Guide

Website design tools and apps: free plans and prices

Harrowtech.ai · last checked 13 October 2026

Five of the six best-known website design apps let you start for nothing: Wix, WordPress.com, Framer and Webflow have free plans that publish a site, and Figma has a free Starter plan. Squarespace has no free plan, only a 14-day trial. Those four free plans put your site on the vendor’s own address until you pay. Below is what each one includes, what it limits and what the paid plans cost, using only the vendors’ own pages.

Free plans at a glance

WixWix’s guide “Is Wix really free?” lists “Wix branding (and sometimes ads) on your site”, a free domain name you cannot customise, on a wixsite.com address, “up to 500 MB of storage and up to 1 GB bandwidth”, and “No eCommerce functionality or way to take payments”. The guide shows a day and month (July 26) but no year, so check the current plan before you rely on it. Wix’s home page adds: “To connect a custom domain, remove ads and unlock advanced business features like selling through an online store, you’ll need to upgrade to one of Wix’s Premium plans.”
WordPress.comThe pricing page says the free plan has “no expiration date” and gives you “a WordPress.com subdomain, 1 GB of storage, unlimited pages and posts, and access to basic stats for the last 7 days. It does not include a custom domain, plugin installation, or ad-free browsing for visitors.” It also says “Free sites display WordPress.com ads to visitors.”
FramerFree at $0 with “500 AI credits to try”, a “Free Framer domain” and “1 GB bandwidth”. Using your own domain starts on the paid Basic plan.
WebflowThe Starter plan is free, “For exploring and experimenting with Webflow”. It lists a Webflow.io domain, limited Webflow CMS, 2 static pages, 1 GB bandwidth and 50 form submissions. A custom domain starts on the paid Basic plan.
FigmaStarter is free: “Free limited access to Figma products”. Figma is mainly a design tool; see below.
Squarespace“Squarespace doesn’t offer a free plan, but every site starts with a free trial”. The pricing page says “Free for 14 days.”

What a free plan means for a business

Paid plans, as each page showed them

Prices below were read on 13 October 2026. Currency and billing period are given only where the page states them. Vendors change prices and some show different currencies by location, so check the page before you buy.

WixLight $17.77, Core $29.77, Business $39.77 (marked “RECOMMENDED”) and Business Elite $159.77, each shown as “mo”. The page says: “Prices and currency vary by location. USD prices displayed for reference only. Displayed prices are for yearly subscriptions, paid in full at the time of purchase.” It also says the final price is shown on the purchase page before you pay.
SquarespacePrices shown in pounds, with a “Pay monthly” and “Pay annually” switch. Paying monthly: Basic £16/mo, Core £24/mo, Plus £36/mo, Advanced £89/mo. Paying annually: Basic £12/mo, Core £17/mo, Plus £29/mo, Advanced £79/mo. The page says “Pay annually to save up to 36%.” Plans bought for an annual term include one year of free domain registration.
WordPress.comPrices in US$, “excl. taxes”. Paying monthly: Personal US$9, Premium US$18, Business US$40, Commerce US$70. Paying yearly, “per month, billed every 12 months”: Personal US$4, Premium US$8, Business US$25, Commerce US$45. Two- and three-year terms cost less per month. Enterprise has no price and links to WordPress VIP. Plugin installation is on every paid plan; Business and Commerce add “SFTP/SSH, WP-CLI, Git commands, and GitHub Deployments”.
FramerBasic $10 per month and Pro $30 per month, shown next to a “Yearly billing” label. Enterprise is custom. The page does not name the currency. It says “All prices are monthly and billed according to the billing cycle selected at checkout” and that sales tax is added at checkout based on your location. A complimentary domain is “included on yearly” on Basic and Pro.
Webflow“All prices in USD, per site, plus applicable taxes added at checkout.” Basic $15/mo billed yearly (custom domain, 300 static pages, 10 GB bandwidth). Premium $25/mo billed yearly (everything in Basic plus the Webflow CMS). The page has a monthly and yearly switch and says yearly saves “up to 40%”.
Figma“Prices in USD”. Professional: Full seat $16/mo, Dev seat $12/mo, Collab seat $3/mo. The page says the Figma Sites beta “is available on Full seats”.

Selling online changes the bill

On Wix’s plans page, Light lists no eCommerce feature, Core lists “Basic eCommerce”, Business lists “Standard eCommerce” and Business Elite “Advanced eCommerce”. On Squarespace, Basic carries a 2% online store transaction fee and card rates from 2.0% + £0.25. Core, Plus and Advanced show a 0% store fee, and the card rate falls to 1.7% + £0.25 on Plus and 1.5% + £0.25 on Advanced. Card fees sit on top of the plan price, so add them up against the sales you expect.

WordPress.com and WordPress.org are different

WordPress.org says “WordPress is open source software”, licensed under the GPLv2. Its download page describes self-installing as “For anyone comfortable getting their own hosting and domain.” WordPress.com, in the tables above, is the hosted service with plans. WordPress.org does not put a price on the software, so none is quoted here.

Figma: a design tool first

Figma’s home page calls it “The full-stack creative canvas” and describes Figma Design as “Design and prototype in one place”. It lists Figma Sites as a beta that will “Publish fully responsive websites”. The other five on this page are site builders that host what you make.

Questions to ask before you pick one

What we will test

This page reports what the vendors say. We plan to try each builder hands-on and add the results here. The tests:

  1. Time to publish a five-page site on the free plan, from sign-up to live.
  2. Whether a custom domain can be connected on the free plan, and the total at checkout for the cheapest plan that allows one, tax included.
  3. Export: whether pages, text and images can be taken out and moved to another host.
  4. Mobile editing: making a change to a live page from a phone.
  5. What a visitor sees on a free site: branding, adverts and the address bar.
  6. Taking a payment: the first plan that allows it, and the fees on one test sale.

If you would rather not learn a tool

We build the site and hand it over. A redo of your existing five-page site starts from £950 and a new five-page site from £2,500. You get the keys, with no monthly fee to keep it, and hosting is billed to you directly with no mark-up. Our full price list and process are on our website design company page; what a website costs in the UK has the market ranges.

Get a fixed quote

What this guide does not cover

It does not rank these tools or name a best one; that waits for the tests above. It leaves out Shopify, Canva, GoDaddy, Hostinger and many others. Templates, their licences and switching limits are covered in website design templates or a custom design. Prices were read on one day and will change. More guides: all Harrowtech.ai guides.

Sources, all read 13 October 2026