In this day and age, growing your business and the internet go hand in hand. Whether you want to promote your brand, help people discover your local business, sell your products and services, or simply showcase your expertise and qualities, creating a website is synonymous with advancing further and reaching success.
Take us, for example. We create websites for everything we work on, even individual products because we believe that it allows us to hone our company’s image and brand, and it really does! Everyone on our team has their own personalized website. That way we boost our credibility and accessibility, being available 24/7. To put it simply – a personal website is today’s digital business card.
Now let’s get down to the nitty-gritty of today’s article – building websites with Duda and WordPress. Here, you’ll read all about why we chose those two in particular, what they have to offer, and how they compare in every aspect important for modern website building.
Why Choose Duda or WordPress?
WordPress is a household name in the website building market. It’s been around since 2003 and swiftly became the most popular content management system (CMS) while assisting people and businesses quickly develop their websites. Its signature characteristic is its website building process which requires little to no prior coding knowledge. With it, you can get your website online in a matter of hours.
Duda, founded in 2009, is a lot younger CMS and a lot less popular than WordPress. However, we decided it’s a worthy competitor to WordPress since it requires even less coding skills to build an awesome website. There are many similar platforms to Duda, and for some reason, more popular ones, but Duda is amazing as a website builder as it’s incredibly fast and easy to use. This is why we’ll give it a go in this show-off, so you can get a better understanding if it’s a suitable option for you.
Comparing Duda With WordPress
Putting together this article was an easy feat for us. We’ve been using Duda and WordPress for ages, and we’re pretty familiar with most of their features. However, to refine our comparison and tailor it for you, we’ve tested both platforms even further and inspected many other user reviews about them.
Below, you’ll get the chance to observe Duda and WordPress from 9 different angles. We’ll take a look at how each platform performs in each of the most important aspects that concern content management systems. We’ll state our expert opinion on which service fares better than its rival in each category and for whom it’s more suitable.
Here are the 9 categories in which Duda and WordPress will compete against each other:
- User Experience
- Templates & Themes
- Plugins
- Customization
- SEO Capabilities
- eCommerce
- Customer Support
- Pricing
- User Reviews
Let’s kick off with the first one:
User Experience
Anyone searching for a CMS platform to build their website with isn’t really interested in learning how to code nor wants to lose time working around the interface itself. Entrepreneurs would rather manage their projects, close more deals, and grow their businesses, than tackle the specifics of their online presence. That’s why users agree that the simplicity of these tools is a must for them.
WordPress
While it’s pretty straightforward going about WordPress’s interface, you would occasionally stumble upon areas that require some time to get used to. The platform has many different features, and some website aspects are manageable from different sections.
When it comes to its editor, WordPress constantly works on it, and what used to be a text-based editor, now is replaced with a simplified “blocks” method. We rarely ever use their editor, as we’ve witnessed many don’t either since WordPress is all about their templates which more often than not come with their own customized editors. A popular and highly-rated visual editor is Elementor, and if you decide to try WordPress, we strongly recommend getting familiar with it.
Duda
Duda on the other hand has their own drag-and-drop editor which is extremely easy to use. Packed with a large range of widgets and pre-built sections, you can effortlessly fill your pages with content and style it any way you wish.
Adding advanced elements such as maps, cart buttons, parallax sliders, and more, is doable simply with a couple of clicks.
What we love about it is the option to save the sections you create so you can use them for the creation of future pages. Also, the preview option is super useful – with it you can see how your site will appear on tablets and smartphones as you’re building it.
Winner
Duda scores the first point here. It’s tailored for beginners with no prior knowledge as it’s fast, straightforward, and pretty intuitive.
Templates & Themes
Templates are great when you don’t have a clear image of how your site should look like. They not only inspire and give ideas about what you want to do with your content but also save immense amounts of valuable time.
WordPress
Templates at WordPress are called themes. The platform itself offers about 130 free themes and over 180 premium themes that you need to purchase separately or get for free on their “Business” or “Enterprise” plans. However, WordPress is so popular that there are hundreds of companies and individuals that create WordPress themes and sell them on marketplaces such as ThemeForest and TemplateMonster. They grow by the minute, and currently, there are over 30,000 themes available for WordPress.
These themes cover any imaginable business purpose from blogging about cats to selling guns. With WordPress’s theme customization options, you can alter your theme and make your site look any way you want.
Duda
Duda is quite limited in this area compared to WordPress. Being relatively young it offers only about 100 templates that are, as a matter of fact, stylish, elegant, and professional.
Even though all of the templates are mobile-responsive, Duda lacks the customization capabilities that come with WordPress. While you can use any of the thousands of plugins to alter your theme in WordPress, with Duda, you’re stuck with what you’re given – only a few tools.
Winner
It’s pretty obvious that WordPress aced this category. There’s simply no match for it when it comes to finding a reliable theme that you’ll fall in love with – one that’s secure and constantly upgraded to ensure you’re keeping up with the latest trends.
Plugins
Adding extra features to enhance your website’s appearance and performance always comes in handy. Your chosen template doesn’t always have to include everything you need; you can supplement it by choosing a plugin that will do the job for you.
WordPress
Due to its extreme popularity, WordPress boasts over 55,000 plugins available on its platform or other marketplaces, offered similarly and in addition to their themes.
With those, you can add extra security, speed things up by optimizing media and enable caching, implement traffic analytics and CRM systems, and so much more.
Plugins are one of the top reasons why many turn to WordPress as a website building solution since you can add as many of those as you want. However, we recommend keeping their number between 10 to 20 and deactivating those that you’re no longer using, as they can slow your site’s speed if you overwhelm your server with them.
Duda
Although there are a few integrated apps included on the Duda dashboard, the platform doesn’t support additional plugins. You’d have to work with what they have.
Even though these apps are great for things like email marketing, online booking, and client invoicing, you can’t implement plugins for enhancing your site speed or improving security for example.
However, Duda operates on AWS (Amazon Web Services) servers which are super safe and offers an incredible CDN (Content Delivery Network), meaning your site will be already fast enough.
Winner
Just like the previous category, WordPress owns this one as well. The amount of extra features you can get with it is incomparable with other CMS platforms.
Customization
Having the freedom to alter your website as much as you want can often be limited when using CMS services. Taking off from a pre-coded configuration means you have to follow the rules that are already established. So, let’s see how flexible WordPress and Duda are in this department.
WordPress
This is another category where WordPress excels greatly. There is pretty much no other website building solution that offers that much freedom to its users.
With it, you can develop any type of website and customize it to your own preferences. The platform is open-source, which means you can even alter the code of the theme, plugins, and editor to suit your requirements. Because it’s open source that opens up the possibility for a lot of different services to assist you when needed. For example, there are good solutions for WordPress maintenance services, hosting, speed improvements, and more.
Duda
Duda goes as far as allowing you to insert additional CSS or HTML elements to your template, but that’s about it.
Moreover, every website developed with Duda’s assistance is audited for its content type. If that doesn’t comply in accordance with Duda’s terms of service, the website will be marked for violating core guidelines and promptly taken off the platform.
Winner
If you’re interested in a quick solution and don’t care too much about changing the preset configuration, Duda might be the option for you. However, WordPress allows much more freedom and gives you endless possibilities of what you can do with your website structure and content.
SEO Capabilities
Search Engine Optimization is a characteristic everyone should look into when aiming to grow more traffic and attract new customers. That’s why it’s important to find a website builder that offers lots of options to improve your website in the best way possible when it comes to SEO and ranking.
WordPress
Besides a few basic SEO elements such as free SSLs, sitemaps, custom URLs, and alt tags, WordPress doesn’t offer much by itself. If you want to go big on SEO, you can do so by installing a third-party plugin.
Yoast SEO is one of the many such plugins that can greatly enhance your ranking. It’s so powerful that you’ll rarely need to use anything else regarding the technical aspects of SEO, and it even helps by suggesting how you should compose your content to rank higher.
Duda
All of the SEO capabilities that come with WordPress are included in Duda and then some. The platform serves your websites on a global CDN and automatically performs Google PageSpeed Optimization.
To redirect your bad URLs or add meta keywords and descriptions with WordPress you need to alter the back-end or use a plugin, but with Duda, this is seamlessly integrated on its dashboard, so you’re all set from the start.
Winner
Since both services make great efforts to give their users advanced SEO options, we’ll declare a tie in this category. However, if you’re really focused on SEO, it might be a good idea to go with a battle-tested option such as WordPress.
eCommerce
If you came here to learn which platform to set up your online store with, you’re in the right place. Here, we’ll take a look at how Duda and WordPress can help you sell more.
WordPress
The platform’s highest tier is an eCommerce plan that lets you accept payments in over 60 countries on unlimited products and services, integrate with top shipping carriers, and include eCommerce marketing tools.
If you’d like to expand your retail business even further, you might consider installing the WooCommerce plugin. It opens up every possibility to extend the functionality of your store and bring you more leads.
Duda
Duda’s eCommerce approach is pretty limited compared to WordPress. Even though you are offered wonderful features such as inventory management, fulfillment channels, and shopper loyalty programs, you’d need to pay extra on top of your monthly fee to use them.
You are free to sell up to 10 products on any of Duda’s plans, and then you need to pay $7.25/month to sell up to 100 products, $19.25/month for 2500 products, and $39/month for unlimited products.
Winner
Taking advantage of every eCommerce possibility is much easier with WordPress. Duda can also be a good option, but it can be restricting and much more expensive.
Customer Support
Anyone, no matter how experienced or knowledgeable they may be in building websites, can benefit from some competent assistance. You never know when things can get tricky, so having an expert running to your aid is always of great value.
WordPress
Depending on which plan you opt for, WordPress offers email and live chat support available 24/7. If you go for the “eCommerce” plan you’d have the privilege to access personalized expert support sessions whenever you wish.
Considering how popular WordPress is, the online community is immense and there are many forums where there’s a solid chance your questions are already answered.
Duda
Duda’s knowledge base is populated with useful articles about various feature fixes and troubleshooting. The platform also has a dedicated support team available through email and live chat.
There’s also the option to submit a request about the issue you’re having and based on your urgency, you’ll promptly receive the required help.
Winner
It’s another tie. WordPress and Duda are both great at taking care of their customers, so we’ve got no preference in this category.
Pricing
Let’s see how much Duda and WordPress will cost if you decide to build your website with them. Small businesses often find this aspect crucial when searching for options, so we’d certainly include our insight in the matter.
WordPress
Let’s start by saying that WordPress has a completely free plan. Although very limited and basic, it’s still an opportunity to test the service and its features.
There are four paid plans offered by WordPress: “Personal”, priced at $4/month, “Premium”, priced at $8/month, “Business”, priced at $25/month, and “eCommerce”, priced at $45/month. Note that these subscriptions are billed annually.
Duda
You can try all of Duda’s services for free on a 14-day trial. After that, if you’d like so, you can pick from the four paid plans the service offers.
Duda’s “Basic” plan costs $19/month, the “Team” plan costs $29/month, the “Agency” one is $59/month, and the “Custom” plan has a custom price adequate to your requirements.
All of the abovementioned plans have a 25% discount if you decide to pay for the whole year.
Winner
More or less, Duda and WordPress cost pretty much the same. It’d be unfair to declare a winner here too, so we’re witnessing another tie.
User Reviews
In this last category, we’ll observe real testimonies of customers about their experience with Duda and WordPress. Let’s see what they have to say.
WordPress
“Easy to develop and build, it is possible to expand appearance and functionality using plugins and add free or paid components or features easily. Has a very large community that helps solve the problem that you may face, and you can fully control your site, and one of the main advantages is the ease of search engine optimization (SEO). According to my experience, it is classified from the cheapest way to build websites where you can build any website of any kind through it.” – Mohammed A. (12/14/2020)
“In the recent years, I have learned so much about WordPress. I’ve taken several classes and I have been able to navigate it so easy. Now that I know how to use it our company’s website runs off of work for us and it works really well and we always get compliments on our website and I truly believe that WordPress being behind it helps with all of that. You can easily change and update several things on your website and know that it’s going to be secure and backed up in WordPress. You don’t have to worry about doing something wrong or ruining your website by experimenting, you’re trying things out it’s a really great program.” – Angel C. (11/17/2020)
Duda
“The interface is very intuitive, and the templates offer a great starting point. Also, having automatic backups and an SSL certificate included are great features. Duda makes everything very easy, from content creation, media organization, SEO, forms, etc. I can’t say enough about how easy it is to use and make great looking websites. Creating the desktop, tablet, and mobile sites simultaneously is a big plus too.” – Zachary G. (12/22/2020)
“Ease of use. No plugin setup, therefore no searching and validating, etc. Seamless WYSIWYG editing between different devices is outstanding. To have a simple website up and running only takes hours compared to days when I used other services.” – Egill V. (10/20/2020)
Winner
To determine a winner in this category, we’ll take a look at WordPress and Duda rankings on some renowned reviewing sites. With a tiny bit of an advantage, the last point goes to WordPress.
Conclusion
To conclude, we’ll do a recap of the categories each contender won. They were competing against each other to take the title of “the better website builder” and these are the results:
- WordPress scored five points, winning the Templates & Themes, Plugins, Customization, eCommerce, and User Reviews categories;
- Duda won in only one category – User Experience;
- They were both equal in the SEO Capabilities, Customer Support, and Pricing categories.
That’s a win for WordPress! It took down Duda with 5:1, which just proves why it’s our preferred CMS most of the time. The platform is a great option if you want the ultimate freedom when creating your site and also offers countless possibilities when style and structure are in question.
That being said, Duda is great for beginners who don’t want to bother with every detail of the website building process.
That’s a wrap. Thank you for sticking to the very end of this article. If you’re still undecided if you should go for WordPress or Duda, go ahead and visit our article about Wix and Shopify – two similar website builders that might expand your views on the matter.