Websites and hosting decision
Duda
A single-site builder with AI copy generation and a publish flow is realistic for a small team to build and maintain, but matching Duda’s multi-tenant scale, AWS-backed hosting, white-label platform features, and integrations ecosystem is not practical to reproduce quickly.
Visit website↗Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need - the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship. All Duda alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Allow an agency to create, publish, and manage a single customizable website with template-based pages, a CMS for content, and simple AI-driven content generation (prompts → page content).
What it still won’t have
- AWS-backed multi-tenant hosting at Duda scale and SLAs
- White-label platform features and account-level multi-site management
- Built-in AEO / AI Visibility add-on and agentic SEO integrations
- Award-winning support, account managers, and enterprise compliance features
- Mature Zapier/MCP integrations and app store ecosystem
What remains hard
- Infrastructure at scale
Publish sites you can depend on with ultra-reliable AWS hosting, enterprise-grade security, automatic backups, and no technical ongoing maintenance.
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 3 seats.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a single-tenant website builder and publisher using Next.js (React) frontend, a Postgres database, and S3-compatible object storage; use Vercel or an equivalent for hosting the frontend and Cloudflare CDN for assets. Implement: (1) a drag-and-drop template editor with save/load, (2) a CMS with pages and collections stored in Postgres, (3) an export/build pipeline that renders pages to static HTML and uploads assets to the CDN, (4) user auth and simple role permissions, (5) a REST API to create/update sites/pages, and (6) an LLM integration endpoint (configurable API key) to generate page copy from prompts. Out of scope: multi-account white-label platform, enterprise SLAs, multi-site billing, and an app marketplace. Include error handling, retries for external API calls, unit tests for core business logic, and end-to-end tests for the publish flow.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 5 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Hard moats found in the evidence-3
- Evidence score64
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 5
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productDuda — official product
- official pricingDuda — Pricing
- official productDuda — Product updates
- open sourcestrapi/strapi
- open sourcewebstudio-is/webstudio
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
