Best software to make your own website

We paid particular attention to the categories that not only differentiate one site from another, but that actually matter to business owners, artists and creators such as SEO features, creative cloud, mobile-friendly website builders, available plugins, live chat options, eCommerce feature, pricing plan and customer support.

If, by the end of the list, you're still not sure which direction to go with your web builder, we've included a guide at the bottom, including key questions you should be asking yourself as you start your online venture.

Finally, if you already have a basic website and just need a host or you're interested in building a self-hosted WordPress site, check out our list of best web hosting services and our list of the best WordPress hosting services.

Wix is the clear front-runner in the race for website builder dominance. It's the biggest player with over million websites built.

This popular website builder also boasts the greatest quantity of tools, capabilities, and freedom. Wix covers the full ease-of-use spectrum by offering an AI-fueled automatic website creator on one end "Wix ADI" that requires minimal effort from the user, all the way to Wix Corvid, an open development platform for advanced applications like Javascript, databases and data-driven dynamic pages.

To maximize the experience, we do recommend choosing one lane e. Like many competitors in this space, Wix offers a basic free website builder plan that lets website owners create a free website starter site with ads. If you like what you see with the free website builder, you can spend up for a premium, ad-free site. Those prices do not include a domain, so you'll need to account for that separately.

And if you're interested in stats and analytics, you'll either need to get a Google Analytics paid plan or another third-party tool, as Wix doesn't have its own. Despite being the clear favorite among most reviewers, Wix does have a few drawbacks. Wix was one of the few builders that has data limitations for each of its plan tiers, so if you want to upload endless photos and videos, or expect more than 5, visitors a month to your site, make sure you do the math before choosing a plan.

Also, the editor's freedom and range of options can be overwhelming for folks who don't have the time or inclination to make lots of little decisions and the web design flexibility means you'll need to be more hands-on with the format and layout, as opposed to more structured or limited editors where you can't draw too far outside the lines. Squarespace strikes us as being the cool kid in high school -- flashy and hip on the surface but lacking substance underneath.

We found it to be in between Wix and Weebly in terms of ease of use, though it did get consistently positive marks from reviewers for the quality of the design options.

Where we think it really might shine is for small- to medium-size businesses who want a nicely designed page and room for e-commerce growth with lower transaction fees. The Squarespace editor isn't as intuitive as Wix and Weebly, requiring a little bit of work until you get the hang of it. It has a fair amount of add-ons, website templates and tools, and the universal style editor and strong photo editing are helpful.

The responsive website editor means that your site will always look good on a mobile device, but you won't be able to make mobile-specific edits like with Wix or Duda. We also found consistent high marks for helpful and responsive customer support, which should put business owners' minds at ease. So depending on your sales volume on a given month, those savings for our online store could really add up.

Overall, Squarespace's website is a good analog for what you get with its products: clean, professional and inviting design, but without the layers of design power or freedom you get from other builders. Weebly flies under the radar relative to Wix with 50 million websites created, but offers some excellent options depending on your needs.

If you want a simple and easy-to-use do-it-yourself website editor, a large site more than 25 to 30 pages , unlimited storage, site portability and affordable yet powerful online store capabilities, Weebly plays a good David to Wix's Goliath. The editor is one of the easiest website builder options to use and the low learning curve still nets great-looking sites.

That ease of use means the editor is more limited in terms of add-ons and design flexibility and it doesn't have the range of options or mobile customization that a builder like Wix has.

Still, in our testing, we never came to a point where we found those constraints to be limiting. For a high-octane web designer, though, it could come up.

Weebly is a good option for those who may be more limited in terms of their time investment and its commerce options outshine competitors like Wix and Squarespace. For those who are wary of committing to a website builder knowing that you won't be able to pick up and leave later on, Weebly also offers the ability to download site files so you can move to another host, a rarity in the site builder landscape.

Duda is a smaller player compared to the other builders above with around 15 million websites built and it focuses on a specific market segment: designers and design agencies. It caters to individuals and groups that make a lot of sites, but with a powerful and easy-to-use builder and a number of differentiated offerings, it's emerged as a good option for anyone looking to develop an online presence.

Duda's builder boasts a number of features that set it apart, including mobile site customization, detailed data analytics e. It's also known for its multilanguage support and a free e-commerce add-on that allows you to sell up to 10 products. Duda is a little expensive, but it fills some of the voids that the main players have like analytics, multilingual capabilities, better personalization and mobile customization. GoDaddy is best known for its custom domain names and web hosting services, so it makes sense that it also offers website builder software.

The free tier includes such niceties as email and social media marketing, PayPal payments and an SSL certificate. Despite the fact that GoDaddy is better known as a domain seller, a domain isn't included in those prices -- you'll need to add that separately.

But all in all, GoDaddy's current website creator is a nice step up from its now-discontinued GoCentral product. Likewise, by switching to a free tier, there's no longer a day timer on your experience, so you can take your time kicking the tires to see if GoDaddy is right for you. When most people talk about WordPress, they're usually referring to the free open-source software available through WordPress.

That's very powerful, but it takes some time to learn and still requires that you find a website host and domain name. If you're interested in going the advanced route of WordPress. The WordPress. It's similar to the other builders listed above and is primarily geared toward bloggers and writers.

The WordPress website editor is fairly limited compared to other services, but is easy to set up and has everything you need for blogging. We should also note that it's not an intuitive drag-and-drop website builder like Wix or Weebly. Overall, WordPress caters to bloggers who don't want or need to spend a lot of time on website design, but it feels very limited for most other use cases.

That said, anyone who's looking for more robust off-the-shelf CMS content management systems options should consider Joomla and Drupal. Both are arguably less user-friendly than WordPress, but offer more customization options. If Wix is the clear favorite for most website building needs, Shopify fills that role for an e-commerce store. The platform offers an easy and user-friendly way to get an e-commerce website store up and running online, and it supports business owners throughout the process with their e-commerce tools.

Account Plan offers two choices of either Individual or Team plans. You can kind of figure out which features these both entail! With Teams, you can collaborate with other team members with a shared dashboard, and is a lot more customizable. Webnode is a popular choice of free website maker with more than 30 million users around the world.

You can move elements around, but they will conform to predetermined designs. For example, if you move an image from the middle of the page to the right, the page design will change to accommodate this, rather than simply letting you drop the image where you want it. It lends itself really well to building simple, minimalist sites — we recommend it for events websites rather than, say, business websites. One of the big drawbacks to Webnode is the limited storage you get on the free plan.

You only receive MB storage, which is five times less than most of the other builders on our list. The domain we got for our cupcake website looked like this: lucy-s-cupcakes0. Most of its templates have visuals taking up most of the page — This means its ideal for ecommerce websites that really want to show off their products! A Ucraft watermark is attached to all free websites — you can remove this when upgrading to Pro plan! The image-driven platform lets you showcase your products or services in a bold fashion from large visuals, to flashy fonts.

The main focus on aesthetics really makes this builder enjoyable for the user! The onboarding process for Ucraft is pretty straightforward. When signing up, you get asked to choose your template and to type in your business name — Ucraft then gets to work creating your site. Without a drag and drop editor, it was little more difficult to move elements around the page! The design process was, overall, super fun to play around with and you can achieve a lot of page character when using Ucraft.

With Ucraft being a very image-driven builder, its templates are really focused on large images covering the page, rather than text. Ucraft templates are pretty slick and clear with minimal content — the visuals are clearly doing all the talking!

Although this may sound pricey, Ucraft does have a pretty good value for money with the array of features you get in return.

You can select either the Pro Website plan which is its most popular plan , Pro Shop, or Unlimited plan. SimpleSite lets you easily edit your site from your mobile. Its mobile editor in particular is a great feature for those on the go. If you want a builder that walks you through setting up the different parts of your website step by step, then you might enjoy using SimpleSite.

Its onboarding process uses an animated beaver character to guide you through setting up each page, before you get to enter the main editor.

SimpleSite has a very thorough onboarding process, where it walks you through each step of setting up your website before you even reach the editor. SimpleSite is a mobile delight. It has a really impressive specialism — it gives you the ability to create a website to the same extent as on a desktop, but from your mobile device.

As part of the setup process, you have to choose your website layout. There were only two options to choose from, which felt extremely limiting — especially compared to builders like Wix and Weebly! Showing the mobile preview alongside the desktop view is a nice touch, but more template choice would be even better! You can sell up to five products on the free plan, and your site will be mobile optimized, too.

However, you have limited design options, and will need to upgrade if you want to remove adverts — as well as get rid of that page limit. However, there are some big downsides. SimpleSite has two premium plans, and both are pretty expensive for what they offer. Free website builders may have once seemed too good to be true, but we set out to demonstrate that this is not always the case. A question we often get asked is just how do these free website builders make their money?

Is there something sketchy going on? That said, there are some elements that you should pay close attention to when deciding on which free website builder you choose. To create this ranking of the best free website builders, we drew upon our extensive research and user testing for each website builder as a whole, and combined this with a specific focus on their free plans, paying close attention to whether or not the builder ticked these boxes:.

Our screenshots should help you evaluate the ads of each website builder, and decide on the least intrusive option for you. Most free website builders have a cap on the amount of content you can upload to your site. If you need to sell through your free website builder, this limits your options a little. The process and learning curve differ slightly from builder to builder, but here are the steps you can expect:.

This process could take anything from 15 minutes to a few hours, depending on how much you switch up in steps three and four. Again, yoursite. As your site grows and your traffic increases, you may find you simply outgrow your free plan. You may need to upgrade to have enough storage, and so that enough people can access your site at once. Many paid plans offer unlimited storage and bandwidth, so you can have total peace of mind. The features and tools needed to take your business or hobby to the next level will often be waiting for you in that premium plan, so make sure you at least take a look!

Our list of the top 10 free website builders ranks Wix as the best all-around builder, with tons of free features. Just remember that free website builders nearly always limit the features and functions that are available to you — you may be ok with this now, but it could prove extremely frustrating further down the line.

While we always recommend making the most of free plans to build, play, and experiment with different builders, we never recommend staying on a free plan forever. In the meantime, enjoy trying out your favorite free builders — come back and let us know which one you liked the most!

Another way for website builders to make money is through advertising on your site the ads can be removed by upgrading your plan. Free websites are not very SEO-friendly because you cannot connect a personalized domain. Yes — website builders make it super easy to create professional looking sites for no money at all. With these free platforms you get most of the features you need to get your site up and running, but, of course, upgrading your plans gives you access to better tools.

You can upgrade to a paid premium plan whenever you want to. Doing so will provide you with far more tools, templates, storage space, and other important features for growing your website. Yes, they are totally free to use. You can sign up, create, customize, and publish your site without paying a thing.

However, most website builders lock certain features unless you upgrade to a paid plan, but these costs are completely optional, so the overall costs are up to you. Wix came top in our research for ease of use. Its intuitive drag-and-drop design makes it easy to create a professional looking site without any tech knowledge.

It also gives you tons of creative control so you can build a really developed, personalized site. Weebly takes top spot for best free ecommerce builder — it lets you sell an unlimited number of products on its free plan! This feature is for US sellers only. Strikingly is great for creating modern websites quickly, but only lets you sell one product through its free plan. Mozello is more limiting in terms of design, but lets you set multiple languages for your site, and lets you sell up to 10 products on its free plan — great for selling internationally!

Keep in mind though that, like storage, free plans often have a cap on bandwidth, so you may need to upgrade to a paid plan in order to access more resources once you start getting higher traffic levels. All the platforms featured on this list should reformat your site so it displays properly on mobile.

The ten builders featured on this list all offer a free plan you can stay on for as long as you wish, with no pressure to upgrade. There are currently no free services, but check out our article on the Best Cheap Web Hosts if price is your main consideration when choosing a provider. Found this article helpful? Share this article or comment below!

Written and researched by. Natasha Willett Researcher. Lucy Carney Author. Updated: Oct 27, Comments: Our methodology We tested each free builder to rate them on the criteria you told us mattered most — we paid special attention to features, ease, design, and support. Weebly — Ideal for Small Businesses. Jimdo — Small Online Store Builder. Site — Made for Simple Websites. Strikingly — Made for Simple Websites.

Webflow — Best For Designers. Webnode — Quick and Easy Setup. Ucraft — Best for Multilingual Websites. SimpleSite — Great Mobile Editor. Compare the Top 10 Free Website Builders. In a rush? Get all the key information you need at a glance with our helpful comparison table!

Overall Rating Our overall ratings are based on the average score of all ratings combined. Visit Wix. Visit GoDaddy. Visit Weebly. Visit Site Visit Jimdo. Visit Strikingly. Visit SimpleSite. What does the information in this chart mean? We investigate important areas such as: Ease of use Design flexibility Value for money Feature quality Help and support Customer satisfaction This helps us rate and compare the builders fairly, focusing on important factors that users have told us matter most.

Best All-Around Website Builder Wix is by far the best overall free website builder on the market today. Editor's Choice. Wix Best all-around website builder. Visit Site. How Wix scored in our research: 4. What will my domain name look like? What we liked: The creative freedom — we could drag anything anywhere, making it easy to line things up exactly how we wanted them! The template choices and designs — our chosen template already had a menu section built-in.

This is a small but surprisingly useful feature. How easy it was — changing text, images, and backgrounds only took a few clicks. Wix even has an image library on hand, which made it even faster! What could be improved: Onboarding — although Wix is super easy to use, when the editor first loads, it can look a little confusing because there are so many options. This can make Wix look more tricky than it actually is.

A quick tour would make it even more beginner-friendly. Wix Gallery Click the image below to expand. When the editor first loads, it might seem a little overwhelming or daunting for beginners, which is a shame because Wix is actually very easy to use! Ease of use: 4. Build your free site to find out what all the fuss is about!

Build my Site with Wix for Free. Further Information How do these builders match up side by side? InVision Studio is currently in free beta. Visit InVisionapp. Framer X is a rapid prototyping tool that supports complex animations and generates the code for React components on the fly.

Designers like Framer for its responsive design features, an array of premade components, and support for advanced animations. Developers love it because it simplifies the process of turning a design into production-ready code. Framer X offers a day free trial. Visit Framer. Photo-editing and graphic design tools allow designers to manipulate images and create graphics. While originally released purely for photo editing, Photoshop has evolved to support a variety of use cases, including interface design, video editing, and more, while remaining true to its photo-editing use.

While many designers prefer to work exclusively in Photoshop because of its flexibility, others prefer more specialized tools. If you need a simple tool for creating graphics for social media posts, flyers, or business cards, Canva is a fantastic option.

Users love Canva for its easy-to-use, drag-and-drop interface. With thousands of templates and hundreds of design types, marketers and hobbyists can produce beautiful imagery in just a few clicks. Canva offers a free plan with over templates. Visit Canva. Vectr is a free, cloud-based illustration tool with features similar to Sketch and Adobe Illustrator. If you want to create complex illustrations, or simply design a website or mobile app, Vectr offers everything you need to get started.

Visit Vectr. While you can use Pixelmator for illustration or interface design, it works best as a tool for editing and retouching photos, with features for color correction, retouching, and applying filters. Pixelmator also offers a free, day trial on its website. Visit Pixelmator. GIMP packs quite a bit of power and is capable of nearly everything that Photoshop can do.

Visit Gimp. All of the abovementioned tools can help you be more productive and creative at the same time. Disclosure : This content is reader-supported. If you click on our links, we may earn a commission.