How we rank: the method behind every stamp

How we rank website builders comes down to one refusal: there is no overall score on this site. A builder that rates 8.4 for a restaurant can be useless to a band, so every rating on the board is a for-this-trade verdict, produced by the same four-part test applied to that trade's facts.

The desk's bias, if we have one, runs toward the budget. Most of the businesses these guides serve are one to ten people; a $30 difference per month is a real number to them, and a fee buried in a checkout flow is still a fee. So the method below is mostly arithmetic — and where arithmetic wasn't possible, we say so on the page.

The four-part test

1. Job-critical features

Each trade has two or three jobs its site cannot open without — online ordering for a restaurant, MLS search for an agent, compliant intake for a clinic, giving for a church. We check whether a builder does those jobs natively, does them through a respectable add-on, or doesn't do them at all. This criterion is weighted heaviest, because a cheap site that can't do the job is expensive.

2. True monthly cost

The advertised price is a starting bid. We price the plan that actually does the trade's job — a gym gets quoted Wix Core at $29/mo, not the $17 Light plan that can't take a booking payment — then add what the pricing page plays down: annual plans billed upfront in full, month-to-month markups, renewal rates, card processing, and add-ons that are mandatory in practice.

3. Setup pain

Hours to a working site matter to people who bill by the hour. Quote-only pricing, sales calls, setup fees and per-location or per-provider multipliers all count against a vendor here — if we can't find the price without a demo, your first invoice is a negotiation.

4. Lock-in

The exit is part of the deal. We check whether you own your domain outright, what exports when you leave, and what doesn't — bookings, member lists and giving histories are the usual hostages. A builder that's easy to leave earns points for it. One piece of advice is universal: register your domain at a registrar you control, not inside the builder, and no migration can hold your address hostage.

Why generalists sometimes beat specialists

Specialists price for a whole workflow; most small trades need a fraction of it. A church can run Wix Light at $17/mo with a $0/mo giving embed instead of a $99/mo church-platform subscription, and pocket the difference every month. An agent can put IDX Broker's $60/mo search on a $19/mo Squarespace site rather than sign a quote-only annual contract. But the direction isn't fixed: for salons and membership businesses, the specialist replaced two or three subscriptions at once and won. We re-run that comparison per trade, with figures, instead of assuming either answer. That's also why two builders can hold several ladder slots between them without the board being lazy — Wix wins three different trades for three different reasons.

Specialist fees are part of the price

A monthly plan price that ignores the vendor's cut is fiction, so the cut goes into the math. Marketplace commissions: Fresha takes a one-time 20% fee, minimum $6, on each brand-new client its marketplace sends you. Platform fees: Mighty Networks keeps 2% of member payments on its Launch plan, on top of card processing. Giving cuts: Tithe.ly's $0/mo giving runs 2.9% + 30¢ per card gift, so a church's real cost scales with its congregation's generosity. Data fees: IDX Broker's plans carry a one-time setup fee, and some MLSs bill their own monthly data charges on top. Per-order fees: BentoBox's ordering plan adds around $0.99 per order at the time of checking. Where a fee depends on volume, we convert it at stated hypothetical volumes — labelled as such, never dressed up as a client's story.

When the board gets re-checked

Every figure on this site was pulled from live vendor pages or clearly dated 2026 sources in August 2026, and the board is re-checked monthly. Vendors that hide pricing behind sales calls, or block their price pages from being read, get their figures written as "around" — a softened number tells you more than a confident wrong one. When facts change, picks change: the salon verdict moved from Fresha to GlossGenius in August 2026 after Fresha ended its subscription-free model, and the amendment is dated on the record.

Affiliate money and the ladder

Some links on this site are affiliate links, routed through /go/ addresses, and some of the vendors we recommend pay us nothing at all — several specialists we price in detail have no affiliate program we belong to. The rule is mechanical: the test above sets the pick, then the links get attached, in that order and never the reverse. The full list of who may pay us is in the affiliate disclosure. The output of all this machinery is one page: the board of best website builders by industry.