Comparing Wix Weebly And WordPress How To Choose The Best Website Platform For Your Business

Deciding whether Wix vs. Weebly vs. WordPress is best for your business depends on many factors.

Are you struggling to decide between Wix, Weebly, and WordPress for your business website? This expert guide will walk you through the important factors to consider when selecting the perfect platform for your specific needs. Discover the advantages and disadvantages of each option and make an informed decision that will propel your business to new heights. Don’t miss out on this valuable resource – read now!

If a modern, mobile-friendly and expandable business website is your goal, you cant go wrong with Wix, Weebly or WordPress. All three of these top-rated platforms deliver features most small-business owners need for online, offline or combined sales business.

Wix and Weebly are the hands-down winners in terms of quick-launch websites and ongoing ease of use. Youll spend more time learning the WordPress platform, but that time is well-spent when you consider its unlimited potential. In the end, the right platform is the one thats the best fit for you.

Overview

You can create all types of beautiful and functional business websites with Wix, Weebly and WordPress — in that aspect, theyre equal. However, how you get to that point, your design options, costs and overall versatility differs greatly between each platform.

Wix

The all-in-one website builder platform Wix packages every tool you need to build, launch and run any type of online business website into one tidy package. Wix websites are very easy to build, thanks to over 500 plug-and-play designs, called templates, that you can customize using Wixs drag-and-drop design tools. You can also design your website from scratch using blank templates or Wixs advanced Editor X designer.

You can easily accept online payments and add complete e-commerce features to Wix websites, plus enable all kinds of business-specific functionality with over 250 Wix apps. Online restaurant menus with delivery and pick-up features, event management with ticket sales and online bookings are a few of the many features powered by Wix apps.

However, unlike Weebly and WordPress, Wixs online payment and e-commerce features arent free. Wix offers a free website plan, but to accept any type of online payment, you need a paid Business and E-commerce plan, which starts at $23 per month. If you want to sell online using Wix, youll have a monthly cost — theres no way around that.

Weebly

Like Wix, Weebly is an all-in-one website builder platform that delivers a full set of website design, online sales and business marketing tools in one tidy package. Designing a unique website is extremely easy on Weebly. However, its drag-and-drop design tool isnt as full-featured as Wix.

Weebly also falls short of Wix in available plug-and-play website designs, which Weebly calls themes. You can choose from around 100 general and business-specific themes on Weebly, compared to over 500 design templates on Wix. Though, you can expand Weeblys website functionality with over 355 integrated apps.

Weebly soundly tops Wix when it comes to economical online sales. Every Weebly plan, including its free plan, supports online payments and e-commerce stores. This is because Weebly is owned by Square, which is a top-rated small-business payment processor. Weebly is Squares built-in website and e-commerce solution. If you use Square for payment processing, you can run a Weebly website and online store for free.

Weebly does have paid website plans too, which offer expanded sales and marketing features. The $26 monthly plan also lets you use either Stripe or PayPal for payments alongside or in place of Square.

However, the Square plus Weebly pairing gives you a full suite of business management tools for free, including inventory, mobile payments, complete retail point-of-sale (POS) systems, bookings and much more. The combination delivers real value for startups and growing businesses.

WordPress

WordPress operates very differently than Wix and Weebly. Its not an all-in-one package like the other two. Instead, its a free, open-source platform made up of many parts, including website hosting, design themes, page builders and functional plugins. Since you must assemble and maintain these “parts” yourself, WordPress has a far greater learning curve compared to the all-in-one simplicity of Wix and Weebly.

However, WordPress also delivers near-infinite flexibility compared to Wix and Weebly, which are limited to their supported features and app universe. With WordPress, you can, quite literally, build any type of website that you can dream up.

From e-commerce stores and online multi-seller marketplaces to worldwide news hubs, e-learning academies, affiliate powerhouses and video portals, WordPress can do it all — it just takes more setup work and ongoing upkeep to get there.

In-depth comparison

All-in-one Wix and Weebly website builders occupy a different category than multifaceted WordPress, but all three platforms still deliver terrific business websites. Let’s dive deeper.

Costs

Wix, Weebly and WordPress all have a free option as well as paid plans, so even a shoestring startup has a choice. Wix and Weebly offer free plan levels, and the free hosting plan on WordPress.com lets you launch a WordPress site with no monthly fees.

Wix and Weebly paid plans provide added storage, sales tools and marketing features on top of the design tools, security and backups common to all plans. Likewise, paid WordPress hosting plans deliver added bandwidth, storage and website management features on top of the basic features of free plans.

Wix

Wix has eight paid plans, and these are split between general and e-commerce-type websites. If you simply need a marketing website or blog and dont plan on accepting online payments, you can use Wix Website plans that range from $13 to $39 per month, shown below.

To accept online payments for any type of sale — services, memberships, downloadable items or goods that ship — youll need a Business and E-commerce plan, shown below. These range from $23 to $500 per month.

Weebly

Weebly offers just four plans and all, including the free plan, support online sales including e-commerce sales, online bookings, virtual goods, service payments and more. You must use Square to process payments with the Free through Professional plans, but the $26 per month Performance plan lets you add PayPal and Stripe for payment processing.

WordPress

The cost of running a WordPress website can vary greatly. Hosting, which is where your WordPress website “lives” online, is generally very economical for most small-business needs. The free plan on WordPress.com is fine for basic blogging, but the $6.95 per month e-commerce plan on Bluehost, shown below, delivers everything that e-commerce startups and solopreneurs need.

Hosting is just one of many potential costs in the WordPress universe. Youll also need a theme and various plugins to drive the overall look and functionality of your WordPress website. You can find plenty of free WordPress themes and plugins — even the power-packed WooCommerce e-commerce plugin is free. However, you might need paid plugins for specific features, like subscription sales, online bookings or advanced design tools.

Simply put, Wix and Weebly have set plan-based costs and features. WordPress has more moving parts and therefore more potential cost variations depending on your specific needs.

Ease of use and design features

If youre new to building websites, both Wix and Weebly soundly beat WordPress when it comes to ease of use. However, once you learn the WordPress platform, you can more easily expand WordPress into a powerhouse website, like an e-commerce superstore or nationwide news portal. Ease of use really depends on your comfort level with online dashboards and design tools, your overall goals and how much youre willing to learn.

Wix

Launching a new and highly customized Wix website is easy. Simply select your website template from over 500 modern, business-specific options, add your information, connect your domain name and presto! Your website is live.

Wix also gives you a stellar drag-and-drop design tool that gives it a design edge over Weebly. Starting with a ready template or a blank slate, you can create any look you want with drag-and-drop images and content. Or, let Wixs ADI wizard build you a custom website based on your answers to a few questions.

Wixs backend dashboard, shown above, is clean and intuitive, with ready access to your design, marketing and management tools as well as the Wix apps marketplace. Plus, you can easily upgrade your Wix plan — say to add an online store — without completely reworking or changing your existing website.

There is one drawback to Wixs stellar design offering. You cant easily swap your Wix website over to another template if you want to change your look. Changing to another template essentially requires a complete rebuild. So, take your time when choosing your Wix template, youll live with it for a long time.

In contrast, both Weebly and WordPress allow you to change themes to update your overall look far more easily.

Weebly

In terms of quick-and-easy website setup, Weebly doesnt have all of Wixs drag-and-drop design freedom. However, Weeblys ease-of-use does edge past Wix in a few notable areas. Weebly supports complex websites with tiered sub-categories, as shown in the menu below. WordPress supports this as well. In contrast, Wix only supports two menu tiers, for category and sub-category, so you cant build menus more than two tiers deep.

Weeblys built-in integration with Square also beats out both Wix and WordPress in terms of ease-of-use for sales management. Pairing Weebly and Square lets you track your online sales and your in-person mobile or retail store sales within one streamlined system. This can save you a ton of time on bookkeeping and inventory tasks if you sell products.

In contrast, Wix doesnt offer any ready integration to any POS system. If you want to sell in-person or in-store as well as online, youll have to track it all manually. Many WordPress e-commerce plugins can connect to various POS systems, but it takes work to set this up and transfer needed data.

WordPress

WordPress is not a simple platform for those new to building websites. You need to set up hosting, then select, install and set up a theme, then add various plugins to make your website work. Once thats completed, you can start to build your WordPress website.

Most WordPress hosting providers walk you through a basic website setup, as shown on Bluehosts intro screen, below. However, the platform doesnt deliver the near-instant website that you get with Wix or Weebly.

In terms of custom design features, WordPress websites offer a ton of flexibility, even without coding. Once you learn the platform, theme and plugins basics, custom looks are easy to build with drag-and-drop design tools like Elementor, Divi and Beaver Builder.

Once youve mastered the basics, WordPress is very easy to expand and there are tens of thousands of plugins that let you add all types of functionality. You can do much more with WordPress in terms of mega-stores, e-learning portals, monetized blogging and content marketing than you can on Wix and Weebly.

However, with WordPress, youre also on the hook for ongoing website maintenance, including theme and plugin updates and compatibility issues. The all-in-one Wix and Weebly platforms take care of these issues — and potential headaches — for you.

Customer support

Wix and Weebly both offer customer support that covers their full platforms, design tools and apps. Weebly wins this round with phone, email and chat support on all plans while Wix offers a callback service for all accounts as well as support tickets. Both also deliver full-featured help centers and plenty of online tutorials.

WordPress doesnt offer “holistic” customer support that covers every aspect of the platform. For the most part, youll learn WordPress through various online tutorials and videos published by WordPress hosting providers and other WordPress “gurus.”

For product or service-based WordPress support, hosting providers support their hosting service and generally offer helpful WordPress tutorials for setup and general site management. Likewise, WordPress theme and plugin developers support their products and offer tutorials and how-to guides as well.

Online payments

From virtual sales of online lessons to online payments for in-person services or goods that ship, Wix, Weebly and WordPress make it easy to get paid online. Of the three, Wix is the most expensive e-commerce solution since it requires a paid plan, while Weebly and WordPress are free — or nearly so.

Wix

You need a Business and E-commerce plan to accept online payments on a Wix website. These plans start at $23 per month. Once enabled, you can use the built-in Wix Payments option or select Square, Stripe or PayPal, which are competitive in terms of fees, or use another supported payment gateway.

Weebly

Weeblys integration with Square makes it the most economical and flexible solution if you want to sell online as well as in-person via mobile sales or a retail location. Unlike Wix, you can accept online payments on any Weebly plan — including the free version — as long as you use Square for payment processing.

If you want to use another payment processor or add PayPal as an option, youll need Weeblys $26 per month Performance plan. However, even on this plan, your only payment options are Square, PayPal and Stripe. Weebly doesnt support other payment gateways, like Authorize.net or Braintree, so theres no way to connect your own merchant services provider to Weebly.

WordPress

WordPress offers a huge range of online payment options and all are powered by e-commerce or shopping cart plugins. Some, like PayPal Checkout and Stripe are single-processor solutions that you can add to any WordPress page, blog post or form. Others, like the WooCommerce e-commerce plugin, support multiple payment processors and gateways.

E-commerce features

Wix, Weebly and WordPress support all types of online businesses and e-commerce sales. On Wix and Weebly, these features are built-in, while WordPress requires some type of cart plugin to add payment, product and sales management features.

Wix

Once youre on Wixs Business and E-commerce plan, you can tap into some powerful online store-building tools. You can add products with variations, like size and color, and even sell digital items via download, like photos and e-books. You can also create categories to organize your collection online.

For physical goods, you can track inventory in your Wix store and print shipping labels using the built-in Wix Shipping for USPS. Or, connect Shippo, ShipStation or another shipping service for multi-carrier shipping labels like UPS and FedEx. For other types of online businesses, you can use Wix apps to enable specialized sales for event tickets, prepaid bookings and members-only access.

For all of Wixs e-commerce power, its not a great choice for a seller who wants to combine online and in-person sales or sell on Amazon, eBay and other online marketplaces. POS and multichannel integrations just arent available on Wix — yet.

Weebly

Weebly tops Wixs e-commerce features in a few ways. Most notably, it cleanly integrates with Square POS for streamlined online, mobile and retail store sales. If youre looking for a sell-anywhere solution, the Weebly plus Square combo is hard to beat. Weebly, through Square, also offers more robust inventory tools than Wix, plus you can create deeper menu structures to organize large collections in your online store.

Like Wix, Weebly still falls short in terms of multichannel sales support for platforms like Amazon, eBay and Etsy. For that, you need a dedicated multichannel e-commerce solution like Shopify or BigCommerce — or WordPress.

WordPress

E-commerce features on WordPress are powered by the e-commerce plugin that you choose. The free WooCommerce e-commerce plugin is by far the most popular solution. In fact, the WordPress plus WooCommerce pairing drives more than half of online stores worldwide.

This combination works great for physical and digital product sales, plus it supports all kinds of specialty websites using paid WooCommerce extensions. This lets you power e-learning portals, membership sites, service sales and bookings and multichannel sales across Amazon, eBay and other online marketplaces — all on WordPress.

WooCommerce is one of many e-commerce plugins available in the WordPress universe. While its the most popular solution, another e-commerce plugin might suit your needs even better. If WordPress seems like the right solution for your business, be sure to explore all of your e-commerce plugin options.

Blogging features

In the Wix vs. Weebly vs. WordPress matchup, WordPress is the clear winner in terms of blogging features. All three platforms support blogging and provide tools for tagging, categorizing and displaying posts in myriad ways. Each platform also supports various post types, including video posts, image gallery posts and audio files for podcasts.

However, WordPress is the only one that gives you total control over your blog content and lets you manage unlimited contributors. Thats why WordPress powers some of the worlds mega-sites — including major news outlets, entertainment websites and media powerhouses. In fact, Wired, The New York Times, Time.com, The New Yorker, BBC America, TechCrunch and many more online giants run on the blog-based WordPress platform.

If youre planning to launch a blog-based content website to earn income from affiliate links. Or, if your goal is to create any type of content and media-rich blog-style website, WordPress is worth serious consideration.

A version of this article was first published on Fundera, a subsidiary of NerdWallet.