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Weebly vs WordPress: Which CMS Is Better in 2022

Updated on January 3, 2022

13 Min Read
wordpress vs weebly

Have you finally decided to build your own website but are confused between WordPress and Weebly? If yes, let us dig into the details of both options and help you make the right decision.

WordPress is among the most favorable options to build a website. Approximately more than 35% of the total live websites use WordPress. That’s a hard number to wrap your head around!

However, recently the internet also witnessed a budding competitor named Weebly that’s been collecting rave reviews and tagged as a newbie-friendly website builder for building blogs, sites, and ecommerce stores.

Two strong contenders! Can’t decide which website builder to use for building your first site? Read along as we give an unbiased and thorough comparison of both builders.

Make your final selection after getting acquainted with the features, pricing, and limitations of both Weebly and WordPress, and pick the one that suits your requirements.

If we judge by popularity, then WordPress is the clear winner. But the majority isn’t always right, right? You can’t just opt for the more popular choice. The smart thing to do is comprehensively analyze the available options to make a rational decision.

We have compared WordPress and Weebly as per different metrics and chosen a front-runner for each category. Our blog concludes with a final winner based on the amalgamation of all factors, but the separate comparison for each metric will let you make your own choice.

Weebly vs WordPress: How Are They Different?

Even though WordPress is a huge player in the online world, you’d be shocked to know that even Weebly powers more than 50 million websites on the internet. But, what led to Weebly’s largely growing popularity when we already have WordPress?

No tool can satisfy every user’s requirements, and smart players take advantage of the failings of the popular tools to present themselves as their alternatives. The same is the case with WordPress and Weebly. While both are impressive website builders, they come with limitations and differences that cater to different audiences.

While Weebly is a hosted service, WordPress is a self-hosted service giving you complete ownership of your content. Weebly makes your website reside on other servers and limits you to follow their terms of service.

Looking for a WP Engine alternative for your WordPress website?

Cloudways offers one free managed migration that ensures no downtime during the process.

Also, migration with Weebly is quite a task, but it’s a piece of cake with WordPress.

Wait. Don’t make up your mind too soon. While WordPress has the edge over Weebly as a hosting service, it does not stand well in front of Weebly’s easy drag-and-drop tools that beginners love.

Both WordPress and Weebly have their strengths and weaknesses; we will compare them on separate metrics in our next section. Keep reading to decide which one is a better option for you.

Weebly vs WordPress: Detailed Comparison

We have compared both platforms’ metrics separately and have chosen a winner for each metric for your convenience.

Features and Plugins – Which One Is More User-Friendly?

Features play an important part in website-building and blogging platforms. The more diverse the features, the more it’ll promise user-friendliness and distinguishing visual elements. Weebly acknowledges the need for rich features and offers an enormous variety of built-in blogging features on its platform.

Even if you can’t find your desired feature in Weebly, you can ask your developer to add it. Moreover, Weebly facilitates its users with many free and paid applications; however, the number is nothing compared to what WordPress offers.

Contrastingly, WordPress is popular for its rich features offering, but you will have to manually add most of its features as plugins as they don’t come preinstalled.

WordPress virtually offers solutions for all your wants via its plugins; while Weebly also covers the essential features, it is pretty limited.

WordPress Plugins

WordPress has the edge over Weebly, considering the number, but we will have to give huge props to Weebly for its built-in ready-to-use feature set, unlike WordPress, which requires you to download each plugin manually.

Winner: DRAW

Note: Although we first thought of picking WordPress, Weebly’s built-in features and user-friendly nature neutralized the comparison, resulting in a draw.

Flexibility – WordPress or Weebly?

WordPress is an open-source platform, giving you the privilege of modifying your website as per your needs. Weebly, unlike WordPress, is not an open-source platform, so the freedom is quite limited. However, you have the right to customize your website’s design on Weebly as it lets you edit the HTML and CSS codes.

Weebly is limited when integrating the non-built-in Weebly tools to your website or editing the functions. It has restricted access to core functions from the general public.

Although WordPress is untouchable in the domain of flexibility and complete control thanks to its plethora of free plugins and the ability to add more tools to your website. Weebly isn’t a total loser here; if you know a bit of coding, you can survive with Weebly.

Winner: WordPress

Note: It is advised not to try all WordPress plugins without thought, but do a little research before integrating a new plugin to your site, as some of them can be problematic and may lead to errors.

Ease of Use – Weebly Is Much Simpler

Think of it this way, while WordPress is not about technical skills and complexities that are impossible for a novice user to start with, it isn’t a cakewalk either. Weebly, however, is all about ease of use and user-friendliness.

Even beginners can work with Weebly, as they will have to build everything using drag-and-drop website builders, helping them dodge the HTML ghosts. Weebly requires its users to opt for a suitable theme to start building their website. Plus, you don’t have to worry about paying for a premium theme with Weebly.

Weebly ease of use

Albeit with the advent of Gutenberg, WordPress has promised fewer editing difficulties; it is still not as simple as Weebly, so Weebly is the clear winner in this domain.

Winner: Weebly

Note: If you want all of WordPress’ functionalities and features but wish to have Weebly’s ease of usage, then you can use WordPress’ page builders for an easy drag-and-drop experience like Weebly.

Customer Support – Which One Offers 24/7 Support?

Weebly users can find solutions to the platform-related problems through the help articles available in its support center, inspiration center, and community pages.

However, if any of these options doesn’t resolve your query, you may contact Weebly’s 24/7 support. Contact Weebly by phone, email, or live chat; describe your problem, and get free professional advice.

Weebly Customer Support

Although WordPress does not have dedicated support for directly resolving the user’s issues, its vast library of support articles and forums helps resolve recurring issues. Also, beware that sometimes the solutions on WordPress forums can get a bit techy for beginners to understand.

WordPress help

WordPress online community is famous for helping out other users with their problems. But one can’t rely on the community for fast and timely solutions, so there should be a dedicated live support system. Due to this, we are crowning Weebly as the winner over here.

Winner: Weebly

SEO – Both Offer Optimization Options

SEO is one factor that no one can afford to ignore – make sure the platform you choose facilitates this. Looking at Weebly vs. WordPress from the SEO perspective gives quite interesting outcomes.

Weebly offers its users an SEO guide to help beginners follow the best SEO practices. However, as Weebly is quite limited with its optimization suggestions, one can not rely on this as the ultimate guide.

Conversely, WordPress is considered the best platform for users seeking SEO capabilities, as it lets the user experiment with the technical stuff and offers exemplary additional help via its plugins. Like Yoast, the popular WordPress SEO plugin is a beginner-friendly plugin widely used by all successful WordPress websites.

WordPress yoast

But here’s the interesting part, WordPress is almost nothing without its plugins. While Weebly offers built-in optimizations of title, meta descriptions, URLs, 301 redirects, the addition of Google Analytics, and Google search console, WordPress provides all and more, but only with its plugins.

Winner: WordPress (with plugins) [close call]

Ecommerce & Business

Weebly offers an online store that is equipped with basic but limited features. There isn’t much room left for you in the store customization due to design and functionality limitations.

WordPress is the perfect platform for an ecommerce website. Thanks to robust ecommerce plugins like WooCommerce and WP Ecommerce, you can manage all aspects of an ecommerce platform management.

WooCommerce ecommerce

The WordPress ecommerce plugins allow you to add coupons, customize receipts, and experiment with a lot more changes. Putting more in the bargain, there is no additional transaction fee, and you can easily use any online payment platform of your choice.

Weebly charges its users an extra 3% per transaction (for starters and pro plans), meaning that you will have to opt for a third-party payment gateway like PayPal or Stripe. If you are hesitant about the idea of using a third-party payment gateway, then your users will have to pay an extra 3% fee on each transaction through a Weebly-hosted store.

Weebly ecommerce builder

As an ecommerce store owner, you should know that customers hate additional costs, so these transaction costs with Weebly are a huge turn-off. That said, Weebly can let you turn off these costs by offering you a switch to their business plan at $25/month.

Winner: WordPress (Easy Win)

Maintenance

If you think that all work is limited to building a website, you couldn’t be more wrong. The real struggle starts once your website is live, and one of the most crucial factors is the maintenance of that site.

Comparing WordPress and Weebly in terms of maintenance, we’d see that Weebly provides hosting and security with automatic updates. While WordPress requires more of your time and attention, but again it has the plugins required to do their magic.

We recommend using the best WordPress security plugins to ensure maximum security. Again, WordPress without its plugins is not as robust as Weebly in the maintenance area.

Weebly gives you the freedom to work and handles the security measures itself, so the manual security checks of WordPress make it a bit non-handy.

Winner: Weebly

Data Portability

Weebly allows you to download your website as a zip file containing only the HTML pages and images. If you are a Weebly user and wish to import your blogs to your desktop or another domain, you can stop wishing because it is impossible with Weebly.

In short, it is very challenging to export your Weebly website while preserving its looks and functionalities. Data export is relatively easy in WordPress, irrespective of the format of your website.

With WordPress, the export process depends upon an XML file that dramatically reduces migration issues. Moreover, you can easily migrate your WordPress website to any other platform without much hassle.

Winner: WordPress (Another easy win)

Note: Cloudways offer its FREE WordPress migrator plugin for your website’s easy migration.

Weebly vs WordPress: Pricing | Which One Is Better?

Everything has a cost attached to it. So does excellence, and not everyone can afford it. We all want our websites to be equipped with the best marketing tools and provide our visitors with the ideal user experience.

Sure, you want the best services, but how much are you willing to spend? At the end of the day, you have to be realistic and opt for those website builders that you can easily afford in the long run.

We will cover the pricing plans of both WordPress and Weebly separately in this section and will declare a winner at the end. Knowing the prices will help you make a better choice as per your budget.

WordPress Pricing

WordPress is actually FREE for all users to download and use since it is an open-source platform.

Isn’t the word “free” exciting? Well, don’t be so fast to ditch Weebly. There is some cost involved with WordPress, and since we are being fair in the comparison, we won’t hide anything from our readers.

Sure, you don’t have to pay a dime to get started with WordPress, but you will still be required to pay its hosting plan costs.

Just as your hosting costs align with your goals, our Web Hosting Pricing Calculator ensures precision. This tool recommends the optimal server size based on your traffic and conducts a comprehensive comparison between Cloudways and top competitors.

WordPress divides its pricing into two categories, i.e., monthly and annual. They are further divided into four sub-categories named personal, premium, business, and ecommerce.

WordPress Monthly Plans

The WordPress monthly plans, along with their benefits, can be seen in the image below:

WordPress monthly plans

WordPress Annual Plans

The image below shows the WordPress annual plans, including the benefits under each plan.

WordPress annual plans

Also, bear in mind that WordPress does NOT offer you a domain name, and you will have to register it somewhere else and then link it to your website. The prices for purchasing a domain vary according to the domain name, but the basic prices start at around $5 to $15 per year.

Weebly Pricing

Weebly’s pricing plans are divided into two categories, i.e., for websites and online stores. Further, Weebly has given four separate pricing plans for websites and three plans for online stores.

Weebly Pricing Plans for Websites

Let’s look at the websites’ pricing plans first:

Weebly website pricing plan

1) Free

As the name suggests, Weebly’s free plan does not require you to spend any amounts and provides a free SSL security certificate for your website.

It also gives you 500 MB of storage for uploading media and other files to your website. It also offers a community forum, SEO, contact forms, lead capture, chat & email support.

2) Connect

The connect plan costs $5 per month (when paid annually) and has all the free plan’s benefits. Additionally, it lets you connect your site to any custom domain that you already own.

3) Pro

The pro plan is suited for groups and organizations and costs $12 per month (when paid annually).

The pro plan covers all the benefits that the connect and free plan covers. Moreover, it gives you unlimited storage, removes Weebly ads, and provides site search. This plan also gives you a free domain worth $20 and Google ads credit of $100.

Ecommerce owners can benefit from this plan, as unlike connect and free plans, Weebly Pro offers a shopping cart, payment acceptance via square, and third-party providers. Furthermore, you also get phone support and advanced site stats with the pro plan.

4) Business

Weebly’s business plan is best suited for small businesses and stores. It costs $25 per month (when paid annually), and of course, covers all the benefits that the other three plans cover since it’s the premium plan.

Weebly’s business plan’s additional exclusive benefits are as follows:

  • Advanced ecommerce statistics.
  • Automatic tax calculator.
  • Coupon codes.
  • Integrated shipping labels.
  • Inventory management.
  • Item options and badges.
  • Item reviews.
  • Pop-up notifications.
  • Shipping calculator.
  • Shipping discounts.
  • Square gift cards.

Weebly Pricing Plans for Online Stores

Weebly’s pricing plans for online stores are as follows:

Weebly pricing for online store

1) Pro

Weebly’s pro plan for online stores is priced at $12 per month (when paid annually). It is best suited for groups and organizations. Like Weebly’s pro plan for websites, this pro plan also gives you a free domain worth $20 and Google ads credit of $100.

You get the following list of benefits with the pro plan:

  • Ability to connect a custom domain.
  • Advanced site stats.
  • Community forum.
  • Contact forms.
  • Email and chat support.
  • Free SSL security.
  • Lead capture.
  • Payment acceptance via Square and third parties.
  • Phone support.
  • Removes Weebly ads.
  • Search Engine Optimization.
  • Shopping cart.
  • Site search.
  • Unlimited media storage.

2) Business

The business plan costs $25 per month (when paid annually) and is best suited for small businesses and stores.

Since the business plan contains all the Weebly pro plan’s benefits, we have only listed the additional benefits in the list below:

  • Advanced ecommerce stats.
  • Automatic tax calculator.
  • Coupon codes.
  • Integrated shipping labels.
  • Inventory management.
  • Item badges.
  • Item options.
  • Item reviews.
  • Pop-up notifications.
  • Shipping calculator.
  • Shipping discounts.
  • Square gift cards.

3) Business Plus

Weebly has a special plan for power sellers (sell digital products) named business plus. This exclusive plan costs $38 per month (when paid annually). We know that the price is super high, but it’s justified for the benefits that it provides to the subscribers.

Like the pro and business plans, the business plus plan also offers a free domain worth $20 and a Google ads credit of $100. But here’s the catch: this plan also offers email marketing worth $96 (not bad considering the added benefits).

The business pro plan covers all the features that the other two plans offer. Additionally, it gives you the option to automatically send reminder emails to the customers who don’t complete their purchases and charges the precise rates based on the weight, destination, and carrier.

Winner: WordPress (Weebly’s plans are impressive, but WordPress is cheaper in most circumstances)

Final Decision – Weebly or WordPress?

We compared WordPress and Weebly over 9 different areas, and the results are as follows:

  • Features and Plugins: Draw
  • Flexibility: WordPress
  • Ease of Use: Weebly
  • Customer Support: Weebly
  • SEO: WordPress
  • Ecommerce & Business: WordPress
  • Maintenance: Weebly
  • Data Portability: WordPress
  • Pricing: WordPress

Total WordPress wins: 5
Total Weebly wins: 3
Draw: 1

Weebly has a considerable advantage over WordPress as it provides easy drag-and-drop editing, with no coding skills required. Still, WordPress tackles this with its page builders that are offered as a plugin.

WordPress combined with its plugins is way too handy and offers solutions that none of its competitors provide. So, the winner of this battle is WordPress (based on our personal experience).

Since we have been unbiased in this post, we have left the doors of judgment open to all our readers to decide their winner, so let us know your choice in the comments below.

What’s better WordPress or Weebly?

Both Weebly and WordPress have their pros and cons. If you’re looking for an easy drag-and-drop website builder without any coding complexities, then go for Weebly. However, if you want a professional website with more flexibility and better pricing, then opt for WordPress.

Is WordPress easier than Weebly?

No, Weebly is simpler than WordPress. However, WordPress offers thousands of free and premium plugins that ease users’ website-building experience.

What are the disadvantages of using Weebly?

We have listed the major disadvantages of using Weebly below:

  • Random platform glitches.
  • Limited themes.
  • Poor page management.
  • Lack of variety.
  • Migration difficulties.
  • No forum option.
  • Site blocking.
  • Costly.

Does Weebly work with WordPress?

Yes, you can integrate Weebly with WordPress. Moreover, you can also move your Weebly site to WordPress by acquiring a WordPress domain.

Share your opinion in the comment section. COMMENT NOW

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Sarim Javaid

Sarim Javaid is a Digital Content Producer at Cloudways. He has a habit of penning down his random thoughts and giving words and meaning to the clutter of ideas colliding inside his mind. His obsession with Google and his curious mind add to his research-based writing. Other than that, he's a music and art admirer and an overly-excited person.

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