Websites and hosting decision
Wix
A functional subset (templates + editor + hosting) is practical for a capable developer to build and maintain, but Wix's durable advantages (multi-cloud infrastructure and large brand/scale plus integrated AI agents and business tooling) make a full replacement impractical for a single developer or small team.
Visit website↗$29/mo
$348/yr
Not verified against a pricing page.
$50one-off30 h to build
$20/mo8 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 1 seat.
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 Wix alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Create a website from a template, edit pages in a WYSIWYG editor, upload assets and publish to hosted site
What it still won’t have
- Wix AI Agents (Aria, Kleo, Omni, Juno) and integrated AI workflows
- Multi-cloud managed hosting with enterprise SLA
- Built-in payments, bookings and deep business-tool integrations
- Thousands of built-in templates and media curated by Wix
- 24/7 Customer Care and enterprise-grade security monitoring
What remains hard
- Infrastructure at scale
Multi-cloud hosting
- Infrastructure at scale
99.99% uptime and lightning-fast load times
- Brand trust
300M+ sites built on Wix
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 1 seat.
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 minimal self-hosted website-builder using Next.js (React) for the frontend, GrapesJS for the drag-and-drop editor, an Express (Node) backend, Postgres for structured content, and S3-compatible storage for uploaded media. Implement: template catalog + instantiate flow, WYSIWYG page editing with save/load, CMS CRUD for pages and collections, publish pipeline that exports static HTML and assets and deploys to a configured hosting bucket with automated HTTPS (Let's Encrypt), user auth and a simple domain-mapping UI. Out of scope: payments, enterprise multi-cloud failover, advanced AI agents, marketplace apps. Include input validation, transactional save/rollback, basic role-based access, automated tests for editor save/load, and error-handling with logging and health endpoints.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 5 cited sources+3
- Hard moats found in the evidence-3
- Evidence score57
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 productWix main site
- official pricingWix pricing
- official docsWix features
- open sourcewebstudio-is/webstudio
- open sourcehalo-dev/halo
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
