7 Best Wix Alternatives in 2023 | Find the Best One for You

We were particularly impressed by Squarespace’s marketing features. Similar to Wix, it comes with an in-house email marketing tool, social media integrations, built-in live feeds, and a social post creator. Its blogging features are just as strong, including categories, comments, scheduling, and blog-specific SEO tools.

Squarespace also comes with the ability to hire an expert if you’re feeling like you can’t get to grips with certain aspects of putting your website together. A lovely safety net for website building.

Wix still has the highest-scoring website features we’ve tested, but Squarespace has improved its score by 4% since last year. Wix, however, has dropped from 4.9 to 4.8 out of 5 in a year, which shows that Squarespace is dedicated to improving its features.

Squarespace has specific templates for different industries, including:

• Photography
• Health and Beauty
• Personal and CV
• Local Business
• Restaurants
• Events
• Real Estate
• Travel
• Online Store
• Blogs

• Portfolio

It’s worth browsing all of Squarespace’s templates to find your specific niche. It’s a good idea to pick a template within your industry because you’ll get relevant features that are already built in!

It is worth noting that, over the last year, Wix has improved its design functionality with new templates as well as the navigation of websites. This resulted in a 4.5% increase in its design score for Wix. Whereas Squarespace, being at the top of our list for design, hasn’t made many improvements, resulting in the same score as last year.

If you found Wix’s endless customization options overwhelming, then Squarespace is a great choice – its templates provide a structured editing experience when compared with Wix’s drag-and-drop freedom.

• Personal: $16 per month, billed annually
• Business: $23 per month, billed annually
• Basic Commerce: $27 per month, billed annually
• Advanced Commerce: $49 per month, billed annually

Squarespace doesn’t provide a free plan like Wix does, but it does give you a 14-day free trial. You can change your plan at any time, and choose whether to pay monthly or annually. You can save on your Squarespace plan by using our exclusive discount code – simply enter the code WBE at checkout to save 10% off your plan!

Even without our special discount, Squarespace knocks Wix’s value-for-money score of 3 out of 5 out of the park! This is because Wix’s price increased by 14% over the last year, chipping away at its value for money.

Thanks to a new grid editor and improvements in UX (user experience), Squarespace is now joint best for ease of use. During testing for Squarespace, users said, “I felt like I was great at making websites but, really, it was just Squarespace doing it for me!” Showcasing how easy it has become to make a stunning website with the builder.

You don’t need coding skills or tech experience to create your website with Squarespace. Instead, you can use blocks to build your website, exactly how it appears on the screen.

While Squarespace and Wix have exactly the same score for help and support, the way they offer help varies. For example, both offer 24/7 live chat, community forums, and comprehensive knowledge centers – full of helpful tutorials and even videos. Wix offers phone support while Squarespace doesn’t,  and Squarespace offers email support, while Wix does not.

One neat thing that both these builders also offer is in-editor support. So, as you’re building your website, you can just jump into a support tab and find answers – making the process a lot smoother for you.

The businesses we’ve interviewed have said multiple times that Squarespace’s help and support system is incredibly good, often highlighting that the staff will be there to talk you through any hiccups via live chat.

According to the businesses we interviewed, you could face slow load speeds with Squarespace. When businesses start to grow and the content increases, many find that Squarespace becomes quite slow. Although the businesses often wouldn’t change to a different builder, it can become frustrating later down the line.

The highlights of Shopify’s features include:

• Diverse multichannel integrations
• Huge app store
• Built-in abandoned cart recovery
• Shipping management (including dropshipping and printable labels)

Shopify doesn’t include a free domain like Wix does, and its blogging features aren’t as developed, but similarly to Wix, Shopify does provide a solid suite of marketing tools to help grow your store.

Finally, it’s worth mentioning that in our testing, Shopify displayed the best server response time on both mobile and desktop out of all the ecommerce platforms we analyzed. This means your store should load quickly!

Shopify comes in fourth place out of all the builders we tested for design functionality – with a design score of 4 out of 5. This is because it has huge design potential with extra app functionality alongside very professional designs. But Wix speeds ahead with a score of 4.6 out of 5 for design, as it continues to improve its template designs and add a wide range of functionality.

Shopify can edit your chosen theme to reflect your brand. That said, when it comes to customization, Shopify is more restrictive than Wix. If you want endless freedom over your branding and layout, then it’s not the most flexible option.

• Basic Shopify: $29 per month
• Shopify: $79 per month
• Advanced Shopify: $299 per month

You can try Shopify free for three days before signing up to a paid plan. Should you choose the Basic plan, you’ll only pay $1 per month for the first three months, which is a nice opportunity to see if it really is the right platform for you.

It’s worth mentioning that you’ll need to pay extra for any premium apps you want to add to your site alongside paying for website templates. Shopify relies a lot on apps rather than built-in features, which is great for customization but can quickly hike up your overall cost.

In addition to this, if you don’t use Shopify’s in-house payment gateway, Shopify Payments, you’ll pay a transaction fee between 0.5-2%, depending on your plan.

Because of its expensive starting price, Shopify doesn’t score too highly when it comes to value for money – at 3 out of 5, this is the area it scored lowest in.

• 24/7 phone support

• 24/7 live chat support

• Community forum

• Social media support

• Video tutorials

• Email support

• Help center

• Advanced specialist support

The Shopify Plus plan adds advanced specialist support, giving you your very own dedicated support agent. You can get pretty great support for relatively cheap – because 24/7 help is available on even the cheapest price plan.

However, while GoDaddy has beginner-friendly SEO tools, they’re not the most powerful. You’ll be able to cover the basics, but you won’t find canonical tags or header code.

It’s also worth mentioning that you only get self-managed SEO tools on GoDaddy’s cheapest plan. Once you upgrade, you’ll unlock GoDaddy’s built-in website optimizer to save you time and effort.

GoDaddy doesn’t have an app market or very good blog capabilities when compared with Wix. Wix’s SEO has also leveled up with a new partnership with Semrush. Both of these are reasons why GoDaddy sees a decrease in its website feature score of 6.7%, dropping it to 3.1 out of 5.

Where GoDaddy does beat Wix is with its speed. You can hands down build a website in the same amount of time it takes to cook a meal from scratch. While you can build quickly with Wix, GoDaddy’s ADI builder takes this to the next level, allowing you to build a site by simply answering questions.

Apart from building your entire website with its ADI, GoDaddy offers other new and helpful AI features. If you’re building an online store with GoDaddy, you can now use its AI text generator to generate product descriptions for what you’re selling. It will give you five suggestions, but you can regenerate as many times as you’d like. Keep in mind that this AI tool is in its infancy, so descriptions won’t always be great or match your product. As all artificial intelligence offerings are still learning, you should also beware of inputting sensitive information as the AI will store it.

The benefit of this is that it’s the quickest way to build a website. You don’t need to start from scratch or browse hundreds of templates – instead, you can get straight to customizing.

However, the downside is that GoDaddy’s designs aren’t as unique or stylish as those of Wix or Squarespace. While it has a design functionality score of a solid 4.1 out of 5, GoDaddy’s designs can be pretty generic, and customizations are somewhat limited. So, if you’re looking to make a creative impact, it’s not the best choice.

• Basic: $6.99 per month, billed annually
• Premium: $13.99 per month, billed annually
• Commerce: $14.99 per month, billed annually
• Commerce Plus: $29.99 per month, billed annually

GoDaddy always lets you start building your site for free – you can then choose whether to stay on the free plan or upgrade to a paid plan.

That said, GoDaddy didn’t manage to beat Wix for ease of use in our testing, with Wix scoring 4.4 out of 5 – which is a really impressive score! Our users struggled a little due to GoDaddy’s restrictive block elements as you can’t resize or move image blocks outside of set areas in your template, for example.

One tester said, “No drag and drop makes it hard to organize the website the way I want to.” This is why we usually recommend Wix or Squarespace for ease of use – there are more creative capabilities with their respective editors.

This means Square Online is suited to small stores. The features it offers make it ideal for physical stores as it syncs with Square POS, and offers self-serve ordering via QR codes, and in-store collection on all plans – even on the free plan!

This is simple ecommerce without complication – it’s not meant for complex inventories with tons of product variants.

It’s worth noting that Square Online doesn’t provide blogging tools or dropshipping functionality. If you’re looking for blogging we usually recommend Squarespace, and for dropshipping functionality Shopify.

To remove adverts and connect a custom domain, you’ll need to choose one of Square Online’s paid plans:

• Plus: $29 per month, billed annually
• Premium: $79 per month, billed annually

The only hitch is Square Online’s transaction fees, which cost 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction on the Free and Plus plans and 2.6% + $0.30 on the Premium plan.

We like the fact that Square Online does some of the work for you during the setup process – it’s a straightforward, fuss-free building experience that leads you through creating your store step by step.

The only downside is that Square Online doesn’t have the most logical layout, which can feel confusing for beginners because it uses terminology that may be unfamiliar.

Hostinger’s plan offers the basics, such as a free domain and SSL certificate, but if you want any extra oomph, you’ll be left wanting. There’s no ADI editor or dedicated SEO keyword support, and Hostinger’s ecommerce and marketing tools are no match for its competitors.

You also won’t get extras like an app market, blog analytics, blog comments, or blog specific SEO, and no social post creator. But it does offer a free domain for three months and does offer unlimited storage at the cheapest starting price of $11.99 per month.

Choose from hundreds of pre-made stylish templates, and get creative with Hostinger’s drag-and-drop editor. One thing we particularly like about Hostinger’s editor is its useful grid layout that helps keep elements in line with each other – think of it like having a handrail to guide you.

However, Hostinger doesn’t give its users much room for customization, and you can’t switch out your website’s template once it’s live. That being said, the lack of creative control seems to work in Hostinger’s favor – where Wix might feel pretty overwhelming with its endless creative freedom and design choices, Hostinger keeps things simple and streamlined.

As Hostinger is primarily a hosting provider, it doesn’t offer a free trial or plan, but if you do opt to build with Hostinger, its plan starts at just $2.99 per month. You can make use of its 30-day money-back guarantee if you decide it’s not the right fit for you.

Take a look at the different pricing for Hostinger’s Website Builder & Web Hosting package:

• 1 month: $11.99 per month
• 1 year: $2.99 per month
• 2 years: $2.99 per month
• 4 years: $2.99 per month

It’s worth noting that you can save money by choosing a longer subscription. For example, if you choose the 48-month term, you’ll save $432 over the four years – you’ll even get three months for free with this contract!

With all of these terms, just be wary of the renewal price. They might all seem cheap at the start, sharing the $2.99 introductory deal, but the price will increase after the initial term. For example, if you opt for a 12-month term for $2.99, it’ll then cost $8.99 after the first year.

“Everything was so easy to edit – it would be great for beginners.”

Overall, when you compare this to Wix’s help score of 4.8 out of 5 – there’s almost no competition.

Overall, WordPress gets a 2.8 out of 5 for features– falling behind due to its lack of analytics apps and the absence of unlimited storage.

The good thing about WordPress is that you can change templates later down the line, unlike with Wix, which you can’t change! You’ll need to keep that in mind, your template needs to have the long haul in mind.

Overall, WordPress gets a design score of 2.8 out of 5, which isn’t quite at the same level of Wix’s 4.6 out of 5 – the reason is Wix allows for easy customization whereas WordPress is a little more complicated.

• Personal:

Yearly: $4/mo

Monthly: $9/mo

• Premium:

Yearly: $8/mo

Monthly: $18/mo

• Business:

Yearly: $25/mo

Monthly: $40/mo

WordPress also comes with a completely free plan like Wix, but you’ll eventually need to upgrade for better features and your domain. Wix offers better quality features, but you can run a very successful blog with WordPress for much cheaper.

You get a free domain for one year on all annual plans, plus a professional email address included. There’s also blogging functionality, but you need to be on the $5 per month Plus plan to use blogging features.

So, why did IONOS only score 2.2 out of 5 for its features? Well, it’s missing a lot compared to Wix. There’s no app market, its blogging features don’t include categories or comments, and there are no email marketing tools – whereas Wix has those features.

One standout area of IONOS’ features is its site speed – it performed well during our analysis of the top website builders. In fact, it has the best mobile site speed performance score out of all the platforms we tested!

The trouble is the lack of customization that IONOS’ templates provide you with. Because the editing tools were so restrictive, our users felt as though it was holding them back from creating something truly unique or personalized.

In addition to this, the stock imagery provided by IONOS in its media library is terribly outdated – this is something that hasn’t changed since we first used it over three years ago!

• Starter: $6 per month for 6 months, then $12 per month
• Plus: $1 per month for 6 months, then $18 per month
• Pro: $15 per month for 6 months, then $28 per month

Be aware that your initial discount will end after 6 months, so always check the renewal price to avoid any financial surprises later down the line!

Thanks to its super cheap prices, IONOS has attractive value for money, but it only scores 3.1 out of 5 – a huge 26.2% decrease since last year. This is because of a lack of improvement in ease of use, features, and design functionality.

However, the main problem with IONOS’ pricing plans is the fact that it doesn’t offer a free plan or a free trial, so there’s no way to try it out before committing. You do get a 30-day money-back guarantee though, so if you’re not happy you can get a full refund within the first 30 days of your plan.

In addition to this, the knowledge base isn’t accessible from your editor page, making it harder to follow and implement guidance should you get stuck.

We were also pleasantly surprised by IONOS’ specialist advanced support – offering you an extra helping hand. Along with a 5 out of 5 score for its knowledge center, complete with video tutorials.