you to place the page items wherever you want by dragging (snapping and guides are available). Unfortunately this does not translate well on the infinite mobile screen sizes, with hit and miss results. Sometimes everything looks just the way you meant to, other times some elements are nowhere to be found.
There is a (limited) forever free plan you can use to see if you like it but you'll need the Pro Plus plan ($7.16/month) for any serious website (mobile optimization and 1000 contact form enquiries).
Cindr brands itself as a truly simple website builder and it tries to deliver on that promise buy keeping the featureset to a bare minimum. There are only 8 templates to pick from and the editor is very basic and restrictive (you can't move the blocks wherever you want).
Cindr is built around the "blocks" that you can add to the page (image, text, forms, etc). Unfortunately the blocks aren't very customizable and you start hitting walls pretty soon. Overall it seems like Cindr is underdeveloped and stuck in time, which is a pitty because simplicity is always a strong selling point, as long as it comes with enough funtionality.
There's a forever free plan if you want to play around with it but even at the price of zero there are better alternatives out there.
1&1 is a web hosting company that resells the Duda website builder. Check out the Duda Review for a review of the same builder
Other than that, you need to enter your credit card details to enter the free trial and you need to call them to cancel your plan. The are also known to have some bad billing practices and to always try to upsell you.
