We Compared Bluehost vs Wix: Our Verdict on Costs, Features, & More

The main difference is this: Bluehost is a hosting provider, which focuses more on website resources like storage space. Wix is a website builder, which focuses more on website design tools like templates. But which type of platform will you need?

Bluehost Pros and Cons

Wix Pros and Cons

The Winner

Bluehost is better value for money

Bluehost offers better value for money than Wix, but it’s important to note that you’ll be paying for very different services.

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Both platforms have a range of paid plans to choose from, with the more expensive plans offering a wider range of features. But because Bluehost is a hosting provider and Wix is a website builder, the features included in their pricing plans are pretty different.

• For $2.95 per month, Bluehost will give you powerful server resources, like bandwidth to accommodate plenty of website visitors and storage space to house plenty of media.
• For $17 per month, Wix will help you design a modern and stylish-looking website, with no technical or coding experience required.

Still not enough? Here’s what you need to know:

Bluehost offers better value for money than Wix because its prices are much cheaper, and you still get great features. That said, it’s important to note that website builders like Wix are all-inclusive – everything you need to get a professional site live is covered by Wix’s $17 per month cost.

Heads up: Wix also has a completely free plan. You won’t get to use a custom domain name (instead, it’ll look like yourname.wix.com/customname), and you’ll have to put up with ads on your site, but you’ll still be able to:

• Up to 500 MB storage
• Up to 500 MB bandwidth
• Tips and guidance on using the website editor

On the other hand, hosting providers like Bluehost don’t cover the design tools that you’ll need to create a stunning site. It’s true that Bluehost provides a basic website builder in its hosting plans, but most people end up using a content management system (CMS) like WordPress to design their website instead.

WordPress offers both free and premium themes that you can use, with premium themes typically ranging from a one-time payment of $40 – $130. WordPress themes are very customizable, but they require more advanced technical knowledge than Wix’s themes.

Find out more:

To learn more about the full price ranges and plans that each platform offers, you can check out our dedicated Wix Pricing and Bluehost Pricing Review.

The Winner

Wix has the best features

These two providers offer the best of the best in regard to their service, but Wix is the winner by having everything one could need for starting a  website, including hosting.

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Bluehost has great features; some of the best for a hosting provider. In our research, we gave it a 4.2 out of 5. This is a great score…but it is just a hosting provider only.

Wix, on the other hand, comprises the entire website-building experience into one easy-to-use package. It has website templates, marketing, SEO, a fully developed editor, an app store, and yes, even hosting too! Bluehost’s hosting is better, as you can probably imagine; it has more storage and is just generally a more powerful and generous provider, but Wix includes so much more than Bluehost. We gave Wix a feature score of 4.9 out of 5 stars to reflect this.

Check out the table to see how the two really square off against each other:

As you can see, Bluehost has greater storage and bandwidth than Wix, while Wix has better website design tools. It really comes down to which factor you value more:

1. How your website will perform (Choose Bluehost)
2. How your website will look (Choose Wix)

For Top Performance, Choose Bluehost

As a hosting provider, Bluehost offers great resources on the actual server your website is hosted on. These resources help your site perform better, meaning it will load faster and be able to accommodate more visitors at one time. But when it comes to the website’s look and feel, you’ll either have to outsource to a CMS like WordPress, or settle for one of Bluehost’s basic website templates.

For a Better Look, Choose Wix

As a website builder, Wix hosts your website for you. This means you won’t have to worry about any technical headaches, but it also means you won’t have access to as much bandwidth or storage as you would with your own hosting provider (although small to midsize websites won’t really need more resources than Wix can provide).

Wix’s high-quality website templates and built-in, drag-and-drop editor make it extremely easy to design a stunning website all by yourself.

Find out more:

• Read our solo Bluehost Review for more information on Bluehost’s features
• Likewise, check out our dedicated Wix Review to learn more about Wix

The Winner

Wix is easier to use than Bluehost

Wix’s drag-and-drop website builder requires absolutely no prior knowledge, and all of the technical stuff – including hosting – is taken care of for you.

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Wix: Drag-and-Drop Simplicity

The first thing Wix will do is ask you what kind of website you want to create. You can choose everything from “Portfolio & CV” to “Online Store,” and once you’ve decided, you’ll then be given two options for creating your site:

• Wix Editor is the famous drag-and-drop website builder that we’ve all come to associate with Wix. If you choose the editor, you’ll be able to pick a template and customize it yourself.
• Wix ADI is an even easier to use version of Wix. This option generates a website for you, based on a few questions about the type of site you’re making and the kinds of features you want. There isn’t as much room for personalization, but you also won’t have to lift a finger.

If you choose Wix ADI, you’ll have a finished site in just a few clicks. If you choose Wix Editor, you’ll get to choose from one of 800+ templates, categorized by industry, and start customizing the design right away.

Managing your website is just as easy as designing it. Your Wix dashboard will walk you through everything, from connecting your free domain to implementing SEO best practices.

Wix also hosts your website for you, so you won’t have to set that part up yourself. The drawback of this is that you won’t have as many server resources (like bandwidth and storage) allocated to your site as you would with Bluehost. We gave Wix a score of 4.4 in our research for this category, the best of any builder we’ve tested. If ease of use is your top priority, then Wix is an unbeatable all-in-one package.

Bluehost: No Hand-Holding

Although Bluehost offers a basic website builder with its hosting plans, most people don’t use it – it’s more like a formality. Instead, the most popular option is to create your Bluehost-hosted website through WordPress. In fact, WordPress is so popular that it actually powers 43.2% of the internet!

Since WordPress is a CMS and not a website builder, it offers more design customization than Wix. But that comes at a price: WordPress is not very beginner-friendly. For example, Wix lets you see what your changes (like moving images and text blocks) will look like as you make them on-site. But with WordPress, you create your pages in a dedicated editing section, and then have to enter a separate “Preview” mode to see what they’ll actually look like.

A basic knowledge of code will help you master this CMS editor. But if you’re intimidated by the thought of some HTML, or simply don’t have time to delve into it, then Wix’s code-free editor is a much easier option. Plus, Wix does let you code if you want to – it’s just that with Wix, dealing with code yourself is completely optional!

For managing websites, Bluehost uses “cPanel,” a popular dashboard for hosting providers. Although it’s not as modern-looking as Wix’s dashboard, the cPanel is still a pretty straightforward way to manage your Bluehost site.

Find out more:

• Want the simplicity of a drag-and-drop builder, but not sure if Wix is the one for you? Our ranking of the overall best website builders will show you more options
• Or, decided you want the freedom of a WordPress site, but aren’t sure if Bluehost is the right host for you? We’ve ranked the best web hosting providers to show you what else is out there

The Winner

It's a tie! Bluehost and Wix are similarly matched for design

Wix websites are easier to design but will still look amazing, whereas Bluehost WordPress websites require more advanced knowledge but allow for infinite design freedom. Because they each succeed at satisfying a different function, we can’t say which is better. So it’s a tie.

Wix: Easy and Quick Design

Wix templates are modern and stylish, and they give you a stunning website without any work involved on your part. When it comes to making the template your own, you won’t have as much freedom as you would with Bluehost/WordPress, but it’s still easy to change colors, fonts, and layouts. One user put it best:

“It was easy to drag in images and video, and the more I used it, the easier it became.”

The biggest draw of Wix’s templates is that they’re ready-made, but they’re still high-quality designs, too. With Wix templates, you can have both style and ease of use. 

What About Wix’s Apps?

If you want to add extra functionality to your site, like a live chat widget or an ecommerce shopping cart, Wix’s App Market has over 250 free and paid tools that you can install with just a few clicks. Wix’s app offerings aren’t as extensive as WordPress’, but once again, they’re easier to add to your website.

Bluehost With WordPress: Complicated but Customizable

WordPress offers thousands of templates (or “themes,” as you might see them called), ranging in price from free to about $130 each. Out of the box, these themes are nowhere near as sleek or modern as Wix’s templates.

However, WordPress themes are much more customizable than Wix’s templates. If you have a little bit of coding knowledge, and some time to get comfortable with the WordPress CMS, then you’ll be able to create your own unique pages, loosely based on the WordPress theme you choose.

We spoke to Harry Clarkson-Bennett from Red Orange Peach about his experience using WordPress to create the site:

“If you want to have total control and creative freedom over your website – and you know you’re going to want to make substantial changes in the future – then the design freedom you get with WordPress is, in my opinion, essential.

There are so many more things that can go wrong with WordPress, but I know I can’t create the website I really want with a website builder.”

What About WordPress’ Apps?

As far as apps go, WordPress offers almost 60,000 plugins that you can install to add extra features to your site. There are much more WordPress plugins available than Wix apps, so you’ll be able to find practically any tools you can think of.

The drawback to this is that a lot of the plugins in the WordPress market were created by independent, third party developers, not by the official WordPress software. We recommend checking a plugin’s user reviews before downloading it to make sure you’re not installing anything on your site that’s out of date, or which contains malicious code.

The Winner

Bluehost has the best performance and security

Hosting providers are better than website builders in this area because they’re more focused on the resources and reliability of the actual web server, rather than the front end of the website that your visitors see.

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Bluehost vs Wix: Security Tools

As you can see the two seem relatively the same, but what’s important is the “Uptime” score. Bluehost has more resources available to make sure that your site is live than Wix, meaning you could be losing precious traffic when you go for a site with less guaranteed uptime.

Additonally, with Wix, you have no access to your site’s technical settings. With Bluehost, you can change factors if your website’s loading slower and even upgrade your plan for more storage or memory. With Wix, you are locked to their service.

The Winner

Wix has the better help and support

They both have responsive support teams that you can reach over the phone or email. But Wix editor’s built-in tips, which guide you as you go along, push this builder over the top.

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First, the basics. Both Bluehost and Wix offer multiple ways to contact their support teams:

Bluehost has great customer satisfaction – in fact, Bluehost beat every other hosting provider in our rankings for “market analysis” with a whopping 4.9 out of 5.

But our help and support research scores tell a different story. Bluehost trails behind Wix with a 3.5 out of 5 while Wix has 4.3 out of 5. What elevates Wix’s support over Bluehost’s is its ease of use and the amount of guidance you get while you’re actually in the editor making changes to your site.

Since Bluehost isn’t a dedicated website builder, it can’t offer this level of on-the-job guidance for website design.

It’s clear that Bluehost and Wix are very different platforms. But one thing’s for sure: They’re both high-quality tools! To recap, here’s how they stack up against each other:

If you’re still not decided, that’s okay! Let’s run through who exactly we recommend each builder for!