Making websites is as fast as it has ever been. With the influx of web builders and artificial intelligence, spinning up a website no longer requires a team of developers and designers.
In short terms, Wix and Framer are web builders specializing in purely no code vision, allowing users to create websites with little or no prior coding skills.
In this article, we will dig deeper into two favored tools for this task, Framer and Wix, how they are similar, what makes them stand out, and which one is for you.
See all our comparisons here:
Framer
Framer is a team-focused UI design platform that enhances product development. It is suitable for making interactive designs and is mainly used by people who design how apps and websites look and feel (UI/UX designers).
Beyond mere UI design software, it fosters live teamwork among designers, copywriters, and developers in UI/UX design projects.
Renowned for its dynamic design tools, Framer facilitates crafting impressive websites and prototypes sans coding.
Constantly evolving, Framer regularly rolls out fresh features, detailed in its blog.
Originating in 2013, Framer has undergone several transformations to emerge as the robust tool it is now.
Try Framer
Framer has a free plan you can start testing today.
Key features
- Framer AI: Employs artificial intelligence to enable the generation of fully-fledged websites from simple prompts. Despite being a recent addition, it’s quickly becoming popular. Perfect for crafting landing pages, it does have some existing constraints.
- Publish right to the Internet: Framer’s complimentary plan permits users to publish projects directly online. However, the use of a personalized domain is a perk reserved for premium subscriptions.
- Collaboration: Framer’s teamwork functionality is a boon for group projects, offering live collaboration. This includes tracking edits in real-time, in-app communication, and oversight of team activities.
Read more: What is Framer: A comprehensive guide.
Wix
Wix is a code-free website builder, ideal for creating personal blogs to enterprise-grade business hubs.
It offers built-in features for eCommerce, marketing, scheduling, and branding and has been a leader in web design.
Wix provides various web design options, including AI, templates, and a Wix Editor for customization.
Key features
- Complete Website Builder: Wix offers a user-friendly interface with drag-and-drop functionality, making it easy for anyone to create and customize websites without needing coding skills.
- AI-Powered Design: Wix’s Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI) helps users quickly create websites by answering a few simple questions, further simplifying the website creation process.
- E-commerce: Wix provides robust tools for building online stores, including payment processing, inventory management, and marketing tools suitable for businesses of all sizes.
Framer vs Wix
Ease of Use
What is considered easy to use is subjective, but we will try to be as objective as possible.
When considering ease of use, we mean:
- How the platform uses technical jargon meant for more technical people.
- How intuitive the dashboards are.
- How easy it is to make changes.
Let’s start with Framer.
The dashboard inside Framers’ website editor is neatly placed, with the top bar holding shortcuts for inserts, layout, text, CMS, actions, the domain name, and publishing settings.
There isn’t much technical jargon only technical people understand. Publish means publishing to the web, CMS opens the content management system, and settings let you configure the site’s title, URL, page descriptions, and so forth.
From my perspective, I think the dashboards are intuitive, but on the right bar, where the properties of each element are, some fields might be a bit more “technical,” like padding, margins, and code overrides – to name a few.
You can read about these, but they’re pretty straightforward if you have some CSS knowledge beforehand.
Changes in Framer are easy to make. All changes are tracked inside Staging and Versions, which means you have version control enabled on all projects (version control means that all changes are tracked, and you can revert to older versions if necessary).
Now, over to Wix.
The Wix dashboard is a bit different than Framer. In the top bar, you can find the page you’re currently on, change between mobile and phone, the current URL, and undo and redo buttons. In the left bar, you can add elements, edit the CMS, add sections, etc.
Regarding technical jargon, Wix doesn’t have many of them. Almost everything is written for non-technical persons.
The dashboard is intuitive and may even be a bit more aimed at non-technical users than Framer.
Changes are, as with Framer, tracked. If you ever want to revert to an older version, you can do so by navigating to “Site History.”
In this category, Framer and Wix do a great job simplifying the dashboards for non-technical people.
But I must admit that Wix is a bit easier to understand without any technical background. Framer might have a bit steeper learning curve for non-technical users.
If you have some designer or developer background, I would say that they’re tied in this category.
Scalability
Scalability is all about tackling growth, either in increased traffic, handling more data, or adding functionality without sacrificing performance.
Now, web builders generally aren’t as good at handling scalability as custom solutions are.
On the one hand, Framer will be best at scaling and handling increased traffic but suffers a bit when handling big data. Not that it can’t handle big data, but it is harder to manage than small data.
The CMS, which is the place where all content is placed, is, as of now, too simple to manage a large quantity of posts and other content formats.
On the other hand, Wix is great at infrastructure, with over 99,98% uptime. It lets web owners scale indefinitely (by paying for it). Wix’s weakness in scaling is complexity when managing large websites, especially site structure with sub-menus and sub-pages.
We can call this category a tie between the two platforms, but be aware that the web owner’s vision must consider the scalability pros and cons for the website.
Both Framer and Wix are perfect starting points for small to medium websites. And at the start, there’s no need to worry about scalability.
Integrations
Integrations are all about connecting to the platform’s third-party extensions (or plugins).
Integrations can extend the platform to great lengths, and the website builders’ ability to attract external developers to develop extensions for the platform will have a headstart.
Framer can be integrated with Formspark, Hubspot, Intercom, Logo, Lottie, Mailchimp, Typeform, and YouTube. These services can be integrated with a Framer project by searching in the platform canvas (some of these services might need an account).
If you have React knowledge, you can also connect to any external APIs since Framer is built upon the React framework. This requires technical skills.
Wix has an app market, which is a marketplace for apps or plugins for your Wix website. It is quite big and houses almost everything a website can need.
With the marketplace, you can extend your Wix with features that might not be available to the Wix core features.
But it comes with a cost, and that is, of course, money. Oftentimes, a Wix app has a free tier, and then you have to buy for more features. And it can quickly become expensive.
In this category, Wix has a bigger marketplace for integrations. Wix is, therefore, the winner here. But be aware Wix apps will cost you!
Community
In the category of community, both Framer and WordPress have a big and active community.
Framer has a Framer Community, Framer Reddit subreddit, discord groups, an active X account, and so forth. The community is active and helpful.
Wix has Wix Groups, Wix Forum, and Wix Studio Community Forum subreddits.
Pricing
Framer has five different pricing plans:
- Free $0 per month per site
- Mini $5 per month per site
- Basic $15 per month per site
- Pro $30 per month per site
- Enterprise with the price on request
Want to know what different plans Framer includes? Read our in-depth guide on the Framer pricing plans here.
Wix also has five different pricing plans:
- Light $10 per month.
- Core $20 per month.
- Business $29 per month.
- Business Elite $149 per month.
- Enterprise with request prices.