Side by side

Compared with nine website builders

Nine comparisons, each one a table of the rows that actually decide a purchase rather than a feature list. Every number on the other side was read off that company’s own page, with the date it was read.

The seven questions every one of these comparisons asks

Nine builders, 111 rows, each checked against the other product’s own public pages on the date shown — 83 go our way, 19 go theirs, 9 are a draw. Every comparison below names at least two rows that go the other way, which is the only reason to believe the ones that do not. Here is our answer to the 7 questions all 9 of them ask.

  1. Inside one starting point

    40 starting points, and each one opens as a working multi-page site rather than a blank canvas. The bakery is four pages carrying nine priced items, a custom-cake enquiry form with a photo field, and a six-image portfolio — a trade site before you have typed a word.

  2. Restyling without retyping

    15 design styles over 40 starting points — 600 openings — and switching one rebuilds the layout rather than recolouring it. Your menu and prices, reviews, staff, classes, listings and business details carry over; headings and photos you edited directly go back to the template’s, and one undo takes the whole switch back.

  3. The parts that run the business

    Ordering, table reservations, appointments, customer records and the back office are parts of the product with no second subscription behind any of them. They go live on Storefront Pro; Storefront builds and previews the same blocks.

  4. Motion on the page

    29 scroll and cinematic sections sit in the component palette, so motion is composed on the page out of real sections rather than picked from a short list of presets.

  5. In the editor before you install anything

    111 components in seven groups — basic, layout, navigation, forms, business, cinema, editorial — are in the editor before you install anything. Nothing on that list is a marketplace add-on.

  6. How far one element can be pushed

    Every block carries a Content tab listing only the fields it owns and a Style tab with three breakpoints: desktop, tablet and mobile. Mobile inherits desktop until you deliberately override it, and the editor marks every field that carries an override.

  7. Getting the site out again

    Storefront Pro downloads the whole project as a standard Next.js app — app/, components/, lib/, a package.json with no dependency of ours in it — so the site can be self-hosted with Naratake switched off.