Starting a business from scratch is a real struggle, especially if you are on a very tight budget. Figuring out how to kick-start its online presence is another daunting task. Since speedy internet connectivity and smartphones have simplified the search of local businesses for consumers, online presence has become ever more vital for every business if they want any success with their salience.

It’s easier to have a social media page, but for a legit and professional impression of your business, it’s highly essential for it to have its own website. Website development, however, can be a real pain: hiring a developer for a website and then following up with a developer when something goes wrong. The second option is to outsource it to an agency, but these agencies ask for an exorbitant fee for a mobile-optimized site.

So we have a list of some great and easy website builders that can let you manage your own website at a reasonable cost, so you can do away with the inconvenience of developers and agencies.

Wix

Wix is the hegemon in the website building software world with 110 million websites built on this platform to date. It has the most intuitive, smooth and powerful interface. Wix lets users create their website within minutes with its ginormous collection of templates, tools, and various other capabilities. Just select a template and begin dragging and dropping objects in the intuitive site builder.

On one hand, Wix offers an AI-powered automatic website builder known as Wix ADI, on the other hand, it offers Wix Corvid that lets you develop web applications with hassle-free coding and serverless computing.

Wix paid plans to begin from $5/month, which lets you have a favicon and site of your own business. A $25/month plan lets you remove Wix ads, provides a free domain for a year, unlimited bandwidth, 20GB storage, a shopping cart and VIP support along with other facilities.

Weebly

Weebly is a powerful and intelligent website building tool, getting toe-to-toe with Wix. Though it has created around 50 million websites, not as many as Wix, it provides a set of tools to let you build a full-fledged website without knowing any coding spells. Weebly has a range of editable website designs you could choose from to suit your business, and you can even change your theme without starting from scratch.

Weebly provides you a subdomain but with Weebly's name attached to it in the free version. In the paid plan, unlike Wix, you don’t have a connected domain so if you ever decide to move away from Weebly, it won’t be a hassle.

You can build your site on Weebly for free with a 500MB storage, but with Weebly ads. You can kick-start your website with a professional outlook with various monthly plans, starting from $8 to $38 per month. Also, Weebly has 3% transaction fees for every purchase made at your store. To bypass this, you will need to upgrade to a higher business plan. The highest price-point gets you the option of email marketing and real-time shipping rates calculation too.

Duda

Though a smaller player as compared to its rivals, nonetheless, Duda is a formidable one with uncomplicated user site building features. Duda’s sites, unlike most website builders, are perfectly mobile-friendly since its founders developed Duda while keeping mobile browsing in mind.

Like all site-building apps, Duda provides a free platform for everyone. What makes it different is Duda gives free rein on the number of sites and pages one user can create, along with bandwidth for those sites. Also, it lets the site sell up to 10 products from its e-commerce store for free.

Duda’s pricing plans consist of a basic one, which is for $14/month and includes AWS hosting along with email support. The Team plan, on the other hand, charges $22/month and the Agency plan charges $74/month, which comes with additional features.

Constant Contact

Constant Contact is the first Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered website builder, built specifically for small businesses not well-versed in tech. The builder lets you answer a few questions and develops a customized website for you by itself, filled with images and suggestions for the content you could include. The builder has Unsplash integrated into it, so you can get images for your website directly from there.

Constant contact sites have great portability as your site will adjust to any device. A bonus point the site has its own analytics so you don’t have to integrate a third-party tool to measure your site’s traffic and performance.

You can create your site for free here, but for advanced features and benefits, they have several pricing plans, starting with £6. All the pricing plans, including the free one, comes with unlimited storage.

Gator  

Gator was created by HostGator, an established hosting service provider. That makes Gator a fully hosted platform, so you don’t need to fret over any software, backups or updates and it doesn’t even require a HostGator account since Gator has its own login. The builder comes with 200+ templates for you to choose from and has a user-friendly interface with a drag-and-drop feature. It also has its own built-in stock library. Gator doesn’t have any email marketing service and you cannot get a developer to radically modify your website or add additional features of your own.  

Although Gator doesn’t have any free plan or even a trial period, this fabulous website builder starts its pricing plan from $3.84/month and provides many more perks as compared to other site builders. All plans come with a custom domain name and SSL certificate for your website and don’t show any ads or sell your data. Its e-commerce plan lets you set up an online store easily with digital download selling. More insights and details can be check on this Gator Website Builder Review.  

Other Website Builders

Though WordPress is a powerful website builder and ideal for any business, for a beginner it is a hassle to learn the new interface and keep up with updates and backups. Hence our list entailed a number of reasonable and easy-to-use alternatives you can have. As for building an online store, Shopify and BiCommerce are your options too at a pricing plan of $29/month.

How to Choose?

The best way to choose a site builder is to identify your business needs, your goals and what features your ideal site would include, and then see which site builders fulfill it best and will keep on fulfilling as your business evolves.

If you don’t want your website builder to prevent you from moving to another hosting service, go for Duda or Weebly.

Best WordPress alternatives available are Constant Contact and Gator, which are equally powerful.

As for Wix, it has an unlimited free trial that runs with Wix ads. You get free SSL, but you will need to enable it by yourself.