I have built on both, and I am not going to give you another table of ticks and crosses. What I remember about each platform is not a feature list, it is four or five specific afternoons: the evening a Wix site went from nothing to bookable, the morning a scheduling limit refused to do the one thing I needed, the day I published a site by accident, and the September afternoon I discovered that my WordPress blogs had been running PHP on every single request since launch.
Those afternoons are the comparison. Here they are in order, with what I would take from each one.
The first evening belongs to Wix, and it is not close
The Wix site I built was a small appointment-booking business: three services, online payment taken at the moment of booking, a calendar that blocks the slot automatically when someone books, a mailbox on the domain. From empty account to something a customer could actually pay through was one working session. Hosting, certificate, domain, booking engine and payments all arrived already wired to each other, and nothing needed a decision I was not qualified to make.
There is no honest way to make WordPress match that. On WordPress, evening one is choosing a host, installing, picking a theme, and then discovering you need plugins for the two things Wix included. You can absolutely get there, and the result will be better in most respects later, but “later” is doing real work in that sentence.
The limit that stopped me was not on any feature list
The brief was ordinary: bookable slots in the morning, a break in the middle of the day, more slots in the afternoon. The Wix working-hours editor accepts one continuous block per day. Not two. I tried it from several directions and the answer did not change, so the schedule had to be set as one long window, with the break protected separately by blocking it out as time off in the calendar.
That is the whole character of a builder in one anecdote. Wix’s booking system is genuinely good: it takes payment, it blocks the booked slot without being asked, it notifies the owner by email and in the app. It is also exactly as deep as its designers decided, and when your requirement falls outside that, there is no layer underneath to drop into. You work around it or you change the requirement.
WordPress fails differently. A booking plugin will very likely handle split hours, and will also introduce an update cycle, a settings screen nobody documented, and a compatibility question every time the theme changes. Choose your failure mode: a ceiling you cannot lift, or a floor you have to keep swept.
I published a site by accident
The Preview and Publish buttons sit together in the top right of the Wix editor. On 21 July 2026 I clicked the wrong one, and a site that was supposed to be private went live. No harm done, as it happened: I checked it over, confirmed everything worked, and unpublished it from the site settings within the hour.
I tell it because of what it reveals about the model rather than about the button. In a builder, the editor and the live site are two views of the same thing, and “unpublished” is a setting rather than a state of the files. That is convenient, right up to the moment it is not. WordPress separates draft from published at the content level and gives you a preview URL, but it is not a safe playground either: an edit to a theme file is live the moment you save it, preview or not. Neither platform saves you from a misclick. One of them just puts the misclick one pixel from the button you wanted.
What WordPress quietly adds to your week
On 20 September 2026 I ran curl against my own sites instead of trusting my memory of how they were configured. Neither WordPress blog returned a page-cache header. Every visit, including the ones from search engine crawlers, was running PHP 8.3 to rebuild a page that had not changed in weeks. Nobody was going to tell me this, there was no alert, and the sites looked fine.
The same audit turned up a public API endpoint handing out my login name and comments left open on ninety posts with no comment form to receive them, which is a spam funnel with no upside. None of that is a scandal. It is the ordinary maintenance bill of holding the keys yourself, and it is invisible until you look. The cache story is in I thought my blog was cached, it was not, and the security pass is in hardening WordPress after finding my own site wide open.
In the weeks that Wix site existed, I never once thought about patching anything. That is not nothing, and any comparison that treats it as a rounding error is written by someone who does not do the patching.
The money, and why the two columns do not line up
| Wix | Self-hosted WordPress | |
|---|---|---|
| Published price | Free tier with Wix advertising; Light $17.77/month, Core $29.77, Business $39.77, Business Elite $159.77, billed annually | No licence fee. Hostinger Premium $2.99/month on a 48-month term, renewing at $10.99 |
| What that includes | Hosting, certificate, editor, apps, free domain for a year on paid tiers | Server space for up to three sites, 20 GB, certificate |
| What you add | Business mailbox, some apps, domain renewal after year one | Domain, mailbox, any premium theme or plugin, and your own time |
| Currency and date | USD, checked 20 September 2026 | USD, checked 20 September 2026 |
Two warnings about reading that table. The hosting figure is an entry price that requires paying four years up front and then renews at nearly four times as much, so the number that describes the plan is $10.99, not $2.99. And it carries three sites, which is why the per-site arithmetic looks so lopsided against a subscription that covers one. Divide honestly: one small WordPress site on a one-year term against Wix Light is a much closer contest than the headline suggests.
The bigger variable is not on either page. It is whether the hours WordPress asks for are hours you have. I write the full version of that sum in what I pay for hosting, domains and email.
Leaving, which is the part I would weigh hardest
That Wix site was closed in 2026 and I was the one who cancelled it. What came out of the platform was the material that already existed elsewhere: the text, the logo, the photos. The pages themselves stay in the editor, and the editor stays in the account. Unpublishing preserves the site inside Wix, which is genuinely useful for a paused project and no use whatsoever if you want to move.
WordPress content leaves as files. There is an export in the admin, and the REST API will hand you every published post as JSON without even logging in, which is how I pulled ninety posts out of this blog in one command when I audited it. Whether you move host, change theme or rebuild entirely, the writing is portable.
Two practical details from the shutdown that apply to any platform, not just this one: register the domain somewhere independent, and never let the account login be a mailbox that dies with the plan. Both bit me. The full account of closing that subscription, and a Shopify one, is in website builders I have run, and what closing them was like.
When I would still choose Wix
A one-person service business that needs to be bookable and paid this month, with nobody who will ever log in to apply an update. For that job the builder is not the compromise, it is the correct answer, and I would make the same call again. Wix generates its own sitemap and gives you per-page title and description fields, which is enough for a small local site to be found properly.
I would choose WordPress when publishing is the point rather than a feature: when the site will hold hundreds of pages, when ad and affiliate placement must be unrestricted, when somebody will actually maintain it, or when the site is an asset that may be sold, handed over or rebuilt. This blog is that case, which is why it is not on a builder. If the question underneath yours is really about hosted versus self-hosted WordPress, that is a different comparison and it is in WordPress.com vs WordPress.org.
What no comparison can settle
I cannot tell you how Wix or WordPress performs at scale, because nothing I have run on either has meaningful traffic, and I will not quote a speed test between two sites that are not the same site. I have not used Wix’s own support, so I have nothing to say about it. And my Wix experience is one project on one plan, which is a sample of one.
What running both did teach me is that the decision is not about editors. It is about which set of problems you would rather own: a ceiling somebody else set, or a floor you have to keep swept yourself. I have picked each one at least once, and I would do it again.