There are lots of online website builders. Use this comparison page to find the best one for your organisation. You won’t need to learn coding or language programming.
Before you choose your website builder you need to spend some time working out what you need it to do.
If you haven’t done that yet read our page Before you start a new website project.
Then you need to determine what skills you have in your organisation.
Once you’ve thought about those things, you're ready to start comparing tools.
We have compared six tools. We’ve focused on how easy they are to use, and given starting point information about costs.
Just because a tool is included in this list doesn’t mean we recommend it for you. We’ve tried to cover a mixture of new software and big brand names most people will have heard of.
There are lots of other free and low cost website building tools online. If you're keen to use one of those, ask yourself the same kinds of questions we've covered for the tools in this comparison. If you choose a free tool, make sure you know what limitations it has.
You also need to think about digital accessibility. Some of the website building tools make this easier to get right than others.
Find out more about this in our introduction to digital accessibility.
Carrd is one of a new generation of website builders that are very easy to use. It creates a website as a single page.
Perfect for getting started. You can do a lot in a single page. If the people you support prefer using social media to websites, Carrd is useful for you. You can focus your efforts there, but still have a single place to show funders who you are.
It's the cheapest option.
Pages feature several different elements. Building blocks make it possible for you to add:
You can’t use it for a blog or add additional pages. You can only adapt the one static page. You can change the content on it as often as you like.
You can’t do this on the page. You can have a link to your page on a fundraising platform such as JustGiving.
Squarespace is one of the most popular online website builders.
Squarespace is great for many charities’ projects. It stops you making mistakes that make your website hard to use. It restricts what you can do, but it does those things beautifully. It's easy to learn to use. If you need a simple website and have never built one before it is a great option.
Using Squarespace, it's easy to guarantee that:
Squarespace has less than 100 templates to choose from, but they all work well. They work on both mobile and desktop. They use colour combinations and font sizes that meet accessibility standards. They include the ability to embed video or sound files as well as images and text.
Simple to use. You can see what the page will look like as you build it (unlike some systems where you need to go to a different screen). Squarespace makes it easy to add new pages. You can also add blog posts with comments and discussions.
Squarespace has an option to create a donation block.
This system:
Wix is another of the most popular website building tools on the internet. We don’t think that it's as useful for charities as some of the others on this list.
Wix offers a huge choice of templates. It's enjoyable to use if you like creating things by dragging and dropping. Its design flexibility means you need to have a lot of time to spend on testing and checking. It's harder to make Wix sites work on different devices (phones and computers) or browsers. It's also harder to pass accessibility tests.
Wix has thousands of templates to choose from. Many of them are free to use. It also has plenty of different building blocks you can add in for things like video content and images..
You create new pages by duplicating existing pages or using templates and blocks. Wix does not have quite as many features for managing adding posts and pages as some of the other similar tools.
Wix doesn't have a donations system. You can add links to PayPal Donate.
WordPress started as a blogging platform. You can also use it to build websites and manage content online. Wordpress.com is the online version and is entry-level. Developers use Wordpress.org to create websites and content management systems. It has more flexibility.
If you want to know about the full wordpress.org have a look at our page comparing content management systems.
If you already know WordPress, then it is fine to carry on using it. It works well once you're used to it.
Many people like the way it allows for adding news content, blogs or project updates. If the person doing the initial build understands WordPress well, others can then use it to add extra pages.
You can upgrade later, moving your website from the online platform to a more complex site.
WordPress has thousands of templates to choose from. Many are free to use. It also has thousands of plugins that add extra functions. From a Twitter feed to a security certificate, all these things use plugins. Some of these work from the wordpress.com site. Others need you to be using the wordpress.org installation on your machine.
It can be hard to work out which is which. It can also be hard to work out which ones 'just work' and which ones need a little bit of coding skill to get going.
This is what WordPress was created to do so it is where it works best. It also has more menu options for pages than other similar tools. Although the number of menus you can use does depend on your template.
Choice of many different plugins to do this.
Webflow is a relatively new no-code tool that allows you to build multi-page websites with ambitious formats from scratch.
You can use Webflow to create complicated but easy to use websites that look stylish. And you don't need to use code. It has some of the same strengths as the systems that developers use to build websites. It's flexible, and provides a content management system that makes it easy for your teams to update. This makes it particularly good for organisations that want to add content regularly.
It does take some time to learn the basics. So it's particularly good if you have a volunteer or staff member interested in website design or development.
Webflow helps you build using blocks and elements visually and automatically creates the CSS and HTML (coding languages) that those blocks and elements are built with. It makes that code visible to you. Most of the other platforms hide this and do it where you don’t see it.
In addition, there are lots of templates that you can copy and re-use (clone) as a starting point.
Webflow is great for creating pages simply. Its content management system makes it easy for people to use and stick to the layouts and templates set by the designer. You can easily choose different content blocks for different things in the editor.
It doesn't allow you to create blog posts that have comments and discussions.
There are a range of plugins to make this possible.
Glide covers just one part of a website that your organisation might need and it does it well. Glide makes it easy to view directories or collections of resources or services. It's an app that you can link to from your website. It can’t be directly embedded.
Use Glide to help your website visitors find something they want among many options.
For example:
It's a good alternative to website pages with long lists of links. You no longer need a developer to build directories with specific layouts, filters and searches. You can use Glide instead.
You can choose the colour scheme, logo and size of images if you use them. Everything else is set by Glide.
You focus on choosing what data the pages display, how it is structured and how users navigate through it.
Below are some of the main choices.
In Glide you're creating entries. You simply add the data to a Google Sheet. This works nicely, as it makes it easy to give colleagues the right permission to keep it up to date.
Want to work with developers rather than building your website yourself? Learn more about content management systems (the way most websites are built) so you can understand how the developer or agency might work.
Last reviewed: 02 March 2021
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