Wixvs
Webflow
Webflow: Pick Webflow if you want visual editing that produces clean semantic markup and a real CMS you can export.
Wix
Drag-and-drop website builder with hosting, e-commerce and marketing bundled into one subscription
As of 1 September 2026, Wix has a free plan and paid plans start at $17/month. A hosted site builder that trades portability for convenience: everything from the CMS to the payment processing lives inside Wix, and there is no export path to another host. Softwr lists it under Web Development. Wix is made by Wix.com Ltd., available on Web, iOS, Android.
Overview
What Wix does
Wix is a hosted website platform. You pick a template or generate a layout, edit it visually on an absolute-positioning canvas, and Wix hosts the result on its own infrastructure. Paid plans add a custom domain, remove Wix branding, and unlock storage, video minutes, e-commerce and marketing tools. Wix Studio is a separate editor aimed at agencies building for clients, and Wix eCommerce is the shop-focused packaging of the same platform. The distinguishing commercial fact is lock-in. Wix does not let you export a site to another host. There is no equivalent of a WordPress database dump plus theme files. You can export a blog as WXR and download product CSVs, but the design, the layout logic and the app configuration stay behind. That makes Wix cheap to start and expensive to leave, which is exactly the shape the pricing is built around: the entry Light plan at 17 USD a month annually is deliberately underpriced against the 39 USD Business plan where the e-commerce features live. Who buys it: small businesses, restaurants, tradespeople and creative freelancers who want a site live in a weekend without hiring anyone, plus agencies using Wix Studio for low-budget client work. The trade-off is ceiling. Once you need custom server-side logic, a real staging environment, or a content model with relations, you are working against the platform rather than with it, and the migration you avoided at the start becomes a full rebuild.
What people use it for
- A restaurant that needs a menu, online ordering and reservations live before the weekend without a developer
- A tradesperson or consultant who wants a credible five-page brochure site and a contact form without ongoing maintenance
- A photographer or designer publishing a portfolio where visual control matters more than markup quality
- An agency using Wix Studio to deliver low-budget client sites on a fixed fee with client-editable content areas
Related searches
The honest half
Where it falls short
Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Wix.
- There is no site export, so moving to another host means rebuilding the site from scratch; the blog exports as WXR and products as CSV but the design and app configuration do not come with you.
- Advertised prices are annual-billing rates and monthly billing costs substantially more, so the 17 USD Light plan is really 24 USD if you are not willing to commit for a year.
- Templates cannot be swapped after publishing; changing the look of an existing site means rebuilding it page by page on a new template.
- The absolute-positioning editor produces heavy markup and Wix sites routinely score poorly on Core Web Vitals compared with a hand-built or static site, which matters if organic search is your main channel.
- E-commerce is gated behind the 39 USD Business tier, so a shop paying 29 USD on Core discovers mid-project that abandoned-cart recovery, subscriptions and multi-currency all need an upgrade.
Cross-shopped
What people choose instead of Wix
Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.
- WixvsSquarespace Commerce
Squarespace Commerce: Pick Squarespace if you want tighter default design and a simpler pricing ladder for a shop.
- WixvsWordPress
WordPress: Pick WordPress if never being locked to one host matters more than convenience.
Pricing
What Wix costs
Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.
Free
Free
- Wix subdomain only
- Wix branding on every page
- 500MB storage
- No custom domain
Light
$17 /mo
- Custom domain
- No Wix ads
- 2GB storage
- 2 collaborators
- No e-commerce
Core
$29 /mo
- Accept payments
- 50GB storage
- Basic marketing suite
- 5 collaborators
Business
$39 /mo
- Full e-commerce
- 100GB storage
- Advanced analytics
- 10 collaborators
Business Elite
$159 /mo
- Unlimited storage
- Advanced e-commerce and dev tools
- 100 collaborators
- Priority support
Capabilities
Features
Visual editor
Absolute-positioning drag-and-drop canvas with responsive breakpoints in Wix Studio
Wix ADI
Generates a starting site from answers to a short questionnaire
App Market
Third-party and first-party add-ons for bookings, memberships, forms and events
Velo
JavaScript development environment with a database collections layer and page-level code
Wix Payments
First-party payment processing with per-transaction fees on top of the plan
Bookings and Restaurants
Vertical modules for appointment scheduling and online ordering
Marketing suite
Email campaigns, SEO checklist, social posts and basic automations
Managed hosting
CDN, SSL and automatic scaling with no server access
Answered, with sources
Questions people ask
Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
Can I move my Wix site to WordPress?
Not directly. You can export blog posts as WXR and products as CSV, but the pages, design and app settings have to be rebuilt.
Is the free plan usable for a business?
No. It shows Wix ads on every page and does not allow a custom domain.
Does Wix charge transaction fees?
Wix itself does not add a commission on paid plans, but Wix Payments charges standard card processing fees per transaction.
What is the difference between Wix and Wix Studio?
Studio is the agency-oriented editor with responsive CSS-grid layout, reusable design systems and client handover; it targets people building sites for other people.
Keep looking
Where to go from Wix
- Wix alternativesEvery product people weigh against it
- Wix pricingPlans, floors and what the tiers exclude
- Wix badgesWhich rules it meets, and the figure behind each
- All Web Development softwareThe full category
- Best Web Development softwareThe shortlist, and how it was cut
Best Web Development software for
Compare Wix with
- Strikingly
- Drupal
- Carrd
- Docusaurus
- SolidStart
- Astro
- Lit
- Next.js
- Django
- MySQL
- Flask
- MUI
- npm
- TanStack Start
- Alpine.js
- Carrd
- SolidStart
- Astro
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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Wix, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.
More on Wix
Wix alternatives
What people switch to, and what they give up
Wix pricing
Every tier, and where the cost actually lands
Compare Wix
Put it head to head with anything we hold
Wix badge
Its rating, and an embed for your own site
