Start here
The best website builders
Ninety builders in one order, priced at the renewal rate and scored on ease, design, room to grow, support and what the money buys.
Website builders you will not outgrow
Ranked on headroom rather than on the first month: what happens when the site gets bigger, busier or more complicated than you planned.
What you are building
Best website builders for a small business
For the five-page site a business actually needs: what it says, how to contact you, and a price that has not tripled by year two.
Best website builders for a blog or content site
The builders that treat writing as a first-class thing rather than a tab, ranked by how easily a beginner gets going.
Best website builders for an online store
Everything here can take a payment. They differ enormously in what happens after the order arrives.
Best website builders for a portfolio
When the work is the argument, the site's job is to stay out of its way. Ranked by how good the result looks without a designer.
Best website builders for bookings and appointments
For a business whose website exists so people can book time — salons, clinics, trades and consultants.
Best landing page builders
Tools built around one page that has to convert, rather than around a site that has to exist.
Best link-in-bio tools
One address to send an audience to. They differ most in whether it is an address you can keep.
Best website builders for selling online courses
Selling a course is mostly an administrative problem. These differ in how much of it they take on.
Best website builders for a local business
For a shop, a salon or a restaurant, where the site exists to get someone through the door.
Best website builders for a newsletter
For writing sent by email and archived on the web, where the list, the archive and the payments all need to be the same product.
The best platforms to sell digital products
Selling a file is a different business from selling a box, and these platforms price it differently: a share of sales rather than a subscription.
How it is built
The best drag-and-drop website builders
Builders where you move things around the page and they stay where you put them, which is what most people mean by a website builder.
The best one-page website builders
For a site that is genuinely one page: fast to build, cheap to run, and a much better answer than a five-page site with nothing on four of them.
The best hosted CMS platforms
For sites where the content is the product: structured publishing, editorial workflow, and an editor several people can share.
The best website builders for designers
Tools that give you real control over layout, type and interaction, for people who know what they want the page to look like.
Price, features and support
Easiest website builders for a complete beginner
Ranked on how far someone with no experience gets alone, from signing up to a live page on their own domain.
Website builders that produce the best-looking sites
How good the result can look with nobody but you working on it, and how far the templates bend before they break.
Cheapest website builders worth using
The options under fifteen dollars a month at the renewal rate, and what each one gives up to get there.
The best free website builders
Not a trial. A tier you can publish on and keep, with the branding and domain limits stated plainly.
Website builders that do not brand your site
Every builder here will take its own name off the page. What differs is which plan that requires, and what the domain costs alongside it.
Best website builders for SEO
Builders that give you the controls search engines need — titles, descriptions, redirects, structured data — rather than deciding them for you.
Website builders with email marketing built in
Builders that can collect an address and mail the list from the same place, so the signup form and the newsletter are not two subscriptions.
Best website builders with real human support
The builders that put a person on the other end of a channel on the plan you would actually buy, rather than one several tiers up.
Website builders that let you export your site
The builders that produce something you could take elsewhere, and what each export actually contains once you have it.
Best website builders for multilingual sites
The builders that document running one site in several languages as a supported arrangement rather than as a workaround.
Built by AI
Best AI website builders
Generators that produce an ordinary website — pages, copy and images — rather than an application, ranked by how far the first run gets you.
Best AI app builders
Tools that write a working application from a description, ranked by how far a reader gets before hitting something they have to understand.
Best no-code app builders
For building something with users, records and permissions rather than pages.
Alternatives
Linktree Alternatives
No Linktree plan connects a domain you own, on any tier. These are the link pages that publish at an address you control.
Gumroad Alternatives
Gumroad takes ten per cent plus a fixed charge on every direct sale and no plan reduces it, because there are no plans.
Ko-fi Alternatives
Ko-fi is the cheapest way to be paid by an audience and the page is a payment page. These are the alternatives that are a business instead.
Beacons Alternatives
Beacons takes nine per cent of sales until its top tier, and a domain bought through it stays the property of Beacons rather than yours.
Stan Store Alternatives
Stan Store starts at twenty-nine dollars a month with no free plan, and no tier on it connects a domain you own — only a redirect to theirs.
Podia Alternatives
Podia's cheapest plan is forty-two dollars a month billed yearly with no free tier, and its email list stops at a hundred subscribers.
Wix Alternatives
Wix has no export of any kind — a finished site cannot be moved to another platform. These are the builders worth looking at instead.
Squarespace Alternatives
Squarespace has no free tier at all, and an off-template design means custom CSS or a compromise. These are the builders to compare it against.
Shopify Alternatives
Shopify's promotional rate rises steeply once it ends, and an outside payment processor adds a percentage to every order. These are the alternatives.
Webflow Alternatives
Webflow scores 2 for ease — competence takes weeks, not an afternoon — and site plans, workspace plans and add-ons stack into one bill.
WordPress.com Alternatives
WordPress.com's advertised entry rate lasts twelve months and then renews at roughly two and a half times as much, and it scores 2 for support.
Framer Alternatives
Framer has no store, no bookings and no marketing email at any tier, no export, and a free plan the vendor describes as non-commercial.