Wix vs GoDaddy website builder – two different worlds

Wix and GoDaddy offer very different, but very intriguing website builder options. In their own unique ways, they are both great choices for beginners, looking to quickly build a solid business presence.

Back in the 2000s, GoDaddy was alpha and omega for everything website-related. America’s biggest hosting and domain name company was on the mind of anyone looking to go online.

But so it turns out, that people (you and I included!) wanted an easier, more intuitive, more beginner-friendly way to build their websites.

That’s probably why Wix – a powerful and intuitive website builder has taken the world by storm. I don’t think that anyone’s surprised. With two great editors, hundreds of great templates, and thousands of helpful apps, Wix takes all the power of intricate website editing and puts it in the hands of regular users. What’s not to love there?

Seeing that, it seems obvious that GoDaddy is doing all it can to break into this market. Its newly updated website builder might just be the tool to do that. It puts business first – offering excellent beginner-friendly business features, and mixing them with a very simple website editor.

Between those two, which one do you choose?

On this Wix vs GoDaddy website builder comparison, I’ll be taking a look at both of these platforms, and I hope that by reading this comparison, you’ll be able to see which one’s better for you.

How did I do this builder comparison? Simple – I just signed up and made the websites with both of them (no worries – I’ll show them later!).

And yes – there’s a lot to talk about. So if you just want to go straight to my conclusion – just click here. Alternatively, use the links on the table just below to read up on the topics, that you’re the most interested in.

Pricing – Which one has better value?

Wix has a total of 8 available plans. 7 are paid one, and there’s also a free plan. The prices for the premium plans go from $14 to $49 a month. Plans offer different features – such as varying storage, eCommerce capabilities, and so on.

GoDaddy website builder appears to be a good deal cheaper than Wix: the plans range between $6.99 and $17.49 a month. However, these prices are promotional, and will increase as the initial purchase period expires. The plans also differ heavily in their provided features.

Let’s take a look at how these platforms compare:

Wix plans

For regular websites, not used to sell online, these are 5 plans:

For online selling, there are 3 more:

While the free plan sounds good – I don’t recommend using but anything other than basic testing. There are several reasons for that: the bandwidth and storage are rather limited, so your website won’t be able to have much content or support many visitors. Plus, it’s going to be seriously marked by Wix – both with a massive ribbon at the bottom of your page, and the fact that the site will be hosted on a wixsite.com subdomain.

For a serious-looking website, you’ll have to pay. Here, the Combo plan removes most of those bad things, keeping the free plan down. You can connect your own domain, and Wix’s ads are gone as well. It’s still super limited, mind you.

Unlimited and Pro plans are a lot more fun, including SEO apps, website analytics, and a lot of additional storage. The VIP Plan, on the other hand, is only a marginal improvement – adding a bit of additional storage and customer support options.

But none of these plans let you sell online. What about those who do?

Business Basic includes some of the general selling features. Surprisingly, despite being the value plan here, it actually has a good deal of features. There are no transaction fees, no limits on how many products can be added, and also sales on social media, as well as abandoned cart recovery.

Business Unlimited deals with all the sales tax, as well as allows to use the platform to sell subscriptions, and do dropshipping.

And finally, Business VIP adds priority support, and allows to set up a loyalty program for your buyers.

Personally, I’m not a big fan of both VIP plans. They include not much more extra but command a serious fee. Personally, I found the Business Basic and Combo plans to be the best value. They’re not all that expensive, too, at $23 and $14 a month respectively.

GoDaddy website builder plans

GoDaddy website builder prices aren’t nearly as complicated as Wix’s. There are only 4 plans to pick from: here’s what they are.

There’s one thing you should remember about the GoDaddy prices: they will increase, once your initial purchase period ends. Then, the plans will cost $9.99, $14.99, $19.99, and $24.99 a month respectively.

The Basic plan is good for, well, basic publishing. It’s a good pick for portfolios, or landing pages, leading to external links. It allows you to send up to 100 marketing emails, and connect 1 social media platform, as well as make 5 monthly posts through the builder’s dashboard.

The Standard plan adds some content marketing features, namely, SEO optimization, which is missing from the cheapest plan. Marketing emails are increased to 500, and you can also connect up to 3 social media platforms, and do up to 20 monthly posts.

The Premium plan adds some features for businesses. You still can’t use the plan to sell online, but there will be options to do appointments, as well as organize various group and recurring events through the platform. Emails are capped to a solid 25,000, and there are no social media posting limits.

Finally, the Ecommerce plan does what it says on the box. It’s a plan for selling online, allowing you to build your own store, as well as sell through social media.

There is no free plan – but you can use each plan for free for 14 days. It’s a good way to see the platform’s capabilities and seeing if any of the plans that you pick are worth the money.

Wix is more expensive than GoDaddy website builder – but the difference almost entirely disappears once the initial period expires. They’re both pretty similar then, and there’s no clear winner.

Wix vs. GoDaddy website builder – A case study

Of course, I can speak hours about builders here, but a picture speaks a thousand words – especially if that picture leads to a fully-built test website!

Yep – for this Wix vs GoDaddy website builder comparison, I have two test sites made and ready for you to visit.

Here’s how the Wix website looks like (click on the image to open it).

And here’s the GoDaddy website builder site:

Now, let’s take a big hard look at what it was like to make a website with these platforms.

Ease of use – Experiences from using both

• Wix offers two different website editors: a simple, smart Wix ADI with limited customizability, and a highly-editable classic Editor, with a bit of a learning curve.
• GoDaddy website builder offers one very simple editor, which sacrifices customization for the sake of ease of use.
• GoDaddy will be a great option for beginners looking to make custom websites, meanwhile, Wix offers to pick between the two extremely different approaches.

Ease of use is by far the most important part of a website builder. Hey, that’s what they’re supposed to do – turn website building (an inherently difficult process) into a smooth operation. So, let’s see how they both did: in terms of signing up to the platform, making a website, and editing it to your specific vision.

Using Wix

As you choose to get started with Wix, it’s not holding back any punches: I was immediately asked what kind of website I wish to make.

And once I picked out the right type of a website, I had to make perhaps the biggest decision of using Wix: which editor should be used to build the site?

These options are seriously different from one another.

• Wix ADI will generate a website, based on your business type, provided information, its needs, and your answers to the questionnaire. You can’t do much more, except music editing. But it’s a quick way to make a website.
• Wix Editor offers around 700 templates to choose from. Then, they can be edited as much as you can possibly like. It’s more difficult to use than ADI – but it can do more, as well.

If you pick out ADI, you’ll need to further specify your page’s topic.

The setup won’t take more than a few minutes. During them, I got asked questions, for example, about what sections I want to see on the website.

At the end of picking and choosing, there were 3 final options, finalized and ready to go. I just had to pick the preferred one.

And there you have it: that’s a website ready to go.

Now, what about editing?

Well, it’s simple – but that’s what you would expect, considering that you can’t edit all that much. Best you can do while editing a Wix ADI website is to pick out different pre-made layouts for the sections, and change their order.

You can easily say “no” to all this, and choose to transfer the ADI website to Wix Editor. Or, you can choose to start with Wix Editor already.

It’s an entirely different breed. At first, you’ll be asked to pick from one of the 700-ish templates.

And then…that’s it! You’ll be set free to build and edit everything however you wish.

The choice of what get added where falls entirely on you. Wix has hundreds of elements and sections available, and you can simply drag and drop them on your site. And then, you can use a multitude of editing options to edit all of them as much as you wish.

Of course, this system comes with its own set of complications. Sure, you can edit absolutely everything everywhere, and get full control of the visuals…

Therefore, the responsibility of making the site look good falls on you as well. And if you’re not fluent in all things website design, this could actually turn into a bit of a problem.

Really, it’s up to you to decide whether that’s a good thing or not. If not, you can always go to ADI.

And in nutshell, this is the entire Wix experience, explained. You can do a lot with Wix – there are two different editors and hundreds of themes to choose from. If you’re a beginner who intends to stay that way – choose ADI. But if you’re ready to push your existing design skills to the max – the Editor is actually a pretty good option, once you get used to it.

Using GoDaddy website builder

GoDaddy builder’s setup is incredibly quick: all I had to do was to pick out my site’s name, category, and…and nothing. That was it!

I was immediately transferred to the website editing interface.

Here, setting everything up was very simple: the menu on the right-hand-side includes most of the website-editing options.

And then, right from the website display, I could add and remove pre-made sections on the site.

There aren’t as many sections as on Wix – you won’t be able to add everything that you desire. But the basics are covered – with options for adding content, images, and more intricate options, like a menu, or an appointment signup form.

But sadly, the edits of these sections are very limited. I could only do some basic stuff, like changing the size, and the pre-added text.

I couldn’t do much editing, nor I was given plenty of options. Also, GoDaddy website builder is not a drag and drop website builder. It doesn’t let you place all of these sections and their individual elements wherever you please.

Everything has its place, and that place is predetermined by the builder. But hey, at least there were some solid options for editing colors, buttons, and fonts.

In this section, I really have one main takeaway. Wix gives you either full freedom to edit whatever you want or a super quick way to get a website built by an ADI algorithm.

GoDaddy website builder, on the other hand, offers something very simple to ADI – but with a few additional bells and whistles. For a beginner user, the scale of usability goes Wix ADI -> GoDaddy builder -> Wix Editor. And so do the features.

Wix offers both a super simple, and a seriously complicated way to do things. GoDaddy falls somewhere in the middle. Pick whichever option suits you the most!

Templates – Two very different approaches

• Wix has around 700 templates available, offering options for many different niches.
• GoDaddy builder has only around 20 templates. They are not separated in niches.
• GoDaddy allows to change the theme without losing your content. Wix does not.

A good template can be an excellent starting point for your website. So, in this part, we’ll be taking a look at all the templates offered by these two platforms.

Templates on Wix

Wix Classic Editor offers a total of around 700 distinct templates, covering dozens of different categories.

There’s a lot to choose from, and most likely, you’ll find a section that closely resembles one of your future website.

But really, I suggest going not for the preferred topic, but a preferred layout. Because Wix has a bit of a…difference in quality between the themes that it offers.

Some of them are genuinely excellent!

Some of them are genuinely not!

I suggest taking your time and really browsing through these templates. Choose wisely – once you pick a theme for your website, you can’t swap to a different one without losing all of your content. That’s what you get when your themes are just so dang different.

Templates of GoDaddy website builder

GoDaddy takes a completely different route from Wix, offering a mere 20 templates. They are not some “design-winning, ultra-modern” options either. You know, just…simple templates. The only main difference between them is the overall layout. The menus look different, the buttons are placed elsewhere, that’s about it.

But they have a killer feature.

You can easily swap the themes at any time, quickly seeing your existing content in an entirely different light.

Comparing Wix vs GoDaddy website builder, there’s a very clear difference in concept. You have to adapt to Wix – GoDaddy adapts to you. It’s a lovely little feature that makes editing the site a lot more inviting and simple.

Wix has many, many more themes, and most of them look better than the ones on GoDaddy. But GoDaddy makes the selection, editing, and swapping process as easy as it gets. It’s up to you to choose which of these methods makes more sense.

Business features – Options vs. simplicity

• Wix has an incredible array of first and third-party tools, letting it be a great tool for pretty much any type of online business.
• GoDaddy focuses purely on first-party tools for selling, marketing, and measuring your site’s overall performance.
• GoDaddy offers an accessible suite of business features to beginners, while Wix is a little bit more advanced.

Both of the platforms claim to be great options for all of your business endeavors. Are they? Well – this is what this part is going to be about. While building the websites, I also made sure to give both platforms a test in eCommerce, marketing, SEO, and analytics. This is how everything went down:

eCommerce

Both of the platforms offer options and plans, suited to sell online. Wix’s eCommerce-capable plans start at $23/month. GoDaddy Ecommerce option will set you back $17.49/month for the first term, going up to $24.99 once the initial plan expires.

Let’s see how they both compare – starting with Wix.

There’s a separate menu where you can easily add and manage the products. And once you’re ready to turn those separate products into one lovely store, you’ll need to add them to your site through the site editing dashboard.

You can add and manage an online store straight through the website editing dashboard. Simply pick out to add the store from the massive list of available options, and a site will appear whenever it is required.

In a typical Wix fashion, the editing options for the store are super extensive. You can edit the design to an unrivaled extent.

And in terms of selling features, Shopify has an ace up its sleeve – it’s massive app store. There are plenty of first and third-party options available, several of them focused on things like sales tax calculations, print on demand, shipping, dropshipping, or payments.

GoDaddy, on the other hand, focuses less on customization, and more on ease of use.

The dedicated dashboard streamlines the entire store setup and management process, letting you easily build a shop.

The process of adding the fully set up online store on the GoDaddy website builder is actually quite similar to Wix. All you have to do is go to edit your website, and chose to add the Online Store section.

The style will automatically adapt to your preselected design options, such as font and colors. It can easily go from this…

…to this.

Comparing GoDaddy vs Wix in terms of eCommerce, the difference is pretty clear:

Wix gives you full customization, while GoDaddy tries to customize everything for you. If you have a specific vision of how your store should look and act, pick Wix. If you just want a simple website that works well – go with GoDaddy.

Marketing and SEO

Marketing is by far GoDaddy’s biggest strength – but with solid SEO, and plenty of customization, Wix is also no slouch. Let’s take a dive and see how both of these builders will help you market your business and charm the search engine robots.

GoDaddy website builder

GoDaddy offers a marketing tool called InSight. It does a very simple job of staying at your dashboard and constantly reminding you of your business goals and what should you do to achieve them.

You’ll pick the goals – and GoDaddy will tell you what to do in order to achieve them.

There’s some basic stuff like “connect a domain”. But moving on, you get some serious help, such as guides on how to get email subscribers and set up marketing campaigns. All of these features are available in-house, and you don’t need to pay extra or download anything to go for it.

At the end of the day, there will be a score on a scale from 0 to 100. It’ll be given, depending on how you perform compared to similar sites in the same niche.

I, for example, am not doing all that good.

As for SEO, GoDaddy also focuses on simplifying everything as much as possible. There is an interesting SEO tool available – but only if you’re using a $10.49 Standard plan or higher.

This helpful SEO wizard will help you to choose the right keywords for your site, and them help add them to relevant content, to give your site a chance to rank on search engines.

This tool will make sure that your keywords are in all the right places.

If you’re an advanced SEO professional, I can hear you scoffing from the other side of the screen right now: “No big deal, adding keywords to titles!”.

And you’d be right – it’s not a big deal. For example, no additional software is required to add these things on Wix. But for those with no idea what SEO is, GoDaddy has an excellent entry-level crash course. I like that. A lot.

Wix

Wix offers a wide variety of marketing features. I’d like to start with one blurring the lines between marketing and design. Namely – the integrated video maker, that allows to use your existing video content and edit it to promote your business.

There’s a lot of stuff that you can do: think adding text, stock video, do color grading, and picking from various transitions. It’s a good tool for both design and marketing. Many professional websites use looping videos to showcase and promote their products. With Wix, you can do it, too.

Going deeper to some pure marketing, I also appreciated Wix’s ad options for Facebook and Instagram. The Automated Paid Ads system uses AI algorithms to help you set up automated ads, based on the information of your business and audience. Then, the methods of reaching the audience and turning them into customers will be constantly changed and adapted – depending on what works and what doesn’t.

And finally, there’s Wix Ascend. It’s a premium tool, that costs from $5 a month. This is a quick and simple way to make promotional material and send it out to your audiences – for instance, customized emails and newsletters!

Other marketing features can also come through Wix’s massive App Market. There are hundreds of marketing apps available: some are free, some are premium, and others offer a free plan – but the best features will only come if you decide to pay up.

But luckily, you won’t have to pay money for a third-party app to do SEO. In fact, Wix’s SEO system is perhaps the best out of all website builders. And it’s free of charge on all plans!

Advanced users will like this more than GoDaddy website builder – you can do some in-depth edits, like edit your robots.txt file, view and edit the sitemaps, set up redirects, and so on.

But if you’re a beginner, and all these words sound like I just made them up on the spot, no worries. Similar to GoDaddy, Wix also has a quick SEO setup guide. It will not only help you add keywords in al the right places, but also keep a checklist of all the SEO-related things you can improve.

Comparing GoDaddy website builder vs Wix on marketing and SEO, it’s easy to see some of the key differences. Wix offers a massive amount of features, both in-house, and third-party to help you get the perfect blend. GoDaddy, on the other hand, offers a smaller, but more curated set of features.

Performance – One clear winner

• GoDaddy absolutely dominates in performance tests, being faster than Wix on all metrics.
• Despite the underwhelming results, Wix still offers solid real-life performance.

A fast website is a good website. Obviously – you can edit your website to look like a Louvre masterpiece, but if it takes ages to load, no one’s going to stick around to see it, right?

In this final Wix vs GoDaddy website builder comparison, I put both of the test websites on GTMetrix – a tool, measuring website’s load speed and platform’s overall optimization.

Here are the results for Wix:

And here are the results for GoDaddy website builder:

That’s a paddlin’.

GoDaddy’s hosting pedigree shines right through. Its website builder site loads fast – 1.3 seconds, compared to Wix’s 8.4s. Wix takes around 2 seconds to display the main portion of the website – and GoDaddy doesn’t even take one second.

Overall grades are also quite telling: GoDaddy gets an A, while Wix fails the class with a D.

However, I don’t fully agree with the test results.

GoDaddy is absolutely blazing fast, that part is true. But Wix isn’t as slow as portrayed: in real-life tests, I found that Wix barely takes a couple of seconds to load the key portion of the site, which is actually quite good. The D grade is low – and I’d say that it’s too low.

GoDaddy did incredibly well in performance tests. Meanwhile, Wix has lacked behind – but even then, its performance should be perfectly fine for most users.

Wix vs. GoDaddy website builder – Overall comparison

When comparing Wix vs GoDaddy website builder, I kept seeing one trend that fully explained the differences between the two platforms.

Wix allows you to build and edit whatever you like. There are tools for just about anything: with two drastically different website builders, a lot of pre-made templates, as well as both first and third-party features, Wix makes website building your oyster.

All of that comes with a danger of the platform ending up a bit too complicated to use – but if you dedicate some time and hard work, this can be an excellent option for nearly any type of website.

Meanwhile, GoDaddy website builders focuses on setting up your business as quickly as possible. Not even a website – but an entire business. GoDaddy InSight is really the star of the show, allowing complete business beginners set up their new endeavors and see the results. Same goes for the SEO wizard, too.

The website here is just one of the tools for success – and not the whole story.

And really, that’s the entire idea of this Wix vs GoDaddy website builder comparison right here.

Choose Wix, if you want an awesome, beautiful, highly customizable website with a massive array of business tools. And give GoDaddy website builder a shot, if you’re a beginner who wants a streamlined way to quickly launch and manage a small business.

And, for one more time, here’s a table comparing both platforms in-detail.

And that’s it – we’ve reached the end of this Wix vs GoDaddy website builder comparison. Good luck building your websites and growing your businesses!

Wix vs GoDaddy website builder FAQs