Website builders

Website builders let a business, a creator or a marketing team design pages visually, write a blog, collect form submissions and publish the site on the builder's own hosting, without running servers or hiring a developer. They are a different tool from app hosting platforms, which deploy code that developers write. Builders differ in how much design control they give (a free-form canvas or templates), what the entry plan includes (a blog, forms, editors), whether they sell products and memberships, which security reports they publish, and how easily a site can leave.

We compare them on the same six indicators, read from each vendor's pricing, trust, legal and help center pages:

• Pricing and plan clarity: whether the plan you need has a published price, can be bought online and month to month, and whether the pages leave prices out or contradict each other.
• Free plan, trial and refunds: a permanent free plan with a blog and forms, or the length of the trial and whether it needs a card, and the refund window on a new annual plan.
• Price for a small business site: the monthly cost of one site on your own domain, without builder branding, with a contact form and a blog, for one editor, billed annually, with the plan and any assumption shown.
• Site features: site search, more than one language, password-protected pages, member-only content, online selling and a second editor, and on which plan each one sits.
• Security and compliance: the vendor's own SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001, a DPA, two-factor authentication, single sign-on and a record of who changed what.
• Ownership and exit: exporting your blog and CMS content, moving the whole site to other hosting, exporting form submissions and restoring earlier versions.

How fast a site loads and how often it is up depend on the site and the day they are measured, so we do not score them. Each review says which pages it was written from and when. Where we have run a product hands-on, the evidence is on its page.