Bluehost vs. Wix: Which Is Right for Your Website?

While researching what platform to build your website on, you’ve narrowed it down to these two top contenders: Wix vs. Bluehost.

Bluehost and Wix are often at the forefront of discussions about the best web hosting platform. Bluehost is used as a web hosting provider by over 2 million websites and is also endorsed by WordPress. Wix hosts over 8 million websites.

Both are beginner-friendly, easy to use and full of features to help you get your website off the ground. But that’s about where their similarities end.

Let’s compare and contrast Wix and Bluehost to help you decide which is the ideal platform for your website.

Wix and Bluehost 

Bluehost and Wix are both prominent players in website creation. Bluehost is renowned for its robust, inexpensive web hosting services, providing reliable and scalable solutions for various purposes, such as running a small business.

On the other hand, Wix is an all-in-one website builder popular with individuals and startups, made to help you create a website design without coding.

While both platforms allow you to create a website for relatively cheap, their approaches are very different.

Wix’s platform is an integrated website builder and web host, so it’s a closed platform and you can only use the provided features. Bluehost is a web host that will work with anything, including a content management system (CMS) like WordPress.

These fundamental structural differences make Wix and Bluehost incompatible, as Wix includes hosting as part of its package.

That means you’ll need to pick one: Wix or Bluehost.

Bluehost vs. Wix: Features comparison

As mentioned, Bluehost and Wix accomplish the same basic task: helping you set up a website and get online. But the way they go about it is very different.

It’s time to compare what each platform has to offer –– and which does a better job of offering various features like hosting, eCommerce integrations and SEO tools.

Bluehost vs. Wix: Performance and security comparison

Performance is a critical metric. A slow or constantly down website is bound to irritate visitors and damage sales, something no small business can afford.

From August to October 2023, CodeinWP determined that Bluehost had 100% uptime. In all of 2023, Bluehost only had two brief downtime incidents.

Wix’s status page reported an uptime of 99.94% in September 2023 and 100% in October 2023. Not bad, but the status page also reported many more incidents throughout the year.

As for security, both offer security-focused infrastructure and free SSL certificates. You can also order SiteLock through Bluehost, opening up features like malware detection and DDoS prevention.

Bluehost vs. Wix: Ease of use comparison

Wix is often lauded as a highly beginner-friendly platform, but Bluehost’s onboarding features make it extremely easy to set up a website.

Every WordPress plan at Bluehost includes WonderSuite, a set of tools that makes it easy to create a WordPress website. Step-by-step tutorials walk you through picking a theme, learning to customize it and even creating a store.

Wix’s website builder was also designed to make website creation easy for beginners. For example, it comes pre-installed with numerous templates and intuitive infrastructure, both of which make building and launching a website a straightforward endeavor.

While Bluehost’s onboarding features help you get the hang of WordPress, it’s a simple fact that Wix is a less complicated tool. Even so, its lack of complexity can be limiting when trying to grow your website beyond the basics or over the long term.

Still, because of the streamlined onboarding, Bluehost and Wix are more similar in terms of ease of use than you might think.

Bluehost vs. Wix: Website builder comparison

Wix is a website builder at its core. It’s been focused on this sole goal since 2006, and the result is a streamlined tool that works very well for what it does.

But there are serious limitations that might be deal-breakers for some:

• Wix only provides 500 MB of storage space on the free plan and 2 GB on the paid Light plan. This can be very limiting, as a website with images and video will use up this space fairly quickly.
• There are collaborator limits on all plans except the Enterprise plan. This could make it difficult to work with a team or bring in contributors.
• Wix’s website builder works best for getting online quickly with varied templates, but its versatility is limited.

As for Bluehost, WordPress plans come with WonderSuite, which helps you pick a theme and customize it easily in the block editor. For instance, you can add plugins or HTML code to customize the website-building experience exactly how you want with themes and a drag-and-drop editor. Non-WordPress websites can instead use the Bluehost Builder.

Ultimately, Wix’s website builder is twenty years in the making, and it can be hard to beat. However, Bluehost’s builders are robust and work well regardless of your website’s type or size –– plus, they don’t come with any of Wix’s limitations on functionality.

Lastly, Bluehost’s WonderSuite is built directly within WordPress, which means even if you wanted to migrate, you could take all your files with you to a new host.  Wix’s proprietary website builder does not allow you to easily keep all of your web files, meaning some aspects of your site will need to be re-built upon migrating away from their platform.

Bluehost vs. Wix: eCommerce comparison

Starting an online store? Then, you need to know if Wix or Bluehost provides better eCommerce features.

The simple fact with Wix is that while it provides decent eCommerce features, these are supplemental.

In other words, Wix eCommerce is extremely limited compared to platforms like WooCommerce. You’re stuck with the features provided by Wix and any third-party solutions they choose to provide you with.

There’s also the fact that Wix locks essential eCommerce features behind paywalls, requiring a more expensive monthly plan. On the free and Light plans, eCommerce options are entirely unavailable.

In contrast, no matter which Bluehost plan you choose, you can install WooCommerce, an open-source plugin for WordPress. WooCommerce has hundreds of extensions that let you customize your online shop. Or, you can choose from many other eCommerce plugins for setting up a shopping cart and checkout experience with added features like cart recovery and wish lists.

If you want an extra boost, check out Bluehost’s WooCommerce hosting plans, which provide many supplemental plugins.

Bluehost vs. Wix: Control panel comparison

Wix’s Dashboard, which comes bundled with the platform, is relatively similar to WordPress’s and is generally easy to get the hang of. But it can feel cluttered and is full of menu items you may never use.

Bluehost uses a proprietary control panel. It’s simple and has a good layout, and you’ll be familiar with it if you’ve run a website before. It also serves as the access point to tools for more complex website building, like File Manager and Databases.

Bluehost vs. Wix: SEO comparison

Wix has increased its emphasis on search engine optimization (SEO) in recent years, implementing many tools to help. These include the SEO setup checklist and SEO monitoring tools.

SEO is now a big focus for Wix, but what about Bluehost? Things are a little different.

Since Bluehost is a web host and not its own self-contained platform, your SEO relies mainly on how you set up your website.

But Bluehost still puts in the extra effort by implementing SEO tools that measure various factors in detail and generate reports on your website’s search rankings.

Besides that, you’ll have to manually look into SEO plugins and use these to improve your rankings. Luckily, installing WordPress plugins is easy to do.

Bluehost vs. Wix: Customer support comparison

When you have a big problem, good customer service can get you out of a rut and get your website working again. But how do Wix and Bluehost stack up?

Regarding availability, they’re almost equal: Bluehost offers 24/7 chat and phone support. It also has both a domestic (U.S.) and international line.

As for Wix, there’s a little more to it. While an English phone support team is available 24/7, support in 10 other languages is only available at certain times.

Also, contacting Wix via their Contact Us page is needlessly complicated, as the page that instructs you on contacting Customer Care is buried several pages in.

On Sitejabber, a website where users can leave unbiased reviews for online platforms, Bluehost currently has a rating of 3.42 stars. In contrast, Wix only received 1.74 stars. Only 1.8% of these in the past 12 months have been positive.

In particular, many customers voice complaints about Wix’s customer support.

Bluehost vs. Wix: Hosting plans comparison

Bluehost and Wix offer a distinctive set of hosting plans with one significant difference: While Wix only has a single set of plans, Bluehost offers a variety of plans to complement the needs of any website.

First, let’s give an overview of Bluehost as a web hosting company. Note that each of these also provides its own tier of plans with their own features.

• Shared Hosting: An excellent choice for beginners, as it’s immensely cheap, efficient and easy to set up.
• WordPress Hosting: This is identical to shared hosting, except Bluehost bundles WordPress-tailored onboarding features to help you get started.
• WooCommerce Hosting: A specialized plan to help stores get started with WooCommerce, a popular eCommerce plugin for WordPress. It comes with an integrated suite of useful YITH plugins.
• VPS Hosting: A step up from shared hosting in power, VPS hosting gives your website its own virtualized server space to thrive in.
• Dedicated Hosting: The final and most powerful hosting tier provides you with your own dedicated server space and is really only necessary for large, intensive websites.

Now, Wix’s plans:

• Free: The free plan offers little besides the core website builder tools and limited storage and bandwidth.
• Light: This basic plan gives unlimited bandwidth, slightly more storage and limited features.
• Core: The next step-up unlocks a serviceable amount of storage space and some basic eCommerce functionality, analytics and marketing features.
• Business: The core mid-range plan unlocks more space, collaborators, marketing and eCommerce features.
• Business Elite: The most expensive plan includes unlimited storage, developer options and all marketing, eCommerce and analytics features.
• Enterprise: This is a scaling price plan and the only way to access unlimited collaborators, multi-site management and other vital high-level features.

Both platforms also offer some additional features, including a free custom domain for the first year, free CDN and free support.

The question is: What does Bluehost have that Wix doesn’t?

• More storage.
• No limit on collaborators and users.
• No core features are locked behind higher-tier plans.
• No platform lock-in; you can work with any third-party tools, content management systems (CMSs), plugins or platforms on Bluehost –– most notably WordPress and WooCommerce.

While Wix offers limited plans tailored around their website building tool, Bluehost comes in with various plans and more flexibility.

Bluehost vs. Wix: Pricing comparison

Now, onto the key feature that will be the deciding factor for many: Pricing. We’ve picked out the lowest-priced premium plans and the best-value plan outlined above and broken down their pricing for you.

As you can see, Bluehost’s pricing, especially during the initial period, is extremely cheap. But even after the normal renewal prices kick in, Bluehost is still way more affordable.

Bluehost also offers better value for the price. Wix’s more expensive Light plan only grants 2 GB of storage, which many websites will struggle with. Bluehost’s cheapest plan, on the other hand, gives you 10 GB to work with. And the amount of storage only goes up from there.

While Wix sometimes provides promo codes, Bluehost avoids coupon codes and focuses on maximum savings.

Final thoughts: Bluehost vs. Wix: Which one is right for you?

Bluehost and Wix are both popular platforms for a reason: they offer value to their customers.

Wix is a self-contained solution focusing on website building for beginners, while Bluehost offers reliable web hosting, flexibility and helpful onboarding features.

While Wix is easy to set up with, locking yourself onto their closed platform could be a bad idea long-term.

Bluehost is much more versatile, as you can work with the robust WordPress CMS or code your own website. And while Bluehost’s website builder hasn’t been in development for as long as Wix’s, it can keep up, offering WonderSuite as an intuitive way to drag and drop your way to a new website.

If you’ve chosen Bluehost, check out our hosting plans. We have a plan for any project you can imagine, whether you’re a blogger, a creative or an online store owner.

Bluehost vs. Wix: Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)