Wix earns the top spot not because it dominates any single category, but because it's the most complete platform across all of them. It's the rare builder that doesn't force you to choose between design freedom and ease of use.

The editor operates on a genuinely free-form canvas — drag anything anywhere, no grid constraints. Paired with 800+ designer templates and an AI generator (ADI) that assembles a full site from a short onboarding flow, it's the most accessible entry point for non-developers who still want real creative control. The App Market exceeds 500 integrations, and infrastructure improvements over the past year have meaningfully closed the performance gap with competitors.

If Wix gives you freedom, Squarespace gives you taste. Its template library is smaller but more consistently beautiful — every design ships with impeccable typography, balanced whitespace, and a visual coherence that's hard to accidentally ruin.

The section-based editor is more constrained than Wix's canvas, but that constraint is part of its value. It's much harder to make something that looks bad. For photographers, designers, and creatives whose work is inherently visual, Squarespace's image handling, gallery layouts, and font pairing system are outstanding.

Webflow is a visual builder for people who understand how websites actually work. Its interface maps directly to HTML structure and CSS properties, producing clean, semantic code — not the bloated markup that most visual tools generate.

For professional designers who want visual tooling without sacrificing code quality, Webflow is unmatched. Its CMS is powerful, its animation system handles scroll-triggered interactions without JavaScript, and hosting performance is consistently excellent. The learning curve is steep — budget at least a week to feel fluent — but for agency work and complex content sites, the investment pays off substantially.

If selling products is your primary objective, nothing does it better. Shopify is purpose-built for eCommerce in a way general builders simply can't replicate — its inventory management, payment processing, shipping integrations, and analytics are in a different league.

The website building tools are competent but not the differentiator. Templates are clean and conversion-focused, and the updated editor is a genuine improvement. But if you're not selling, Shopify is overkill. For smaller stores where brand presence matters as much as commerce, Wix Commerce or Squarespace Commerce are more cost-effective.

WordPress.com brings the world's most powerful publishing platform to a fully managed, hosted experience. For serious bloggers and content-driven sites, its editorial tools, SEO depth, and writing experience remain unmatched.

The block-based editor is now genuinely pleasant to use, and site-building tools have improved considerably. It's not as visually flexible as Wix or Squarespace, but if written content is your primary output — with categories, series, author profiles, and reader engagement — you'll quickly outgrow every other builder on this list.