Comparison
A Wix alternative that hands you the code
If you got here searching for a way to pull your site out of Wix: there is not one, and Wix says so itself. What follows is the other purchase — 40 working trade sites, the modules that run them, and an export that puts the whole codebase in a folder with your client’s name on it.
In the browser: Storefront $49 a month, Storefront Pro $79. On your own machine: LocalSite Studio $59 a month or $699 once. Building and previewing cost nothing and take no card, with a 7-day refund. See the full price list
The 11 rows that decide it
| What you are asking about | With Naratake | With Wix | Who takes the row |
|---|---|---|---|
| Exporting the site’s code | The whole reason the desktop line exists. LocalSite Studio writes the site into a folder as source — a Next.js project you can read, change and host yourself, and when the site takes orders or bookings the database and the back office come out with it. One license, unlimited sites, unlimited exports, and nothing in the folder needs an account with us. | Not offered. Wix’s Help Center states that a Wix site is built with Wix’s technology and needs to be hosted and operated on Wix’s servers, and puts the reason on the architecture: for a SaaS product using proprietary technology, external hosting is not supported. On Aug 26, 2026 we could find no download of any kind offered on that page. | Ours |
| What is left if you stop paying | The folder. It is an ordinary Next.js project and it keeps working wherever you host it. Let the subscription lapse and the editor still opens with all your projects in it — only exporting and deploying pause. Nothing you already handed over is touched. | Nothing you can host yourself. Wix’s own position is that the site has to run on their servers, so cancelling leaves no files behind and the only exit is a rebuild elsewhere — which is the quote most people searching this phrase have just received. | Ours |
| What works the moment you open it | 40 industry starting points, and the question worth asking is what opens rather than how many there are. The bakery is four pages: nine priced items, a custom-cake enquiry form with a photo column, a six-image portfolio — and the ordering, booking and enquiry parts are live sections of the page, not placeholders waiting for an upgrade. Layer any of 15 design styles over it and the layout is rebuilt rather than recoloured — a different set of bones, not the same page in a different colour. | The breadth is genuinely theirs: Wix advertises more than 2,000 templates sorted by trade, says its restaurant templates include built-in sections for menus, daily specials, reservations and online ordering, and says every template is fully customisable. What those sections then need is the rest of the purchase — Wix’s own restaurants overview states that you must upgrade the site to accept online orders and payments, and to let customers book tables online; without that you can display the menu and add reservations by hand. | Ours |
| Showing a client another direction without redoing the site | 40 industry starting points across 15 design styles is 600 different-looking sites before anyone touches a colour — and the count is not the part that matters. This is: every one of the 15 styles rebuilds the layout instead of recolouring it. The hero composition, every page header, the type, the corner radius, the motion and the photo treatment all move together, and palettes are chosen per trade, so the same style over a bakery and over a law office does not come out the same colour. Switching rebuilds the pages from the template and the content comes with it: the menu and prices, the reviews, the staff, the class timetable, the listings, the coupon codes and the opening hours all carry over, along with the client’s own details — name, phone, email, address, logo, social links. What does not: the headings and body text you edited inside a block, and the photos you swapped in, go back to the template’s. A single undo puts the whole switch back. So it is still the first-meeting tool — three directions on the table in an afternoon — and it is still the move to make once the client’s own content is in. | The breadth is genuinely theirs: Wix advertises more than 2,000 templates sorted by trade and says every one of them is fully customisable. What changing template does to the content already in a site is a question for Wix’s own pages rather than ours — and it is the one worth asking before a client’s copy goes in. | Ours |
| The parts that actually run a trade | Eleven of them, in the editor: online ordering, table reservations, appointment booking by staff member and time slot, a class timetable, an order tracker, property listings, quote requests, a coupon banner and three menu layouts. Nothing to install, no second subscription behind any of them, and they leave with the export — the folder contains the module, its database and the back office that reads it. | Real, and each one is a separate app you add. Wix documents restaurants as three apps — Menus, Orders and Table Reservations — with Bookings a fourth, all marked free to install in the App Market. Its own overview then draws the line: upgrade the site to accept online orders and payments, upgrade it again to let customers book tables online. The apps stay on the platform, because the site does. | Ours |
| What is in the editor before you install anything | 111 components and 15 design styles, all there from the first minute, and the design styles rebuild the layout rather than recolour it. There is no market to browse, nothing to keep updated, and no second company’s terms attached to your client’s site — and every one of them comes out in the export as ordinary code you can edit. | Layout and content elements are in the editor as standard — text, galleries, slideshows, hover boxes, repeaters, forms, embeds. The trading elements are conditional, and Wix’s own list of editor elements says so one by one: the Stores tab shows product galleries and an add-to-cart button if you have already installed Stores, the Bookings tab shows timetables and waiver forms if you have already added it, and the Restaurants tab lets you add a cart button and a table reservations form if you have already added them. | Ours |
| How far you can push one element | Dragging a block onto a page is the doorway, not the product. What is behind it: 44 style properties on any single node, each of them settable four times over — desktop, tablet, mobile, and again for hover — which is 176 adjustable points on one element. Vertical CJK text for a hanging-scroll heading, a neon glow in a colour you choose, frosted-glass backdrop blur, a two-colour gradient at the angle you set, a tilt up to 45° either way, sticky positioning, z-index, and a per-node entrance of fade, slide, zoom or blur. All of it is a control in the panel, and all of it comes out of the export as ordinary style props in the project you hand over. | Wix’s editor is a full browser editor, and this row is not about its controls. What belongs in it is where the result lives: Wix’s Help Center says a Wix site is built with Wix’s technology and has to be hosted and operated on Wix’s servers, so everything you tune in that editor stays inside it. There is no version of it that arrives in a folder. | Ours |
| Cinematic sections, finished | All 29 arrive built rather than composed, among them video that scrubs as you scroll, parallax, a scroll-told story, a horizontal scroller, a film strip, a cinema reel, a marquee, an image that reveals as it comes up, a scroll progress bar. A 3D hero and an animated background ship alongside them. One attribute sets the intensity for the whole site — subtle, lively, cinematic, or off altogether — across ten entrance signatures: rise, fade, slide, zoom, blur, clip, flip, letterbox, iris and swing, so changing your mind is one value rather than forty edits. The words stay readable with JavaScript off, and a visitor asking for reduced motion gets the site holding still. | Wix hands you the controls and you compose the section yourself. Its Studio editor groups animation into entrance, hover and click, scroll, loop and WebGL background effects, and its scroll animation is genuinely tied to scroll position rather than fired once — that is a real capability and we are not going to pretend otherwise. It is not uniform, though: Wix’s own per-element table lists accordions, slideshows, tabs, tables, Lottie and input fields as entrance-only, and its animation overview says breadcrumbs, forms and embeds cannot be animated at all. | Ours |
| What it costs | Building and previewing cost nothing and take no card; the monthly price starts when you publish, and there is a 7-day refund. In the browser: Storefront is $49 a month ($468 a year) and Storefront Pro $79 a month ($758 a year) — and Pro includes the full source download. On your own machine: LocalSite Studio is $59 a month, $490 a year, or $699 once for a founding lifetime license, with unlimited sites and exports. Nothing is priced per site on either line. Managed hosting for a desktop-built site, if you want us to run it, is $19 a month per site. | Priced per site, across the plans Wix publishes as Light, Core, Business and Business Elite plus a free tier. Wix notes on the same page that prices and currency vary by location, so read the figures where you actually live — we are not going to quote somebody else’s local price list back at you. | Even |
| Installing the thing | The macOS and Windows installers are not code-signed. Both systems will warn you that the developer cannot be identified, and you click past that warning once, at install. What runs after it is a local app with unlimited sites and unlimited exports, and nothing it builds needs an account with us. | Wix runs in a browser, and its companion apps come from the App Store and Google Play — signed, store-reviewed, nothing to click past. | Theirs |
| Running an actual shop | The exported project takes orders, bookings and enquiries into its own database and charges the card through your own Stripe keys — an account you wire in once, after which not one percent of what comes through it reaches us. A menu, a diary and an enquiry form is the trade this is built to run. A catalogue at that depth — stock counts, shipping rates, tax tables — is Shopify’s trade and a different product. | A whole shelf of it, and this row is theirs: Wix’s App Market groups Stores, Shipping & Delivery, Print on Demand, Dropshipping and Online Courses under Sell Online. What each of those costs to run is a question for Wix’s own terms rather than ours, and they are not all on one page — read the ones covering the thing you are actually selling before you price it. Our side of the same question is short: we take no percentage of an order, a booking or a deposit, on any plan, and the card is charged through your own Stripe keys, so the money never passes through us. | Theirs |
Everything said about Wix on this page was last checked on Aug 26, 2026. Plans, prices and features change without telling us — confirm them on Wix’s own pages before you decide anything.
What Wix is shaped for
Three shapes of buyer that Wix is built for.
- 01You want to shop for a look, and browsing a big library is the part of the job you enjoy. Wix advertises more than 2,000 templates. We ship 40, and each one opens as a working trade site with the ordering, booking and enquiry sections already on the page rather than placeholders waiting for an upgrade.
- 02You want reviews, chat, loyalty and email marketing installed from a market in one click, rather than written into code by somebody you pay by the hour.
- 03You want one company to host, patch and back the site up, with somebody to call when it breaks. Our cloud plans host the site and renew its certificate; the desktop line hands you the folder, for you or any developer to run.
When we are the better answer
Move when the folder is the point rather than a footnote.
- 01You are a freelancer or a studio, and the client is buying a website — not a seat on somebody’s platform. At the end you hand over a folder and walk away clean.
- 02You have already been quoted for a rebuild because a Wix site could not be moved, and you would rather not be standing in the same place in three years.
- 03You want the trade parts — ordering, reservations, appointments by staff member, a class timetable — inside the project you export, rather than as apps that stay behind on somebody else’s platform.
Plain about the fit
The buyer this was made for
If you are running an actual shop — stock counts, shipping rates, sales tax, a catalogue that changes daily — a catalogue at that depth is Shopify’s trade and a different product. If you expect capability to arrive from a marketplace in one click, that is a different shape of product too; here everything is in the editor and in the price. And our installers are still unsigned: macOS and Windows will both warn you before they run them, and if clicking past that is not allowed where you work, wait for the signed build rather than fighting it. What we sell is narrow on purpose — 40 working trade sites, 111 components, the modules that run a menu or a diary, and one export that puts the whole codebase in the hands of whoever paid for it.
Questions people actually ask
Does Wix let me export my site’s code?
No. Wix’s Help Center says a Wix site is built with Wix’s technology and needs to be hosted and operated on Wix’s servers, and that with its SaaS architecture, external hosting is not supported. Third-party scrapers can copy the pages a browser receives, but that is a copy of the output, not your site.
What exactly does LocalSite Studio export?
The whole codebase: pages, styles, scripts and images as Next.js source, in a folder you can open, read and build yourself. Which of two shapes you get depends on the site, not on the plan. A site that stores nothing exports with no database, no API and no admin panel. A site that takes orders, bookings or enquiries exports its own database and back office as well, and needs a host that runs them. Either way it is ordinary files, and none of it needs a Naratake account.
Why are the installers unsigned?
Because the installers are not code-signed. macOS Gatekeeper and Windows SmartScreen will both flag the download until they are. If clicking past that is not acceptable where you work, wait for the signed build.
Look at the export before you buy anything
Build something, look at what comes out, then decide. The export is what the desktop app is for; the browser product is the same editor if you would rather not install anything, and Storefront Pro includes the full source download too. The playground below opens the real editor on a working site — no account, no card, and nothing there is saved.
What we checked
The pages this comparison was read from, all of them on Wix’s own site.
- Wix Help Center — exporting or embedding your Wix site elsewhere
- Wix premium plans and pricing
- The Wix template library
- The Wix App Market
- Wix Help Center — the elements available in the Wix Editor
- Wix Help Center — Wix Restaurants, an overview
- Wix Help Center — which animations are available on which element in the Studio editor
- Wix App Market — the Wix Restaurants Orders app listing
Wix is a trademark of Wix.com Ltd. Naratake is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to Wix.com Ltd.