Wix and GoDaddy are household names in the realm of website-building software. These two let you build your own website without relying on web designers and agencies. You do not even need to know coding to be able to use these software: they are easy to use and beginner-friendly. They often do more than just website creation: you can enjoy email marketing and SEO optimization features, among others. But the big question is: ‘Should you use Wix or GoDaddy?’ In this article, you’ll gain knowledge of the two, enough to help you make your decision; keep reading.
Main differences between Wix and GoDaddy
| Wix | GoDaddy | |
| Plans | Free plan | No free plan |
| Offerings | App maker (Branded App by Wix) | Absent |
| User-interface | Easy to use | More beginner-friendly |
| Features | More scalable features and creative controls | Great features |
| SEO tools and optimization | Better | Great |
| Pricing | 14-day money-back guarantee | Unavailable |
| Extras | App market | Unavailable |
Wix vs. GoDaddy: Features and capabilities
Features and capabilities of Wix
- Website builder: Wix offers tons of templates and tools for building your website. You can either use the designer-made templates or start from scratch with a blank template. The best part is that Wix has an automatic site builder (Wix ADI) that can create a fully designed website for you according to your preferences.
- Wix Analytics Overviews: This feature offers an overview of your sales, traffic, and customer behavior. You can visualize your total sales, top-selling items, unique visitors, abandoned carts, and many more.
- Advanced SEO tools: Wix offers many advanced SEO tools built into your website. These include Robots.txt editor, URL customization, custom meta tags, SEO patterns, XML sitemaps, and many more.
- App Market: You can find lots of professional tools and apps on the Wix App Market to grow, power, and manage your Wix website.
Features and capabilities of GoDaddy
- Website builder: With GoDaddy, you can easily build and customize your website using its over a hundred customizable templates and themes. You can even get your website automatically built for you using the ADI feature.
- Chatbots: With the GoDaddy chatbots feature, you can easily automate responses to customers’ questions and inquiries.
- Professional email account: GoDaddy offers one year of Microsoft 365 email service that lets you have an email address that ends in a business/website name.
- Booking appointments: With GoDaddy, your customers can automatically book appointments with you that are automatically updated on your calendar.
- Marketing tools: GoDaddy offers various tools and features for both social media and email marketing. With GoDaddy studio, you can create custom images and videos for your social media, schedule social media posts directly from GoDaddy, set up email sign-ups on your website, and more.
Wix vs. GoDaddy: Pricing
Wix pricing
Wix offers a free plan in addition to its paid plans; you also enjoy a free trial on any of the paid plans. The paid plans on Wix are divided into 2 categories with varying price points.
Website category
- Connect domain (costs $4.50/month annually)
- Combo (costs $8.50/month annually)
- Unlimited (costs $12.50/month annually)
- VIP (costs $24.50/month annually)
Business and e-commerce category
- Business Basic (costs $17/month)
- Business Unlimited (costs $25/month)
- Business VIP (costs $35/month)
GoDaddy pricing
- Free trial
- Basic plan ($6.99/month)
- Standard ($10.49/month)
- Premium ($13.99/month)
- E-commerce plan ($14.99/month)
Reasons to choose Wix over GoDaddy
Wix is the better option for media management: it offers its own dedicated photo studio and video editor for customizing media.
Wix offers a Free plan, whereas all GoDaddy plans are paid.
Unlike GoDaddy, which only creates websites, Wix, in addition to this, offers an app creation feature called “Branded App by Wix.”
Wix has more features, industry-specific themes, and templates than GoDaddy.
Wix offers more advanced and professional SEO tools than GoDaddy.
Wix offers better support and more help for its users than GoDaddy.
Wix offers more design flexibility, automations, and customization than GoDaddy.
Reasons to choose GoDaddy over Wix
GoDaddy is faster and has better speed than Wix.
Although both software offer amazing e-commerce tools, GoDaddy has the edge over Wix with its ‘Abandoned Carts Recovery’ feature that lets you auto-email customers who added items to their carts without checking out.
Although Wix is packed with more features and tools than GoDaddy, this can become disadvantageous as the countless tools and designs on Wix can become too overwhelming and confusing for a beginner; hence, GoDaddy, which is much simpler, is the better option for beginners.
Unlike Wix, GoDaddy offers both Windows and Linux hosting.
Similarities between Wix and GoDaddy
Both software offer amazing features for website building and customization.
They both offer free trials on their paid plans.
They both offer email marketing, social media marketing, and e-commerce.
Both software provide ADIs (Artificial Design Intelligence) that automatically build custom-made websites for you.
Wix and GoDaddy alternatives
- Zyro: Zyro offers full e-commerce functionality, free hosting, email integration, an intuitive user interface, and many other features at an affordable price.
- Squarespace: Squarespace lets you build professional websites, online stores, or portfolios with its wide range of customizable templates, features, and SEO tools.
- Shopify: Shopify is an all-in-one e-commerce solution that lets you build your websites and online stores and manage your products, payments, transactions, and shipping.
- WordPress: You can create a business site, blog, online store, and portfolio for free on WordPress. It is optimized for growth and is user-friendly.
Wix vs. GoDaddy: Final verdict
Both Wix and GoDaddy are excellent website builders that anyone can easily use. Although they share some similarities, each has unique features and offerings that make it better for specific use cases. While Wix offers more features and app extras, GoDaddy provides faster speed. Which one you should pick depends on your preferences, needs, and budget. It is also advisable that you test-run both software by utilizing GoDaddy’s free trial and Wix’s free plan to have a first-hand feel of what each software looks like and has to offer.
FAQ
Can I use Wix for free?
Yes, you can. Wix offers a free plan, but you need to upgrade to a paid plan for professional features such as domain name and e-commerce.
Is GoDaddy website builder free?
No, it isn’t. Although GoDaddy offers a 30-day free trial, you will be required to upgrade to a paid plan upon the expiration of the 30 days.
Can I connect the GoDaddy domain to Wix website?
Yes, you can. Wix lets you transfer and connect your GoDaddy domain name to your Wix premium plan.
Does Wix make apps?
Yes, it does. “Branded App by Wix” is an app-building offering by Wix that lets you build native apps for your business that can be published on Apple and Google app stores.
Can Wix host my domain?
Yes, it can. When you open a Wix account, you get a free Wix domain; however, you can replace this Wix URL with your own domain. To do this, you’d need to upgrade to a premium plan. Note that if you purchased your domain from Google Domain and selected Wix as your site builder, then your domain is automatically connected to Wix.