Wix vs WordPress: Which One Should Run Your Business Site.

This is for a business owner comparing Wix and WordPress before building or rebuilding a site — usually because a contractor, a friend, or a forum thread told you to pick one without explaining why. Wix and WordPress solve the same problem, getting a site live, in close to opposite ways: Wix is a closed builder you rent, WordPress is open software you assemble. That difference explains almost everything else in this comparison.

The short answer

Wix is the easier start. You sign up, drag sections into place, and publish, all inside one company's editor and hosting. WordPress is really two products sharing one name: WordPress.com, a hosted version with its own paid tiers, and WordPress.org, the free software you install yourself on hosting of your choosing. Neither option is flatly cheaper — they are cheaper in different places, and the difference shows up mostly in what you own when you're done.

Side by side

Verified against each vendor's own pricing page, read 31 August 2026.

Who actually builds and maintains it

With Wix, you're the builder, working entirely inside their editor, on their hosting, under their terms of service. There's nothing to install and nothing to patch — but there's also nothing you can touch outside what the editor exposes. That's a fair trade for a five-page site with no unusual requirements.

With WordPress, "who builds it" splits by which WordPress you mean. WordPress.com hides most of the server work behind a paid plan, similar to Wix, but plugin access is gated by tier. WordPress.org hands you everything: the software, the database, the server. That's real flexibility, and it's also real responsibility — updates, backups, and security are on you or whoever you hire, not bundled into the price of the software.

What you own if you ever leave

This is the question most people don't ask until they're already unhappy with their current platform, which is the worst time to ask it.

Wix does not publish a way to export a built site's code from its plans page. Some content can typically be pulled out, but the design itself lives inside Wix's editor and has to be rebuilt from scratch anywhere else.

WordPress.com sits in the middle: a content export exists, but a custom design built inside their editor doesn't travel with it either.

WordPress.org is the clean case. The code and the database are yours from the day you install it. Moving hosts, or moving the whole site to a different framework, is a migration project rather than a rebuild from zero — because there's something real to migrate.

What happens when the platform pushes an update

On Wix, updates to the editor and to app integrations happen on Wix's schedule, and you adopt them whether or not you asked for them. That's convenient when it works and disruptive when a workflow you depend on changes underneath you.

On self-hosted WordPress, you control the update schedule, which is good and bad. Good: nothing changes without your say-so. Bad: nothing patches itself either, and a neglected WordPress install with old plugins is one of the more common ways small business sites get compromised. WordPress.com sits closer to Wix here — the platform layer is managed for you, but plugin availability still depends on your tier.

Which one should you pick

• Pick Wix if you want the fastest path to a working site, you're comfortable paying every month indefinitely, and you don't expect to need a specific plugin or to take the code with you.
• Pick WordPress.com if you want a managed hosting experience today but expect to want the wider plugin ecosystem later, and you're fine outgrowing the lower tiers as you grow.
• Pick WordPress.org (self-hosted) if full ownership of the code and the largest plugin selection matter more than convenience, and you're ready to pay for hosting and upkeep directly, either yourself or through a developer.

The third option: bring what you have and own the code

There's a newer option that doesn't fit neatly into "closed builder" or "open software you host yourself": describing the site you want in plain language to an AI agent that writes and hosts the actual code. Amelia's Agent is built by Houston IT Developers, the company writing this. It's free to start with no card required, building plans start at $10 a month billed annually ($12 billed monthly), and unlike Wix or a page-builder-only WordPress setup, you get a normal git repository from your first turn — the code is yours to take anywhere, the same way self-hosted WordPress code is yours, but without you assembling the hosting and the plugins by hand.

If you're already on Wix, its bring-your-site tool reads the public pages of your current site and rebuilds them page for page, with your own words and images, as real files you can then keep editing by chat. The same exists for WordPress. Worth saying plainly: there's no drag-and-drop canvas here. You describe what you want and read back what came out, which suits some people and not others. See the fuller case for switching off either platform on the Wix alternative and WordPress alternative pages.

Related reading: Wix vs Squarespace vs WordPress · Website redesign & migration · Web design services