Plans and Prices
Wix and WordPress.com's free tiers are essentially ongoing trials. They let you quickly build a website if you accept common limitations of free website builders. For example, free tiers don’t give you all the tools paid plans offer (more on that in a bit). In addition, you'll find ads plastered across your site. You might also run into trouble moving your site to another platform. Still, you can build a capable website with Wix or WordPress.com's no-cost plans.
You can make Wix and WordPress.com better if you decide to pay for the services. Wix has four hosting plans. The entry-level Light tier ($17 per month) gives you 2GB of storage space, a free domain for a year, a lightweight marketing suite, and the ability to rope in two collaborators. At the high end, Wix’s Business Elite plan ($159 per month) adds advanced marketing and e-commerce tools, analytics, payments, unlimited storage, 15 collaborators, and an advanced developer platform.
WordPress.com has five tiers, including the entry-level Personal plan ($4 per month). With it, you can build a basic, ad-free site using dozens of themes (it also features an e-commerce platform for selling items). Personal includes 6GB of storage. For elite website builder features, WordPress.com's top-tier Enterprise offers multifaceted security, staging environments, multisite management, DDOS protection, and generative AI tools for $25,000 per year. You must contact the company to talk about storage totals.
The free tiers mean you have few excuses to not just try both services. However, WordPress.com casts a wider net with its lower cost of entry and high-end platform that powers Meta, SiriusXM, and other large companies.
Winner: WordPress.com
Plug-Ins and Templates
Wix and WordPress.com offer numerous options for customizing your site's appearance and functionality via robust collections of plug-ins and templates.
Wix has approximately 1,000 templates in various styles to make your site attractive, modern, and responsive. You can’t swap themes once you’ve applied one to your site, so you must build a new site from scratch for a fresh look. Wix also has an app market where you can browse hundreds of third-party tools to give your site new features, such as business-friendly inventory management or QR code generation.
WordPress.com makes building a website a simple task, but does so by removing some freedom. For instance, your website can only accept first-party plug-ins. You must self-host a WordPress site to leverage its excellent collection of third-party plug-ins (these recommended WordPress hosting services are terrific starting points). That may result in site-development costs. In addition, free users are locked to first-party WordPress themes; you must subscribe to the highest tiers to access third-party offerings. On the upside, WordPress.com has many attractive themes you can easily swap in and out, unlike Wix.
Winner: Wix
Blogging and Image Editing
Wix and WordPress.com are both excellent blogging tools. WordPress began as a blogging platform and continues to support its users with an intuitive block editor. Wix has its own simplified blogging interface with tools for handling posts, comments, and subscriptions.
However, Wix's site editor is superior to WordPress.com's, as its easier to tailor your site for phones and tablets. Likewise, Wix has powerful image editing tools comparable to dedicated photo editing software. They easily outperform WordPress.com’s limited cropping and rotating abilities. Wix even has AI tools that let you generate an entire site via prompts.
Winner: Wix
Security and SEO
Wix and WordPress.com have all the standard measures to keep your site as secure as possible. They rely on firewalls, secure socket layer (SSL) certificates, HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS), two-factor authentication (2FA), and other security features so you needn't worry much about site safety.
You can also depend on either service to optimize your site for search engines. WordPress.com provides plenty of useful SEO-friendly features and tips. Wix’s basic SEO and analytics tools improve once you explore the app marketplace.
Winner: Tie
Customer Service
Wix has top-notch customer service, even for free users. You can ask a chatbot for an answer, submit a ticket, or quickly connect with 24/7 service reps via phone. WordPress.com has 24/5 email and chat support, but only for paid users. Free users must consult the knowledge base. The service lacks phone support, which is a big blow when you need to get someone on the horn to discuss a problem.
Winner: Wix