Have you ever felt like a deer in headlights when choosing the right platform for your website?
Should you go with the tried-and-tested WordPress? The user-friendly Wix? The design-focused Squarespace? Or the fast and intuitive AI web builder, Durable?
To help you decide, we’ll look at each tool, its core features, pricing, its positives, and negatives, and then compare them head to head.
Wix vs. Squarespace vs. WordPress vs. Durable at a Glance
- Wix: A favorite for beginners. Wix offers drag-and-drop functionality and many customizable templates.
- Squarespace: Best known for stunning, responsive design templates. Its modern and responsive templates make it popular among creatives and businesses.
- WordPress: It’s used by 43.1% of all websites as of 2023. WordPress has immense flexibility and a vast plugin ecosystem. It's perfect for those who want deeper customization. It also has a slightly steeper learning curve.
- Durable: The AI-powered newcomer. It offers a revolutionary approach to website creation. Using Durable, within 30 seconds, you can get a fully functional website, complete with images and content. Best for beginners who don't have hours to spend on YouTube coding tutorials learning the intricacies of web design.
Durable Overview
Unlike traditional platforms, where creating a site requires a fair bit of time and often some design or technical skills, Durable builds a complete website in just 30 seconds.
In the time it takes to make your morning coffee, our platform crafts a professional, sleek, and functional website tailored to your business needs.
Durable has so far built over 4 million sites as of July 2023.
This AI website builder aims to break down the barriers that small business owners and entrepreneurs face when they attempt to cement their online presence.
Every feature, every tool, and every design element is crafted with them in mind, ensuring that even someone with zero website-building experience can confidently establish a strong online presence.
So, the core of Durable's value lies in its ease of use, complemented by a rich suite of AI tools.
To build a website:
- Click “Generate your website” on the home page
- The AI asks you which type of business you’re building. If unsure, click on “See some suggestions.”
- Next, it will ask you to enter your location
- Then enter your business name. If you don’t have a name yet, the AI can assist. Click on “See some suggestions.”
- Durable will then generate your website using your answers.
After the AI has generated the site, Durable allows you to customize it to fit your needs. You can regenerate sections or even the whole site if you don’t like the first output.
You can also add pages to make your site more complex.
To help you get started quickly, Durable gives you a free custom domain upon signing up. You will see it on the backend after signing up.
Durable Core Features
1. AI-Powered Website Creation
Durable’s AI ensures that every site is tailored to the user’s specific business.
It studies your inputs, like business type and name, and crafts a functional and aesthetically pleasing site.
This AI-driven design process eliminates the chances of a bland, cookie-cutter site, giving you a unique digital presence.
2. AI Assistant
This AI is specifically trained to fuel business growth. The AI assistant acts like a digital consultant, always ready to offer assistance.
- Idea generation: Ever felt stuck or in need of some inspiration? Just reach out to Durable's AI assistant. It can brainstorm and generate innovative ideas for campaigns, product launches, or even simple blog topics.
- Q&A: If you have questions about Durable’s features, need clarifications about your website’s analytics, or are curious about digital marketing trends, the AI assistant can provide detailed answers. It's like having an expert by your side 24/7.
- Task completion: Durable's AI can handle various tasks for you. Need a report generated? A quick content proofread? Just ask, and the assistant will get to work.
3. Marketing Tools
Durable has an AI-driven marketing tool. This AI tool generates captivating, relevant, and effective Google Ad copies within seconds.
It understands your business's and audience's nuances, ensuring that the ads resonate and engage.
Beyond just ad copy, the AI can weave together an entire marketing strategy.
For example, if you're targeting a local demographic or aiming for a global reach, the tool will analyze myriad factors and chart out a cohesive, actionable plan.
4. CRM
Durable’s CRM is crafted especially for small businesses. The CRM ensures you never miss a lead. If it's a query, feedback, or a potential lead, the system lets you instantly respond to that lead.
It also centralizes and organizes all your contacts.
Another problem the Durable CRM solves is drafting emails. Drafting emails or messages tailored to each client is time-consuming.
This CRM can auto-generate personalized communications in one click. It crafts the message in a way that’s genuine and in sync with your brand voice.
5. Durable Pricing
Durable offers three monthly plans, and both come with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
- Free
- Starter: $12 per month: Ideal when you’re starting.
- Business: $20 per month: Ideal for scaling your business.
Positives of Durable
- User-centric design: Durable's interface is remarkably intuitive. This means less time tinkering around and more time crafting your perfect website or marketing strategy.
- Cutting-edge AI Integration: Durable has tools like the AI assistant and Google Ad Writer. These don't just add value; they redefine website building and online marketing for businesses.
Wix Overview
Established in 2006, Wix has grown exponentially, providing beginners and experienced designers with a platform that marries functionality with aesthetic brilliance.
As of 2023, Wix has over 200 million users worldwide.
Wix platform offers a visually-driven interface, allowing you to drag and drop elements. This makes website creation feel more like assembling a collage than a complex technical task.
The beauty of Wix lies in its adaptability. You can start with a blank slate and craft your vision from scratch or choose from a vast library of professionally designed templates tailored for various industries and purposes.
Wix offers over 800 free templates.
Wix Core Features
1. Drag-and-Drop Builder
Wix's standout feature is its intuitive drag-and-drop builder. The simplicity of this feature cannot be overstated.
With it, you can place images, text, videos, and other website elements anywhere.
The process is as easy as dragging and dropping an item to your desired location.
Your design options are bound only by your imagination.
2. Wix ADI (Artificial Design Intelligence)
For those who find drag-and-drop too time-consuming, Wix has an ADI tool.
Wix ADI stands for Artificial Design Intelligence. It’s a website builder that uses artificial intelligence to help you create a website. Wix ADI asks you a few questions about your business or personal website, then uses that information to create a custom website design for you.
While the result might need personal tweaking, it’s an excellent starting point, especially if you’re in a rush or unsure about design aesthetics.
Wix is also launching a more powerful AI web-building tool, Wix AI Site Generator.
3. Wix App Market
Wix boasts a thriving app market filled with free and premium apps — 250+ powerful web apps.
The App Market has an app for almost every functionality you can think of — boosting your site’s SEO, integrating social media, adding a comment section, setting up an online store, etc.
These apps are designed to integrate seamlessly with Wix websites, ensuring a cohesive user experience.
Most apps in the Wix App Market offer a free plan, so you can try them out before you commit to a paid plan.
However, some apps are not compatible with all plans. So you'll need to check the compatibility before you install an app.
4. E-commerce Capabilities
Wix has robust e-commerce features that allow you to manage your inventory, track orders, and get paid online.
With secure payment methods, customizable product pages, and even abandoned cart recovery, your online store will look professional and operate efficiently.
Wix integrates with over 70 payment processors. You can accept payments from customers in different countries.
You can also set up different payment methods, such as:
- Credit cards
- PayPal
- Apple Pay
The e-commerce plans, which start at $17 per month, also provide detailed reports on your online store's sales, traffic, and customers.
- Mobile Editor
Having a mobile-responsive site is non-negotiable. Most people use their phones to browse the internet — 58.33% as of 2023.
Wix recognizes this and offers a dedicated mobile editor.
After designing your website for desktop, you can switch to the mobile editor and optimize your site for mobile devices.
The transition is smooth, and the editor ensures that the mobile version of your site looks just as stunning as the desktop one.
6. SEO Wiz
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is intimidating to many, but Wix simplifies this with its SEO Wiz tool.
This tool guides you step-by-step, suggesting improvements to enhance your website’s visibility on search engines.
SEO Wiz ensures you don’t miss out on any crucial aspect of website optimization.
Alt: Creating your SEO checklist with the SEO Wiz
Wix Pricing
Wix offers a free plan. The premium plans include removing the Wix advertisements, access to priority support, increased storage, enhanced bandwidth, etc.
The premium plans are divided into three categories as follows:
Wix Positives
- Live editing: Wix's live editing feature allows you to see your changes as you make them, so you can be sure that your website looks the way you want it to before you publish it.
- App Market: These apps extend the functionality of your website, such as adding e-commerce, social media integration, or contact forms.
- SEO Wiz: SEO Wiz analyzes your website and provides recommendations on improving your website's ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs).
What Could Be Better
- Template lock-in: Once users have chosen a template on Wix, they can’t switch to another without rebuilding their website from scratch.
- Loading speeds: Some users have noted that Wix websites can sometimes load slower than sites built on other platforms.
- Limited advanced features for professionals: While Wix is excellent for beginners and small businesses, it might not offer the advanced tools and flexibility that professional web developers or larger businesses might need for more complex projects. You don’t get access to the code.
Squarespace Overview
Squarespace website builder reached 1 million international customers in May 2023.
Some of the most well-known Squarespace users include The New York Times, Coca-Cola, Tesla, etc.
Founded in 2003, Squarespace allows users to create visually appealing, professional-grade websites through a user-friendly platform.
Its unique selling proposition? It's become especially popular among creative professionals—photographers to musicians—due to its sleek design templates and multimedia integration capabilities.
Squarespace's templates are some of the most beautiful and stylish on the market.
Squarespace Core Features
1. Designer Templates
Squarespace’s templates are meticulously crafted, responsive, and automatically adjust to fit any device: a desktop, tablet, or smartphone.
The templates are categorized by industry and style, such as portfolios, blogs, or e-commerce. This means that a photographer, for instance, can find a template that puts their work front and center, ensuring visitors are captivated as soon as they land on the page.
Squarespace offers you a 14-day free trial to try out different templates before committing to one.
2. Integrated E-commerce Platform
Squarespace's e-commerce capabilities are robust and designed for ease of use.
You can set up a shop, list products, manage inventory, handle shipping logistics, and they also have tax tools to help in taxation matters.
Plus, it supports multiple payment gateways like Stripe and PayPal, ensuring a smooth transaction process for your customers.
A bonus is the built-in analytics, which offers insights into sales trends, customer behavior, and more, helping businesses strategize and grow.
You can also drive traffic to your e-commerce store using built-in SEO tools, social media tools, and email campaigns.
3. Built-in SEO Tools
While SEO can often be complex, Squarespace offers built-in tools to help users optimize their sites.
- Clean URLs
- Automatic tagging and sitemaps
- SEO-friendly translations
- Automatic markup to improve search engine indexing
This ensures that your site has a good foundation for search engines. And for those unfamiliar with SEO, Squarespace provides a comprehensive guide to help them understand and implement best practices.
4. Custom Domains and SSL
Squarespace provides a free domain for the first year with its annual plans. SSL (Secure Socket Layer) is also included for free with all Squarespace websites.
This encrypts data making your site more secure. This is favored by search engines, which can benefit your site's ranking.
Squarespace Pricing
Squarespace offers four pricing plans:
- Personal: This plan is for individuals and small businesses who want to create a simple website. It costs $16 monthly and includes a custom domain, unlimited bandwidth, and 24/7 customer support. This plan doesn’t have e-commerce features.
- Business: Ideal for businesses wanting to create a more advanced website. It costs $23 per month and includes everything in the Personal plan, plus Advanced website analytics, fully integrated e-commerce 3% transaction fee, and check out on your domain.
- Commerce Basic: This plan has selling tools to help grow your business. It costs $27 per month and includes everything in the Business plan, plus advanced e-commerce features, such as powerful merchandising.
- Commerce Advanced: Ideal for scaling your e-commerce business. You get powerful features such as selling subscriptions, advanced discounting, and abandoned cart recovery. It starts at $49 per month.
Squarespace Positives
- Professional Design: Squarespace's standout collection of sleek, modern, and professional template designs cater to various industries. The templates are designed with responsiveness in mind, meaning they automatically adjust and look great on all device types.
- Integrated Features: Squarespace's built-in tools and features eliminate the need for third-party apps or plugins for most common website functions. From blogging to e-commerce to appointment bookings, Squarespace provides these features natively, making it easier for users to set up and manage their websites. But if you want to add third-party extensions, they also offer a lot of them.]
- Reliable Performance: Squarespace hosts all of its websites, and the platform is known for its reliability and uptime. This means fewer worries about your site crashing during high-traffic periods or encountering technical issues. The hosting is also secure, with SSL certificates included for all sites.
What Could Be Better
- More Design Flexibility: Squarespace's drag-and-drop editor is very easy to use, but it can also be limiting for those who want more control over the design of their website. Those who want access to the code.
- Learning Curve: For some users, especially those transitioning from other platforms or those new to website building, there can be a slight learning curve with Squarespace. While clean and modern, its interface may take some time to get used to, especially when trying to find and utilize more advanced features.
If you’ve found Squarespace too difficult, take a look at some Squarespace alternatives.
WordPress Overview
WordPress (and this WordPress.org) started its journey as a blogging platform in 2003. It has since evolved into a versatile content management system (CMS).
Today, it powers over one-third of the web.
What makes WordPress stand out is its open-source nature. This means that its source code is freely available to the public.
This openness has fostered a vibrant and thriving community that consistently contributes to the platform's growth through plugins, themes, and other enhancements.
WordPress has:
- A library of over 31,000 free and premium themes
- A library of 59,595 free plugins.
- A powerful search engine that makes it easy for people to find your website.
- A built-in backup system that helps you protect your website's data
WordPress Core Features
1. Open-Source Community Contribution
Unlike many proprietary platforms, WordPress thrives on the principle of open-source software.
This isn’t just about accessing the source code – it’s about community contribution.
Thousands of developers worldwide contribute to the core WordPress software, ensuring continuous improvement and security.
2. Multisite Capabilities
Introduced in WordPress 3.0, the multisite feature allows users to manage multiple websites from a single WordPress installation.
Businesses or individuals with a network of sites — like a magazine with different sections or a university with various departments — can streamline their administrative tasks.
All sites on a multisite network share the same WordPress core files, plugins, and themes, making it easier to manage updates. Yet, they can have distinct databases, media uploads, and configurations.
For administrators, this capability is a game-changer, offering centralized management without compromising the uniqueness of each site.
3. Built-in REST API
The WordPress REST API transforms the platform from a traditional CMS into a powerful application framework.
With the REST API, developers can interact with WordPress content (like posts, pages, and custom post types) in new, innovative ways.
For instance, they can develop mobile apps, web apps or even integrate with other platforms and systems using WordPress as a data backbone.
This feature is paving the way for the future of web development by promoting decoupled or "headless" WordPress setups.
Here, WordPress acts as the backend content management, while developers can use any technology stack for the front end, be it React, Vue, or any other.
WordPress Pricing
WordPress is free and open-source software, so it’s free to use and modify.
However, you’ll need to pay for a domain name, web hosting, and premium plugins and themes.
- Domain name: Costs between $10 and $15 per year.
- Web hosting: Web hosting plans start at around $5 per month.
Positives of WordPress
- SEO: WordPress is search engine optimized (SEO) out of the box. This means your website will be more likely to appear in search results. WordPress has several features that make it SEO-friendly, such as clean code, keyword support, and XML sitemaps.
- Scalability: WordPress is scalable, so you can easily upgrade your website as your needs grow. It can handle a large amount of traffic, so you don't have to worry about your website crashing if you suddenly get a lot of visitors.
- Customization: WordPress is incredibly customizable. You can change the look and feel of your website to match your brand and add new features with plugins.
What Could Be Better
- Maintenance and updates: Given its open-source nature, WordPress regularly releases updates for its core software, themes, and plugins. While updates generally bring improvements and security patches, they can sometimes break certain parts of your site if not implemented correctly.
- Security: WordPress is a popular target for hackers, so it’s important to secure your website. Furthermore, there are many WordPress alternatives that offer security out of the box.
Wix vs. Squarespace vs. WordPress vs. Durable: Ease of Use
Durable: Designed with the user in mind, Durable provides an intuitive interface paired with the guidance of an AI assistant. This combination simplifies complex tasks and reduces the learning curve, making it a top choice for beginners and those looking for efficient design options.
Wix: With a drag-and-drop interface, Wix is designed to be user-friendly, even for those with little to no experience in web design. The platform's straightforward navigation makes adding pages, elements, and apps easy.
Wix also offers ADI, which helps you generate a site in minutes.
Squarespace: Squarespace also offers a drag-and-drop experience but is often considered to have a steeper learning curve due to its unique block-based design system.
However, once mastered, it provides a high degree of customization. You start by choosing a template and then continuing to edit it. You can also build your template from scratch.
WordPress: While powerful and flexible, WordPress requires more learning time, especially for those unfamiliar with CMS. Themes and plugins vary in quality, and sometimes additional coding knowledge is required for customization.
Wix vs. Squarespace vs. WordPress vs. Durable: AI Integration
Wix: While Wix offers AI capabilities, like Wix ADI (Artificial Design Intelligence), that can generate websites based on user input, it doesn't delve deep into advanced AI tools for marketing or CRM.
Squarespace: As of 2021, Squarespace's AI capabilities are limited, focusing more on generating first-draft content to edit for use on your website rather than advanced AI tools.
WordPress: The open-source nature of WordPress means there's potential for AI through various plugins. However, the AI features are not native to the platform and rely heavily on third-party developers.
Durable: Durable stands out with its robust AI integration — a conversational AI assistant that can generate ideas and answer questions, marketing tools like the Google Ad Writer, and an AI-driven CRM. Durable integrates cutting-edge technology seamlessly to enhance user experience and efficiency.
Wix vs. Squarespace vs. WordPress vs. Durable: Customization and Templates
Durable: Durable blends the best of both worlds. With a broad range of visually appealing templates and the flexibility to customize deeply, aided by the AI assistant, it ensures you get a unique site without facing the complexities often associated with deep customization.
Wix: Wix offers more than 800 customizable templates. Users can start from scratch or choose a pre-designed template and tweak it as per their needs. However, Wix doesn’t offer the option to change to another template later. You need to rebuild your site from scratch to change your template. So, if you want flexibility in your design, it might be worth looking at some Wix alternatives.
Squarespace: It has stunning templates that are carefully curated and also customizable. Its designs are often praised for their aesthetic appeal, but there are fewer templates than Wix.
WordPress: With thousands of free and premium themes available, WordPress arguably offers the most customization possibilities. However, you require coding skills or premium themes/plugins to unlock its full potential.
Wix vs. Squarespace vs. WordPress vs. Durable: SEO Tools
Durable: Durable understands the importance of visibility. Its AI-enhanced SEO suggestions and tools simplify the optimization process, ensuring even beginners can rank high on search engines.
Wix: Wix offers integrated SEO tools and an SEO Wiz to guide users through optimization processes. However, some advanced users might find it limiting.
Squarespace: With built-in SEO tools, Squarespace covers basics like meta descriptions, sitemaps, built-in mobile optimization, and custom URLs but might not offer the granular control some advanced users seek.
WordPress: Being highly extensible, WordPress, with plugins like Yoast SEO, can provide a comprehensive SEO toolkit.
Wix vs. Squarespace vs. WordPress vs. Durable: Which Should You Choose?
To settle on the best builder, you need to consider factors like:
- User-friendliness: Not everyone is a tech wizard.
- Budget considerations: Quality shouldn't push you over budget.
- Features that matter: Tools that drive results.
- Customizability.
Through our comparison, we've dived deep into Wix, Squarespace, WordPress, and our Durable platform and compared them on the above scale.
Here’s a quick recap:
- Durable stands out with high-quality AI features tailored for businesses like yours.
- Squarespace has the best modern and responsive templates.
- WordPress is highly customizable and scalable.
- Wix is easy to easy and offers both the drag and drop features and AI through the Wix ADI.
Now, what's next?
Walk through the Durable platform in more detail. See how it can revolutionize your online presence.
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