Website builders differ less in the editor than in six points printed small: the price after the promotional term, domain and mailbox, template lock-in, multilingual support, legal pages and load time. Price matters most, because with several providers the advertised figure is not the one you pay for long. IONOS advertises its Plus plan at 1 euro a month for twelve months and lists 18 euros next to it as the regular price; STRATO advertises Smartwebsite Plus at 1 euro for twelve months with 12 euros afterwards. Over two years that is 228 and 156 euros respectively, not the number printed large. How long "included" lasts differs just as much: STRATO lists a permanently included domain, Wix a free domain for one year, Jimdo a free web address for the first contract term. IONOS and STRATO include a mailbox; Jimdo's pricing page lists email forwarding. All figures come from the providers' own product and pricing pages, retrieved on 19 September 2026.
I do not run my own pages in a builder. An AI employee builds them as source code I own. For many businesses a builder is still the more sensible choice, and I say below which ones. Two neighbouring topics stay short here because they are covered elsewhere: the full cost calculation in What Does a Website or Landing Page Cost? and the question of who hands over the source code in AI Website Generators Compared. How a small business gets started is in AI for Small Businesses.
The advertised price and the price afterwards
The IONOS and STRATO pricing pages show both: the large number for the promotional term and, next to it, the number that applies afterwards. Work with the second one. The 24-month totals are my own multiplication of the two published prices, not a figure from the providers.
Jimdo, Wix and Squarespace publish no differing follow-on price; over 24 months that comes to 480 euros for Jimdo Grow, 399.84 euros for Wix Light and 288 euros for Squarespace Basic. Three points decide whether your comparison holds:
- The follow-on price. Look for the word "afterwards" on the pricing page. With IONOS Plus, 17 euros a month separate the advertised figure from the regular one.
- How you pay. Wix quotes its monthly prices for annual subscriptions paid in full at purchase, and Squarespace advertises savings of up to 36 percent against monthly payment. The monthly price is then a unit of calculation, not a debit.
- What lasts only a year. Wix lists several items as "free for 1 year", among them the domain and the legally vetted policy pages.
One note on comparisons with a year in the title: the criteria barely move, prices and promotions move constantly. A 2025 comparison is useful for the criteria, not for the amounts, and the ones here will age the same way.
Domain and mailbox
The difference between a mailbox and a forward is what trips people up day to day. A mailbox is something you open and search. A forward pushes mail to an address you hold somewhere else. You can still reply from your own domain address, but only with an additional alias or SMTP access that you book on top. Anyone doing business by email tends to end up with a second product here.
Templates, and how far you can stray from them
Choice is not the problem: IONOS advertises thousands of templates, Wix over 900 customisable ones, STRATO a set of design templates that its product page says can be adjusted later. The interesting part is what happens when you change your mind. Wix writes in its own help centre that it is not yet possible to swap the template of a site you have already built. The route it describes is a different one: start a new site on the new template, copy elements, pages and media over from the old one, then move the plan and the domain across.
The second limit is scope. STRATO caps subpages at 5, 100 or 500 depending on plan; Jimdo at 5 on Free, 10 on Start, 50 on Grow, unlimited only on Unlimited. For special requests Jimdo runs a second builder, Creator, with a coding function. The rule behind all this is documented in AI Website Generators Compared: an editor can do what the provider planned for.
Multilingual sites
Here plans differ within the same provider. STRATO's own feature table lists the multilingual function as not available on Basic and available on Plus and Pro. Wix handles it through an app, Wix Multilingual, free to install, with 3,000 free credits after installation for machine translation, automatic browser-language detection and several possible URL structures. On the IONOS and Jimdo product pages I retrieved, multilingual support is not listed as part of a plan.
If two languages are on the horizon, settle three things first: whether each language gets its own address, who translates, and what happens when you later change one sentence on the German page. The third point decides how much work follows.
Legal pages
Commercial sites in Germany need the mandatory provider details under § 5 DDG, easily recognisable, directly accessible and permanently available; that is only part of the duties a site can face. This is not legal advice, just a note on who has this item in the price. Jimdo sells it as its own plan: Grow Legal at 29 euros a month includes policy texts that Jimdo describes as legally vetted and continuously updated, while the otherwise identical Grow plan at 20 euros does not. Wix lists legally vetted policy pages as "free for 1 year". IONOS sells its legal protection as a separate product together with the IT-Recht Kanzlei München law firm, at 8 euros a month for a website and 12 euros for a shop, with liability cover according to the provider. STRATO lists it as optional across all three plans. "Legally vetted" and "liability cover" are provider claims, not a general guarantee: what a package covers in your case is in its service description, including exclusions and your own duties. Put the item into the monthly price all the same, otherwise you are comparing a plan with legal pages against one without.
Load time: what you can measure
The yardstick comes from Google, not from the builder: a Largest Contentful Paint of 2.5 seconds, an Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds and a Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 count as good, measured at the 75th percentile of page views and split by mobile and desktop. What matters is field data from real visitors: PageSpeed Insights draws it from the Chrome User Experience Report, over a 28-day window according to Wix.
What moves load time inside a builder is described openly in Wix's own help pages. Videos and third-party apps load more slowly than static elements such as text and buttons. Content from third-party apps and iFrames is served from outside servers, which is why Wix states it cannot optimise them. No more than three or four fonts are recommended, because system fonts load faster according to Wix. So images, videos, fonts and widgets are yours to control; the platform's own code is not. One caveat on checking: putting someone else's published page into PageSpeed Insights is a sample, not a platform test, because its score depends on that site's own images, scripts and visitors. It only becomes reliable with a test page you build in the builder yourself and, later, with the field data of your own address. Small sites often have too few visitors for field data, and then PageSpeed Insights shows lab values only.
Leaving
Short, because it is documented in full elsewhere: Wix writes in its help centre that your site must run on Wix servers, and Squarespace documents that only part of your content exports as XML. You usually take the domain with you, the site not. One builder-specific point belongs in your exit planning: if the domain was only included for the first year, cancelling also raises the question of where it moves next. Details in AI Website Generators Compared.
Website builder or WordPress
Two different things. A builder is a rental package: software, hosting, certificate, updates and support on one invoice. WordPress is free software under the GPLv2 that you install and run yourself; the project names your own hosting and your own domain as prerequisites and recommends PHP 8.3 or newer with MySQL 8.0 or MariaDB 10.11 as a minimum. By the project's own account, WordPress runs on over 43 percent of all websites. In between sit managed WordPress offers, where the host takes on updates and backups.
So the decision hangs on how much operating work stays with you, not on price. In a builder the provider handles hosting, platform and technical updates, and you can do what the provider planned for. With WordPress you can do more, and that same technical part sits with you or your host. What stays with you either way: content, imprint and privacy policy, accessibility, embedded services, your account, and the question of how you get hold of a backup.
Who a builder is right for
A builder is the sensible decision if you are starting from nothing, need a manageable site, have nobody for the technical side and want predictable costs. With the two German providers here that buys you a complete package for 7 to 33 euros a month with German-language support, and at STRATO with two data centres in Germany.
The limit sits with a grown website carrying content from several years. None of the product pages compared here documents a way to take that stock over automatically. You move it by hand, and in that work things get lost that nobody misses until a customer asks.
What an AI employee does differently here
In my business this job belongs to Ralf, an AI employee with exactly one task. He gets the address of an outdated website and returns a modern version in one pass that works on a phone: all the content of the old site carried over, better structured, online as a demo if you want. Over 20 customer websites have come out of it, and he rolls out kevinwelter.com himself.
Two points matter for this comparison. First, he starts from your existing site rather than a template, and he invents nothing on top: no services, no prices, no reviews. What is missing is marked as a placeholder and listed in the report. That this is not a formality is shown by three cases from live work: a price list buried in an autoplay slider, a file called logo.png that contained a sports-club crest, and anchor-based navigation that would have made subpages unreachable in the rebuild. That is why every go-live is preceded by a build, screenshots and a click test, and nothing goes live without approval. Second, the result is source code of your own, built with Node.js and Next.js, and it runs wherever you want. How he works and where I hold him back is on Build a Website With AI: How Ralf Works.
What that does not replace: support on the phone for someone starting from nothing. That is what a builder is for, and it is good at it.
Frequently asked questions
Which website builder is the best?
There is no best one, only the one that fits your situation. For a small site with German-language support, IONOS and STRATO are inexpensive, STRATO includes a domain permanently, and Jimdo sells legal pages as a separate plan. Decide along the six criteria above rather than along the entry price.
What does a website builder really cost?
Work with the follow-on price over two years, not the promotional price. IONOS Plus costs 18 euros a month after the promotion, so 228 euros over 24 months; STRATO Plus 12 euros, so 156 euros. Add the items included only in the first year, plus legal pages: 8 euros a month at IONOS, a 9-euro plan difference at Jimdo. As of September 2026.
Website builder or WordPress?
A builder if nobody on your side maintains technology and costs should be predictable. WordPress if you need freedoms an editor does not offer and have someone to handle updates, backups and security. The software itself is free; hosting, domain and maintenance are your responsibility.
Is the domain included, and can I change the template later?
The domain is included at all five providers compared here, but for different lengths of time; see the table above. Changing the template is not possible within the same site at Wix. Its help centre writes that the template of an existing site cannot be swapped; the route runs through a new site into which you copy elements, pages and media and onto which you move plan and domain. So it is a small project, not a setting.
How to carry on
Take the pricing page of the provider you like best and write down four things: the promotional price, the price afterwards, the length of the promotion, and everything marked "for 1 year" or "for the first contract term". Multiply that out to 24 months. Then build a page of your own on the free plan or during the trial, publish it, and put it into PageSpeed Insights, the only load-time test that matches your content. That quarter of an hour tells you more about your future provider than any comparison table, mine included. If it turns out you want to modernise your existing site rather than build a new one, Modernizing a Website With AI takes it further, and for a single target page Create a Landing Page: Guide and Tools. If you would rather have an AI employee that takes over your existing content instead of inventing new content: Ralf and the other finished roles are ready to load in my community, Claude Practitioners.
