Choosing the right website builder is essential, whether you want to launch an online store, a blog, or any other type of site. The options are numerous, ranging from simple and free CMS (Content Management System) to advanced platforms. We'll guide you through the best software available, outlining their pros, cons, and who they're best suited for.
Whether you are a novice or a professional, this article will provide you with the key information to select the ideal software for your web project. We'll compare no-code platforms like Wix and Webflow, open source CMS like WordPress, and e-commerce solutions like Shopify, considering customization, hosting, SEO, and custom domain options. If you are particularly interested in Webflow, know that there is a webflow training course to help you master this powerful platform.
Discover the best website creation software to successfully start your online project.
Top 1: Webflow
Webflow highlights
Webflow is distinguished by its ability to merge design and development at the same stage, simplifying and accelerating the creation of websites. This platform allows you to design directly in HTML and CSS, eliminating the need to convert your designs into code. This ensures a quick and error-free launch of your site.
Security is another strong point of Webflow, with SSL certification as standard and automatic backups to protect your data. Thanks to the Amazon AWS hosting infrastructure, Webflow also guarantees high loading performance, even on modest internet connections.
The Webflow editor is remarkably easy to use. Its intuitive interface allows users, even without technical skills, to make changes without impacting the backend. You can easily add blog posts, projects, team members, and manage form submissions directly from the editor.
Who is Webflow for?
Webflow is aimed at website creators who want flexibility and freedom of design. It is ideal for designers and front-end developers familiar with HTML and CSS, but also accessible to non-technical people thanks to its intuitive visual interface. Webflow is perfect for small and medium-sized websites, and can be adapted to more complex projects with a bit of customization.
The limits of Webflow
However, Webflow has its limits. Its main constraint is the number of pages per project, limited to 100 static pages, regardless of the webflow subscription plan. This can be a barrier for sites that require a large number of pages.
Integrations can also be a challenge. Although Webflow supports tools like Google Analytics and Zapier, integrating less common CRM systems or advanced features may require custom code. This may result in additional costs and the need to hire a developer.
Finally, Webflow imposes restrictions on the number of characters for custom code and videos, and does not offer file upload functionality for forms, except on the Business hosting option.
Top 2: WordPress
WordPress highlights
WordPress stands out as one of the most reputable and effective website creation platforms on the market. Its great flexibility and ability to evolve are among its main assets. With its vast system of plugins, it is simple to transform your site, easily going from a showcase site to an online store, for example.
The platform also benefits from a dynamic and committed global community, ensuring continuous development, reliable technical support, and active sharing of practical advice. This community offers access to a multitude of resources, extensions, frequent updates, and constant improvements. With thousands of plugins available, the possibilities of functionalities are almost unlimited.
The open source aspect of WordPress is a major advantage. Since the source code is open to everyone, users can modify it to customize their website according to their preferences. This openness ensures great independence, allowing you not to be bound to a proprietary solution and to easily transfer your data if you want to change platforms.
Plus, WordPress is remarkably easy to set up and customize, even for those who aren't tech savvy. Its intuitive interface makes it easy to publish content and manage the site, without requiring specific training. The theme library is also rich, offering plenty of customization options to design the site of your dreams.
Who is WordPress for?
WordPress is suitable for a wide range of web projects, whether it's creating or redesigning a site. It is ideal for showcase sites, businesses, small to medium-sized online stores, portfolios, portfolios, blogs, non-profit or non-profit sites, news portals, forums, directories, directories, institutions, media, and events.
This platform is particularly suitable for companies that want to integrate their website into their global commercial strategy. Marketing and communication managers, and business leaders value its versatility and ability to meet diverse needs.
The limits of WordPress
However, WordPress is not without limits. A common challenge is memory management, which is often insufficient for sites rich in media content or using complex scripts, which can lead to “Allowed memory size exhausted” or “Out of memory” errors.
To overcome this problem, it is recommended to increase the PHP memory limit, either by modifying the `.htaccess` or `wp-config.php` files, or via the hosting management panel. Sometimes, opting for a higher hosting plan is necessary to access more resources.
Advanced customization and maintenance can also present complexities. Although WordPress is generally easy to use, some more technical tasks may require specific know-how.
Top 3: Wix
Wix highlights
Wix is a website creation platform that stands out for its ease of use, its variety of ready-to-use templates and its speed of implementation. Its intuitive interface and drag-and-drop system make it easy to create a website without advanced technical skills, simplifying the design process for beginners.
The platform offers a wide selection of templates adapted to different sectors and styles, all well designed and fully customizable. This allows users to design a unique website that reflects their visual identity. Flexibility in customization ensures complete control over the final appearance of the site.
Another major advantage of Wix is its ability to allow professional websites to be created and published quickly, which is ideal for small businesses and freelancers who want to quickly establish their online presence.
Who is Wix for?
Wix caters to a variety of users, from beginners to entrepreneurs and small businesses, to freelancers and freelancers. Those looking to quickly develop a website without encountering technical complications will find it an economical and effective solution. The platform is designed to be accessible to everyone, regardless of technical skill level.
The limits of Wix
Despite its many benefits, Wix has its limits. Once a model is chosen, customization options can be restricted, making model changes complex without losing some of the customization work that has already been done.
Advanced features and integrations may also be limited, especially for sites built with the free version, which include Wix ads and restrictions on the number of pages and features.
When it comes to Wix Stores, Wix's e-commerce solution, there are specific limitations, such as the maximum number of products (up to 50,000) and variants per product (up to 1,000 variants).
Top 4: Shopify
Shopify highlights
Shopify stands out as a highly regarded and powerful e-commerce platform, offering numerous advantages that make it appealing to online sellers. Its ease of use is one of its major assets. With its intuitive user interface, Shopify makes it easy for anyone to create and manage an online store without requiring advanced technical skills.
The customizable templates and the drag-and-drop tool make creating your website much easier.
Shopify also shines with its flexibility in sales channels. The platform allows you to sell via online stores, social networks, marketplaces and even in physical stores thanks to Shopify POS. This diversity opens up a wide range of possibilities for reaching different audiences and diversifying sales channels.
In terms of scalability, Shopify excels, able to adapt to the growing needs of your business. Whether you run a small store or a large business, Shopify can handle high traffic and sales volumes without compromising its performance.
With robust analytics and reporting tools, Shopify allows merchants to track sales, customer behavior, and other key metrics, making it easy to make informed business decisions. The platform integrates over 7,000 applications to extend its functionality, as well as built-in marketing tools for SEO, discount codes, and email marketing.
Who is Shopify for?
Shopify is suitable for a wide range of merchants, from small businesses and startups to large businesses. It is ideal for those who want to create and manage an online store in a simple way and without technical hassles. Sellers of physical, digital, or service products will find Shopify a complete and scalable solution.
The platform is also perfect for entrepreneurs who want to quickly establish an online presence at a lower cost. Shopify's affordable pricing makes the platform accessible to small merchants and startups. 24/7 customer support and automatic updates ensure ongoing support and technical stability.
The limits of Shopify
Despite its many advantages, Shopify has its limits. The personalization of the payment process is restricted, which can be a problem for merchants with specific needs or tight margins.
Transaction fees for payments through external gateways, in addition to the monthly subscription, can increase costs for merchants. Some advanced features require paid applications, thus adding additional costs.
Shopify imposes technical limits, such as a maximum of 1,000 new products or variants per day after reaching 50,000 products, and an overall limit of 100,000 products to maintain optimal performance and platform stability.
Migrating to another platform can be difficult due to Shopify's architectural limitations, requiring merchants to carefully assess their long-term needs before engaging with Shopify as an e-commerce solution.
Top 5: Squarespace
Squarespace highlights
Squarespace stands out for its numerous benefits, making it particularly appealing to its users. Among its major assets is its vast collection of elegant, responsive and modern templates.
These models, created by professional designers, have a sophisticated and refined design, perfect for enhancing images and visual content.
When it comes to e-commerce, Squarespace shines with its comprehensive features for setting up and managing an online store. This includes inventory management, integration of products, categories, shipping costs, and various payment options.
Integrated marketing tools, like payment solutions, tax management, and customer accounts, are advanced and make selling online simple.
Squarespace's drag-and-drop user interface is extremely intuitive, allowing web pages to be created and customized without advanced technical skills. The style editor offers significant design flexibility, with options for adjusting fonts, colors, image opacity, sidebar width, and more.
Squarespace's reputation is also based on fast sites loading and top-notch customer support, available 24/7, with quick email responses and documentation to help users navigate challenges they may encounter.
Who is Squarespace for?
Squarespace is especially for businesses and creatives who want a professional website with a contemporary design. It is ideal for small businesses, online stores, artists and designers, artists and designers, photographers, bloggers, but also for cafes, restaurants, musicians, and event organizers.
This platform is perfect for sectors where visuals take precedence. Those who want a stylish and professional website without coding will find Squarespace an ideal solution.
The limits of Squarespace
However, Squarespace has its drawbacks. Its main constraint is the maximum number of items per page, limited to 250 to avoid slow loading and saving.
It is also recommended not to exceed 20 sections per page and 60 blocks per page or sub-page to maintain site performance.
Squarespace doesn't offer a free plan and its prices may seem high compared to other website building solutions. Customization can become complex after selecting a template, and there is no manual tool for editing specific mobile versions of the site.
Finally, the lack of compatibility with third-party CDNs can restrict customization and optimization opportunities for advanced users.
Top 6: Joomla
Joomla highlights
Joomla is an open source CMS (content management system) that stands out for its power and flexibility, making the platform attractive for a variety of users. Its advanced user and access rights management system is one of its main assets. Thanks to sophisticated user access control (ACL), Joomla allows precise management of rights and users.
In terms of content, Joomla excels in its flexibility, allowing various types of content to be displayed thanks to its components and modules. This capability makes it perfect for complex websites. In addition, Joomla is ready for multilingualism with support for over 70 languages, integrated directly into the core of the platform.
The active Joomla community contributes to an extensive library of extensions (nearly 8,000 available), thus enriching the site's functionality. This community ensures continuous development, technical support, and the sharing of best practices.
Joomla is also optimized for SEO upon installation and uses Bootstrap for responsive designs. Effective menu and cache management, and the ability to customize templates offer great flexibility to optimize site performance.
Who is Joomla for?
Joomla caters to a wide range of users, from small businesses to large organizations, and is particularly suitable for sites that require detailed user and access rights management, as well as for multilingual sites.
Renowned businesses and public organizations, such as eBay, General Electric, and Peugeot, trust Joomla for their online platforms.
The solution is ideal for community sites, news portals, classifieds sites, and intranets, thanks to its flexibility and ability to be extended and customized.
The limitations of Joomla
Despite its many advantages, Joomla has its limitations. Memory management can be a problem, especially with the extensive use of extensions, sometimes requiring you to increase the default memory limit to avoid errors.
The learning curve can also be a challenge, especially for non-technical users, as Joomla can be more complex to master than other solutions like WordPress or Wix. Extensive web development knowledge may be required for advanced customization and management.
Finally, migrating between Joomla versions can be complex, requiring careful planning and execution to avoid data loss or site malfunctions.
Top 7: Framer
Framer highlights
Framer is a design and prototyping platform that stands out for its intuitive interface for creating modern and responsive websites, accessible even without advanced technical knowledge.
The platform makes it easy to import designs from Figma, speeding up the creative process, and offers community templates for a quick start.
It shines with its advanced interaction and animation features, allowing the creation of sophisticated interactions, micro-interactions, parallax effects, and reusable interactive components, thus enriching interactive prototypes and design.
Framer offers real-time collaboration tools, allowing designers and developers to work together on a project, exchange feedback, and adjust designs live. It also supports code integration for more advanced functionalities and highly realistic prototypes.
In addition, Framer offers features to improve technical SEO and web semantics, CMS modules for blogs, internationalization tools, and uses artificial intelligence to simplify the creation of pages and the translation of content.
Who is Framer for?
Framer is perfect for professional web designers and developers, as well as businesses and design agencies looking for advanced tools for prototyping complex websites. Users who want to integrate advanced animations and interactions will find Framer ideal.
It is also suitable for freelancers and small businesses wishing to create professional websites easily thanks to its real-time collaboration tools, making the platform accessible to a wide audience.
Framer's limits
While Framer offers a lot of benefits, it does have limitations, especially in its subscription plans. The free plan is limited to 1,000 monthly visits and 100MB of bandwidth, which can be restrictive for sites with high traffic, no ability to use a custom domain, and with limitations on page count and functionality.
The free plan also limits the number of pages (under 150) and CMS content (up to 1,000 items), which can be a problem for sites that require a lot of content.
Additionally, file storage is limited to 500MB and form requests to 50 per month, insufficient for sites with high form activity.
Finally, the lack of dedicated support and password protection of pages are not available in the free plan, limiting users who need more security and support.
Top 8: Zyro
Zyro highlights
Zyro stands out for its ability to offer a simplified experience for creating professional websites. Its intuitive visual editor, based on a grid system, ensures a neat and structured layout, thus facilitating the creation of a responsive site without additional effort.
Zyro's integration of artificial intelligence (AI), with tools like the AI content generator and the Heatmap AI tool, is revolutionizing content creation and site optimization, making these processes both simple and effective.
The platform is perfectly optimized for SEO, including essential marketing tools like Google Analytics to analyze site performance and visitor behavior. It also offers a variety of customizable templates, designed to be SEO-friendly.
Thanks to Hostinger's advanced server infrastructure, Zyro ensures excellent website speed and availability. The pricing plans are flexible and accessible, with options like adding a custom domain name and removing ads, even in the BASIC plan.
Who is Zyro for?
Ideal for small businesses, beginning entrepreneurs, and bloggers who want to quickly establish a professional online presence, Zyro seduces with its simplicity and clean design. Online retailers with moderate e-commerce requirements will also find something for themselves.
Newbies will especially appreciate Zyro's drag-and-drop interface and its AI tools, which make site creation accessible to anyone without the need for advanced technical skills. Artists and creators looking for a simple platform to display their work online will also be seduced.
The limits of Zyro
However, despite its many strengths, Zyro does have its limitations. The main constraint lies in the immutability of the models: once a model is chosen, it is not possible to modify it, which can be frustrating for those who want to evolve their design over time.
The lack of a free version requires users to opt for a paid subscription. The e-commerce plan is limited to 500 products, which may not be enough for growing businesses.
Compared to other platforms such as WordPress, Zyro's SEO features and customization options seem limited. Users also mentioned a lack of integrations and plugins, as well as oversimplification that could limit the possibilities for advanced customization.
Finally, while the AI content generator is innovative, it may require manual adjustments to align perfectly with the tone and specific needs of the brand.
Software comparison
Choosing the right website creation software involves considering several essential criteria to meet your expectations. Discover our comparison of the platforms analyzed, highlighting their advantages and constraints.
Ease of use: For novices who want to launch a website without advanced technical skills, Wix and SiteW are brilliant for their simplicity. Squarespace and Webflow also offer an intuitive approach, but require a bit more time to master all of their features.
Design and customization: Squarespace is distinguished by its elegant and responsive templates, while Webflow allows for extensive customization thanks to its comprehensive visual editor. Wix and Zyro also offer numerous templates and customization tools that are easy to use.
E-commerce: Shopify and Squarespace dominate the e-commerce industry, offering comprehensive tools to manage your online store. Wix and Zyro provide e-commerce options, but with restrictions compared to Shopify.
Integrations and extensions: WordPress stands out for its vast community and its range of extensions, ensuring greater customization and flexibility. Webflow and Squarespace also offer integrations with other applications, but in a more limited way than WordPress.
Prices and plans: Rates vary widely from one platform to another. Wix and SiteW are more accessible, with subscriptions starting at €12 and €6.60 per month respectively. Squarespace and Webflow are a bit more expensive, with plans starting at €15 and $18 per month. Shopify and Zyro, focused on e-commerce and professional websites, show prices that are in line with their advanced features.
SEO and performance: All the platforms mentioned optimize natural referencing (SEO), but Webflow and Squarespace stand out with their specific tools to boost performance and SEO. WordPress, thanks to its numerous extensions, also offers advanced SEO solutions.
In conclusion, the choice of site creation software depends on your specific needs. For a quick and easy way to go online, Wix or SiteW are recommended. For more elaborate projects or online stores, Shopify, Squarespace, or Webflow are worth considering. As for those who prefer an open source solution offering great freedom of customization, WordPress remains an essential and efficient choice.
Tips for choosing the right platform
Choosing the right website creation platform is essential for the success of your online project. To help you make the best choice, here are some key tips to consider.
Identify your needs and challenges: Start by defining the goals of your website. Whether it is to increase your reputation, improve your positioning on search engines, facilitate communication with your customers, or sell online, your goals will guide your choice towards adapted platforms such as WordPress for showcase sites, Shopify for e-commerce, or Wix for a quick implementation.
Anticipate the necessary technical skills: Evaluate your skills and those of your team. WordPress or Drupal require technical know-how, while Wix, Squarespace, and Zyro are more accessible for beginners.
Determining a budget: Set a budget for your project. Costs vary between platforms based on subscription fees, hosting, themes, plugins, and maintenance services. Make sure to include all of these in your budget.
Know the functionalities of the software: Explore the features available on each platform. For e-commerce needs, consider Shopify or WooCommerce with WordPress. For more flexibility and customization, WordPress or Webflow might be preferable.
Think about the ease of use of the tool: Opt for a platform adapted to your technological ease. Wix, Squarespace, and Zyro are designed to be intuitive for beginners, while WordPress or Drupal require more in-depth learning.
Analyzing and understanding the contract: Take the time to read the terms of the contract and the policies of the platform. Understanding the terms of use, privacy policies, and cancellation terms will help you avoid surprises later.
Give importance to the support and monitoring of the project: The quality of customer support is essential. Effective technical support and well-documented resources can greatly improve your experience. Shopify and Wix, for example, offer great customer support.
Evaluate scalability and security: Ensure that the platform can adapt to the growth of your needs. Options like WordPress or Shopify manage the evolution of sites well and offer solid security measures to protect your data.
By taking these tips into account, you will be able to select a website creation platform that meets your needs, allowing you to develop a professional and efficient site.
Conclusion
After going through our comprehensive analysis of the best solutions for creating a website, you are now armed with the essential knowledge to select the ideal platform according to your requirements. Regardless of whether you are just starting out or if you are already an expert, each software presented has its strengths and weaknesses, which are important to consider.
For those looking for leading expertise in site design and redesign with Webflow, the webflow experts in Paris from the Synqro agency are proving to be a preferred choice in France. Thanks to its Webflow accreditations and an adaptable working method, Synqro is ready to support you in solving your Webflow challenges, from creation to maintenance through the SEO optimization of your site.
It is time to take action and select the platform that meets your ambitions. Whether your project is to launch a showcase site, an online store, or to strengthen your presence on the web, the solutions mentioned here provide you with the keys to achieve this.
Contact Synqro or look at other alternatives to start your website project today and improve your online visibility.
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