With so many platforms currently available, you’ve got no end of options open to you when it comes to deciding which drag-and-drop website builder you’re ultimately going to use to create your new website.
Whilst this may sound like a good think at first, by the time you’ve done your research and looked into all those different options, you may well find that making that big decision is harder than it first seems.
This is especially true when you start comparing all the different aspects of any two given site builders, tying yourself in knots in an attempt to really discover which is going to be the best one for your new site.
But don’t worry, help is at hand. We tasked the experts at Best Website Builder Now with tackling two leading tools – Sitebuilder and Weebly- to help you decide which is the better website builder for your new site.
Pricing
Hands down, Weebly takes the gold here. Whilst both sites come with free plans that are more than sufficient for building a great looking website, Sitebuilder tends to hide theirs behind a wall of confusion that results in you either paying for a premium plan straight away or giving up and going elsewhere. The third option -actually using the free plan- is only really doable (or so we’ve found) by logging off and logging in again. Talk about a pain in the you-know-what.
When you do get through to the pricing upgrades for both sites, you tend to find that Weebly’s a slightly cheaper, even though there is a currency issue. We could neither get Sitebuilder to display in dollars nor Weebly in British Pound Sterling, so we’ll have to make the best of what we’ve got here.
With Weebly, we found prices were usually much less than Sitebuider’s, with a greater flexibility in the number of plans available, make it a much better choice for those who need to pack as much into a small budget as they can.
Features and functions
On both platforms, free hosting comes as a standard feature regardless as to whether you pay for your plan or stick with the free version.
With Weebly, unlimited pages and a one-year domain name are included in all of the paid plans, as is the ability to remove Weebly’s branding from your website, customize your footers and replace their favicon with your own.
Elsewhere, HD video and audio players, password protected pages, site search and membership sites are included with two of their higher paid plans.
Moving over to Sitebuilder, you do get most of those features with the more expensive plans, along with added SEO support and email.
Where the latter site does come into its own is when it comes to building your own store. Weebly does support eCommerce in all of its plans, though many of them are limited unless you pay out for their $20 per month plan. Sitebuilder on the other hand, offer the same package for only £5.25 per month, one area where they really do offer better value for money.
Design
For the most part, Sitebuilder’s professionally designed templates are some of the best on the market, and few other web building tools can really compete with them on that front. Weebly however, can. Though aesthetics is always subject to personal opinion, we personally prefer them to Sitebuilder’s designs.
Ease of Use
Last but not least, the most important one of all. Ease of use is the one reason you’re choosing to build your site with a tool like Sitebuilder or Weebly, so which one provides the better overall user experience? For our money, it’s Sitebuilder, though only by a narrow margin.
Both sites are equally as easy to get to grips with for anyone with even rudimentary IT skills, but there’s something about Sitebuilder sleek interface that makes it just a fraction more intuitive, and for that reason, we’ll give it the point here.