Best Website Builders In 2026 Ranked & Reviewed

Best for: Most people, most use cases

Starting price: $17/month (annual billing) Trustpilot: 3.4/5 from 27,500+ reviews

If someone asks me "what website builder should I use?" and I don't know anything else about them, my answer is Wix. It's not always the best tool for one specific job. WordPress beats it for deep SEO, Squarespace beats it for visual polish but for overall usefulness across the widest range of needs, nothing else comes close right now.

The drag-and-drop editor is the most flexible in the space. You can drop elements anywhere on the page, which sounds basic, but plenty of builders still force you into rigid grid layouts. Wix just lets you build. It has 900+ templates, an AI site builder that's genuinely gotten impressive, and an app market with hundreds of integrations.

What I love about it: The Wix app market is underrated. Need a booking system? There's an app. Email marketing? There's an app. I once built a fully functional membership site with gated content in an afternoon using tools that were all natively available inside Wix. The platform has quietly become a proper business operating system, not just a website builder.

What bugs me: Once you pick a template, you're stuck with it. Switching templates means rebuilding from scratch and that's a real pain if you fall out of love with your design six months later. Pricing has also crept up over the years. And that "free plan" is really just a playground. Wix branding lives all over the site until you pay.

On Trustpilot: A 3.4/5 across 27,500+ reviews is pretty average, and if you dig into the negative reviews, a clear pattern emerges: billing surprises and customer support response times are the main pain points. The product itself gets far warmer feedback. It's the account management side that drags the score down. Worth keeping in mind.

Reddit says: Users on r/web_design and r/Entrepreneur consistently back Wix for non-developer small business owners. The vibe is it just works. The one consistent pushback: experienced developers find it limiting compared to WordPress or Webflow.

Best for: Small businesses, local services, personal sites, beginners who want creative control without touching code.

Best for: Creatives, portfolios, design-forward brands

Starting price: $16/month (annual billing) Trustpilot: 3.0/5 from 3,400+ reviews

Squarespace is the platform I always recommend to photographers, designers, artists, and anyone who wants their website to look like it was built by a professional without actually hiring one. The templates are, and I say this with full conviction, the most beautiful out of the box of any builder on this list.

There's a reason creative professionals gravitate here. The typography is thoughtful, the layouts feel curated, and the overall aesthetic sensibility is just a notch above everyone else. If your site is essentially your portfolio, Squarespace is a very easy call.

What I love about it: Built-in features. Unlike some builders that nickel-and-dime you with third-party apps for basic functionality, Squarespace includes a lot natively blogging, scheduling (via Acuity), email campaigns, video hosting. It's a tighter, more cohesive product than Wix, even if it's less expansive.

What bugs me: The extension marketplace is tiny compared to Wix. If you need something Squarespace doesn't natively do, you might just be out of luck. And the basic plan charges a 2% transaction fee on sales, a quiet penalty that catches people off guard when they go to sell something.

On Trustpilot: That 3.0/5 from 3,400+ reviews looks rough on the surface, and I want to be honest about it the negative reviews are real and mostly center around customer support and payment holds. Squarespace's support has historically leaned on email-only responses, and when something goes wrong, slow resolution times frustrate people. The product itself earns considerably better marks across other review platforms. So: love the builder, manage your expectations around support.

Reddit says: Squarespace is the default recommendation across r/photography and most creative subreddits. The phrase that comes up constantly is "it just looks good." People who've left Squarespace almost always cite limited integrations or pricing as the reason, rarely the design.

Best for: Photographers, artists, designers, freelancers, restaurants, boutiques. Anyone where visual presentation is the #1 priority.

Best for: Bloggers, content sites, SEO-focused businesses

Starting price: $4/month (personal plan, annual billing)* Trustpilot: 3.6/5 from 4,000+ reviews

Note: This is WordPress.com (the hosted version) not WordPress.org, the self-hosted software. They're related but meaningfully different products.

WordPress powers roughly 43% of the internet, and for good reason. It's the most powerful content management system available, and WordPress.com makes it accessible without requiring you to manage your own server. If content is the core of your business  (blogging, publishing, long-form articles) WordPress is simply the strongest platform for it. The SEO plugins alone (Yoast, RankMath) justify the steeper learning curve for anyone serious about ranking in Google.

What I love about it: The blogging and content tools are unmatched. Scheduling posts, managing categories, handling comments, building out a content archive, it's all deeply thought through. And the SEO ceiling here is genuinely higher than any other builder on this list.

What bugs me: It's not for the faint of heart. There's a real learning curve, especially if you're coming from the visual simplicity of Wix or Squarespace. Plugin conflicts are a real thing. And the jump in pricing between tiers can feel jarring. You hit a point where you're paying significantly more for features that competitors include at lower price points.

On Trustpilot: The 3.6/5 from 4,000+ reviews is actually the strongest score among the top three on this list, and the review breakdown reflects it. 50% of reviewers give it 5 stars, with praise consistently focused on the platform's capabilities and support staff (WordPress actually employs "Happiness Engineers," which is a real job title and, based on the reviews, they earn it). The lower ratings tend to come from users who found the learning curve steep or had issues with specific plugins.

Reddit says: r/wordpress is enormous and passionate. The overwhelming advice: if you're serious about content or long-term SEO, WordPress is worth the learning curve investment. Beginners are consistently pointed toward Wix or Squarespace instead.

Best for: Bloggers, publishers, businesses where SEO is a primary growth channel, anyone comfortable with a little complexity.

Best for: Designers and developers who want full creative control

Starting price: $14/month (annual billing) Trustpilot: 1.5/5 from ~207 reviews

Webflow occupies a unique position in this space. It's not really a "website builder" in the traditional sense it's more like a visual development environment. You're essentially writing CSS and HTML through a visual interface rather than typing code, which means the output is cleaner and more customizable than anything else on this list.

Full disclosure: Webflow has a real learning curve. I spent a frustrated weekend with it before things clicked, and I've been building websites for years. Most people should budget about a week of dedicated use before it starts feeling intuitive.

What I love about it: The design freedom is extraordinary. When you build in Webflow, you're not constrained by templates or grid systems, you're working with the actual building blocks of the web. Sites built in Webflow consistently perform well on Core Web Vitals, which matters for SEO. And the CMS is genuinely powerful for content-driven sites.

What bugs me: Pricing gets steep quickly, especially when you want to remove Webflow branding or unlock more advanced features. And if you just want a business site up this weekend, Webflow is the wrong tool. It will take longer and require real patience.

On Trustpilot: That 1.5/5 from ~207 reviews is jarring, and I want to address it head-on. Webflow's Trustpilot page is almost entirely a collection of support complaints from a very small review pool — email-only support with multi-day response times is a documented and legitimate frustration. But anyone who's spent time in the r/webflow community or seen the product in action knows the disconnect between that score and the actual quality of the builder is stark. Treat it as a customer service warning, not a product verdict.

Reddit says: Designers and developers love Webflow. r/webflow is active and enthusiastic. Non-technical users are consistently pointed elsewhere. The community is helpful but honest: this platform rewards investment.

Best for: Designers, agencies, marketing teams, SaaS companies. Anyone who wants pixel-perfect creative control without writing code from scratch.

Best for: Budget-conscious builders who don't want to sacrifice quality

Starting price: $2.99/month (promotional pricing, annual billing)* Trustpilot: 4.7/5 from 66,000+ reviews

Hostinger has quietly become one of the better-value options in the space, and it doesn't get nearly enough attention. The builder itself is clean and easy to use, the AI tools have improved meaningfully over the past couple of years, and the price point is genuinely hard to beat, especially since Hostinger bundles hosting, a domain, and the builder together under one roof.

What I love about it: The value-for-money ratio is hard to argue with. You're getting hosting, a domain, and a capable site builder for a price that most competitors charge just for the builder alone. For someone just starting out, that bundled simplicity actually removes a lot of decisions. And when something goes wrong, the support team, backed by an AI assistant called Kodee is consistently responsive.

On Trustpilot: 4.7/5 from over 66,000 reviews is legitimately exceptional, one of the highest ratings in the entire web hosting and builder category. This isn't a small sample size anomaly; it reflects a company that has invested seriously in customer experience. When Hostinger's score is sitting next to Webflow's 1.5 and Squarespace's 3.0, the gap speaks for itself.

What bugs me: The platform is still maturing. Some features have a "version 1.0" feel, functional but not as polished as Wix or Squarespace. Blogging tools in particular are limited, so if content is core to your site, look elsewhere. Also worth flagging: those promotional prices renew at 4-5x the intro rate, so factor in the long-term cost before committing.

Reddit says: Generally positive, with the consistent note that it's best for simple business pages rather than complex sites. One frequently quoted sentiment from Reddit threads: it's prime for a simple business page, but power users will feel the ceiling pretty quickly.

Best for: Beginners, small businesses on a tight budget, simple landing pages and business sites.