The best AI website builders
Building a website is no longer a particularly hard
task—but it can be an annoying one. If you look at most sites, there's a fair
amount of text, images, and general organization to it all. Wouldn't it be
great if you could just create a website from scratch in just a few minutes?
That's what AI website builders promise to do.
The idea is that by using artificial intelligence, they
can streamline everything from designing a site and organizing your content
into the appropriate pages to actually getting it online. It's a bold claim,
but there are a few apps that pull it off (with varying degrees of intelligence
and success).
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I've been building websites for more than 15 years and
have used hard-coded HTML, WordPress, every site builder you can name, and
even, on one regrettable occasion, Drupal. In that time, getting a site live
has become a lot simpler and easier. It used to take an entire weekend to get a
site up and running, but now, with the best theme-based site-building tools,
you can get something great online in an afternoon.
So I was pretty curious to see how the AI websitegenerators would stack up. After lots of testing and tinkering, here are my
picks for the best AI website builders.
Best AI website builder for most people
Wix (Web)
Wix pros:
·
Effective, easy-to-use AI site designer
·
Backed up by Wix's mature site builder ecosystem
Wix cons:
·
Not the most futuristic-feeling AI around
Wix
is one of the best website-building tools across the board.
Wix's AI site builder manages to perfectly balance
usability and functionality. You start by selecting what kind of site you want
to create and what features you want it to have, add a bit of info about
yourself, and then select one of six moods. From that, Wix will suggest three
homepage designs, as well as pages to add to your site. Make your selections,
and you'll have a rough site ready to go. You still have to add your content,
but I was able to create a quick photography portfolio in less than ten
minutes.
Now, Wix isn't the most AI-powered tool on this list, but I feel it's still the right option for most people. Wix gives you the choice to use its AI site builder or select from a list of themes, and the AI site builder is the faster option. The fact that you then have a top-notch website builder to tweak the content is a good thing, not a downside. You get the speed of an AI site builder plus Wix's mature feature set.
Best free AI website builder with affordable upgrades
Jimdo (Web)
Jimdo pros:
·
A real site builder with all the features you
could need
·
Great free plan and affordable paid plans
Jimdo cons:
·
AI is limited to initial site creation
Jimdo,
like Wix, is a long-running site builder—and it was also one of the first AI
website builders. It launched its AI editor, called Jimdo Dolphin, in 2017,
though it seems to have moved away from that branding.
When you build a site, you can select from a theme or have
Jimdo build one for you—that's the AI-powered option. After you describe the
purpose of your site (and, if you want, link it to your Google Business listing
to get contact information or your Facebook and Instagram accounts to pull
images), Jimdo will suggest a style, color palette, and what pages you need.
Once you've given everything the ok, it will take a few moments to create two
starting points. Select the one you want, and you'll have a draft site ready to
go.
Like with Wix, you then use the site editor to upload
content, configure things like booking modules, and generally tweak your site.
It feels less AI-y than Wix, to be honest, but it does work really well. And
it's also more affordable, with paid plans starting at $9/month.
All in all, Jimdo is another great AI website creator if
you're building a personal or business site. It has an AI-powered site builder
with enough power to get you started quickly, plus all the features you need to
run a real website. Yes, most of the customizing will happen through the
regular site editor, but that's the tradeoff if you want to quickly build a
modern website.
Jimdo pricing: Free with Jimdo branding
and domain; from $9/month for the Start plan that includes a custom
domain.
Best AI website builder for landing pages
Unbounce
(Web)
Unbounce pros:
·
The AI can design effective landing pages in a
few moments
·
Unbounce is one of the top landing page
builders, so it has all the marketing features you could want
Unbounce cons:
·
Wildly expensive if you want to build a regular
website
Landing pages are actually a great candidate for AI
automation. They're normally single-page sites built around one main
call-to-action, so they don't have all the complexity of a full website. Some
businesses will also produce lots of landing pages, either to A/B test them to
find the most effective copy, or to capture different segments of their market.
All in all, they're the kind of thing an effective AI site builder would be
super useful for. And that's exactly what Unbounce is.
Unbounce has been on on our blog list of the best
landing page builders for a few years, and it's slowly been adding
more and more AI-powered features. Its AI Smart Builder (which is technically
still in beta) recommends a template based on the purpose and requirements of
your landing page, as well as your industry and chosen color scheme. The app
will also generate draft copy for your site from a description of your business
(the developers also make Smart Copy, an AI-powered
copywriting app).
Like with most of the apps on this list, the AI still
leaves plenty of work for you to do. While Unbounce will slot in a few bits of
AI copy, it leaves adding the headers, images, links, and the rest up to you.
Thankfully, the site builder is easy to use.
While the AI Smart Builder works well, it's really a bonus if you already want to use a marketing-focused landing page app like Unbounce. At $99/month for up to 500 conversions (like newsletter signups) and 20,000 visitors, it's wildly expensive for building regular websites—and it's not like the AI is significantly more powerful than Wix or Jimdo.
Best AI website builder for complex WordPress sites
CodeWP (Web)
CodeWP pros:
·
Enables technical-minded people to create
complex WordPress code
·
Allows you to build by far the most custom sites
of any tool on this list
CodeWP cons:
·
It's still an advanced tool; unless you
understand how WordPress works, you won't be able to get much use out of it
CodeWP
is one of the most interesting and powerful tools on this list. Instead of
directly building a site for you, it enables someone with a moderate amount of
technical experience to dive deep into WordPress's inner workings on their own
site. (All that also comes with a healthy dose of caveats.)
CodeWP is a GPT-powered code generator trained on hundreds
of thousands of lines of WordPress-specific code, including WooCommerce,
Elementor, and Metabox. This means you can enter a prompt like:
"Create a function that displays a slider with the
header images of the five most recent posts. Include the headline as a h2 and
the summary as a p. Advance the slider every 7 seconds."
And it will return a block of code you can add to your
WordPress site.
Now, as you can imagine, knowing where to add and
implement the code with WordPress requires a certain level of understanding of
how WordPress works. This isn't a tool for someone who's totally new to
building sites; instead, it's for someone who has already built a few websites
and would love to be able to customize them even further—but doesn't have the
coding knowledge.
The major issue with any of these AI code generators is
that the code they create may be total nonsense (or even pose a security
risk). It often isn't—but it can be. To get the most out of them,
you need to be prepared to dive in and troubleshoot things, and have enough
experience to figure out where things are going wrong. They can be a great shortcut
for technical-minded people who understand the general ideas of computer logic
(e.g., loops and variables) but don't have the familiarity with a specific
language to code effectively.
For what it's worth, I didn't have any issues with CodeWP
in my testing, but I have had plenty of issues with code generators before.
I'll definitely be using this one to add some custom features to Bing's Best Things,
a website I run.
CodeWP pricing: Free for 10 WordPress PHP
generations per month; from $12/month for unlimited generations and 12 code
modes, including WooCommerce and WordPress SQL.
Best example of where AI website generators are going
Framer (Web)
Framer pros:
·
It's a super impressive and fun AI
·
The rest of the app is great, so you can build a
real site
Framer cons:
·
Still needs a lot of work to go from AI draft to
great site
By this point, you've probably noticed a conspicuous lack
of super-fast AI website builders on this list. That's because almost all the
tools I tested that claimed to be able to turn a written prompt into a website
in just a few moments turned out to be awful. The biggest exception was Framer.
Now, that's not to say that Framer AI is perfect. It's just that when compared to some of the other apps, Framer actually works. You start with a prompt (the more descriptive, the better), and it will create a rough website, including generating some AI-generated draft copy.
As you can see, it's certainly fun, and there's arguably a
gallery. But while there's a button that says "Request A Session" and
another that says "See Pricing," they don't actually work right off
the bat. I'd need to add the links myself using Framer's site builder, where I
can also customize everything else. It's a great site builder, though a bit
more technical than what Wix or Jimdo offer by default.
Still, what Framer AI does is a touch more than an
impressive party trick. Of all the apps I tested, it was the only one that
could take a prompt and really run with it—for good or bad. I don't think it's
the best way to build a website, and nor is it even the best way to build a
website with Framer (it has countless great themes to work from). But what
Framer AI teases is how an AI website builder might work in the future, while
also offering an AI tool you can use to sort-of start building a website now.
Best of all, you can check it out for free.
Framer pricing: Free with Framer branding
for hobby projects; from $10/month/site for the Mini plan, with two pages and
1,000 visitors per month.
. So, expect this list of the best AI website builders to
change a lot as we continue to update it.
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