Wix is our overall number one rated website builder, but that doesn’t mean it’s right for everyone. Whether you’re looking for alternatives for your new site, or want to switch from Wix to something different, you’re in the right place! We know the market and we know the competitors inside out.
Here at Website Builder Expert, we conduct research to give you accurate and balanced data so you can choose the best website builder for your website. If you want an alternative to Wix, this article will help you narrow down your options and find the best result.
We’ll give you an overview of Wix’s main competitors, and a detailed breakdown of these alternatives by what they’re best for. This covers which is best for business sites, blogging, which is easiest to use, the best for ecommerce, and to sum up, which holds the place as best all-round website builder. But first, let’s take a look at who these competitors are…
Wix Competitors: the Top 9
- WordPress.org – best for blogging, this open source platform requires coding knowledge. But you’ll get a high level of creative control and it’s great for scaling sites.
- WordPress.com – best for blogging if you’re not a confident coder. Easier to use than the WordPress.org platform, it combines powerful blogging features with a website builder design.
- Weebly – best all-round alternative. Weebly has a lot more features than Wix – these features are built-in, so you don’t have to install them as third party apps like you do with Wix.
- GoDaddy– best for a quick and easy business site: skip creating from scratch, you can answer a few questions and GoDaddy will create a great business site for you using ADI (Artificial Design Intelligence).
- SITE123 – using ADI this builder creates an already formatted site for you from just a few simple questions, making it easier than ever and saving you time.
- Squarespace– best for creating good-looking, aesthetic, and professional sites.
- Strikingly – best value for money and great for beginners, especially bloggers.
- Shopify – best for large and serious ecommerce sites. It offers the high level of creative control that makes Wix so popular, combined with the business management tools to support your site’s growth.
- BigCommerce – best for large businesses as it provides the best all round solutions for online stores.
Wix: Are There Better Alternatives?
There’s no denying that Wix is extremely popular. You see the adverts on television and YouTube, and if you’ve been searching for website builders online then chances are it’s popped up in your social media feed too. Wix splashes out for its publicity, and it pays off.
Just see the graph below to see how its google search numbers compare with two of its main competitors, Weebly and Squarespace!
As you can see, Wix’s advertising team know what they’re doing, and so do their product team. While we do rank Wix as our number one all round website builder, there are plenty of Wix alternatives out there! Let’s have a closer look at which ones are best for the type of site you need.
Best Alternative to Wix for Business Sites
Weebly is the best Wix alternative for business sites. With more storage space on offer and more inhouse features than Wix, Weebly is a great choice for your business website.
Weebly’s features are built-in, unlike Wix. Wix mostly uses third party apps which can hike up the overall cost of building and growing your website. Weebly helps you keep costs down by offering a wide range of inhouse features. These include site search, forums, a members area, email marketing, and more.
This said, Weebly has more of a learning curve than Wix. In our research people found it 22% more difficult to use than Wix.
So Weebly takes a little more getting used to – but if you’re not technically confident, don’t worry, it’s still geared towards non-coders.
If you want to keep it really simple, then check out GoDaddy. By using ADI (Artificial Design Intelligence), GoDaddy makes it super quick and easy to create your website. This technology makes it easier than ever to get started online.
All you do is answer a few questions about the type of website you’re creating, and it gives you a template all set out with the information you’ve given it. If you’re building an online store, the relevant features are already set up for you, along with the name of your site. This means you can have a website up in a matter of minutes!
But overall, Weebly offers great scope for growing your brand and business.
Which Sites are Easier to Use Than Wix?
If you’re looking for something that’s easy and super quick to use, take a look at SITE123. This website builder is similar to Wix and GoDaddy in its use of ADI. It creates a tailored and personalized template with all the features you need already installed.
All it does is ask you a few questions – for example, the name of your site and what type of site you want. It then uses your answers to create a pre-formed website, saving you the time and effort of starting from scratch. It really is as easy as one, two, three.
Here’s what one SITE123 user had to say about this beginner-friendly builder:
“Overall I found it really, really simple to use.”
This simplicity makes building a website really quick and possible for even the most nervous tech-phobe. One of the main strengths of SITE123 is its amazing help and support. So even if you did run into difficulty, you’ve got help at hand.
The best support is offered through the live chat feature, which guides you through the creation process. This makes the whole building and editing journey much easier, as you have someone there to talk to and questions as you go.
All in all, SITE123’s automatic creation and top notch live chat support makes it the easiest website builder to use.
If you like the sound of this ADI style of building a website but don’t fancy SITE123, why not check out GoDaddy? It lets you build a website in the same way, using the information you give it to create a personalized website for you to edit. Again, this makes means it’s super quick and easy to publish a website.
But if you want to be more hands on in creating and editing your website, Strikingly is another top choice. It still has a really strong focus on making it really simple for anyone and everyone to create their own website. In fact, Strikingly’s aim is to have your website live as quickly as possible: 15 minutes to be exact!
Strikingly makes it simple to edit, switch, and personalize your chosen template. You get the satisfaction of having designed and customized it yourself, without the hassle or headaches of starting from scratch.
With any of these three builders you’ll have a stress free experience of building your website. SITE123 and GoDaddy are the quickest and are good replacements for Wix ADI. Strikingly provides a hassle free hands on approach more similar to Wix’s drag and drop editor.
Best Alternative Website Builder for Blogging
The best Wix alternative for blogging is WordPress. Whether you choose WordPress.com or WordPress.org depends on your needs and technical confidence. WordPress.org is the original and ultimate blogging platform, but remember it is not an actual website builder.
WordPress.com is not a traditional website builder either, but its design is more streamlined so you get the powerful blogging features WordPress is known for, with the simplified feel of a website builder.
You can read more about WordPress.org in our in-depth review. But for now we’re going to focus on WordPress.com as it’s closer to an actual website builder and is the easier to use option out of the two blogging platforms.
WordPress.com is made for blogging, and it shows! It’s what this builder does best, (meaning that if you want a highly customized website for anything other than blogging you’re better off looking elsewhere).
If you’re looking for a blogging specialist, WordPress.com has all the features you could wish for. These include adding comments, blog specific analytics, display categories, an RSS feed, and the ability to archive older blogs. Wix doesn’t support these last two features, so WordPress.com is a great choice for escaping these limitations.
Which Website Builder is Better than Wix for Design
The best Wix alternative for good-looking designs is Squarespace. While boasting over 500 professionally designed templates, Wix can’t compete with Squarespace’s clean and structured look.
Many love Wix for the high level of creative control of the drag and drop editing tool, but others find this unlimited editing style a cause for anxiety. One wrong click or slip and your website can look disjointed or unbalanced to the viewer.
But Squarespace’s templates use sections, spacers and blocks to help direct and guide your customization. Add to this the range of tailored templates and it’s clear why Squarespace is the favorite for aesthetics.
Here’s what an industry expert had to say about Squarespace’s designs:
“I feel like Squarespace come across like they’d fulfil most people’s needs, they offer maybe the most risk-free solution in a way, a more modern look and features, and yeah that’s the two things that stand out most.”
Squarespace was ranked as the best builder in our research when it came to brand, user experience, and design because of the style and ease of its templates.
Which Wix Competitor is Best Value for Money?
A relatively new website builder wins this: Strikingly is amazing value for money. There’s a wide range of stylish templates, great features including a Simple Store and blogging tools, 24/7 customer support, and absolutely no pressure to upgrade from the free plan.
This is a good all-round free website builder for beginners. It’s super simple to create basic one-page websites – you don’t even need to know a single line of code! By choosing from their selection of templates you can create stylish, professional single page websites with Strikingly in about 15 minutes.
You can see some examples of sites built with Strikingly below:
From the examples given on Strikingly’s website it’s clear the templates cover a wide range of industries, from portfolios to online CVs, blogs and online stores.
With the Simple Store feature available even on the free plan it means that anyone can start to make money through their Strikingly website. You can only add one product with unlimited stock to your store on the free version though, so if you want to sell more either upgrade or take a look at Shopify.
Strikingly also has a range of blogging features on its free plan. These include social bookmarking, an RSS feed and search feature, comments section, and display categories. All you have to do is add the Simple Blog feature to your site and you can get writing! So, if you’re a blogger but think WordPress might be too technical, and want to start off small, then Strikingly is your best choice.
The simplicity of Strikingly’s templates means that if you want a high level of creative control, like you get with Wix, you’re better off looking at a builder like WordPress or Squarespace. But if you’re happy to let the template do most of the work then this is a perfect choice. You can have your website up quickly, easily, and without paying a cent if you don’t want to!
Best Ecommerce Alternative to Wix
Shopify is the best website builder to create your online store with as an alternative to Wix.
It combines the creative control users value on Wix with powerful ecommerce tools which drive sales and support your online store’s growth. With Shopify you can have a range of features Wix does not support, such as:
- Bulk product imports
- Customer login checkout area which stores payment details
- Abandoned cart notification
- Multi-channel integration
Wix does support ecommerce, but as these features show, Shopify has the superior service when it comes to helping you manage and build your business. For example, Wix allows you to create discount codes but doesn’t provide an option to limit the number of times it can be used. With Shopify you can create discount codes, apply them to particular products, and limit their use.
Shopify can’t quite compete with Wix for customization. But Shopify has stronger and more specific sales features to support your store’s growth and help maximise your online presence as a business.
If you’re managing a larger business then BigCommerce is worth checking out. It has powerful tools to boost your sales, from creating promotion campaigns to product wish lists for your site, and integrates your store across various social media channels too.
This makes it a smart choice if you want to really focus on scaling your business and are happy to invest in that growth. This is a strong ecommerce builder which offers all round solutions for your online store.
Best All-Rounder
So out of these Wix competitors, which is the best all-round website builder? Wix usually holds this title, but second best has to be Weebly. Its wide range of inhouse features make it ideal for scaling your website, and its top notch SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tools and guides make it easy to boost your online presence.
The lowest pricing plan starts at just $8 a month (on a yearly subscription). This offers great value for money for the number of apps and features you get. Weebly can be a little difficult to use in the beginning, but if you have the time to learn your way around then you’ll soon find it easy and enjoyable!
If you have an online store, Weebly is a solid choice too. A strong ecommerce focus can be seen in recent updates to their Mobile App. Allowing you to manage your business on the go, from printing shipping labels straight from the app to creating personalized, branded coupons from your phone.
Although Weebly is our best all-round Wix alternative, WordPress.org deserves a mention too. It is one of the most popular platforms around – over 30% of the internet uses WordPress! You need to know how to code to use WordPress, and you also find and pay for your own hosting provider.
If the thought of either of these doesn’t have you shaking in your boots then WordPress.org is a great choice. We recommend it here because it has a lot more creative control and freedom compared to online website builders, meaning that pretty much anything is possible!
You have full control of how you design and manage your website, and the coding aspect means you can create complex sites with whatever custom features or functions you want. This means it is not beginner friendly, but it does make it an extremely powerful and popular platform to create websites on.
Conclusion
Wix is a popular website builder, and rightly so! In fact it’s so popular, sometimes it can feel like it’s the only option out there. But there are tons of other great choices, whether you want an online store or a blog, are a beginner or a coding pro.
Our best all-round choice as a Wix alternative is Weebly, for its range of features, ecommerce functions, and SEO guides, which also makes it our top pick for business websites. If you’re a confident coder, WordPress.org is a highly flexible option with the most creative control available.
Let’s have a quick recap:
- Best for business: Weebly
- Best for a quick and easy business site: GoDaddy
- Best for creative freedom and blogging: WordPress.org
- Best for blogging: WordPress.com
- Best for a quick and easy site: SITE123
- Best for design: Squarespace
- Best value for money: Strikingly
- Best for ecommerce: Shopify
- Best for large online stores: BigCommerce
So, there really is something for everyone. Whether you champion Shopify or Weebly, WordPress or Squarespace, you can find your perfect website builder without giving into Wix’s advertising campaigns. Turn off the TV, ignore those adverts, and enjoy building your very own website on your new platform!
No comments yet.