Free Website Builder Plans Comparison (2024)

What is a Free Website Builder?

There are many websites that market their web building platform as "free" for building a business website, online portfolio or ecommerce shop. We’ve done the research here to help future web content creators find the most free website builder software available. There is a lot to sort through and compare, all the pricing plan pages and conspicuous limitations, fees and conditions.

Overall the search criteria here is simple. Get the most features for the lowest cost, and we are shooting for free. That said, there are different levels of free: free software, free hosting and an ad-free experience.

What’s the Catch with These Free Site Building Websites?

You may have heard nothing in this world is free. How does that phrase translate to the world of simple, “free” labeled site builders? Here are some of the problems you might commonly encounter:

• Branding - It contains a notification bar, a badge, or some other somewhat unobtrusive site builder branding

• Limitations - A withholding of “premium” features which are raised into higher tier pricing plans. These may include access to plugins, advanced seo, and the most devastating is the ability to connect to a custom domain. In this way the free plan is pay gated.

• Ads - The free site builder software may place ads on your webpages to offset the fact they are giving away a free website experience.

• Content Restrictions - constraints on the size of your site, number of sites, bandwidth and storage limits, even page view/visits.

A Quick Comparison of "Free" Site Builder Pricing Plans & Their Limitations

GoDaddy

• Free plan uses a subdomain, but no ads

• Source: https://www.godaddy.com/en-sg/websites/website-builder/plans-and-pricing

Wix

• Displays ads

• Source: https://www.wix.com/premium-purchase-plan/dynamo

Weebly

• Displays ads

• Source: https://www.weebly.com/pricing?lang=en

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Wordpress

• Displays ads, must pay for hosting separately

• Source: https://wordpress.com/pricing/

Webflow

• webflow.io subdomain; $14 to actually connect to custom domains

• Limited bandwidth and functionality

• Source: https://webflow.com/pricing

Site123

• Limited storage, bandwidth and subdomained

• Source: https://www.site123.com/pricing

Carrd

• Subdomained

• limited functions no forms or widgets in pro lite plan

• Source: https://carrd.co/pro

Yola

• Yola Ads displayed on site

• 2 Pages limit, limited storage 1gb

• Source: https://www.yola.com/pricing

GitHub Pages

• Repository of web files, where coding and markdown are required.

• From what we can tell, it could be entirely free. It isn't clear what limitations there are on bandwidth or requests.

• Also, making a business website seems to be in violation of their terms of use. Prohibited uses: "GitHub Pages is not intended for or allowed to be used as a free web-hosting service to run your online business, e-commerce site, or any other website that is primarily directed at either facilitating commercial transactions or providing commercial software as a service (SaaS)."

• Source: https://github.com/pricing

Framer

• Free plan locked to a subdomain with limited bandwidth

• Framer banner ad

• Source: https://www.framer.com/pricing/

Google Sites

• Completely free

• Free hosting

• Free SSL Certificate

• No tiers, conditions or limitations imposed

• There is a tiny, semi-transparent "Report Abuse" button in the bottom left.

Why You Should Always Buy & Connect a Custom Domain

What you need to buy for any successful website - a domain name. A website that is a subdomain of the site builder app, like carloslaw.wix.com or chicagocoffeeco.webflow.com , is not a memorable, unique or authoritative site. You won’t get far if your business is subdomained as it basically cripples the site’s effectiveness. Therefore, regardless of the platform, buy a .com. We have some recommendations for getting started on a website.

Is There a Completely Free Website Builder?

If you are looking for the most free, or completely free, website builder then use Google Sites. You will need a Google account to get started and here is the login page for Google Sites.

Wix, Weebly, GoDaddy, Carrd, Framer, Canva, Hubspot, Wordpress and Webflow all have very limited free plans available. These limitations necessitate the upgrading to higher, premium tier plans to launch a fully-functioning website.

To learn more about Google Sites, check out our extensive resources page.

Other Considerations for Choosing Your Platform

Access to Support

It is important to weigh your choice against the level of support, development updates and tutorials you expect from the platform or its community. For example, Google Sites support for a free Gmail account is basically no existent from Google Inc. themselves. There isn't a way to submit a ticket or talk to a Google representative. With a Google Workspace subscription the situation improves, but it comes at a cost there. However, there is an active Help Community of product experts, which is a forum type system. You may consider:

• Do they have chat or phone support?

• How extensive is the platform's tutorial content, video tutorials, help articles, how to's?

• Is there a community of experts online that help new users?

Access to Templates

Templates make launching a new website much easier. The workload of design and user interface has mostly been completed by a talented designer. Therefore, it is an added bonus if the site builder website has:

• Free Templates

• Premium Templates

• Ecommerce Templates

• Template Designers

• Easy Template Gallery for Installation

If you are interested in Google Sites templates, we got you covered.