Website builders that let you export your site

Webflow is a design tool that produces real markup, and it makes no attempt to hide that fact. Positioning, spacing and responsive behaviour are edited as the properties they actually are, so a design that could be built by hand can be built here, and one that could not be built by hand cannot be faked.

The content system is what turns that into a website rather than a drawing. Collections define a shape once — a product, a case study, a team member — and pages are generated from them, so a growing site does not become a growing pile of hand-made pages. The code can be exported, which very few tools in this category permit.

The downside is the learning curve, and it is measured in weeks rather than hours. The vocabulary is a designer's vocabulary, the first week is spent understanding why things move when they do, and a reader who wants a site by Friday will not have one. The pricing is also layered — a site plan, sometimes a workspace plan, sometimes an add-on — so the monthly total is rarely the single number on the page.

Shopify treats a store as the whole product rather than a feature bolted to a website. Inventory, payments, shipping rates, tax, discounts and the point-of-sale in a physical shop are one system, and the parts of selling that quietly break other platforms — a tax rule, a shipping band, an out-of-stock variant — are handled rather than approximated.

The app market is the mechanism that keeps it fitting. Where the core does not cover a trade's particular way of selling, something in the market usually does, and the platform stays supported underneath it. Support runs around the clock, and the volume of published material means an unusual problem has usually been written up already.

The cost is that it is priced as a business system and behaves like one. The advertised trial rate is a promotional figure that rises steeply once it ends, using a payment processor other than the platform's own attracts a percentage on every order, and the in-person tools are a further monthly charge per location. For a business whose sales justify that it is money well spent, and for one testing whether it has a business at all it is a heavy place to start.

Squarespace is opinionated in a way the rest of this category is not. Its templates arrive looking finished, its type and colour settings apply across the whole site rather than element by element, and the editor quietly refuses many of the arrangements that make a self-built site look self-built. For a business owner with taste but no training, that constraint is the feature.

The mechanism is a global style system sitting above the page layout. Changing a heading font or a palette changes it everywhere, consistently, without the reader having to remember which pages they already edited. Selling, scheduling and publishing are built in rather than bolted on, and support runs around the clock.

The cost is that the same restraint becomes a ceiling. A design the templates did not anticipate means fighting the editor or dropping into custom CSS, and there is no free tier — the trial ends and a decision has to be made. For a reader whose site needs to look considered rather than bespoke, that is the right bargain; for one with a specific layout in mind it is the wrong tool.

WordPress.com is the hosted, managed form of the software a very large share of the web already runs. The distinction matters and is widely misunderstood: the software is free and can be installed anywhere, and this is a company selling the hosting, updates, backups and support around it as a subscription.

What that buys is a ceiling far above small-business scale together with a genuine exit. Plugins are available from the entry paid plan, the content model handles a site that grows into thousands of pages, and an export produces a file another WordPress installation will read — so leaving means moving rather than rebuilding, which is not true of most of this category.

The cost is that it feels like software rather than a builder. There are more concepts to meet — themes, plugins, settings that live in several places — and the fastest path to a good-looking site still runs through choosing a theme well. A reader who wants to describe a business and be finished this afternoon will find it heavier than the drag-and-drop options, and one who expects the site to be a long-term asset will find it worth the weight.

Ghost starts from a different premise than the rest of this category. It assumes the site is a body of writing with an audience attached, and builds outward from there: an editor that stays out of the way, a members system, and email newsletters that go out from the same place the post was published.

That integration is the argument. A consultant, a coach or a specialist trade whose marketing is genuinely their expertise gets a publication, a mailing list and a way to charge for access as one product, and the subscriber list belongs to them rather than to a marketing platform they are renting. A custom domain is included on every plan rather than gated.

It is not a general-purpose website builder, and using it as one is a mistake. There is no store, no drag-and-drop page design and no bookings, and its entry price sits above several tools that do far more of those things. For a business whose website is mostly writing it is precisely aimed; for one that needs a homepage, a services page and a contact form, it is an expensive way to get them.

10Web takes the two halves of this problem that usually come separately and puts them together: the speed of describing a business and getting a site back, and the durability of that site being ordinary, widely supported software rather than something only one company can read.

The generation produces pages, copy and images, and everything after that is a visual builder sitting on top of WordPress, with the hosting, caching and updates managed. Round-the-clock chat support is included from the entry plan, and because the result is WordPress, plugins and themes from the wider ecosystem apply as they would anywhere else.

The trade-off is that WordPress underneath means WordPress complexity when something needs attention. The reader who wanted to avoid thinking about plugins, themes and updates has not entirely escaped them, only deferred the encounter, and the abstraction is thinner than the marketing implies. For a business that wants generation now and portability later it is a rare combination; for one that wants never to see a plugin screen it is a partial promise.

v0 generates interface code rather than a site, and it does that unusually well: the output uses a real component library, a documented design system and conventions a developer would recognise. Someone comfortable in a codebase can move from a description to a working screen quickly, and take the result away as a repository.

Publishing is where it diverges from everything around it. The vendor's own instructions hand deployment to a separate hosting service, send the reader to that service's console and then to their registrar's DNS. That hosting service documents its free tier as non-commercial, so a business publishing a v0 project needs a paid plan there as well as the plan here.

The cost is a price that misleads rather than merely understates. The cheapest plan a new customer can buy is thirty dollars a month per person, the tier below it has been withdrawn, credits are consumed daily on top, and the hosting bill sits outside all of it. No support channel is named below the enterprise tier.