Which Website Builder Should You Use? What I’ve Learned Working Across All of Them

Choosing the right website builder for your service business is one of the most searched questions in online business, not to mention one of the most anxiety-inducing. This guide covers what I’ve learned working across WordPress, Showit, Squarespace, Systeme, and Wix with real clients, including where each platform shines and where it doesn’t.

This post may contain affiliate links, which means I may receive a commission, at no extra cost to you, if you make a purchase through a link. Please see my full affiliate disclosure for further information.

The Platform Question (And Why It’s Often the Wrong First Question)

“Which website builder should you use?” It’s one of the most common questions small businesses ask when starting or updating a site. WordPress or Squarespace? Is Showit worth it? Is Systeme just for funnels?

I work across all of these platforms with real clients, and here’s what I’ve learned: the website builder conversation is most useful when it comes after you’ve answered a few other questions first:

• What is your website actually supposed to do?
• How technical are you willing to get?
• What kind of content will you create?
• Are you building primarily a service business, a product business, or some combination?

The platform is a vehicle, not a destination. A well-built Squarespace site will outperform a poorly planned WordPress site every time. That said, the right vehicle does matter, and some platforms genuinely are better fits for certain types of businesses than others.

This guide covers the platforms I work with and recommend, what they’re actually good for, where they fall short, and who each one tends to suit best. My goal isn’t to steer you toward one platform. It’s to help you make a decision you won’t need to undo six months from now.

Answer These Before You Choose a Platform

Before reading the platform breakdowns, work through these questions. Your answers will make the comparison much clearer.

• What is your primary website goal? Booking discovery calls, selling services, selling digital products, growing an email list, hosting a course, or some combination? Different goals weight the platforms differently.
• How comfortable are you with tech? Honestly. Not how comfortable you want to be—how comfortable you are right now. Some platforms reward a learning curve with more capability; others give you less to manage but also less control.
• Do you plan to blog? SEO-driven blog content is one of the highest-leverage things a service provider can do for long-term visibility. Some platforms handle this better than others.
• What’s your budget for the platform itself? Monthly fees vary significantly across platforms, and some have meaningful differences between tiers.
• Are you building primarily a website, or do you need funnels, email automation, and digital product delivery too? This one question alone can narrow the field considerably.

With those answers in mind, here’s how the main platforms stack up.

WordPress (Self-Hosted)

Maximum flexibility and ownership for those willing to manage it

Self-hosted WordPress (WordPress.org) is the platform I use for my own site and recommend for clients who want full ownership, long-term flexibility, and no ceiling on what their site can do. It powers a significant portion of the entire web for good reason.

WordPress itself is free. You’ll pay for hosting (the server where your site lives), a custom domain, and potentially premium themes or plugins depending on how you build. The cost of a well-maintained WordPress site varies significantly, from modest shared hosting to managed WordPress hosting that handles security, backups, and performance for you.

WordPress is a strong fit if:

• You want complete ownership of your site and its data
• You plan to blog consistently and want maximum SEO control
• Your business is complex—multiple services, digital products, memberships, or custom functionality
• You’re comfortable with occasional technical management or willing to hire support
• You want the ability to grow and customize without hitting a platform ceiling

Where WordPress requires more from you:

• You manage your own updates, security, and backups (unless you’re on managed hosting)
• The learning curve is steeper than any of the hosted platforms
• More plugin decisions, more moving parts, more things that can theoretically go wrong

A note on WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org

These are two different things. WordPress.com is a hosted service that limits your customization. WordPress.org is the self-hosted platform this section describes—the one that gives you full control. My blog post covers this in detail if you need it.

Showit

Full visual design freedom, with WordPress powering your blog

Showit is genuinely one of the most distinctive platforms available for service providers who care deeply about how their site looks and feels. It’s a drag-and-drop visual builder that gives you pixel-level design control—moving elements anywhere on the page, designing desktop and mobile layouts independently, and creating the kind of custom-looking site that usually requires a developer.

What makes Showit unusual is its blog setup: your site design lives in Showit, but the blog itself runs on WordPress. That means you get Showit’s design flexibility and WordPress’s powerful blogging and SEO capabilities in the same package. Security, updates, and hosting are handled for you.

Showit is a strong fit if:

• Visual design is a high priority for your brand and you want something that looks genuinely custom
• You want to blog for SEO without managing WordPress infrastructure yourself
• You’re a creative professional such as a designer, photographer, strategist, or coach and your site needs to reflect that
• You want the design freedom of a custom site without the development cost or technical overhead

Where Showit has trade-offs:

• It’s one of the pricier hosted platforms, particularly at higher tiers
• The design freedom that makes it powerful can also make it easy to spend a lot of time tweaking
• It’s less suited to complex digital product setups or membership sites without additional integrations

My affiliate link for Showit includes an extended free trial if you want to explore the platform

Squarespace

Clean, all-in-one simplicity for service providers who want polish without complexity

Squarespace is the platform I point to when someone wants a professional, well-designed website without learning curves, plugin decisions, or maintenance overhead. Everything is handled in one place—hosting, security, updates, and the website builder itself—and the templates are genuinely well-designed out of the box.

It’s not the most flexible platform and it doesn’t try to be. What Squarespace does, it does cleanly. For service providers building a relatively straightforward site (e.g., services, about, blog, contact), it’s one of the most efficient paths from idea to live, mobile-friendly site. It also handles basic ecommerce well if you sell a small number of products or services directly.

Squarespace is a strong fit if:

• You want a polished site without managing any technical infrastructure
• Your site is relatively straightforward in terms of pages and functionality
• You value design consistency and a clean aesthetic over total design freedom
• You want to get live quickly without a steep learning curve

Where Squarespace has trade-offs:

• Less design flexibility than Showit or a custom WordPress build
• Less extensible than WordPress for complex features like memberships, advanced ecommerce, custom functionality
• Template structure can feel constraining once you’ve outgrown it

I’m a Squarespace Circle Partner, which means I have access to extended trials and benefits for clients.

Systeme.io

Budget-friendly all-in-one for businesses built around funnels, courses, email, and digital products

Systeme is the platform that surprises people when they discover it. The free plan is quite generous—funnels, email automation, digital product delivery, online courses, and a website builder—and you won’t need to pay anything until it’s time to scale. Paid plans are significantly less expensive than the equivalent tools purchased separately.

This is not a traditional website builder in the way WordPress or Squarespace is. Systeme is built around the funnel and automation model: you create pages, connect them to email sequences, and sell products or courses directly through the platform. The website capability is real, but the DNA of the tool is marketing infrastructure.

I use Systeme for in my business and have built templates for the platform. If you’re running a business where funnels, email sequences, and digital product delivery are central—not just a future add-on—Systeme is worth a serious look before you commit to a more expensive stack.

Systeme is a strong fit if:

• You’re building around digital products, online courses, or a membership
• You want funnels, email automation, and digital delivery without paying for multiple separate tools
• Budget is a significant factor and Systeme’s free plan is genuinely useful, not just a teaser
• You’re comfortable with a platform that prioritizes marketing infrastructure over design sophistication

Where Systeme has trade-offs:

• The website and page design capabilities are functional but not as visually polished as Squarespace or Showit
• Less suited to service providers whose primary goal is a traditional professional website without a product or funnel focus
• The ecosystem is less mature than WordPress: fewer integrations, less community documentation

Wix

Quick to launch, but worth understanding the trade-offs

Wix is one of the fastest ways to get a website live, and its drag-and-drop builder is accessible to anyone. Sites are mobile-friendly by default, and the app market adds a decent range of functionality. I include it here because it’s quite popular and comes up in platform comparisons regularly.

That said, it’s not a platform I typically work with for client projects, and there are reasons for that. Wix’s SEO capabilities are more limited than WordPress or Squarespace. The platform owns your site infrastructure in a way that limits migration options later. And while Wix has expanded its features significantly, it’s still better suited to simple business sites than to anything complex or content-heavy.

If Wix is where you are right now, that’s fine. But if you’re planning for the medium or long term, I recommend choosing a platform you won’t need to rebuild on later.

Wix is reasonable if:

• You need something live very quickly with minimal learning curve
• Your site will remain simple
• You’re in an early testing phase and aren’t yet investing heavily in SEO or content

Where Wix has limitations:

• SEO control is more restricted than on WordPress or even Squarespace
• Once built on Wix, migrating to another platform requires rebuilding—there’s no clean export
• Less suitable for complex sites, heavy blogging, or long-term content strategies

What About Carrd and Canva Websites?

These come up often, especially for people just starting out, so they’re worth a quick note.

Carrd

Carrd is a simple, affordable tool for building one-page websites. It’s excellent for exactly that use case—a clean landing page, a link-in-bio page, a simple coming soon page. For a single focused purpose, it works well and the price is genuinely low.

The limitation is that you’re only building a single page. As soon as your business needs multiple service pages, a blog, or real navigation, Carrd isn’t the right tool. It’s a stepping stone, not a foundation.

Canva

Canva‘s website builder is approachable for people who are already comfortable in Canva, and the design results can look polished quickly. The trade-offs are significant though: SEO capabilities are minimal, the platform isn’t built for business functionality beyond simple pages, performance can be inconsistent, and the platform isn’t built for meaningful business functionality beyond simple pages.

If you’re creating a one-time landing page or a simple visual presence and SEO isn’t a concern, Canva can work, and I’m creating Canva website templates just for these purposes. For an ongoing professional business website, however, it’s not where I’d point you.

How to Actually Choose a Website Builder

If you’ve worked through the questions at the top of this post, the comparison above should narrow things down. Here’s a quick summary of who tends to land where:

• Service provider who wants simplicity and polish: Squarespace. Get live quickly, maintain easily, grow steadily.
• Creative professional who cares deeply about design: Showit. The visual control is worth the higher price point if brand presentation is central to your work.
• Business built around digital products, courses, and funnels: Systeme, especially if budget matters. Consider whether you need a traditional website at all or primarily need marketing infrastructure.
• Established service provider who wants full ownership and long-term flexibility: WordPress. Plan for the learning curve and technical management, or hire support for it.
• Just testing an idea, very tight budget, need something basic now: Squarespace’s entry tier or Systeme’s free plan. Avoid locking yourself into Wix or a one-page tool if you can.

One more thing worth saying: the platform matters less than the strategy behind the site. A clear homepage, a strong offer, a single call to action, and a way to capture email addresses will outperform a beautifully designed site with none of those things, regardless of what platform it’s on.

Platform Costs: What to Realistically Budget

Hosted platforms (Showit, Squarespace, Wix, Systeme)

All-in-one pricing that covers hosting, security, and updates. Squarespace and Showit are priced similarly at mid-range monthly fees; Wix is slightly lower; Systeme’s free plan is actually functional and paid plans are significantly less expensive than comparable tools purchased separately. Check each platform’s current pricing. These change and it’s worth comparing tiers based on the features you’ll actually use.

Self-hosted WordPress

WordPress itself is free. Budget separately for: hosting (shared hosting is inexpensive; managed WordPress hosting is more but handles security and performance for you), a domain name, and any premium themes or plugins your build requires. The total cost varies more than any hosted platform, but a well-set-up WordPress site doesn’t have to be expensive, and it scales without platform pricing increases.

Frequently Asked Questions