Verdict
Open Portfolio compared with
Wix
Wix will publish a site today with less effort than anything here. It also states in its own support article that there is no way to take that site anywhere else, ever.
Who
Stay with Wix if
- You want a site published in the next hour with no decisions.
- You need a shop, bookings or a restaurant menu in the same place.
- You will never want to move it.
Look at this if
- The sentence "your site must run on Wix’s servers" bothers you as much as it should.
- You are on the free tier and the advertising banner is on your portfolio.
- You want the content in a file you own.
Sources
From Wix’s own documentation
Every claim below links to the page it came from and says when it was read. Quoting a vendor’s own support article is the only form of comparison that cannot be argued with — and a claim with no date is worth nothing a year later.
Wix’s own support article says: "Since Wix is a SaaS solution, your site must run on Wix’s servers."
Wix’s free tier publishes on a Wix subdomain with an advertising banner that scrolls with the visitor, and no custom domain.
Wix is roughly Light $17 / Core $29 / Business $39 / Elite $159 per month billed annually.
Side by side
Side by side
| Question | Wix | Open Portfolio |
|---|---|---|
| Export | None. "Since Wix is a SaaS solution, your site must run on Wix’s servers." | One JSON file with everything, at any time. |
| Free tier | Publishes on a Wix subdomain with an advertising banner that scrolls with the visitor. No custom domain. | No banner, no subdomain requirement, no upsell. Free hosting tiers have their own catches, listed plainly. |
| Paid plans | Roughly $17 to $159 a month, billed annually. | Nothing to us. You pay a host and a registrar. |
| Editing model | Drag anything anywhere, absolutely positioned. | Stacked blocks with a fixed set of arrangements. Less freedom, and much harder to produce something broken on a phone. |
| Apps and extensions | A large marketplace. | None. A short list of services you can connect, and no plugin system. |
Concessions
What Wix does better
Not a formality, and there is no “but” after any of them.
Nothing beats it for time-to-published
Sign up, pick a template, type, publish. No host, no domain, no setup phrase. For somebody who needs a page this afternoon and does not care what happens in three years, that is the right answer.
The drag-anywhere editor is more expressive
You can put anything anywhere. Ours cannot, on purpose — but "on purpose" does not make it more capable, and a designer who wants a specific arrangement will hit our limit and not theirs.
The app marketplace is real
Bookings, chat, forms, shops, memberships. If you need one of those, it exists there and does not exist here.
CTA
Have a look before you decide
The demo is the fastest way to know whether this is enough for you. It needs no account and forgets you after an hour.