Duda, the eponymous platform from the company in Palo Alto, is a web design platform for companies that offer web design services to small businesses. The company serves customers from freelance web professionals to digital agencies, all the way up to the large hosting companies, SaaS platforms and online publishers.
$25
per month
ExpressionEngine
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
ExpressionEngine is a content management system from EllisLab in 2002, a successor to pMachine Pro, a blogging system, which is written in object-oriented PHP and uses MySQL for data storage. ExpressionEngine is their flagship Content Delivery Platform.
$249
per year
Wix
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Wix is a website builder used to grown an online presence. The platform allows users to build their website from scratch, choose from designer-made templates, or use an AI website builder to add sections, images, and text.
Duda lets me customize the entire page. With Squarespace, many of the templates were limiting on editing the header and footer. Also in the past, I couldn't change the page title and page header to be different in Squarespace. This was not good for SEO. Wix is good but also a …
When comparing Wix to Duda, Duda is a breeze. Duda is better in every aspect I can think of from customizing, designing, to hosting. I am proud to use Duda as our website builder, we have built well over 200 different sites on Duda.
Really good visual editor. Easy to use, predesigned templates and sections that are easy to add and update. White labeling for previewing sites with clients.
Verified User
Employee
Chose Duda
I can't speak to why my agency selected Duda, but I can say from personal experience that building a website in Duda is much easier, and backed by better support than any other website builder I've used.
Duda allows me, as a web designer, to still create great looking and unique …
EE offers a much more flexible experience content experience while still keeping the content intact. Other CMSs have really become more "page builders", which is great to start but does not scale in either speed or functionality. EE, though rigid in the content structure, gives …
ExpressionEngine is just as dynamic, if not more so than the other CMS tools that I've worked with in the past. From my experience, It's been easier to customize the templates and content containers. This advantage makes a world of difference when trying to design a landing …
Duda is great for agencies. There is a good client management area. It's even good for small businesses. They can choose a template and build out their own site. It's easy to customizes a website from a barebones template. There are many customizations in the each widget. The pricing is good for all size businesses. There is no tech headache with updates and backups.
ExpressionEngine is a very powerful and flexible content management system. It can handle a simple small business website all the way to a large corporation's website. If you are a business with multiple websites ExpresionEngine can handle that as well with it's Multiple Site Manager. I think ExpressionEngine would be less appropriate for a global large scale business with a magnitude of sites with different regions and languages.
I would recommend Wix if you're more website-savvy; it is more customizable than Squarespace. However, Squarespace's modules look more polished than Wix's, which you drag and drop onto the site. With Wix, you need to do a lot more work, and it allows for more customizations, but I am a lot quicker on Squarespace.
Content structuring. You can set up channels and fields to hold just about any kind of information imaginable; text, images, videos, numbers, code, etc. You can structure this information any way you want and in any order. You literally create your own information database just the way you want it using a clear, easy online interface.
Template system. Utter freedom. Need I say more?
Exensible. There are a lot of add-ons, extensions, and other external modules that extend the core functionality of ExpressionEngine. Need a user management system? Check out the User module at http://solspace.com.
Easy to create and duplicate website, and web pages for similar products, services and campaigns, so you do not have to start from scratch
Find features such as video, image and button, and templates to customise your website's feel and look. For example, recently, I was able to add a countdown timer for the sale of tickets to our online conference.
Creating website Anchors - making it easy for you to take a visitor to a particular part of a page so that they do not need to scroll through the entire webpage making it more user-friendly.
The SEO part of Wix makes it easy for you to set up meta data, create fully functional social media shares that are on brand and looks professional in the Google search engine..
For me, one of the greatest strengths of ExpressionEngine is also one of their weaknesses. There are so many add-ons available (some free, some not) for ExpressionEngine to allow you to do just about anything you want. However, the more add-ons that you use the more you have to deal with when performing updates. For instance, is the add-on compatible with the new version of ExpressionEngine - or even another add-on? What if that add-on gets abandoned by the developer - is there another that can perform the same functionality?
I think that ExpressionEngine needs to offer more out of the box than it does. Yes, you can get add-ons for just about anything but this adds to the cost. I have a list of add-ons that I use on almost every site which can raise the cost of getting started with a new site by $100-300. So add that to the cost of a license and you're at $400-600 and you haven't even started working on it yet. For instance, I shouldn't have to buy an add-on to allow me to customize the menu for my end-users.
The membership management feature is seriously lacking. Fortunately, there are add-ons (for an additional cost) to allow you to manage things better.
In my opinion, with the removal of the ADI web-building tool in favor of editor, user-friendliness has suffered tremendously.
In my opinion, the removal of the ADI web-building tool in favor of editor makes that a big portion of a website has to be redesigned, as items are now linked to each other in a different way than before.
In my opinion, the removal of the ADI web-building tool in favor of editor makes Wix only usable for professional website builders and no longer for the general public.
I'm satisfied with the way that my site runs on EE. My primary concern is that support is now a profit center for EE's publisher and so they've consequently gutted their community support boards. However, a good EE community is developing at StackExchange. At this stage, I don't think that EE is a good choice for an individual site owner. WordPress or SquareSpace would be a better choice unless you have a budget for support.
We will definitely renew Wix. The ability to completely control our website has been invaluable to us. We will maintain this service as long as we are an incorporated organization, we've tried several other software options and this has been the best solution by far for all of our needs.
Again, this platform has to be one of the easiest web development sites I have ever used in my life. From creating pages to linking buttons, hiding pages, and more, it makes it so much easier to develop websites for clients, including forms and custom membership login portals. It really is the best.
ExpressionEngine is very powerful and flexible. With this flexibility comes a bit of a learning curve. There are some great online resources for getting up to speed with EE, but the control panel can be a bit daunting. A lot of EE's installation process involves settings, configurations and flipping of switches. It is tedious, but well worth it as you ultimately have a very robust, secure and scalable CMS. Also, as of version 2.9.2, the control panel isn't responsive natively. You'll want to have a big enough screen to see the full control panel UI. Personally, I think the control panel would benefit from a major overhaul. It would be nice to see the colors and UI controls "modernized" and be able to more effectively customize the layout. Yes, some of this is built-in, and there are third-party add-ons to help, but maybe we'll see more refinement in future versions.
Great customization, but a pain to backtrack. They recently added the ability to set fonts etc as headings, title, body etc, but if you did not begin your build with these presets you are screwed if you ever try to change font/ colors/layout etc.
I never had an outage issue per say. I would say it was very reliable of a website building platform and as a marketing source there was never any issues connecting it to the server. I don’t recall there being any editing tools or hosting issues. Nothing went down when using it.
The admin section would slow to a crawl the larger the tag section grew. There were many areas where better pagination would've helped improve performance. Nothing complicated, which made the lag so frustrating
Not complex at all. It teaches you how to use their platform in a dynamic way. Each tutorial offers an explanation that can be reviewed later on. The connection speed of a web page has been smooth so far, with no major problems regarding this subject. Overall, Wix can manage 10+ pages with great connection speed.
I have personally never found any complications when trying to receive support from EllisLab in regards to ExpressionEngine when using the support plans they offer. I have always been responded to promptly and received satisfactory help with whatever my needs were in an extremely timely manner. This makes rating the support offered an easy job for me
As stated before I didn’t use the support as I did not have the feature and did not often enough need the help. I was able to figure it out mostly on my own by exploring the site. I’ve found exploring and playing on it told me how to do most things.
After installing the system a few times, you can see a pattern of things that have to be done to work the way you want them (settings, paths, etc.). By knowing what you want, you can put together some scripts that prepare the file system for installation, adjust post installation configuration settings, and install initial templates.
Like I said I was a beginner so it was fun to navigate and teach myself how to implement the features when building and maintaining my site. It was a fairly easy place to host my domain, and creat something simple.
I can't speak to why my agency selected Duda, but I can say from personal experience that building a website in Duda is much easier, and backed by better support than any other website builder I've used. Duda allows me, as a web designer, to still create great looking and unique websites. I find that other platforms, while they may provide nice templates, make it very difficult to deviate from the guardrails they put in place. Through the years, even the most basic site that I've built in Duda is significantly better than those built in other platforms
ExpressionEngine is vastly more flexible than any other content management system I have used to date and the quality of the add-ons are significantly higher than what you find in other directories. The ExpressionEngine community is also very willing and helpful with if you have any questions or run into any issues.
Wix is a great starting platform for anyone looking to create a website. It definitely holds its own against any other all in one website creation platform. The one thing I would say is if your main focus is solely on eCommerce you may be better off using something like Squarespace which is specifically designed for that market.
Maybe it's scale-able from the content user perspective, but it was very limited from the programmers perspective. So many custom hacks were necessary that it reached a point it would be impossible to upgrade to a newer version
I give this rating to Wix because it's a great content creator. It has a great platform and also offers great customer service. If you encounter any technical issues, with Wix you will find a solution. For premium members or domain holders, this is the same as for Trial members or non-domain holders.
Being able to be recognized as a leader within the ExpressionEngine development community has led to us being sought out by those customers seeking expert guidance.
We tend to specialize in using ExpressionEngine for our customers, so it has been easier to ramp new resources up on our development process, as well as be able to seek out independent experts to use as sub contractors or freelancers.
As we have been using ExpressionEngine almost exclusively for a number of years, we have built a reusable repository of proprietary code that makes our development process much more efficient and decreases the effort required for our projects.
Wix has helped the companies I've worked with to promote their products and events. Without Wix, it would be extremely difficult to create landing pages for email campaigns or advertisements so, Wix has enabled us to save a lot of marketing and design labor.
As a marketer for a non-profit (and previously for a startup), Wix has helped the companies I've served to build marketing campaigns despite having little to no marketing budget. Because many of its features are free or affordable, small businesses and non-profits receive a huge ROI since there isn't much investment required.
