WordPress vs Wix which both are amazing tools for building a website— but they have completely different approaches: Wix is a website builder and WordPress is a CMS (or Content Management System). Understanding this difference is critical in deciding which to choose.
Table of Contents
1. Website Builders vs. CMS
A Content Management System like WordPress has a deeper learning curve but is highly customizable. You need to setup WordPress on a web host— though that’s less intimidating than it sounds (there are plenty of hosts offering 1-click WordPress installation). WordPress is open-source, which means it’s free for anyone to use and modify (though hosting, themes and plugins can all cost money).
Website builders like Wix are easier to use but less customizable. They also include hosting— so you don’t have to set up a web host— but that means you can’t ever move your website off of Wix and on to a new web host.
We’ll just be scratching the surface of the differences— as you’ll see in the rest of this article, the difference between WordPress vs Wix manifests itself in templates, hosting, features, customer support and many more.
2. WordPress vs Wix : The Editor
One of the most obvious differences between WordPress vs Wix is the editor.
Wix has a visual, drag-and-drop editor. It’s similar to Powerpoint or Keynote in that it allows you to move any element to any place on a page:
WordPress recently relaunched their editor as a block-based editor known as Gutenberg.
WordPress’s Gutenberg editor is abstracted away from the page— it doesn’t show the full page within the editor (for example, you don’t see the header, sidebar and footer). Because of this, you’ll still find yourself switching between the editor and the published website to see how published page looks.
WordPress often abstracts their interface away from the page. For example, forms created with plugins such as WPForms are created in a separate interface and then embedded into pages using a “short code”.
By contrast, most things in Wix are edited visually. If you see something, you click it and change it. The website stays within view and changes happen as you make them. For example, creating a form is done within the page editor.
Overall, WordPress’s interface is often more cluttered than Wix— but this comes at no surprise. WordPress is more sophisticated than Wix and more sophisticated software needs to be more utilitarian and abstract.
Wix aspires to friendlier pages. As website builders go, Wix is more cluttered than Squarespace or Weebly— but they are definitely more friendly than WordPress.
3. WordPress vs Wix : open-source
3.1. WordPress – CMS
WordPress is an open-source CMS— which means anyone can contribute to it. This is a major strength but also a weakness.
One advantage is that WordPress has a huge amount of plugins and themes that were created by the open-source community. At the time of writing, there were 55,000+ plugins on WordPress.org and 12,000+ themes on Themeforest. That’s way, way more than any website builder has.
But the breadth of WordPress is also what can make it a hot mess. WordPress backends can get notoriously confusing. There can be long, technical settings pages and language can often get abstract and jargon-y.
Plus taking advantage of WordPress’s many themes and plugins never quite works perfectly. Incompatibilities often arise and getting the fix can require users to make tweaks to code— something not everyone is comfortable doing. All you have to do is browse plugin reviews to get a sense of the frustration.
3.2. Wix – Website Builder
Wix is completely different. They offer an App Market that seems similar to WordPress’s plugins— but is really not. It’s a small, curated collection of 300ish apps— not even close to matching the huge library of WordPress plugins. But unlike WordPress, Wix checks all apps for compatibility— so you can be confident they’ll integrate perfectly (there are rarely any compatibility issues or need to tweak code).
The same thing is true with themes. Wix has around 500 themes which is less than WordPress… but all the themes work out of the box— there’s no need to tweak code. (Plus Wix’s visual theme editor is so customizable that you could design your own theme from scratch right from the start.)
With Wix, you shouldn’t need to hire outside help unless you’re doing something really unusual— it’s designed to be amateur-friendly. With WordPress, you may end up hiring a WordPress professionals to help you build your website if you get frustrated trying to integrate themes and plugins.
Overall, Wix is designed to be user-friendly while WordPress is designed to be customizable. It’s not that WordPress doesn’t care about being user-friendly— actually the WordPress team works hard to make WordPress user-friendly. Equally, it’s not that Wix doesn’t care about being customizable— the Wix team actually really cares about making a customizable website builder.
Instead, these differences are just fundamental to the nature of website builders and CMS’s. That’s why you should think hard about what your website needs and use that to guide your decision. There is no universally right or wrong decision.
4. WordPress vs Wix : Themes
Wix offers 500+ themes— a good amount for a website builder, but nowhere near WordPress which has over 11,000+ themes.
Like plugins, WordPress has a wider selection, but you’ll occasionally run into compatibility issues that will require you to debug with code. Wix has a smaller selection but you’ll never run find a theme that requires to mess with code to be compatible with Wix features.
Theme customization in WordPress is done through Customizer a nice tool that lets you click elements to reveal style options or browse along and make style customizations.
Wix has another approach. Wix elements can be grabbed and moved. Elements can be selected and you can make customizations on the fly.
5. WordPress vs Wix : Price Comparison
The last point we’ll tackle in this article is pricing.
It’s hard to compare Wix and WordPress pricing because they are priced completely differently.
Wix includes everything in one package: hosting, ecommerce, themes, apps, customer support— these are all included in every Wix package. (Some apps on the Wix App Store do cost money— but almost all are free.)
WordPress is different in that the WordPress core is free. But you could end up paying for themes, plugins and hosting.
For example, BlueHost charges $7.99 / month for WordPress hosting. A premium theme from ThemeForest could cost $39 (though you get it for life, and there are also free WordPress themes available).
Then there are premium WordPress plugins. WooCommerce is a ecommerce plugin but it sells extensions (costing between $0 – $299) that add specific features (for example, a UPS Shipping Method extension costs $79 and lets you get UPS shipping rates). WPForms is a drag-and-drop WordPress form builder that starts at $40 / year.
In case you wondering, Website development is one of LETKET’s services. And we can help you build your using using either Wix or a CMS like Worpress. More details here