Webflow vs Wix: Which is better?

In today's digital age, having a website for your business or personal brand is essential. However, not everyone has the technical skills or resources to build a website from scratch. Fortunately, website builders like Webflow and Wix have made it easier than ever to create professional-looking websites without the need for coding knowledge.

Webflow overview

Webflow is a design and web development platform that offers an all-in-one software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution for website building and hosting. It provides users with a visual canvas, i.e. a drag-and-drop interface, making it an excellent choice for web designers. It allows them to create highly customized websites without the need for coding, even though that is also included if necessary. 

Founded in 2013, Webflow today has over 3.5 million users globally. While its interface is intuitive and user-friendly, it was developed with designers in mind, thus resulting in a slightly steeper learning curve compared to a few other website builders.

However, no prior coding or design experience is necessary to utilize the platform. With the help of Webflow University’s comprehensive resources and tutorials, concerns like ‘is Webflow ease to use?’ will go away. You will be able to quickly learn how to use Webflow and start designing your masterpieces. 

Webflow offers users the flexibility to choose from a list of over 1,500 pre-designed premium templates of different categories, including Webflow portfolio templates, landing page templates, agency templates, and more, or you can simply create a unique design from scratch.

Additionally, Webflow provides a range of advanced features such as animations, interactions, and dynamic content, empowering users to develop the most innovative and captivating websites.

Outstanding features and benefits of using Webflow

Webflow is filled with numerous features that will make your design experience enjoyable, and facilitate you to design and develop even the most complex high-end websites.

• To start with, Webflow has its own Content Management System (CMS) enabling users to create dynamic content, providing numerous e-commerce features, and more. That makes it possible to manage blogs, online stores, and directories with ease, saving time and effort. 
• Webflow automatically generates clean code while you design and develop your website, and gives you the possibility to examine or export it at any time.
• Webflow provides its users with responsive websites, so no matter what the screen size of your device is, the design will adjust to it. This is important, especially now in a time when most of the internet users, particularly from third-world countries because of poverty, but not only, use mobile devices as their primary means to access the internet.
• When it comes to customization, there are no limits in Webflow, everything is customizable. You can even manually add custom CSS and HTML code for complex interventions you want to make. 
• Webflow provides built-in SEO optimization tools that help websites rank higher in search engine results pages. Designers can use Webflow's SEO features to optimize their website's meta tags, headings, and content for search engines, and they can use Webflow's site map feature to ensure that search engines can crawl and index their website's pages.
• Webflow features reliable and secure hosting with automatic backups, SSL encryption, and through AWS and Fastly provides world-class page loading speeds.
• Collaboration possibilities in Webflow are endless, using this feature designers and developers can work together sharing their ideas and feedback, thus reducing errors and inconsistencies, improving the workflow, increasing productivity, etc.
  

Webflow pricing plans

Webflow provides different plans and pricing based on its user’s needs. You may ask, is Webflow free? Well, it is not a free platform in essence, but it offers users a free plan, giving them the ability to build a website for an indefinite period of time at no cost. However, once ready to publish, you’ll be given a free webflow.io subdomain, but to have a custom domain, you must pay for the site hosting.

The amazing thing is that Webflow is offered for free to students and educators, as long as they are studying or teaching at an accredited college or school and provide their college-dedicated email address. This allows them to take their time perfecting their website without worrying about additional expenses.

The plans vary in terms of features, with the higher-priced plans offering more advanced features like password protection, CMS collections, custom code, site search, and more.

For teams, there's a specific plan that includes collaboration tools and team management features. 

Below are the general Site plans that Webflow offers and their pricing. Click this link to check the Ecommerce and Workspace prices that are not included in the picture below.

Wix overview

Similarly to Webflow, Wix is also a famous no-code website builder platform. The platform simplifies the process of creating professional-looking websites with its collection of customizable templates, drag-and-drop design tools, and diverse features and applications. Users can quickly and easily build their websites using these resources.

Wix empowers users to build websites for various purposes such as business websites, blogs, portfolios, online stores, and more. The platform provides 800+ customizable templates to select from, and users can personalize their sites by adding their own branding, content, and images or completely design from scratch. 

Designed with inexperienced users in mind, Wix has a fast learning curve, so even if you're a complete beginner, you can quickly get up to speed with how the platform works and start creating your website in no time.

Features and benefits of using Wix

Curious about what does Wix do? As a user-friendly website, Wix offers its users a variety of features to facilitate their workflow:

• Using the drag-and-drop website editor you can create and customize your website without any coding experience. 
• One of the cool things about Wix is the Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI) tool. Through a series of questions about your website's purpose and design preferences, the ADI will automatically generate a custom personalized website for you. This feature is particularly beneficial for beginners and individuals who need a website but lack interest or expertise in web design. With the Artificial Design Intelligence tool, they can quickly create a personalized website without spending time, effort, and guesswork. 
• Wix's e-commerce capabilities make it easy to build and manage an online store. Its robust set of tools includes customizable product pages, payment processing, and inventory management, among others.
• Wix provides a help button with its features. Clicking on the button takes you straight to the relevant information, making it easy to troubleshoot issues and find the answers faster.
• Its inbuilt SEO wizard makes the process of site SEO optimization easy. By guiding you the way with the follow links, it sends you straight to the right sections, allowing you to update and add the necessary information. 

Wix pricing plans

Wix also offers a range of pricing options, including both free and paid plans. Though as you can expect, the free plan is limited and doesn't offer you all the features you get with the premium ones.

That said, there is a benefit in that your free plan is not restricted to a 14-day trial period, rather, it is valid for an indefinite period of time. You can check the free plan features in the picture below. 

As for the premium plans, they are split into Website plans and Business&eCommerce plans. They start at $4.50 for the basic Website plan, and at $17 for the Business&eCommerce plan, which allows you to also accept online payments. Check the picture below and the link above for more details on the prices and features included.

Similarities between Webflow vs Wix

As website builders, Webflow and Wix share many similarities. To start with, they are both cloud-based all-in-one website builder platforms. Both of these platforms offer a drag-and-drop interface for the users to be able to build websites without the need for code. Despite that, they each offer the ability to add custom code manually.

The two of them offer free plans with no time trial limitation, allowing you to slowly get the hang of working with their tools without making you feel rushed by time pressure. 

Additionally, they provide hosting services and e-commerce capabilities, allowing users to create online stores and sell their products through their websites. Finally, each of them has a range of templates that you can choose from and also at the same time allow you to build your site from scratch if you want a more unique design to your liking. 

Differences between the two platforms

When it comes to Webflow vs Wix differences, Wix is more rigid with regard to website design flexibility, you have to be careful because once you create a website, you cannot transfer the data of your site to another template, rather you have to build the site on another template from scratch.

Webflow, on the other hand, is known for its design flexibility and customization capabilities. Wix features the Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI) tool that helps users to quickly design their website with the help of AI, but that is not offered on Webflow.

Wix is slower on page loading speed. The reason why Wix is slow is that it isn’t well optimized for speed, and doesn’t generate a well written clean code. Webflow lacks a bit on the e-commerce side with features like subscriptions and abandoned cart recovery which are built in at Wix, that said they are planned and soon will be present on the Webflow platform.

Also, Webflow has a limited number of products you can sell, with even the highest premium plan offering a number of 3,000 products per month, whereas they are unlimited in Wix. 

Webflow has better SEO capabilities because of the control it offers users over HTML/CSS code of their websites, giving them the capability to optimize their code for search engines. 

Customer support and learning resources

Wix offers 24/7 live support in English, for any issues you may have. Also, it provides users with different learning resources like Wix Learn or the Wix Blog where they can find many articles, guides, and more on how to use the Wix platform and its features.

Webflow likewise offers customer support Monday through Friday, and also provides a bunch of learning resources like the Webflow University, Webflow Blog, Forum, and Community. Basically, anything you need to know about, you will find it in one of these resources.

Why Webflow is the better choice?

You may be wondering, 'Is Webflow good, or is Wix good?'. Both Webflow and Wix are great platforms to build your website with. However, we believe Webflow is the better choice to make, and here is why: 

• Webflow is built with designers in mind. That’s why it is best for experienced designers or beginners wanting to be proficient in design in the long term. It offers full site customization, giving you the ability to build even the most high-end site designs with beautiful animations and interactions.
• While Wix does provide the ability to create blogs, its limitations in terms of lacking a built-in CMS make it less suitable for larger websites that have more than 30 pages.
• Webflow is way more responsive on any device and screen size and has faster page loading speeds because of its clean code design.
• Webflow is great for students and educators because it offers them a free CMS site plan for a year, equipping them with a custom domain, 2,000 CMS items, and 200GB bandwidth.
• Webflow offers a larger collection of templates to choose from compared to Wix, and at the same time, they feature better animations and interactions compared to templates designed in Wix.

If you want to check out some Webflow website examples, avoiding to start your project from scratch, check our collection of premium Webflow templates. Get inspired by the various and unique Webflow web portfolio, agency, landing page, and other template categories.

Wrapping up

Both Webflow and Wix are excellent website builders that enable users to create professional-looking websites without coding knowledge.

The choice between Webflow and Wix depends on your personal needs and preferences, including your level of expertise, the type of website you want to build, and the features and pricing that suit your budget.

Yet, Webflow with its awesome built-in features offers more when it comes to being able to express ideas into modern and premium web development designs. Following with the wide range of possible trigger interactions or other page animations. 

Don’t forget to come back to our blog post and check various articles and updates related to the web design industry.