Weebly vs Wix: Website Builder Comparison Guide

We tested both Wix and Weebly and found that Wix was the clear winner, thanks to a better app store, strong customer support, impressive templates, and a superior mobile experience. Weebly does beat Wix when it comes to price, however, and both are great website builders for small businesses.

In this guide, we’ll explain why we think Wix is the better website builder overall, and point out the scenarios in which Weebly would be a better choice. And if you need a bit of extra help, why not take our website builder quiz to get recommendations based on your particular needs.

In this guide:

• Weebly vs Wix Overview
• Weebly vs Wix: Head-to-Head Comparison
• Wix and Weebly Alternatives
• About Our Research
• Verdict: Which Website Builder Is Better?
• Wix vs Weebly FAQs

Wix vs Weebly Overview

Wix is a better choice than Weebly for almost everyone. We’ve spent more than 80 hours testing website builders, and Wix actually proved itself to be better than all the other providers we tested in our last round of research.

However, that’s not to say that Weebly isn’t a good website builder — it is. In a head-to-head against Wix, though, Wix takes the victory across a number of categories, as you’ll see in the table below.

Who are Wix and Weebly Best for?

Wix is a better choice than Weebly in almost all instances, but that doesn’t mean businesses won’t get a lot out of the latter provider. Here are some use cases and what provider would suit them best:

Wix Review

Wix’s reputation as one of the world’s best website builders is well deserved. Not only is it one of the most feature-rich website builders available, but it’s also got one of the biggest app stores on the market. Whatever you need to build your website, Wix certainly has it.

On the app store, you’ll find apps to cover everything from appointment bookings to live chat functions and everything in between. They’re all incredibly easy to implement – simply drag and drop them on to your site. You won’t need to add a single line of code to get them working, either.

Wix users often remark on how easy it is to make the website look exactly how you want it to – something you can check with the super useful ‘preview’ feature.

Wix also has a special design tool called Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI). It sounds complicated, but it’s simply the system Wix uses to help build your site for you. During the setup, it’ll ask you some questions about the type of website you want to make, and then present you with a website template created specifically for you.

Making use of Wix’s AI capabilities. Source: Tech.co

However, if you want to edit it, it’s pretty simple – you’re not confined to grids and blocks, and Wix users often remark on how easy it is to make the website look exactly how you want it to – something you can check with the useful ‘preview’ feature.

It is also relatively inexpensive to get started with an online store using Wix. Pricing plans start from just $17/month, making it one of the most affordable website builders on the market. What’s more, you’ll get a lot of bang for your buck, including generous storage allowances.

The only real drawbacks are that when you’re building a site with Wix, once you publish you won’t be able to change your site’s template. This might not be a problem if you love your template but, if you need to change a feature or the layout down the line, you might be stuck.

Weebly Review

Despite not scoring quite as well as Wix, Weebly is still a great website builder. Most importantly, it’s excellent value for money (more on this below) and one of the cheapest website builders you can buy. All of Weebly’s plans are cheaper than comparable plans provided by Wix, and their first paid plan won’t set you back as much as Squarespace, GoDaddy, and Duda’s least pricey plans.

Weebly allows you to go deeper into the customization of your website than the average website builder. You get full access to the code that powers your website, meaning that you can fine-tune any elements or functionality. You’ll need to be a bit handy with CSS or HMTL coding languages but you can pick these up pretty easily. However, if you’re looking to avoid coding altogether, Wix is a much better choice.

Weebly has a decent selection of templates. This means you won’t find it a struggle to create a professional-looking website, regardless of whether you want to run a blog, a business, or a portfolio.

Weebly has a decent selection of templates. This means you won’t find it a struggle to create a professional-looking website, regardless of whether you want to run a blog, a business, or a portfolio. Secondly, the templates are flexible – so you’re able to chop and change the base design to your liking – and you can switch templates after you’ve published your site. However, there aren’t as many as Wix.

The Weebly app center has a number of useful website add-ons for you to choose from, including plenty of free ones, but it isn’t quite a match for Wix’s.

Weebly vs Wix: Head-to-Head Comparison

Now, it’s time to dig a little deeper. We’ve made it clear that our research found Wix to be the better website builder, but now we’re going to look at some more granular details, specifically value for money, business features, design features, ease of use, and customer support.

Best Value: Weebly

Weebly is much cheaper than Wix. Only Weebly offers a free plan, but Wix’s cheapest pricing plan is the Light, which starts at $17 per month if you pay annually. Weebly, on the other hand, has a personal plan that starts at just $6 per month – aside from WordPress.com, that’s the cheapest starting plan provided by the website builders we tested.

Our research team concluded that Weebly is better value for money despite the fact it’s nowhere near as good as Wix for building a website. Wix is easier to use, has better support options, a much bigger range of design templates, is generally a speedier builder, and has lots of other advantages – but it’s a bit expensive. Weebly isn’t nearly as impressive but, conversely, it’s one of the most affordable providers on the market.

Best Ecommerce Features: Wix

Wix’s business plans really set the standard for ecommerce capabilities. On some of Wix’s plans (Core, Business, and Business Elite), you’ll have the ability to secure online payments, collect recurring payments, sell subscriptions and allow customers to create accounts.  You’ll also be able to recover abandoned carts, offer subscriptions and sell unlimited products.

With Wix, you’ll be able to sell on all social channels with ease, which makes Wix one of the best website builders for small businesses that want to sell products through sites like Facebook and Instagram.

Wix’s most expensive packages, the Business and Business Elite plans, will allow you to collect and post user reviews.

These pricey plans will also grant you access to features included in apps such as Wix Stores, Wix Bookings, Wix Restaurants, Wix Hotels, Wix Videos, and Wix Events – basically everything you need to run a successful online store. Wix Stores, for instance, will let you fully customize the design of your ecommerce site, create shipping rules, manage your store using the Wix Owner app and secure your site with SSL encryption.

Other useful tools Wix will provide for your business include a logo maker, as well as access to Wix Payments, Wix Ascend (CRM), and a POS system. You can even hire an expert to help you out.

Weebly’s ecommerce features are largely confined to the Performance plan, the most expensive plan Weebly offers at $26 per month. With this plan, you can send abandoned cart emails and accept PayPal payments, the ability to collect product reviews and tools to gather ecommerce insights.

However, we’d always recommend Wix over Weebly if you’re building an online store, whatever that store may be. That’s because Weebly was bought by payment services company Square – and since then, Square has been redirecting people who are looking to build a business website with Weebly to Square. Still, we think the best ecommerce website builder is Shopify, due to its enterprise-level functionality and robust inventory features.

Learn more in our Shopify pricing guide

Connecting payment methods with Wix. Source: Tech.co

Best for Design Features: Wix

Overall, we think Wix offers users a much better template experience – it has more templates to choose from than Weebly (more than 800 versus less than 100). Plus, Wix’s often look nicer as well.

On the Wix platform, there are professional-grade templates for everything from personal travel blogs to sophisticated ecommerce retail stores. Wix provides a number of site-specific templates that Weebly doesn’t, including for electronics stores, education & book sites, fashion & beauty pages, medical/healthcare resources, and real estate businesses. Weebly’s are a lot broader and are, unfortunately, a bit blander than Wix’s.

One of our favorite Wix template features we discovered during testing is its mobile optimization. With the Wix mobile editor, you can make tailored changes to the mobile-view version of your site, or trust Wix to automatically put the best mobile-optimized settings in place. Weebly is pretty poor when it comes to mobile formatting, and even features included in set themes are not properly formatted on phones.

The only downside to Wix is that you can’t change your Wix template after you’ve published your site, which isn’t ideal. Weebly, on the other hand, is much more flexible – you can switch templates after your site goes live. However, Wix does compensate for its “no going back” philosophy by having a much broader selection of templates than Weebly, so you’re much more likely to find the right template the first time around with Wix.

Selection of Wix templates. Source: Tech.co

Best Marketing and SEO: Wix

Wix also leads the way when it comes to marketing and SEO – although this is one of Weebly’s strong points too. Both Wix and Weebly provide the ability to create meta descriptions, custom URLs, header code, 301 redirects, and Google Analytics integration. Both sites also offer social media integration and have SEO-specific apps.

Despite Weebly’s very commendable selection of SEO tools – and having mobile-responsive templates – the provider won’t change how your website looks on mobile devices.

However, Wix edges it due to how mobile-friendly it is, which is key in SEO terms because so many people use mobile phones as their primary device for Googling. Surprisingly, despite Weebly’s very commendable selection of SEO tools – and having mobile-responsive templates – the provider won’t change how your website looks on mobile devices, leading to a diminished experience for mobile users.

It would be nice to see Wix add keyword support in the future, but this isn’t a feature that Weebly offers either. Squarespace, on the other hand, is a provider that does offer this. Wix, however, will give you SEO best practice prompts when you’re building your site – as does Weebly – whereas this isn’t provided by Squarespace.

Weebly also has some additional marketing functionalities that your business will find useful, including a photo studio and email marketing support via Promote, which will let you create and send announcements, promotions, newsletters, and events. Wix also has email marketing support available.

Best for Ease of Use: Wix

The bottom line is that Wix is by far the easier site to use. Both sites keep their technical jargon to a minimum, so things are easy to understand, but it’s a lot easier to correct errors in Wix than it is in Weebly, and there are more visual clues too. What’s more, in our user-experience testing, we found users were more likely to recommend Wix to a friend than Weebly.

If you’re already an experienced coder, or fancy stretching your legs with your new website, Weebly might be the website builder for you. You’re able to edit your site’s code, even on the free package. Weebly also allows you to access the raw code at the heart of the site. Wix, on the other hand, offers what it calls developer tools, which allow you to edit certain parts of the code, rather than all of it.

A big part of how easy a website is to use is how quickly a website loads pages. Unfortunately for Weebly, it performed extremely poorly in our speed tests, and was one of the slowest website builders we tested. Wix, on the other hand, was one of the quickest.

Editing code with Weebly. Source: Tech.co

Best for Customer Support: Wix

Wix edges Weebly when it comes to customer support, scoring much higher on our testing. Although you cannot email Wix for support (there is a contact center, however, as listed below) Wix has pretty much every other base covered. You can contact them on live chat, social media, and the phone, and there are on-site GIF/Video/Image tutorials.

Unlike Wix, Weebly does not provide these tutorials, nor can you contact the provider via social media – and phone support is only available on the more expensive ecommerce plans.

However, both website builders have pretty responsive knowledge centers. We searched for a number of common website building queries (e.g. “how to redirect visitors to the right page”, “changing meta tags”, etc) to see what information Wix and Weebly would return to us, and subsequently scored each provider on how relevant the information was. Wix scored 11 out of a possible 15, whereas Weebly scored 10, so there really wasn’t much in it at all. However, as we’ve covered, Wix beats Weebly on other support fronts.

Using the Wix help center. Source: Tech.co

Weebly and Wix Alternatives

Although Wix and Weebly are top website builders, they’re not the only two providers on the market – there’s a whole range of website builders out there, each with its own merits and pitfalls.

Shopify, for example, is an excellent tool for ecommerce, Squarespace has some of the best, most beautifully designed templates in the industry, and Hostinger has some of the lowest prices you can find.

So, if you’re deciding precisely what website builder will work best for your prospective site, it’ll be good to take a look at some of the other competitors in the space.  To do this, you can take our website builder quiz to get recommendations based on your needs or take a look at the table below:

About Our Research

Finding business software is hard without actionable information to base your decision on. Fortunately, we at Tech.co don’t just throw features and pricing on a page and call it a day. We’ve spent hours of our time doing in-depth research that bring you the most valuable information about business software, including website builders.

For these particular platforms, we based our rankings on specific criteria to help you fully grasp what these platforms can do for your business. In our Weebly vs Wix guide, we looked at business features, design functionality, ease of use, customer support, and pricing.

If you want to learn more, you can always check out our research guide to see exactly what goes into our business software review process.

Wix vs Weebly FAQs