About The Builder Review

There are roughly a hundred ways to put a website on the internet, and the honest answer to "which one should I use" is almost always it depends on what you are building. Most of the writing about these tools refuses to say what it depends on. It ranks ten platforms, gives nine of them four stars, and sends you back where you started.

This site exists to do the opposite: to say which job each tool is actually built for, and to be specific about the point at which it stops being the right answer.

What we cover

Website builders and site tools — Wix, Squarespace, Framer, Webflow, WordPress, Carrd, Notion Sites, reach and the rest — plus the things you have to decide around them: domains, hosting, publishing, search visibility, and the design questions that come up once the tool is chosen.

The standard

Every review here has to clear three bars before it goes up.

We built something on it. Not a trial account and a look around the dashboard — a real site, taken as far as publishing.

It names the losing case. If we cannot describe the project for which a tool is the wrong choice, we do not understand the tool well enough to review it.

The numbers are checked. Prices, limits and timings are verified against the vendor's own current pages, and every article says when it was last checked.

Who publishes this

This publication is run by the team behind reach, a personal-website tool that appears in some of our comparisons. That is a real conflict of interest and we treat it as one — the full explanation is on the disclosure page, and it is worth two minutes of your time before you take any recommendation here at face value.