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GoDaddy Website Builder vs. Weebly vs. Wix - they are the three most well-known website builders. I've written about them individually here, here and here. But how do they compare directly to each other?
Skip to the Conclusion & Next Steps
First, a bit of background. The process of building a website has changed radically since the early days of the Internet. Even though the core job of a website - HTML rendered in a browser - has not changed, the technology used to produce the HTML has. While you can still produce a website with nothing but a text-editor - most people choose a technology that makes the process of building and managing the website much easier and more accessible.

All-inclusive website builders have been particularly interesting. Companies like GoDaddy's Website Builder, Weebly, and Wix have brought websites to everyone regardless of coding skills with their drag & drop and/or customizable templates.

There is a wide variety of website building solutions, and they all live on a spectrum with a tradeoff between control & convenience.

On the 100% control, but 0% convenience end - you have solutions like a text editor and server space that you purchase separately. It's a bit akin to buying raw land to build your house for shelter.

On the 0% control, but 100% convenience end - you have solutions like Facebook and Twitter that provide no control (not even domain name control), but are highly convenient.

In the 50/50 middle - you have solutions like WordPress that live on your own server, but help you manage & build your website. It's akin to buying a house that you own - you are responsible if anything breaks, but you can do really whatever you want.

Towards the convenience end, but with more control all live "hosted" website builders like Weebly, Wix, and GoDaddy's Website Builder. They offer more convenience by bundling hosting, design, etc, but trade some control.

Using a website builder is sort of like leasing and customizing an apartment in a really classy development instead of buying and owning your own house. You're still in control of decor, cleaning, and everything living-wise - but you leave the construction, plumbing, security, and infrastructure to the property owner. That point is key because there's usually a direct tradeoff between convenience and control.

In the long-term, it affects your versatility, functionality, and, of course, your brand. In the short term, it can certainly add/take away a lot of headaches. That said, just like choosing a physical house or office, there is no such thing as an absolute "best" or "top" choice. There's only such a thing as the right choice relative to your goals, experience, and circumstances.

GoDaddy Website Builder, Weebly, and Wix as a group compete with options like WordPress (which provides the free software to build a website that you own & control on your own hosting - see my WordPress setup guide here) all the way to options like typing actual HTML code into a text file.

*confusingly, GoDaddy also offers hosting, where you can install website software like WordPress. This comparison will focus on GoDaddy's Website Builder that bundles hosting. You can find GoDaddy hosting alternatives here.

Make sense? Awesome, let's dive into the comparison.

Side note - if you want this comparison in a BuzzFeed-style quiz, you can take my website builder quiz here...

Otherwise, we'll look specifically at pricing, onboarding/user experience, design features, technical features, marketing features, and customer support.

One other quick aside - a disclosure - I receive referral fees from all the companies mentioned in this post. My opinions & research are based on my experiences as either a paying customer or consultant to a paying customer.

Pricing

Comparing pricing among GoDaddy Website Builder, Weebly, and Wix is tough because their tiers are completely different. Weebly tiers are based on technical and eCommerce features. GoDaddy bases their tiers on service upgrades (like "Globally Optimized Speed"). Wix has several tiers based on a wide range of factors.

And all three have free plans.

The short version is that Weebly offers the most feature value and fewest real caps at each tier. Weebly's cheap tier is a particularly attractive tier for most small business and personal sites.

Wix is competitive with GoDaddy's Website Builder depending on use case. If you need a basic, cheap plan without a ton of features, then GoDaddy will be a better choice. But if you include all of Wix's functionality and look at plans above $10/mo - then Wix is more competitive.

Weebly wins overall here.

*Reminder - these costs are all very different than if you are looking at building your own site with WordPress or a something else. Part of the point of website builders is the bundled pricing. It's possible to get a custom website with unlimited functionality for much cheaper if you build it yourself.

Onboarding & User Experience

No matter how intuitive and simple a piece of technology is, there's always that moment of "what am I looking at and what do I do now?"

Onboarding is how products get you past that point. It is how companies move you from being a new customer to an active customer. And since website builders have a bundled product - in theory, they should have a huge advantage on this point.

Onboarding's close cousin is "user experience" which is software jargon for how easy something is day to day.

Weebly wins overall - given how many features they have. Wix does fine. But on a measure of how quickly you get from your first click to a live website - GoDaddy wins. But it has a bit of a caveat.

Weebly starts the process well with a way for you to immediately segment yourself by type of website (ie, "restaurant" or "real estate", etc). They also offer plenty of unintrusive info buttons, pop-ups, a checklist and an email sequence to make sure you're on track.

Wix is fine. They have an email sequence, which is mainly focused on hard selling their premium plans over helping you get set up. Their backend is straightforward, but requires some clicking and strategizing to decide what to do next.

Like I said earlier, GoDaddy's website builder is fastest from start to finish. But part of that is due to the fact that they have fewer features, fewer templates and fewer options in general than Weebly or Wix.

That's not a good or bad thing - it all depends on what you're looking for. But GoDaddy's setup is much more akin to setting up a Facebook or Twitter profile than designing a website. This will crop up in the next few sections, but for now, it's actually a huge advantage.

And since so many people use GoDaddy for their domains - they make it seamless to connect your domain to your website.

They also do plenty of segmentation and pre-filling templates.

Design Features

Part of the overall value of website builders is design.

Design is hard. And it matters - a lot. A lot of people can spot a good looking website but have a harder time figuring out how to get there. Using a template for a foundation and then customizing it is a good way to get the site you want without paying for a custom design.

Like I mentioned in the onboarding section, GoDaddy not only has plenty of templates, but they do an excellent job of pre-filling the templates with solid imagery.

On the flip side - GoDaddy has very limited actual design options.

They do not have drag and drop. You can add "sections" - but the color, typography, and layouts are pretty set. Their templates are fine, but certainly not groundbreaking or beautiful.

Weebly has a diverse range of templates. They are solid, but even as a non-designer, I can tell that they are more functional than anything.

Wix's designs are good. They've improved a lot over the last year. Additionally, Wix doesn't allow any CSS customization, so you're really stuck with whatever templates they have.

Weebly wins on design in my experience. They have solid templates and allow for full customization if that's your thing. If you want to deliberately limit yourself to a pre-filled template that does the job - then GoDaddy's route is certainly an option.

Technical Features

Technical features are all the web development best practices that don't really matter...until they matter a lot. I'm talking about generating clean URLs, editable metadata, allowing page-level redirects, etc.

For Weebly, they have plenty of front end tools. They automatically generate permalinks and well-coded HTML. You can edit CSS & HTML if you want. For a hosted website builder, they do very well.

Wix is fine, but not ideal. They use an HTML5 / AJAX engine to build and serve their pages. It's a bit clunky from a front-end perspective, but it works. Wix websites get a URL structure that works but is also not ideal.

GoDaddy makes sites that work...but are very limited from a technical perspective.

With GoDaddy - what you see is what you get. It creates clean URLs and renderable HTML. It is not suitable for a long-term project where you will want to upgrade and add features.

Website builders are limited on technical features by their nature, but Weebly does surprisingly well and certainly the best among the three.

Marketing Features

In Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner's character famously says "if you build it, they will come." Sadly, that is not true about websites. Just like any business, you have to actively promote and market your website for anyone to show up.

Marketing features like custom metadata, open graph information, Schema markups, email signups, share buttons, landing pages, etc all make marketing your site a lot easier.

For marketing features, Weebly does well with Wix doing fine, but not ideal.

Weebly has plenty of plugin "apps" along with built-in marketing features (like SEO editor) in addition to the ability to place custom Javascript anywhere, which opens a lot of opportunities for custom tools (like OptinMonster) to retargeting and conversion rate codes.

Again, here Wix is ok (they do provide many native apps), but not ideal. They do not allow custom Javascript code and have some issues with advanced technical SEO.

GoDaddy is, again, what you see is what you get. It's simple but very limited. In fact, GoDaddy uses some marketing features as an upsell, while thoroughly miseducating their customers. Here's an example on how they do this with "SEO" - you can read the full context in my GoDaddy Website Builder Review, but basically they create a non-issue with SEO and then sell the "solution."

The issues here are that first, while all too common - the idea of "ranking higher" is misleading. Second, they put way too much emphasis on things like title tag formatting that sort of matter, but do not matter nearly as much as having a good keyword map with good content that targets an achievable theme of keywords.

Or - things like mapping out an effective marketing strategy.

Support & Service

All three have knowledge-bases and customer support. All three do phone support during business hours, in addition to email tickets and customer forums.

Since they all run on proprietary platforms, it's usually straightforward to find a solution (ie, they built the software, so they can fix it). They all have anecdotal horror and success stories around the Internet. While I've never had a bad experience with any, it's also unfair to judge any based on anecdotes.

They all offer good support channels, but they all also view customer support both as an investment and as an opportunity to upsell. Be sure to be direct and forthright about your problem, and watch for upsells. But there's no real advantage / disadvantage between these three on support.

Comparison Conclusion

If you decide that using an all-inclusive website builder is right for you, then Weebly and GoDaddy will be the two I'd narrow it down to.

GoDaddy Website Builder is a good fit for anyone who needs something basic, quick and straightforward. Get GoDaddy's promo here.

Weebly is a good fit for anyone who wants a full-featured website builder with drag and options. Get Weebly's free trial here.

If you're interested in building your own website on your own hosting (including on GoDaddy Hosting), check out my step by step tutorial here.

If you are looking for a builder with good eCommerce options, be sure to take my Online Store Builder Quiz.

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GoDaddy Website Builder vs. Wix vs. Weebly: Website Builders Compared

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GoDaddy Website Builder vs. Weebly vs. Wix - they are the three most well-known website builders. I've written about them individually here, here and here. But how do they compare directly to each other? Skip to the Conclusion & Next Steps First, a bit of background.

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