Building a website is no longer a particularly hard task—but it can be an annoying one. If you look at most sites, there's a fair amount of text, images, and general organization to it all. Wouldn't it be great if you could just create a website from scratch in just a few minutes? That's what AI website builders promise to do. 

The idea is that by using artificial intelligence, they can streamline everything from designing a site and organizing your content into the appropriate pages to actually getting it online. It's a bold claim, but there are a few apps that pull it off (with varying degrees of intelligence and success).

I've been building websites for more than 15 years and have used hard-coded HTML, WordPress, every site builder you can name, and even, on one regrettable occasion, Drupal. In that time, getting a site live has become a lot simpler and easier. It used to take an entire weekend to get a site up and running, but now, with the best theme-based site-building tools, you can get something great online in an afternoon.

So I was pretty curious to see how the AI website generators would stack up. After lots of testing and tinkering, here are my picks for the best AI website builders.

The best AI website builders

• Wix for most people

• Jimdo for a free AI website builder with affordable upgrades

• Unbounce for an AI landing page builder

• CodeWP for an AI tool for complex WordPress sites

• Framer for an example of where AI website builders are going

What makes the best AI website builder?

Right now, AI is the hottest marketing buzzword around. And unfortunately, it doesn't really have an easy definition. There are lots of different tools all claiming to use AI, even though they do different things. 

When it came to the apps on this list, I relied on two things to decide whether or not they were using AI: their claims and my judgment. 

Some apps essentially had me fill in a survey about who I was and what my site was for, while others could build a rough site from a typed prompt like "make a website for Harry Guinness, an Irish landscape photographer who specializes in sunrise seascapes." If my input genuinely made a difference to the end-product, I was happy to consider it AI-powered, regardless of if it was a form or a prompt. But if a so-called AI website builder took what I said and slotted it into the same generic theme it uses for everything, I was happy to write it off as a poor attempt to cash in on the current AI boom. 

On top of actually feeling like an AI, I was looking for website builders that checked a few important boxes:

• Enable you to make a great-looking site. Theme-based website builders have set the bar really high here, so there's no need for a website to look like it was built using Dreamweaver in 2005. This requirement actually tripped up some of the most AI-powered builders I considered: they could take a written prompt, but they somehow managed to make something awful from it.

• Make it easy to get the results you want. Picking a WordPress theme is pretty simple. No matter how AI-powered an app is, if you have to spend ages crafting prompts to get it to produce good, relevant results, or need to spend a lot of time tweaking things afterward in a mediocre site builder, it didn't make this list. 

• Truly build custom sites. The cynical way to make an AI website builder is to have it take a prompt and then slot that information into a single generic theme. Changing the prompt just changes the headers and maybe the images, not the actual layout of the site. I won't link to them, but I ran into a few tools like this. For an app to get featured here, it had to allow you to build genuinely custom sites. It should be an AI-generated website, but it shouldn't feel like an AI-generated website.

• Offer a good overall experience. The whole point of AI tools is that they make things easy; if any app makes you battle with a bad interface, awkward AI, or anything else, there's no point using it. There should also be solid documentation in case you do get tripped up.

There were also a couple of things I wasn't looking for. 

• Standard website builders with generative AI for content. This list is showing off AI-powered website builders, so the AI tools had to actually build the website. Some of these apps also use AI to generate content, but I wasn't considering any apps that just had ChatGPT baked in to help you write copy.

• AI design apps. There are lots of apps popping up that help designers mock up websites using AI, but they don't produce working websites with functional code. This list was narrowly focused on the kind of AI tools that allow you to build and launch a website.

Do you actually need an AI website builder?

Website builders are already really easy to use and have approximately a zillion templates, one of which will definitely work for you. 

I'm still a long way from convinced that you need artificial intelligence to make a great site. And I'm 100% not convinced that being able to build a site from a written prompt in 30 seconds will ever be more than a party trick. 

I don't imagine for a second most people would be able to launch a site without doing some customizing themselves. That's why I'd suggest finding an AI website builder that's backed up by a solid non-AI website builder. It's the best of both worlds.

The best AI website builders at a glance

Best AI website builder for most people

Wix (Web)

Wix pros:

• Effective, easy-to-use AI site designer

• Backed up by Wix's mature site builder ecosystem

Wix cons:

• Not the most futuristic-feeling AI around

Wix is one of the best website-building tools across the board. It's on Zapier's lists of the best free website builders, the best blog sites, and the best eCommerce platforms. So it's no wonder that it also tops our list of the best AI website builders. 

Wix's AI site builder manages to perfectly balance usability and functionality. You start by selecting what kind of site you want to create and what features you want it to have, add a bit of info about yourself, and then select one of six moods. From that, Wix will suggest three homepage designs, as well as pages to add to your site. Make your selections, and you'll have a rough site ready to go. You still have to add your content, but I was able to create a quick photography portfolio in less than ten minutes. 

Now, Wix isn't the most AI-powered tool on this list, but I feel it's still the right option for most people. Wix gives you the choice to use its AI site builder or select from a list of themes, and the AI site builder is the faster option. The fact that you then have a top-notch website builder to tweak the content is a good thing, not a downside. You get the speed of an AI site builder plus Wix's mature feature set.

And, really, if you're trying to build a real website, that's what matters more than anything. You can use Wix to start a blog, sell digital and physical products, take bookings, and anything else you could want. It even integrates with Zapier, so you can automatically create contacts or update a spreadsheet based on Wix automations.

There aren't many other AI-powered site builders that can match Wix on practicality. 

Wix pricing: Free with Wix branding and domain; from $16/month for the Combo plan, including a custom domain for one year.

Best free AI website builder with affordable upgrades

Jimdo (Web)

Jimdo pros:

• A real site builder with all the features you could need

• Great free plan and affordable paid plans

Jimdo cons:

• AI is limited to initial site creation

Jimdo, like Wix, is a long-running site builder—and it was also one of the first AI website builders. It launched its AI editor, called Jimdo Dolphin, in 2017, though it seems to have moved away from that branding. 

When you build a site, you can select from a theme or have Jimdo build one for you—that's the AI-powered option. After you describe the purpose of your site (and, if you want, link it to your Google Business listing to get contact information or your Facebook and Instagram accounts to pull images), Jimdo will suggest a style, color palette, and what pages you need. Once you've given everything the ok, it will take a few moments to create two starting points. Select the one you want, and you'll have a draft site ready to go. 

Like with Wix, you then use the site editor to upload content, configure things like booking modules, and generally tweak your site. It feels less AI-y than Wix, to be honest, but it does work really well. And it's also more affordable, with paid plans starting at $9/month. 

All in all, Jimdo is another great AI website creator if you're building a personal or business site. It has an AI-powered site builder with enough power to get you started quickly, plus all the features you need to run a real website. Yes, most of the customizing will happen through the regular site editor, but that's the tradeoff if you want to quickly build a modern website. 

Jimdo pricing: Free with Jimdo branding and domain; from $9/month for the Start plan that includes a custom domain. 

Best AI website builder for landing pages

Unbounce (Web)

Unbounce pros:

• The AI can design effective landing pages in a few moments

• Unbounce is one of the top landing page builders, so it has all the marketing features you could want

Unbounce cons:

• Wildly expensive if you want to build a regular website

Landing pages are actually a great candidate for AI automation. They're normally single-page sites built around one main call-to-action, so they don't have all the complexity of a full website. Some businesses will also produce lots of landing pages, either to A/B test them to find the most effective copy, or to capture different segments of their market. All in all, they're the kind of thing an effective AI site builder would be super useful for. And that's exactly what Unbounce is. 

Unbounce has been on Zapier's list of the best landing page builders for a few years, and it's slowly been adding more and more AI-powered features. Its AI Smart Builder (which is technically still in beta) recommends a template based on the purpose and requirements of your landing page, as well as your industry and chosen color scheme. The app will also generate draft copy for your site from a description of your business (the developers also make Smart Copy, an AI-powered copywriting app).

Like with most of the apps on this list, the AI still leaves plenty of work for you to do. While Unbounce will slot in a few bits of AI copy, it leaves adding the headers, images, links, and the rest up to you. Thankfully, the site builder is easy to use.

While the AI Smart Builder works well, it's really a bonus if you already want to use a marketing-focused landing page app like Unbounce. At $99/month for up to 500 conversions (like newsletter signups) and 20,000 visitors, it's wildly expensive for building regular websites—and it's not like the AI is significantly more powerful than Wix or Jimdo. 

If you do sign up for Unbounce, it integrates with Zapier. That means you can do things like automatically add form submissions to a Google Sheet, to Slack, or to your email marketing tool. Here are some examples, or you can read more about how to automate Unbounce.

Unbounce pricing: From $99/month for the Launch plan

Best AI website builder for complex WordPress sites

CodeWP (Web)

CodeWP pros:

• Enables technical-minded people to create complex WordPress code

• Allows you to build by far the most custom sites of any tool on this list

CodeWP cons:

• It's still an advanced tool; unless you understand how WordPress works, you won't be able to get much use out of it

CodeWP is one of the most interesting and powerful tools on this list. Instead of directly building a site for you, it enables someone with a moderate amount of technical experience to dive deep into WordPress's inner workings on their own site. (All that also comes with a healthy dose of caveats.)

CodeWP is a GPT-powered code generator trained on hundreds of thousands of lines of WordPress-specific code, including WooCommerce, Elementor, and Metabox. This means you can enter a prompt like: 

"Create a function that displays a slider with the header images of the five most recent posts. Include the headline as a h2 and the summary as a p. Advance the slider every 7 seconds."

And it will return a block of code you can add to your WordPress site. 

Now, as you can imagine, knowing where to add and implement the code with WordPress requires a certain level of understanding of how WordPress works. This isn't a tool for someone who's totally new to building sites; instead, it's for someone who has already built a few websites and would love to be able to customize them even further—but doesn't have the coding knowledge.

The major issue with any of these AI code generators is that the code they create may be total nonsense (or even pose a security risk). It often isn't—but it can be. To get the most out of them, you need to be prepared to dive in and troubleshoot things, and have enough experience to figure out where things are going wrong. They can be a great shortcut for technical-minded people who understand the general ideas of computer logic (e.g., loops and variables) but don't have the familiarity with a specific language to code effectively. 

For what it's worth, I didn't have any issues with CodeWP in my testing, but I have had plenty of issues with code generators before. I'll definitely be using this one to add some custom features to Bing's Best Things, a website I run.

CodeWP pricing: Free for 10 WordPress PHP generations per month; from $12/month for unlimited generations and 12 code modes, including WooCommerce and WordPress SQL.

Best example of where AI website generators are going

Framer (Web)

Framer pros:

• It's a super impressive and fun AI

• The rest of the app is great, so you can build a real site

Framer cons:

• Still needs a lot of work to go from AI draft to great site

By this point, you've probably noticed a conspicuous lack of super-fast AI website builders on this list. That's because almost all the tools I tested that claimed to be able to turn a written prompt into a website in just a few moments turned out to be awful. The biggest exception was Framer. 

Now, that's not to say that Framer AI is perfect. It's just that when compared to some of the other apps, Framer actually works. You start with a prompt (the more descriptive, the better), and it will create a rough website, including generating some AI-generated draft copy. Click here to see what it made for the following prompt:

Design a portfolio website for an Irish photographer called Harry Guinness. He specializes in shooting portraits of dogs, so make it fun. Make sure to include a gallery. 

As you can see, it's certainly fun, and there's arguably a gallery. But while there's a button that says "Request A Session" and another that says "See Pricing," they don't actually work right off the bat. I'd need to add the links myself using Framer's site builder, where I can also customize everything else. It's a great site builder, though a bit more technical than what Wix or Jimdo offer by default. 

Still, what Framer AI does is a touch more than an impressive party trick. Of all the apps I tested, it was the only one that could take a prompt and really run with it—for good or bad. I don't think it's the best way to build a website, and nor is it even the best way to build a website with Framer (it has countless great themes to work from). But what Framer AI teases is how an AI website builder might work in the future, while also offering an AI tool you can use to sort-of start building a website now. Best of all, you can check it out for free.

Framer pricing: Free with Framer branding for hobby projects; from $10/month/site for the Mini plan, with two pages and 1,000 visitors per month. 

AI website builders are changing fast

AI website builders have been around for a few years, and for the most part, they're pretty decent. But over the past year or two, public expectations of what AI can do have drastically changed. Wix's AI is really good at building functional sites, but it doesn't give you the same wow as ChatGPT or DALL·E 2. The only app that came close to that, Framer, was still super rough around the edges. 

While I can only speculate, I think over the next year or two, we'll see a lot more apps trying to be the ChatGPT for websites—a true AI website generator. Right now, none of them are close to pulling it off, but I don't think it's an insurmountable problem. So, expect this list of the best AI website builders to change a lot as we continue to update it.

Related reading:

• The best AI image generators

• AI at Zapier: How we use artificial intelligence to streamline work

• The best AI writing generators

• The best AI app builders