WordPress vs. Weebly vs. Squarespace vs. Durable: A Detailed Comparison (for 2024)

When looking for a website builder, you look for one with a user-friendly interface, robust customization options, reliable support, scalability, and cost-effectiveness.

For example, Durable lets you build a website in just 30 seconds. This is great if you don’t want the technical complexities of WordPress.

Weebly is also super easy for beginners. It's more about drag-and-drop, meaning you pick up things and move them around on your page. Squarespace is perfect if you want your website to look professional and stylish.

Each option has its strengths, so it's all about finding the one that fits your needs. We’ll take a closer look at what each platform offers to help you make the best choice.

WordPress vs. Weebly vs. Squarespace vs. Durable at a Glance

• Durable: Powerful AI-powered website builder that generates an entire website with copy and images in 30 seconds.
• WordPress: A highly versatile and customizable platform, ideal for users ranging from beginners to advanced developers.
• Weebly: A simple and user-friendly interface is suitable for those who prefer a more guided website-building experience.
• Squarespace: Offers stylish, modern templates for users prioritizing design aesthetics.

Durable Overview

At Durable, using the power of AI, we're looking to change how professional websites are created.

Our platform caters to the needs of small business owners, especially those without the technical skills or large budgets required for web development.

Our AI website builder generates complete websites with images and copy in 30 seconds. Durable is the fastest website builder in the market right now. 

We understand that not everyone is tech-savvy. That’s why we've made Durable incredibly user-friendly. For solopreneurs or small business owners like a hair salon, coffee shop, or any other small business, you can build your website with us in no time; no coding or technical skills are required.

Traditional website builders often involve a learning curve, especially for customization and advanced features. With Durable, we streamline the building process, removing any need for technical know-how.

We provide hosting, analytics, and a custom domain name as part of our service. This comprehensive package gives you everything you need to launch and maintain your website.

Every Durable website has powerful DDoS protection, SSL encryption, a firewall, and a global CDN. These security measures ensure your site is safe and secure from online threats.

Durable Core Features

• Ease of Use and Customization
• Blogging Features
• AI CRM

1. Ease of Use and Customization

We've designed our platform to make building and customizing your website straightforward, eliminating the need for coding skills or technical expertise.

Like Wix ADI or Squarespace Blueprint, in Durable, you answer three questions, and our AI will use your answers to build a website for you.

Here's how you create a website with Durable:

• Step 1: Visit our homepage and click "Generate your website."
• Step 2: Input your type of business. If uncertain, use our AI’s suggestions to identify the right category.
• Step 3: Enter the location of your business. This helps us tailor your website to local needs. We’ll also include a map of your location on your website.
• Step 4: Provide your business name or use our AI business name generator for suggestions.

Our AI takes over and builds a website that aligns well with the specifics of your business.

For instance, if you run a bakery, the AI creates a website highlighting your specialties, location, and business hours, with a design and layout that appeals to bakery customers.

After your website is generated, you can personalize it further. First, sign up to access editing features.

To edit any section, hover the mouse over the section and click the edit icon. An edit panel will appear on the right side of your screen, allowing you to modify text, images, or layout.

If you need assistance during customization, our AI assistant is available. Click on the bolt symbol at the top center of the editor screen for help.

Our user-friendly platform ensures that anyone can create a professional-looking website quickly and efficiently.

2. Blogging Features

A blog is a powerful tool for engaging with your audience, improving your website's SEO, and establishing expertise in your field.

Like in WordPress and Weebly, it’s also easy to add a blog to your Durable website.

On your Durable website editor, click the "+" sign next to "Home" at the top center of the editor.

A pop-up will appear. Look for the "Blog post" option and click "Add" to integrate a blog page into your website.

Once you add the blog page, another pop-up will prompt you to enter the title of your first article. This is our AI Blog Builder. It assists in creating your blog and generating posts in seconds.

After entering a title, our Blog Builder writes an SEO-optimized article for you. This tool is a significant time-saver, especially considering the effort and resources typically required to write and maintain a blog.

You can edit the generated article and add images to make it unique, aligning it with your brand and message. If you're unsure about what to write, our AI tool also suggests blog titles based on your business and industry trends.

Writing quality blog content is time-consuming, often requiring hours of research, writing, and editing. 

Our AI Blog Builder reduces this time, allowing you to maintain an active blog with minimal effort.

With AI’s help in generating content, you can more easily stick to a regular blogging schedule, which is crucial for audience engagement and SEO.

3. AI CRM

After getting visitors onto your website, how do you manage them?

A CRM system manages interactions with current and potential customers. It helps organize, analyze, and facilitate communication with customers, ensuring that your business effectively tracks and nurtures these relationships.

A CRM is crucial for managing customer information, sales leads, and marketing campaigns.

At Durable, we've integrated an AI-powered CRM directly into our platform, enhancing how you manage and interact with visitors to your website.

Features of Durable AI CRM:

• Respond to Leads: Our AI CRM lets you respond to leads quickly. This immediate engagement is crucial in converting inquiries into sales or long-term customer relationships.
• Organize Contacts: As your business and website traffic grows, so does your contacts list. You can organize these contacts with custom fields, ensuring you can manage customer information efficiently.
• Automated Client Communications: Sync your email with Durable, and our AI will generate unique customer responses based on past messages. This ensures personalized and relevant communication with each customer. Enable “email sync” on the back end to use this feature.
• Automated Responses to Contact Form Requests: The AI CRM also enables you to create automated responses to contact form submissions on your Durable website. This automation ensures that every inquiry receives a prompt response, an important aspect of customer service and engagement.

Unlike many website builders that require additional payments for third-party CRM services, Durable integrates the AI CRM directly into your website. 

This streamlines your operations, as you don't have to juggle between multiple platforms to manage customer relationships.

Durable Pricing

At Durable, we offer three distinct monthly plans, each tailored to different stages and needs of your business. All our plans come with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

• Free Plan: Perfect for those who want to establish an online presence without any initial investment. It includes basic features needed to get a website up and running.
• Starter Plan: $12 per month. Ideal for businesses in their growth phase.
• Business Plan: $20 per month.Tailored for businesses seeking to maximize their online potential. It includes unlimited monthly blog articles and unlimited contacts.

Positives of Durable

• Creates professional websites in 30 seconds, making it ideal for quick, quality site creation.
• Integrates a suite of AI tools like invoicing, AI Assistant, and Business Name Generator, simplifying various business processes.
• Offers a free plan and competitive premium options. The plans are budget-friendly for every stage of your business journey.

Downsides of Durable

• Durable is optimized for efficiency and ease of use, which might mean less flexibility for creating complex, highly customized websites.

WordPress Overview

WordPress.org is a versatile content management system (CMS) with extensive website creation and blogging capabilities.

According to W3Techs, it’s used by 62.8% of all the websites whose content management system is known. This accounts for 43.0% of all websites.

WordPress works by providing you with a framework that lets you create, manage, and publish content. You can use it to build various websites, including blogs, business sites, portfolios, forums, e-commerce stores, etc.

As an open-source platform, it’s free to use and modify, so it has a large community of developers who continually contribute to its improvement and expansion.

You will have access to extensive documentation, forums, and third-party resources for support.

WordPress Core Features

• Design and Theme System
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Custom Content Types

1. Design and Theme System

Getting started with WordPress is easy. With over 11,000 free themes available, you have options to choose from, catering to virtually any style or industry.

These themes range from simple layouts for personal blogs to sophisticated designs for corporate websites.

One feature of WordPress is the ease with which you can install and preview themes. You can browse, activate, and switch between themes in just a few clicks to see how they will look on your site.

This process doesn't require any coding knowledge. The live preview option lets you see how the theme will look with your content before making it live.

When it comes to editing your chosen theme, WordPress introduced the Gutenberg editor. This block-based editor, integrated since WordPress 5.0, allows you to add and arrange various media types — including text, images, and videos — in a highly intuitive way.

Each content is placed in its block, which can be individually customized and rearranged.

Despite its user-friendly interface, there is a learning curve associated with the Gutenberg editor. 

If you’re transitioning from the classic WordPress editor or new to WordPress, you might need time to get accustomed to this block-based approach. The concept of blocks, while flexible, is initially a bit challenging to grasp, especially when dealing with more complex page layouts or custom content types. 

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is crucial for any website's success, so most website builders currently have built-in SEO tools.

WordPress excels in this area. It provides robust built-in features and additional tools to help optimize your website for search engines.

It inherently follows best practices for SEO. It uses high-quality code and generates semantic markup, making your website attractive to search engines. This means that WordPress sites often rank higher in search results than others.

While WordPress is SEO-friendly, its real power comes from its extensive range of SEO plugins. It has over 900 plugins for SEO.

You also get various ways to optimize images, which is vital for SEO. Using plugins or built-in features, you can compress images for faster loading times without sacrificing quality, add alt text for accessibility and SEO, and manage image metadata effectively.

Plugins like Yoast SEO, All in One SEO Pack, and Rank Math provide comprehensive tools to enhance your website's SEO. These plugins help you:

• Optimize your content with targeted keywords
• Generate sitemaps
• Improve your metadata
• Create clean and SEO-friendly URLs
• Provide real-time feedback on your content's SEO effectiveness

Another key factor in SEO is mobile responsiveness, and WordPress themes are mobile-friendly. This responsiveness ensures your site looks great and functions well on all devices.

3. Custom Content Types

By default, WordPress comes with standard content types like posts and pages. However, it can create Custom Post Types (CPTs) and custom taxonomies. 

You can go beyond simple blog posts and pages to create content tailored to specific needs, like portfolios, testimonials, products, and more.

Custom post types allow you to define different content types unique to your website. For instance, if you’re running an online store, you could create a CPT for your products. Similarly, a movie review website might have a CPT for reviews. These CPTs can have their custom fields and parameters, allowing you to customize them according to your specific requirements.

Along with CPTs, WordPress enables you to create custom taxonomies. These are ways of grouping content.

Unlike the default categories and tags, custom taxonomies provide a way to categorize your content types in a way that makes sense for your website. For example, a book review site could have a taxonomy for genres, authors, or publishers.

Creating and managing custom content types offers immense flexibility, but it comes with a learning curve.

WordPress Pricing

WordPress.org pricing operates differently from other website builders that offer straightforward subscription models.

First, the WordPress software itself is free. You can download, install, and use it without any cost. It’s an open-source project maintained by a community of contributors.

However, there are associated costs to consider when setting up and running a WordPress website:

• Hosting: WordPress.org requires you to find and pay for your web hosting. Hosting costs vary widely, depending on the provider and the hosting you choose (shared, VPS, dedicated, etc.).
• Domain Name: You’ll need to register a domain name for your website. Domain registration costs around $10-15 per year.
• Themes and Plugins: While thousands of free themes and plugins are available, certain premium themes and plugins come with a cost. These range from a one-time fee to a recurring subscription, depending on the product.
• Maintenance and Development: WordPress has a learning curve. So, if you require professional assistance for website setup, customization, or maintenance, this will be an additional cost.
• Additional Services: Other potential costs might include email hosting, eCommerce functionality, additional security measures, SEO tools, and more, depending on your specific needs.

Positives of WordPress

• WordPress offers easy customizations, designs, and layouts. You only need to install the relevant plugins if you want to add a pop-up to your site or integrate it with an email marketing platform.
• WordPress is responsive across various devices. Your site adapts to different screen sizes and resolutions.
• WordPress is supported by a vast and active community of developers, designers, and everyday users who contribute to forums, create tutorials, and offer advice.

What Could Be Better

• WordPress is flexible, but it's not always beginner-friendly. The interface and the number of options can be overwhelming for new users. For more beginner-friendly website builders, explore these WordPress alternatives.
• The popularity of WordPress also makes it a target for hackers. The core software is secure, so much of the security responsibility falls on the user. 
• WordPress.org, being a free and open-source platform, doesn’t provide direct customer support. You must rely on community forums, online resources, and sometimes third-party services for troubleshooting and assistance. 

Weebly Overview

Weebly is a user-friendly drag-and-drop website builder. It caters to individuals and small businesses looking to create websites, blogs, or stores. 

It’s part of the Square product suite, which adds robust e-commerce capabilities to its platform, so it's a particularly appealing option for those looking to set up an online shop.

Weebly is for users who don’t have technical expertise in web development but still wish to create professional-looking websites. Its functionality spans from basic website building to advanced e-commerce solutions, offering a range of tools suitable for various needs.

However, Weebly can feel somewhat outdated compared to other, more modern website builders. This is evident in its customization options. 

Weebly provides the basics for website building but lacks the advanced customization features found in platforms like WordPress or Squarespace.

Its strength has been its affordability, particularly appealing to those just starting or operating on a tight budget. It offers ecommerce features even in the free plan.

Weebly Core Features

• Easy to Use and Customization
• Weebly App Center
• Blogging Features

1. Easy to Use and Customization

Weebly offers around 50 themes. This range is not as extensive as some competitors like WordPress and Squarespace, but it covers a variety of styles. 

The themes are functional and cater to different needs. A significant advantage here is that you can switch templates at any time, allowing you to refresh your website's look without starting from scratch.

In Squarespace, for example, you must build your site from scratch when you want to change the template.

One of Weebly's most user-friendly features is its drag-and-drop editor.

But unlike the more open-ended platforms like WordPress, Weebly’s themes are more structured. This means you can’t place elements just anywhere. There’s a certain layout and order to follow. 

This structured approach is an advantage for those who may feel overwhelmed by WordPress's vast array of customization options.

The structure acts as a guide, helping you create well-organized and aesthetically pleasing websites without needing a background in design.

2. Weebly App Center

The diversity of apps available in the App Center means that almost every user can find something that suits their website’s needs. 

Whether adding a photo gallery, integrating an email marketing service, enhancing e-commerce capabilities, or improving site analytics, the App Center has various options.

Accessing and using the Weebly App Center is straightforward. The interface is designed to be user-friendly. You can browse or search for an app, then select and install it.

When editing your site, scroll down to the left and click “Add App.” You’ll be redirected to the App Center to add your apps.

The process is intuitive, requiring minimal technical expertise, which aligns well with Weebly’s overall user-centric approach.

The App Center includes free and paid apps, offering flexibility depending on the user’s budget and requirements. 

3. Blogging Features

Weebly offers blog templates, which can be used as standalone sites or as parts of a larger website or online store. 

These templates are fully customizable, allowing you to alter them to fit your blogging goals.

Weebly provides free blog hosting. This ensures that your content loads quickly and remains accessible to your readers.

With Weebly, you can control your blog layout and post structure. This includes complete customization of categories, tags, and sidebars.

You also get advanced comment management tools to integrate popular commenting systems like Disqus or Facebook into your blog. 

Weebly’s blogging platform includes built-in RSS and social sharing features for amplifying your content across various channels. The ability to schedule blog posts in advance is particularly useful, as it allows for consistent content delivery and effective time management. 

Scheduled sharing on platforms like Facebook and Twitter and the ability to craft custom messages for different networks enhance your reach and engagement.

Weebly Pricing

Weebly offers some of the most competitive pricing plans in the website builder market. It rivals Durable in terms of affordability and value.

• Free Plan: Ideal for those just starting or experimenting with website design. This plan also supports ecommerce but with limited features.
• Personal Plan: $10 per month. For individuals looking to connect a custom domain to their website.
• Professional Plan: $12 per month. For users seeking more customization options and those looking to create a professional-looking website with their domain.
• Performance Plan: $26 per month. For businesses looking to add advanced features that drive growth and manage operations, particularly in e-commerce.

Positives of Weebly

• Weebly's drag-and-drop editor is an advantage, especially for those new to website building.
• It offers robust e-commerce capabilities, particularly beneficial for small to medium-sized online stores.
• One of the perks of using Weebly for e-commerce is the flexibility in payment options. It provides alternatives for clients who prefer to use credit cards directly instead of setting up and using a PayPal account. 

What Could Be Better

• Weebly is not suitable for all types of websites. For instance, if you need to create a website with a complex database or advanced functionality, Weebly may not be the best tool.
• The way URLs are structured in Weebly is not particularly optimized for SEO.
• Since the acquisition by Square, there has been a noticeable decline in the development and updating of the Weebly platform. 

Squarespace Overview

Squarespace is an all-in-one website builder known for its sleek design templates and user-friendly interface. It combines website building, hosting, and domain registration into a single platform.

This website builder is suitable for creating visually appealing sites, such as portfolios, blogs, business websites, and e-commerce stores.

Squarespace has designer-quality templates. These templates are highly customizable and feature elegant and modern aesthetics.

It includes built-in e-commerce capabilities, making it an excellent choice for online stores. You get features like inventory management, secure payment options, and customer account creation.

Additional features include built-in SEO tools to help improve the visibility of your website on search engines. It also provides detailed analytics to track website performance.

Squarespace Core Features

• Easy to Build using Modern Templates
• E-commerce Features
• Marketing Tools

1. Easy to Build using Modern Templates

Getting started with Squarespace is easy. You just choose from one of the 165 templates. These templates are highly customizable and are known for their elegant, modern aesthetics.

Despite being template-based, Squarespace doesn't restrict creativity. These templates are highly customizable, allowing you to tailor the look and feel of your site to match your brand or personal style. 

This customization extends to layouts, color schemes, fonts, and more.

To customize, you use the Fluid Engine, an advanced drag-and-drop editor that leverages a grid system, allowing for precise and flexible placement of content blocks.

It expands the possibilities for content customization, background setups, and block arrangements, giving you more control over your website's design and layout.

In addition, the introduction of Squarespace Blueprint will further simplify website creation in Squarespace.

This AI-driven tool operates similarly to other AI-based website builders like Durable and Wix ADI. It guides you through a five-step process, gathering information about your preferences for website structure, color palette, and font pairing. 

Based on these inputs, Squarespace Blueprint generates a personalized website template, offering you a customized starting point that you can further refine and edit.

2. E-commerce Features

Squarespace offers 40 high-quality online store templates, crucial for creating a successful e-commerce website. 

These templates are visually appealing and put a strong emphasis on your products. 

A well-designed template enhances user experience, showcases products effectively, and helps build brand trust. The aesthetics and functionality of these templates help in attracting and retaining customers.

Beyond the templates, Squarespace is optimized for selling. It gives you powerful features and valuable e-commerce tools.

You get an intuitive system to track and manage your product inventory, ensuring your stock levels are always up-to-date.

To access Squarespace's ecommerce capabilities, subscribe to at least the Business plan. However, the Commerce Advanced plan is the best for advanced sellers as it offers more advanced tools like abandoned cart recovery.

Other key e-commerce features offered by Squarespace include:

• Product Subcategories: This lets you organize products into subcategories, streamlining your store’s navigation and making it easier for customers to find products. It also enhances SEO by automatically generating category pages indexed by search engines.
• Custom Forms for Products: Squarespace lets you set up custom checkout forms for various purposes like gift messages, special delivery instructions, or customer comments. This optimizes the checkout experience for both your business and your customers.
• Point of Sale (POS): For businesses selling in person, Squarespace offers a Point of Sale system through its iOS and Android apps, currently available only in the US. Connecting a Square account and pairing a reader allows you to accept payments in person while keeping your inventory, customers, and sales analytics synchronized with your online store.

3. Marketing Tools

Squarespace integrates marketing tools to enhance the visibility and reach of your e-commerce website.

A key strength of Squarespace is its built-in SEO capabilities. These increase your site's visibility on search engine results pages, like Google. 

Squarespace sites are automatically aligned with established SEO best practices. This includes generating pages with clean HTML markup, making it easier for search engines to index and understand your site's content. 

Additionally, Squarespace integrates with Google My Business, allowing for syncing location information between your website and Google and enhancing local SEO.

You also get marketing features like:

• Social Media Selling: Squarespace allows for direct integration with social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. You can sync your products with your social media profiles, allowing for direct selling and advertising through posts, stories, and the shops on your profiles.
• Marketing Analytics: Understanding the performance of your website is essential, and Squarespace provides comprehensive marketing analytics tools. These tools enable you to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs).
• Email Campaigns: Email marketing is a powerful tool in ecommerce. With the Squarespace email feature, you can create cohesive marketing efforts that align with your brand voice across your website and emails.

Squarespace Pricing

Squarespace offers a 14-day free trial, allowing you to explore its features before committing to a plan.

After the trial period, you choose from four different pricing plans:

• Personal Plan: $16 monthly. For individuals and small businesses looking to create a basic website.
• Business Plan: $23 per month. Geared towards businesses seeking a more advanced website that can take payments.
• Commerce Basic Plan: $27 per month. Focused on e-commerce, offering tools to help grow your business.
• Commerce Advanced Plan: $49 per month. The most comprehensive and is ideal for scaling your e-commerce business.

Positives of Squarespace

• Streamlined and efficient payment process. Intuitive checkout experience for customers, making it faster and easier for them to complete purchases.
• Minimalist and aesthetically pleasing design choices catering to different industries.
• You get video training and accessible chat support when building a website, making the process manageable even for those with little to no website-building experience.

What Could Be Better

• Squarespace can become quite costly, especially for users with advanced needs or those managing multiple websites. For an in-depth comparison, check out these Squarespace alternatives.
• Compared to platforms like WordPress, Squarespace is not as open to add-ins and customizations.
• For users with extensive WordPress experience, Squarespace feels restrictive in certain areas.

WordPress vs. Weebly vs. Squarespace vs. Durable: Ease of Use

Durable simplifies website building to a few straightforward steps. This is ideal for users without any technical background. The platform guides you through intuitive prompts, ensuring a smooth and efficient creation process.

WordPress has a highly customizable interface, appealing to users who desire full control over their site's design and functionality. However, this flexibility comes at the cost of a steeper learning curve, particularly with the introduction of the Gutenberg editor.

Weebly uses a user-friendly approach featuring a drag-and-drop editor. The platform's structured design approach is advantageous for beginners. It provides guidance and prevents common design pitfalls.

Squarespace strikes a balance between ease of use and aesthetic appeal. The Fluid Engine editor is intuitive and flexible, allowing you to easily customize the stylish and responsive templates.

WordPress vs. Weebly vs. Squarespace vs. Durable: Integrated AI Capabilities

Durable has many AI-driven features, including website generation, AI CRM, invoicing tools, and blogging assistance. These tools automate and streamline many processes, from initial site creation to customer interaction and content generation.

WordPress doesn't inherently offer AI capabilities, but its vast plugin repository includes various AI tools. You need to actively seek out and integrate these plugins to leverage AI functionalities.

Squarespace introduced the Squarespace Blueprint, which works like Durable. It asks you questions through a five-step process, gathering information about your preferences for website structure, color palette, and font pairing. There is also the Squarespace AI, a copywriter that generates website copy for selected text.

Weebly focuses more on user-friendly design tools than on integrated AI features. While Weebly offers streamlined website creation and management processes, it doesn’t heavily feature AI-driven tools in its core offerings.

WordPress vs. Weebly vs. Squarespace vs. Durable: Blogging Features

Durable’s AI blog builder generates SEO-optimized articles based on provided titles, significantly reducing the time and effort needed for content creation.

Originally a blogging platform, WordPress offers extensive blogging capabilities with vast customization options, making it a top choice for professional bloggers.

Weebly provides a straightforward blogging feature, suitable for basic blog needs, but lacks the depth and customization available in WordPress.

Squarespace offers elegant blog templates and easy integration within websites, appealing to users who prioritize design and functionality.

WordPress vs. Weebly vs. Squarespace vs. Durable: SEO Tools

Durable integrates advanced AI tools to optimize websites for search engines automatically. This includes generating SEO-friendly content and metadata based on the latest algorithms and trends simplifying the SEO process for users without requiring in-depth SEO knowledge.

WordPress has a wide range of SEO plugins, like Yoast SEO and All in One SEO Pack, which provide comprehensive control over every aspect of SEO. These plugins guide you through optimizing content, managing keywords, creating sitemaps, and more.

Weebly offers SEO functionalities, such as customizing title tags, meta descriptions, and alt text for images. It's suitable for users new to SEO or those running smaller websites with less complex SEO needs.

Squarespace includes built-in SEO tools that cater to general SEO requirements, such as clean HTML markup, automatic sitemaps, and mobile optimization.

WordPress vs. Weebly vs. Squarespace vs. Durable: Which Should You Choose?

After evaluating each platform's features, let's look at the final scores in crucial areas like ease of use, SEO tools, and e-commerce capabilities.

The perfect website builder should align with your specific needs, skills, and objectives. 

Durable, with its AI-driven approach, offers exceptional ease of use and effective SEO tools, ideal if you’re looking for efficiency and user-friendliness.

With the addition of integrated tools for website management, Durable stands as a comprehensive all-in-one solution.