Comparing Wix vs GoDaddy: Which Is Your Best Option for 2026?

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BEST ALL-IN-ONE	BEST SPEEDY SETUP
Wix	GoDaddy
Overall Rating 4.8	Overall Rating 4.1
Today's best price $17 $15.30 with code “TAKE10”	Today's best price $10.99
Free plan or free trial Free plan	Free plan or free trial Free plan
Number of templates 2,000+	Number of templates 200+
Free custom domain	Free custom domain
AI website builder	AI website builder
Recommended for Businesses promoting their online presence	Recommended for Tech novices and side hustlers
Start Free Trial	Try GoDaddy
See our Wix Review	See our GoDaddy Review

Who Do I Recommend Wix and GoDaddy For?

Both Wix and GoDaddy are among the best website builders we’ve tested, but the two cater to different audiences:

Of the 12 website builders we tested this year, both Wix and GoDaddy offer the best value for money plans. You can see a breakdown of each builder’s pricing and plans in the sections below:

How Much Does Wix Cost?

Wix’s pricing is split into four plans, three of which have ecommerce features:

• Light – $17 per month (billed annually)
• Core – $29 per month (billed annually)
• Business – $36 per month (billed annually)
• Business Elite – $159 per month (billed annually)

For new online businesses trying to get off the ground, Wix gives users the tools for succeeding – but with slightly larger start-up costs than GoDaddy.

How Much Does GoDaddy Cost?

GoDaddy’s pricing is split into three premium plans, with only one plan having ecommerce features (the Commerce plan):

• Basic – $10.99 per month (billed annually)
• Premium – $16.99 per month (billed annually)
• Commerce – $23.99 per month (billed annually)

If you do decide to sell, then the Commerce plan is cheaper than Wix’s most basic ecommerce plan ($29/mo). But you will get more features included with Wix’s plan.

Can I Build a Website for Free?

For new users and businesses just getting started, Wix and GoDaddy both offer a free website builder. This is great if you have little to no budget, but I wouldn’t recommend staying on a free plan long-term since they lack the scalability and features of premium plans. Test the editor and features out with the free plans, but upgrade to a premium plan once you’re ready to share your site publicly.

The Winner

Wix and GoDaddy both have affordable plans

Both Wix and GoDaddy offer a free forever plan, which come with ads and limited features. Once you’re ready to upgrade, GoDaddy’s plans are cheaper overall, but if you pay a bit more for Wix, you’ll unlock a greater suite of tools and design options.

Though I found both builders easy to use during hands-on testing, GoDaddy is the better choice for total beginners, while Wix is suitable for those seeking a more hands-on approach with plenty of creative control.

How Do I Get Started With Wix and GoDaddy?

When you boot each website builder up, you’re presented with a choice to use their AI website builders, which involves filling in a short questionnaire used to generate a custom template based on your answers.

When I tested out my own AI prompts for building websites, I found that both Wix and GoDaddy generated completely new templates based on my answers, meaning they truly are customized for your particular business.

You can see our experience using Wix’s AI website builder in the video below:

Play

However, what sets GoDaddy apart is its speed – you can have a published site in under a minute, making it the fastest builder for getting online. So, I highly recommend GoDaddy if you’re on a time crunch.

Is Wix or GoDaddy’s Editor Better?

I found that once I was in the editor, GoDaddy’s drag-and-drop wasn’t as advanced as Wix’s. Elements could only be placed in certain blocks, and there was little customization to be found in their style and size on the page. With Wix, I could move elements anywhere on the page without limitation.

In streamlining the entire building process, GoDaddy has stripped back a lot of user choices but keeps things simple. For example, while GoDaddy does have premade templates to pick from, it heavily advertises the use of its AI builder, whereas Wix is more upfront about there being two choices: an AI builder or templates.

💡 One thing we noticed during testing…

I was impressed by the amount of creative choice Wix gave me in the editor. From the right-hand sidebar, I could add gallery carousels, contact forms, restaurant menus, social media links, and other useful design elements to my homepage. If you want to make your website your own, Wix is a good call!

Holly Choules Writer

The Winner

GoDaddy's onboarding process and editor are really simple

Wix’s editor is more advanced. From its generative AI tools to its endless customization options, you can create a sophisticated website that comes with the key functionalities your business needs to grow online.

Try GoDaddy for Free

Though you can create presentable designs with GoDaddy, Wix’s templates and customization options offer much more variety. From the editor, I could customize each part of my website by dragging and dropping different design elements wherever I wanted on the page.

Wix has over 2,000 free templates to choose from, covering industries ranging from online sports stores to forensic pathology. Plus, Wix has an AI Theme Assistant that offers design suggestions within the editor itself to help with areas like color schemes and font style.

GoDaddy, on the other hand, falls short with roughly over 200 themes. When I explored the templates myself, the limited nature of GoDaddy’s editor made each template look fairly similar and blur together in my mind. GoDaddy pushes its AI building experience ahead of its templates for one reason: its template design is lacking.

The Winner

Wix’s design features are more advanced

With over 2,000 templates to choose from spanning multiple industries, and a wide range of customization options, Wix makes it easier for you to design a website that best represents your business.

Try Wix Now

Features are what really separate the average platforms from the elite. What you can and can’t do on each platform is crucial to your final decision, especially when starting a new business.

What Features Does Wix Have?

According to our research, Wix is the reigning king of website features. Its builder comes with a range of tools, all available from one centralized dashboard, including:

• Wix Astro, an AI-powered business assistant introduced
• Wix Business Launcher to help you find other ways to make money online
• Wix Menu (for restaurants)
• Wix Booking to help manage services and appointments
• Wix Hotels to support with reservations and payments
• Pricing plans to showcase transparent prices to your site visitors
• Membership groups for accessing exclusive content
• Email marketing for connecting with subscribers with branded newsletters

Do GoDaddy’s Features Compete With Wix?

GoDaddy can’t hold a candle to Wix’s range of features. As well as lacking an app store – meaning it loses a lot of niche, business-related features – building a website with GoDaddy is much more limited than Wix, with an emphasis on being streamlined and easy to use rather than offering the best quality features.

However, where GoDaddy does stand out is in its marketing and social media integration. With features such as building branded content, an AI social media content calendar, and email automation available on every plan, GoDaddy is great for getting your business name out there. It’s also a good alternative for those needing a website to advertise their business and little else.

The Winner

Wix has the best website features

Wix’s range of features and quality of tools makes it flexible and usable for any type of business. The bulk of important features, such as email marketing, are built into the builder, but you can also add extra functionality through Wix’s app market.

Test Wix for Free

Wix is best ecommerce website builder out of the two, since it’s home to more powerful and scalable sales features than GoDaddy. However, though Wix and GoDaddy do offer ecommerce, these options are best for small businesses that only want to sell a few products on their website.

Both providers include these six vital sales features on their respective ecommerce plans:

• Sell unlimited types and quantities of products
• Sell both physical and/or digital products
• Process payments securely through gateways like PayPal, Stripe, or Square (although Wix offers a larger number of gateway options)
• Mobile apps for managing your store on the go
• Various shipping and accountancy options
• Discount and sale codes

The issue with GoDaddy’s ecommerce is that its features are limited and lack scalability. For example, GoDaddy won’t be ideal if you’re looking for dropshipping or international selling tools. As a small business, you don’t want to immediately cap your business’ potential growth.

Wix’s ecommerce plans extend all the way up to specialized enterprise plans for industry-leading brands, meaning you have plenty of room to grow your business with Wix’s subscriptions. To put it simply, Wix’s sales features let you run a sizable and profitable online store, while GoDaddy limits you to a smaller business.

The Winner

Wix can help you grow your online store

Wix has better sales features than GoDaddy, because it allows online stores to scale up as they grow bigger, meaning that you can rely on Wix for longer throughout your ecommerce journey.

Sell With Wix

Wix’s SEO features are the strongest overall, outperforming GoDaddy thanks to its personalized SEO guidance and third-party integrations with industry standard tools like Google Analytics.

Wix also provides top-notch customization across the board, allowing you to edit things that will have an impact on SEO, such as meta titles and descriptions, URL slugs, and header code.

What SEO Tools Does Wix Offer?

Wix has plenty of built-in SEO tools, as well as integrations with popular SEO platforms:

• Customized SEO checklist – Wix offers personalized SEO support and recommendations based on your website, so you can make strategic improvements to boost your rankings
• Semrush – a popular keyword research tool you can use to look for search keywords related to your industry.
• Google Analytics – gives you access to numerous website metrics, from key traffic sources to the number of conversions on a page.
• SE Rankings – this tool provides you with insights into your main competitors, helping you compete with them on search engine results pages.
• Microsoft Clarity – used to access insights on user behaviors, so you can track what real visitors are doing via heatmaps and website sessions metrics.
• Wix SEO Learning Hub – access resources on all things SEO, including webinars, glossaries, and online courses from industry experts
• Searchlight newsletter – a newsletter by Wix detailing the latest SEO updates.

How Does GoDaddy’s SEO Compare?

No matter which premium plan you choose, GoDaddy provides access to SEO basics, as well as its SEO Wizard website optimizer.

Unfortunately, GoDaddy lacks the advanced SEO features that Wix provides. GoDaddy covers the basics, such as editing your meta titles and descriptions, URL slugs, and image alt tags. However, you’ll have to do without canonical tags or SEO best practice prompts. It also can’t compete with the sheer amount of extra integrations and partnerships Wix has, but then again no other competitor really can.

The Winner

Wix has better SEO tools than GoDaddy

Wix is above GoDaddy when it comes to SEO, offering a fleshed-out SEO checklist alongside unique integrations with platforms like Semrush and Microsoft Clarity.

When comparing Wix and GoDaddy, I used the results of our website builder research to provide you with suitable recommendations for your business. Our team conducted over 300 hours of data collection and covered 207 areas of investigation.

Each platform is assessed via six key criteria that reflect what users are looking for in a builder—this criteria is also weighted based on importance:

1. Website functionality – 30%
2. Design features – 25%
3. User experience –  15%
4. Pricing – 15%
5. Help and support – 10%
6. Reputation – 5%

My own experiences during hands-on testing have also shaped the views expressed in this article. By getting up close and personal with Wix and GoDaddy, I have a clear understanding of each builder’s strengths and weaknesses. This allows me to share useful insights that can help you make your final choice.

It was a great showing from the two builders, but in the end, Wix is the overall winner. Its superior features, such as its AI chatbot builder and in-depth marketing suite, make it difficult to suggest any other builder for business owners that want to promote themselves online.

That being said, GoDaddy certainly cements itself as a solid cheap alternative, great for those who are short on time and money and, perhaps, those who need to streamline their operations between their in-person and online presence.

If you want to know more about each builder, you can read our full Wix review and GoDaddy review.