Looking for a Wix alternative?

The short answer

Choose Wix if you have time on your hands, you enjoy fiddling with software, you want full control over your site, and you're prepared to spend 20 to 40 hours building it (then a few hours a month keeping it going).

Choose Inboundry if you'd rather be on tools or with your family on the evenings and weekends it would take to build a Wix site yourself. We do it for you in seven days.

If you're not sure which one fits, keep reading. We've tried to be fair about the trade-offs.

Wix vs Inboundry: side-by-side comparison

Figures correct as of May 2026. Re-verify before any sales conversation.

Who Wix is built for

Wix is a website builder. It's a very good one. They've been around since 2006, they've got over 200 million users globally, and they've made it genuinely easy for someone with no coding experience to put a website together. They've got drag-and-drop tools, an AI builder that generates a starting point from a description, hundreds of templates, and a vast app marketplace if you want to extend what your site does.

For a UK tradesperson, the published Wix plans start at around £130/year for Light (basic) and run up to £360/year for Business (everything except heavy ecommerce). All prices are billed annually, and the free domain only applies to the first year, renewal is around £17/year after that.

What Wix does well

• You're in full control. No agency, no waiting list, no monthly fee for changes. Want to add a page at 11pm on a Tuesday? Go for it.
• Fast to start. The AI builder can generate a basic site from a few prompts in 10 to 15 minutes. You'll have something on the internet in an afternoon if you're determined.
• Cheap monthly cost. £9 to £25/month is genuinely affordable compared to most agency options.
• Huge template library. Hundreds of designs to start from, including some tradesperson-targeted templates.
• App marketplace. If you want to add bookings, payments, live chat, reviews, or pretty much anything else, there's an app for it (most are paid extras).
• Good documentation and support. 24/7 chat support, an extensive help centre, and a massive community of users sharing tips on YouTube and Reddit.
• You own your account. Your Wix subscription is yours, your domain is yours, and you can take both with you if you ever leave.

What Wix might not be right for

Every product has trade-offs, and these are the ones worth knowing about before you sign up.

• It takes 20 to 40 hours of your time to build a usable site. This is the bit nobody tells you. Industry research consistently puts the average DIY site build at 20+ hours, often spread across multiple weekends and evenings. For most tradespeople, those hours are worth £40 to £80 each in lost work, family time, or rest. Do the maths: 30 hours × £50 = £1,500 of your time before you've paid Wix a penny.
• Most tradespeople don't finish. Anecdotally, around half of small business DIY sites either never go live or stay in "draft" forever. Starting is easy; finishing is hard. And there's nothing worse than a half-finished site sitting in a tab on your laptop, reminding you every time you open it.
• The AI builder gets you 70% of the way, then you're on your own. Wix's AI is good at generating a starting point. It's not good at writing trade-specific service pages, FAQs, or local SEO content that actually ranks.
• No SEO done for you. Wix has SEO tools, but you have to use them. That means learning what schema markup, meta titles, image alt tags, and local citations actually do. It's not difficult, but it adds 10 to 20 hours to the learning curve and another 3 to 5 hours a month in research and updating.
• No content written for you. You're writing every page, every service description, every FAQ, every blog post. If writing isn't your thing, this is the bit that quietly kills most DIY trade sites.
• No marketing strategy. Wix gives you a website. It doesn't tell you what to put on it, who to target, what keywords matter for trades in your area, or how to convert visitors into phone calls.
• The headline price isn't the real price. The "£9/month" Light plan is really £130 a year. The Core plan is £230 a year. Business is £360. Add an essential app or two and the real cost is closer to £400 to £500/year, not £108.

Who Inboundry is built for

Inboundry is a done-for-you website service for UK tradespeople running small businesses, whether that's plumbers, heating engineers, electricians, builders, roofers, or any other trade. Instead of you spending weekends building a website yourself, we build one for you. Then on the Growth and Always On plans, we run the marketing that brings the work to your phone. Growth is everything in Launchpad, plus monthly marketing to bring in more work. Always On is everything in Growth, plus an AI receptionist that answers every call.

Here's the part that surprises most people: we don't charge you up front. We build the site for your business first, before we ever speak to you. You get to have a proper look at it, decide whether you like it, and only then do you commit and pay. No deposit, no contract, no sitting through a sales pitch before you've seen anything. And if there are bits you'd like changed once you've seen it, we make those changes. The site needs to be right for you, not just built and handed over.

What Inboundry does well

• Zero hours of your time. The whole point. You don't build, you don't write, you don't learn SEO. You see the site, approve it, it goes live.
• It's all yours, even though we look after it. We host your site and look after your domain on your behalf so you don't have to think about any of the technical stuff. The moment you ever want to leave us, for any reason, we transfer the domain to you, hand over the content, and we'll make moving wherever you'd like to go as easy as possible. No strings attached, no exit fees, no awkward goodbyes.
• Built for UK trades. Every site is designed for UK tradespeople. The pages, the language, the service descriptions, the FAQs are all written for the work you actually do. We know what a CP12 is. We know what NICEIC means. You won't have to explain any of it.
• Proper local SEO from day one. City and town landing pages, schema markup, Google Business Profile management, citations, the lot. Designed to rank for "your trade + your area" searches.
• What you see is what you pay. £297 is £297. No mid-year renewal increases, no apps that double the bill, no domain renewal surprises.
• One-off £297 to get a website live. No 12-month contract, no recurring fees if you don't want them. Optional ongoing marketing on Growth and Always On for trades who want the work to keep coming.

Where Inboundry might not be the right fit

This section matters. If any of these describe you, Inboundry might not be your best move, and I'd rather you know that now.

• If you genuinely enjoy fiddling with software, Wix is more fun. We're not. We build it, we hand it over, that's the experience. If tinkering with your own website is something you actively want to do, Wix is the right answer.
• If you have plenty of time and very little budget, Wix's £9/month entry plan is hard to beat for a basic business presence. We're not £9. We're £297 once and £15/month thereafter, or higher tiers for active marketing.
• If you want to update your site every day yourself, Wix gives you that. We do all edits for you in the first 30 days of launch and for free on request afterwards, but the platform isn't designed for a sole trader poking at it daily. That's by design, we want you doing what you do best, working on jobs, not on your laptop.
• If your business model genuinely needs a webshop selling physical products, Wix's ecommerce is a strength we don't focus on. Our sites are built for tradespeople taking enquiries, not for selling things online.

The bit nobody talks about: how much is your time worth?

This is the honest reframe of the whole comparison. Wix isn't really "£16/month vs £297". It's "£16/month plus 20 to 40 hours of your time vs £297 and zero hours of your time".

Here's how to think about your own hours. A plumber doing emergency callouts earns somewhere between £40 and £80 per hour on tools. A heating engineer fitting boilers earns £60 to £120 per hour. An electrician on commercial work is £45 to £75 per hour. Pick the figure that's honest for you.

Then ask yourself: would you rather work 30 extra hours over the next two months to save £200 by building your own website, or pay £297 to skip that and get back to either the work that pays the bills or your evenings with your family?

Some people genuinely enjoy building websites and would do it for fun anyway. For those people, Wix is the right call. For everyone else, "saving money" by going DIY is almost always a false economy once you cost in your own time properly.

If the "technical bit" is what's been putting you off, we built Inboundry specifically for trades who don't want to learn a new system. And if you've tried Wix, finished the site, and it's not getting you any calls, we'll tell you why and what to do about it.

Real-world scenarios

These are the three patterns I see most often when I talk to tradespeople.

Scenario 1: Mike, a Gas Safe engineer who's been trading for three years, busy with word-of-mouth work, no website at all.

Inboundry Launchpad is the right call. Mike's hours are worth £60/hr easily, and he'd spend 25 to 30 of them building a Wix site that wouldn't be as good as ours. The economics aren't close: £297 buys back 25 hours of his life and gets him a better result.

Scenario 2: Sam, recently semi-retired electrician who only takes on a few small jobs a month, mostly for friends and existing customers.

Wix is probably the right call. Sam isn't running a serious commercial operation, he doesn't need to be found by strangers on Google, and he has time on his hands. £9/month for a simple Wix site that says who he is and lists his number is genuinely all he needs. Spending £297 on a proper trade site would be over-engineering for his use case.

Scenario 3: Dave, builder running a four-person crew, currently quoting most jobs through Facebook and word of mouth.

Inboundry Growth is the right call, not Launchpad. Dave needs more than a website, he needs ongoing marketing, SEO, Google Business Profile management, automated reviews, and missed-call text-back. Building all that on Wix would take him 50+ hours of his own time, then another 5 to 10 hours every month maintaining it. He doesn't have those hours. £1,245 in year one buys him a proper marketing engine and gives him back the 60+ hours he'd otherwise lose.

Frequently asked questions

Can't I just use Wix's AI website builder? Doesn't that do it all for me?

Wix's AI builder is genuinely impressive at generating a starting point in 10 to 15 minutes. The problem is that the output is a starting point, not a finished site. You still need to write your service pages, your FAQs, your about page, your contact section, and your privacy policy. You still need to add your photos, your logo, your phone number, your service areas. You still need to set up SEO, configure your contact form, install any apps you want, and learn enough about Wix's editor to maintain it. The AI builder saves you the first 5 hours. It doesn't save you the next 25.

What if I already have a Wix site and I'm thinking of switching?

Two honest options here. First, if your Wix site is working for you and bringing in enough work, keep it. We're not interested in trying to switch trades who are already happy. Second, if your Wix site isn't bringing in work, we can build you a proper trade site at our usual £297 and migrate your existing domain so you don't lose anything in the move. Either way, we'd run through your current site on the call before recommending you switch.

Doesn't Wix have all the same features as you?

Wix has the technology. We have the trade-specific setup and the marketing layer. The difference is what someone has actually done with the features. A Wix site with empty service pages, no local SEO, and stock images doesn't perform. An Inboundry site, built specifically for your trade with proper local SEO and trade-specific content, does. Same underlying internet, very different outcomes.

Will Inboundry get me on the first page of Google?

Honestly: maybe, eventually, depending on your area and trade. SEO is a long game. We do everything right (technical setup, content, local citations, ongoing optimisation), but no one can guarantee a Google ranking, and any agency that says otherwise is lying. What we can guarantee is that your website is set up correctly, that we're publishing two blog posts a month on Growth, that we're managing your Google Business Profile, and that we're tracking the results so you can see what's working. Most clients see meaningful local ranking improvements within four to six months.

What if I want to make my own changes after launch?

You can. The site lives on a standard CMS that's straightforward to edit, and we'll show you how on the onboarding call. Most clients ask us to handle changes through our Growth plan because it's faster than learning the editor themselves, but the option's there.

How long does Inboundry take to set up compared to Wix?

We get a website live within seven days of you saying yes, often quicker. Wix can publish a basic AI-generated site in 10 to 15 minutes if you don't customise anything. Wix is faster for a placeholder. We're faster for a properly built site, because we count from "you saying yes" to "site live and ready for customers", not from "you opening the editor" to "first version drafted". We like to think we're better for year one than they are by year two.

Our honest take

Wix is a perfectly good piece of software, we actually love it ourselves. For some people, it's the right answer. If you've got time, you enjoy fiddling with website builders, and you want full control over your own site, Wix will serve you well.

For most tradespeople I talk to, though, the maths doesn't add up. They earn good money on jobs and seeing customers. 20 to 40 hours of time during evenings and weekends seems an unnecessary cost. A Wix site costs them more in time than the £297 we charge to do it properly.

We built Inboundry because too many tradespeople were either paying £1,500 to £3,000 to local agencies for sites that took six weeks, or trying to DIY on Wix and never quite finishing. £297 to get a properly built site live in seven days, without you having to lift a finger or learn anything technical, felt like the answer most people actually needed.

If that fits where you are, we'd love to show you the demo we've already built for your business. If Wix is genuinely the right answer for you, we mean it: go with Wix. Better to know now than to waste anyone's time.

Will Founder, Inboundry

The whole article in 60 seconds

If you only read this far, here's the gist:

• Wix is cheap on paper, but expensive in time. £9 to £25/month sounds great until you cost in the 20 to 40 hours of your evenings and weekends it takes to build a usable site.
• At a tradesperson's typical hourly rate, the real cost of a Wix site in year one is £1,200 to £2,500 including time. Inboundry Launchpad is £297, no hours of your time.
• Wix is a good fit if you enjoy fiddling with software, have time on your hands, and want full control over your site.
• Inboundry is a good fit if your time is better spent doing the work you get paid for, or with your family. £297 once, site live in 7 days, no hours of your time.
• Both are legitimate options. This isn't a "Wix is bad" page. It's a "what's your time worth" page.