Plans and Prices: Free With Premium Options
WordPress.com and Weebly both offer free tiers, letting you sample a limited version of the services with little risk. That way, you can determine whether to fully dive into either platform. However, the free tiers differ. Weebly's free plan displays ads on your site and limits storage to a paltry 500MB. On the upside, it comes with unlimited monthly data transfers. WordPress.com's no-cost plan is likewise ad-supported and features unlimited monthly data transfers, but ups the storage to a respectable 1GB. For the complete site-building experiences, though, you must pay—but not too much.
Starting at $10 per month, Weebly's Personal tier includes a custom domain name and the ability to sell digital goods, but retains the 500MB storage limit. For $12 per month, the Professional plan adds unlimited storage, enhanced analytics and security, and a free domain name. For $26 per month, the Performance tier adds extra e-commerce features, including support for customer reviews and PayPal digital payments. All tiers can access all themes.
Paid WordPress.com plans are cheaper than Weebly's at the lower end but pricier at the higher end. For $4 per month, the Personal plan offers 6GB of storage, several themes, the ability to use plug-ins, and e-commerce tools. Premium ups storage to 13GB per month, enhances analytics, adds premium themes, and unlocks video uploads. For $25 per month, the Business tier has 50GB of storage and GitHub integration. Finally, the Commerce tier includes professional e-commerce upgrades powered by WooCommerce. WordPress.com gets the nod here as it covers a wider spread of potential use cases.
Winner: WordPress.com
(Credit: WordPress.com/PCMag)Plug-Ins and Templates: Expanding Your Site's Look and Feel
When it comes time to build your site, you'll run into Weebly and WordPress.com's biggest issues, and the reasons they aren’t rated higher: their theme and plug-in support.
Weebly's templates look great, but there are only about 50, and you can't preview them on a mobile device before choosing a design. It's also more difficult than it should be to undo actions or move elements across the page. However, you can tap into a robust app store to add social media, e-commerce, and other functionality.
With WordPress.com, you can only use first-party plug-ins, as the many excellent third-party WordPress plug-ins are exclusive to WordPress.org. Themes are also gated by payment tiers. Making the most of these attractive themes can be frustrating, given the lack of a true WYSIWYG editor for easily arranging elements, a flaw only fixed through—you guessed it—select plug-ins.
On the plus side, you can swap themes whenever you want with WordPress.com or Weebly, an uncommon bonus for website builders.
Winner: Tie
(Credit: Weebly/PCMag)Blogging and Image Editing: A Series of Trade-Offs
WordPress.com shines as a blogging tool, arguably the service's raison d'être, and why to forgive the platform's other shortcomings. After all, WordPress.com's intuitive block editor makes more sense for a blog than for a full site. Blogging is all about posting quickly and easily, not designing bespoke layouts.
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In comparison, Weebly’s blogging tool has no blog template. It's simply a way to make posts using the existing site builder, which makes blogging slightly more awkward than it should be compared with WordPress.com.
Both Weebly and WordPress.com have basic image functionality, limited to simple edits like cropping and adjusting contrast, so neither replaces a dedicated image editing tool. Weebly has a few more tools, though, namely image filters and text effects.
Winner: Tie
AI Tools: Which Service Makes Creating Content Easier?
Weebly lacks AI tools to simplify and speed up site creation, so it's the platform to avoid if you're looking for that type of assistance. Considering that I recommend avoiding AI site-building tools, that’s not necessarily a deal-breaker. After all, a website created by a human hand is less likely to be a cookie-cutter online destination.
However, if you’re curious about the functionality, WordPress.com offers an AI helper. For $5 per month, you can use the JetPack AI assistant to perform simple tasks like cleaning up your writing or suggesting content.
Winner: WordPress.com
Customer Service: Help at Your Fingertips
WordPress.com and Weebly both offer decent but imperfect customer service. Weebly offers 24/7 online chat, email support, and a huge knowledge base with hundreds of articles. But phone support is reserved for paid users.
That still edges out WordPress.com, though. That service offers 24/5 email and chat support—but only to paid subscribers. Free users have to use the knowledge base, which is comparable to Weebly's in its usefulness. However, there's no phone support at all.
Winner: Weebly