Wix vs. WordPress: Which website builder should you use? [2025]

Let me tell you about my least favorite email: "Your WordPress site has encountered a fatal error." It usually arrives at the worst possible moment, like midnight on the day before you leave for vacation. After years of building websites, I've seen every WordPress crisis imaginable: broken contact forms, hacked sites, and the dreaded white screen of death.

Yet surprisingly, WordPress still powers about half of the internet. Why do millions of users (including me) stick with a legacy platform that requires technical know-how—especially when modern site building apps like Wix make it easy to launch sites that just work, without all the hassle? The answer boils down to a simple choice: WordPress lets you build almost anything, as long as you're ready to dive into the technical side, while Wix trades that flexibility for simplicity.

Having spent the last decade building WordPress sites—and countless hours testing Wix's latest features—I've developed strong opinions about each platform's strengths. In this article, I'll walk you through their key differences so you can make the right choice for your needs.

Table of contents:

• Wix vs. WordPress at a glance

• Wix is much easier to set up—especially using its AI features

• Wix makes it simple to make attractive websites

• WordPress is infinitely customizable

• Wix is an all-in-one marketing and business ops hub

• Both are solid choices for eCommerce

• WordPress is free (sort of)

• WordPress has exponentially more plugins, but both integrate with Zapier

• WordPress vs. Wix: Which should you choose?

Wix vs. WordPress at a glance

Here's a rundown of the differences between these two website builders:

Wix is best for small businesses and non-technical users. With Wix's intuitive design app, all-in-one marketing suite, and AI-powered tools, you can create and manage a professional website without any coding knowledge. Wix handles everything from design to email marketing to analytics, making it easy for you to focus on your business rather than wrestling with technical details.

WordPress is best for customization and flexibility. With its massive ecosystem of plugins and themes, there's no limit to what you can build. If you need complete control over your website's functionality and don't mind managing technical details, WordPress offers unmatched flexibility and scalability. It's especially well-suited for developers, agencies, and businesses with specific technical requirements.

Wix is much easier to set up—especially using its AI features

Wix's setup process is incredibly simple. Click a button, and you're immediately presented with two options. You can either browse through hundreds of templates, or let Wix's Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI) do the heavy lifting. The AI option is particularly impressive: after a brief chat about your business and goals, Wix's ADI generates a complete website tailored to your needs, no coding knowledge required.

Wix generates a full website with suggested layouts, relevant images, and even draft copy. Don't like what you see? You can regenerate the entire design, fine-tune specific elements, or try one of Wix's hundreds of pre-built templates instead.

WordPress's setup process is much less approachable than Wix's. Before you can even think about design, you'll need to navigate several technical hurdles: choosing a hosting provider, purchasing a domain name, downloading WordPress, figuring out how to install it on your server, and going through the WordPress setup process.

To be fair, most hosting providers these days have a one-click WordPress installation process that makes this simpler (though it depends on the host). But even so, the technical challenges don't end with installation. At a minimum, you need to update plugins and themes regularly, navigate plugin conflicts, and watch out for compatibility issues between your theme and the latest versions of WordPress and PHP. Most of us who've used WordPress long enough are familiar with experiences like digging around via FTP to disable problematic plugins, or restoring a site from backup because no other troubleshooting steps have worked.

Building with WordPress comes with perks that, for some people, offset this complexity. With WordPress, you truly own your website and can move it to any host or modify it however you want. You're not subject to price increases or platform restrictions. And you don't have to worry about your website shutting down because the company behind it went out of business.

But for many users—especially those without technical backgrounds—Wix makes your website much easier to set up and manage. Its AI-powered tools and intuitive interface let you focus on creating your website, rather than Googling error messages at 2 a.m.

Wix makes it simple to make attractive websites

Wix's design tools are surprisingly adaptable: you can instantly remove image backgrounds, enhance images with filters, and even auto-improve image quality with AI. Want to get creative? You can fill text with videos or gradients and create custom hover animations without touching code.

Put all of these options together, and you can create polished designs that look custom, rather than templatized.

I also appreciated that unlike some site builders (like WordPress's default builder) that lock you into rigid grids or stacks, Wix gives you the freedom to place elements wherever you want on the screen. While you need to be careful with this feature due to its implications for responsiveness, it's nice to feel like you have full creative control during the design process.

Mobile design is another strong area for Wix. While most website builders claim to be "mobile-friendly," Wix gives you a dedicated mobile editor that lets you fine-tune how your site looks on phones without affecting your desktop design. You can even create a custom loading screen for mobile visitors.

Beautiful, mobile-friendly designs are possible with WordPress, too, but they aren't as easy to achieve. WordPress's default "blocks" editor, known as Gutenberg, lets you stack different elements—text, images, galleries, widgets—to build your pages. While it's more intuitive than WordPress's original editor (which felt like writing a Word document in 1995), it's still not exactly user-friendly, and the aesthetics are nothing to get excited about.

WordPress's native design limitations have spawned an entire ecosystem of third-party page builders and themes. Popular options like Elementor and Beaver Builder add powerful drag-and-drop functionality and pre-built templates that make WordPress feel more modern. 

The upside of WordPress's fragmented approach is flexibility: you can mix and match different tools to create exactly the design workflow you want. But each page builder has its own learning curve, potential for compatibility issues, and monthly subscription fee. And for most users, especially those who just want to create an attractive, professional-looking website without becoming a part-time developer, Wix's approach is more appealing.

WordPress is infinitely customizable

Wix offers plenty of features through its design app and marketplace, but you're ultimately bound by what Wix approves. Sometimes this means running into seemingly arbitrary limitations. For example, Wix's file hosting system doesn't let you control how files are named: instead of "product-catalog.pdf," you might end up with something like "7128b3_e2e554f99422c467c414a8.pdf." Not exactly user-friendly or great for SEO.

WordPress, on the other hand, lets you modify virtually anything. If something isn't working quite right, you can usually find a way to fix it—whether through the admin dashboard, by tweaking code in your PHP files, or by installing one of over 60,000 plugins. (Compare that to Wix's marketplace of a few hundred apps.) The variety is staggering: want to create a social network? BuddyPress has you covered. Need a learning management system? LearnDash can transform your site into an online school.

WordPress's strength is how these plugins can work together. You could combine an events plugin with a membership system and an eLearning platform to create a complete online conference system—something that would be difficult or impossible with Wix's more contained ecosystem. And if you can't find exactly what you need, WordPress's open source nature means you can modify existing plugins or create new ones.

Wix is an all-in-one marketing and business ops hub

Where WordPress takes a mix-and-match approach to marketing features, Wix provides a complete marketing solution right out of the box.

Social media and ads

With Wix, you can manage social media posts and coordinate ad campaigns without leaving the platform. You get access to a built-in Instagram feed, for example, unlike WordPress where you'd need to install (and pay for) a separate social media plugin. Plus, Wix's AI-powered social media planner helps you create social media posts quickly, then schedule them to be posted on your business's accounts.

While power users will want to use dedicated platforms for ads and social, Wix makes it easy for non-technical users to get started.

Email automation

Wix includes an impressive set of email automation features in all its plans, including a library of pre-built workflows. You get 200 subscriber emails per month free, with paid plans ranging from $10/month to $49/month. Wix handles everything from abandoned cart recovery to customer winback campaigns.

Lead generation and CRM

While WordPress requires third-party form builders like Gravity Forms (often hundreds of dollars per year), Wix includes form building capabilities by default. You can create multi-step forms that adapt based on user input, and all submissions flow directly into Wix's built-in CRM.

Wix's booking system handles everything from appointment scheduling to staff management to automated reminders—something that would require multiple WordPress plugins to achieve.

Analytics

If you don't proactively add analytics to your WordPress site, you'll never know anything about your traffic or website activity. You need to integrate Google Analytics, set up additional tracking for eCommerce data, and install a third-party dashboard reporting plugin.

Wix, meanwhile, provides comprehensive analytics right in the dashboard, helping you understand visitor behavior and conversion metrics without any extra setup.

SEO

Thanks to its partnership with Semrush, an SEO tool, Wix provides basic keyword data, including keyword volume, trends, rank difficulty, and search intent. Wix's AI-powered meta tag generator analyzes your content to suggest optimized titles and descriptions, a feature that WordPress SEO plugins typically require separate subscriptions for. And you can even manage your Google Business Profile directly through Wix—crucial for local business SEO.

Both are solid choices for eCommerce

If you want to get started selling stuff fast with minimal hassle, Wix is your best bet. As you'd expect, it's simple to set up, but it also has advanced features. For example, multilingual support is built in: you can translate your entire store, including product descriptions and checkout, without additional plugins. (WordPress would require something like WPML or Polylang, adding $100+ to your annual costs.) Currency conversion is built in, too, allowing visitors to automatically switch to their local currency, and Wix handles multilingual SEO automatically by setting up proper tags and URLs for each language version of your store.

Wix's eCommerce analytics make it simple to understand what's working and what's not. In addition to store revenue charts and product-by-product sales numbers, you can access more tactical data like your conversion funnel and abandoned carts funnel.

WooCommerce, WordPress's primary eCommerce solution, is a solid solution that has the advantage of being free. (Wix requires you to pay $29/month for basic eCommerce and up to $159/month for its most advanced eCommerce features.) With WooCommerce, on the other hand, you can add unlimited products, variations, and customizations. You're not changing plans to unlock features like subscription capabilities or digital downloads—you just add the extensions you need. Want to modify your checkout process? No problem. Need a unique shipping calculation method? There's probably already an extension for that, and if not, you can build it.

But this flexibility comes with risks. While Wix handles all your security updates and performance optimization, with WooCommerce, that's on you. If your store starts getting thousands of orders, you'll need to think about caching, database optimization, and server upgrades. WooCommerce is also subject to the same caveats as WordPress itself—things can break, and it's your responsibility to fix them. Having your online store go down while you troubleshoot plugin conflicts isn't exactly great for business.

For most small and medium-sized eCommerce shops, Wix's more limited but user-friendly approach is the better choice. You'll get a solid, reliable eCommerce platform that's easier to manage and less likely to cause technical headaches. But if you need extensive customization or have specific technical requirements—like integrating with unusual payment providers or creating custom checkout flows—WooCommerce's flexibility might be worth it. And it's worth noting that as your business grows, you might want to consider graduating from either platform to a dedicated eCommerce platform like Shopify.

WordPress is free (sort of)

WordPress starts with a deceptively attractive price tag: free. But that's just the software. To actually run a WordPress site, you'll need to piece together several paid components. Hosting is your first expense, ranging from budget-friendly shared hosting at $5/month to premium managed WordPress hosting that can easily exceed $100 monthly. Then there's themes (typically $30-100 for a quality option) and essential plugins. Want solid security, form building, and automated backups? That could add anywhere from a few dollars to hundreds annually.

Wix takes a more straightforward approach: you'll pay $17 monthly for the Light plan, which includes 2GB storage and basic features. Need entry-level eCommerce features? That's the Core plan at $29/month, which bumps you up to 50GB storage. The Business plan ($36/month) adds more marketing tools and eCommerce features plus 100GB storage, while Business Elite ($159/month) removes all limits and includes priority support.

Wix's pricing tiers create clear boundaries—if you have more than two editors on your site, you'll need to upgrade to the Core plan, even if you don't need the other features that come with it. WordPress lets you optimize costs around exactly what you need. You could run a basic blog on budget hosting with free plugins for $5/month, or build a complex site with premium tools that costs more than Wix's top tier.

WordPress has exponentially more plugins, but both integrate with thousands of apps via Zapier

It sounds like hyperbole to say this, but WordPress has literally a hundred times more plugins available than Wix does. At last count, there were around 60,000 WordPress plugins, with new ones being added constantly. This massive selection means that you can find plugins that solve incredibly specific problems. For example, Germanized for WooCommerce is a plugin that automatically adapts WooCommerce to the specific legal, tax, shipping, and privacy requirements necessary to sell in Germany.

Still, Wix's App Market, with its hundreds of apps, offers a solid selection, and every integration is vetted and guaranteed to work with the platform.

Using Zapier, you can connect either WordPress or Wix to thousands of other apps, so you can automate website management and get data from leads wherever you need it. Learn more about how to automate WordPress or how to automate Wix, or get started with one of the automation workflows below.

WordPress vs. Wix: Which makes sense for you?

If you're not quite sure which platform to go with, here are some final thoughts to help you decide.

Choose Wix if you want simplicity and streamlined features. Its easy-to-use interface and built-in marketing tools let you create a professional website or eCommerce store without touching code. You'll trade some flexibility for a reliable platform that handles all the technical headaches for you.

Choose WordPress if you want complete control over your website. Its open-source nature and vast plugin ecosystem let you build exactly what you want, how you want it. While you'll need to manage the technical details yourself, you'll never have to worry about platform limitations holding you back.

Related reading:

• The best WordPress alternatives

• The best free website builders

• The best website builders for small business