What is cheaper, WordPress or Wix?

In cash, self-hosted WordPress came out cheaper than Wix in all three scenarios I priced below, by about $733 over four years for a simple blog and about $1,261 for a small shop. But those gaps work out to roughly $15 and $26 a month, so if patching, backups and plugin babysitting eat more of your time than that is worth to you, Wix wins once you count hours. A static site on a free host beats both on cash, if you're comfortable shipping HTML from a Git repo.

Last verified: 2026-11-02.

Disclosure: I work on VeloCMS, which shows up further down as one of four other things you could price, with its weak points listed and a section on when to skip it. Every price, fee and limit below was read from the vendor's own page on 2026-11-02, with the link beside the claim. Prices are in US dollars unless I say otherwise. Wix is the shaky one: its page labels the figures "USD prices displayed for reference only" and says prices vary by location (Wix plans). Treat the Wix numbers as a model input, not a quote.

How should you cost this, as an engineer would?

Sticker price is the wrong variable. The number on a plan card is a monthly rate for a specific billing term, often the cheapest and often introductory. What you actually pay is a sum over a horizon: platform or hosting, domain, yearly licenses, payment processing if you sell, and the hours you spend keeping it alive. Then, at the far end, there's the cost of leaving.

I picked four years as the horizon because one hosting plan I priced bills for 48 months up front, and its renewal jump lands at month 49. A shorter horizon would flatter it.

For the domain I used a single baseline everywhere: Porkbun lists .com at $11.81 a year for registration and renewal, with WHOIS privacy free (Porkbun). Where a plan gives the first year of a domain free, I drop year one. Wix, WordPress.com and the hosts don't print what they charge for that domain afterwards on the pages I read, so the baseline stands in. It's the same for every option, which is what matters.

Your own time I won't pretend to know, so it's a variable: break-even minutes per month equals the monthly cash gap divided by what an hour of your time is worth. I'll plug in $50 an hour as an illustration only, not a statistic. Put your own rate in.

What does WordPress itself cost?

Nothing. The WordPress.org site says WordPress is open source software licensed under the GPL (WordPress.org). The software is free, and everything around it is where the bill comes from.

The big line is hosting. Hostinger's WordPress page showed me three plans, all billed up front on a 48-month term; I priced the two cheapest (Hostinger). Premium is $2.49 a month ($119.52 due today), renewing at $10.99 a month, with weekly backups, 20 GB of SSD and three sites allowed. Unlimited is $3.49 ($167.52 today), renewing at $16.99, with daily backups and 50 GB of NVMe. Each includes a free domain for one year, and the page says you can cancel anytime. Bluehost's page showed Starter at $3.99 a month on a 36-month term, renewing at $9.99, with weekly backups and a free domain the first year (Bluehost).

Look at those renewal multiples, because they're the whole game on cheap shared hosting. Hostinger Premium goes from $2.49 to $10.99, about 4.4 times. Unlimited goes from $3.49 to $16.99, about 4.9 times. Bluehost Starter goes from $3.99 to $9.99, about 2.5 times. For a site you intend to keep for a decade, the renewal price is the real price and the intro price is a coupon.

Next comes whatever you license. Plenty of WordPress sites run on free themes and plugins, and I'll price that case. But a lot of teams buy a premium theme or builder, and those renew yearly. The one I could read today: GeneratePress One is $99 a year for one site, $149 for up to ten and $199 for a hundred sites, with yearly plans renewing automatically (GeneratePress). One vendor, but a fair stand-in for "a commercial theme plus a block toolkit."

The last line is maintenance, and this is where WordPress people and Wix people talk past each other. WordPress core now updates itself for new installs: the developer docs say new installations have automatic updates on for both minor and major core releases by default, while plugins and themes only auto-update "in special cases" (WordPress developer docs). So the thing that needs your attention isn't core. It's your plugin list. Patchstack's 2026 report counted 11,334 new vulnerabilities in the WordPress ecosystem in 2025, 91% of them in plugins, only six in core, and says 46% weren't fixed by the time they were disclosed (Patchstack). That doesn't mean your blog gets hacked. It means the unpaid job of reading update notes is real, and it scales with your plugin count.

What do the WordPress.com tiers cost?

WordPress.com is the hosted version, so you skip the server shopping. The pricing page showed, per month, in USD with tax excluded (WordPress.com pricing):

• Personal: $9 month to month, $4 billed yearly, $3.25 on a two-year term, $2.75 on three years
• Premium: $18 month to month, $8 yearly, $6.50 two years, $5.50 three years
• Business: $40 month to month, $25 yearly, $20 two years, $17.50 three years
• Commerce: $70 month to month, $45 yearly, $36 two years, $31.50 three years

What each tier unlocks matters more than the price. The page lists plugin installs from Personal upward, SSH, WP-CLI and Git deploys on Business and Commerce, real-time backups on Business and Commerce, and WooCommerce tooling on Commerce. A fee row for paid subscriptions and other payments (on top of Stripe's processing fee) falls from 8% on Personal to 0% on Commerce, and a separate WooCommerce payment-feature row shows 0% on Business and Commerce. Annual and multi-year plans include a free domain for one year.

Here's the catch for modeling: the renewal line on each card was an unfilled template when I read it ("Auto-renews at [price]..."), so I can't tell you the renewal price. In the scenarios I assume the displayed rate holds, and I say so each time. If you're going to run this, check the checkout screen.

What do the Wix tiers cost?

Wix's upgrade page listed four paid tiers at these monthly figures, which it says are for yearly subscriptions "paid in full at the time of purchase" (Wix plans, Wix premium plans):

• Light: $17.77 a month, 2 GB of storage, 2 collaborators, free domain for a year
• Core: $29.77 a month, 50 GB, accept payments, basic eCommerce, scheduling and services, 5 collaborators
• Business: $39.77 a month, 100 GB, accept payments, standard eCommerce, 10 collaborators
• Business Elite: $159.77 a month, unlimited storage, advanced eCommerce, an advanced developer platform, 100 collaborators

The thing a shop owner has to notice is that "accept payments" first appears on Core. If you want to sell anything on Wix itself, Light isn't an option, and the sticker price you saw advertised on the cheapest tier is not the price of a store. A $0 Free tier shows up in the page's table too, but a help article says connecting a domain you own requires a paid plan (Wix help), and the FAQ says a Premium plan is what lets you remove Wix branding.

Three caveats I can't resolve from the page. Each paid card says "Price includes GST" while the footer says prices exclude applicable taxes, so I can't say what tax is in the figure. Core, Business and Business Elite each show a struck-through figure and "Save 50%", but the page doesn't say what period that figure covers, so I can't tell whether the displayed rate is a promotion. And no renewal price appears anywhere. I model the displayed rate as flat because that's the only number I have, but if it's a promo, Wix is costlier than my math shows. The free-domain voucher is for a first-time Premium purchase only, must be used within 60 days, and isn't included when you renew or upgrade.

Then there's the part developers tend to forget: apps. The Wix App Market page I read shows pricing labels, such as "Free plan available," "14 day free trial" and "Premium Site Required," but no monthly figures (Wix App Market). Wix's App Market terms say apps are billed either by the third-party developer or through Wix (App Market terms), and the developer docs describe paid plans as recurring fees billed monthly or yearly (Wix developer docs). I couldn't verify a specific app price, so none is in the math. Set your own app budget; it's the Wix analogue of a WordPress plugin license.

What are the payment and transaction fees?

If you sell something, this line can dwarf the platform price, and it's where the two platforms are closest to identical.

Wix Payments' US schedule lists cards other than American Express at 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction, American Express at 3.7% plus $0.30, a 1.5% cross-border fee on top, a 1% currency-conversion fee, and a $15 chargeback fee. The page doesn't list a separate transaction fee (Wix Payments fees). WooPayments, the first-party payment option for WooCommerce, lists 2.90% plus $0.30 for US cards, +1.50% for international, +1.00% for currency conversion and a $15 dispute fee (WooCommerce fees). Same rates, to the decimal. It's "pay as you go, without setup costs or monthly fees" for online sales (in-person card readers are $5 a month each) and is available in 38 countries, per the product page.

So processing isn't a differentiator between those two. What differs is what surrounds it: a platform tier that gates the feature (Wix Core and up), a hosting plan (WordPress), or a tier that also carries a fee row (WordPress.com).

How much does leaving cost?

The exit bill is the cost nobody puts on a pricing page, and it's lopsided.

On Wix, a help article says the site "needs to be hosted and operated on Wix's servers," and offers no way to export the site itself. It says the content you build "belongs to you" without describing how to get it out. The domain can live at another registrar, but only if you connect it to a paid plan (Wix help). Blog posts are the sharpest edge: Wix's help center says "Currently, it is not possible to export blog posts to other platforms," and lists it as a feature request (Wix help). So a Wix blogger's real exit cost is the hours to copy and rebuild, and that scales with how many posts you've published. Price that with your own hourly rate and your own post count.

On WordPress, Tools, Export writes one XML file in the WXR format, and WordPress's docs say it contains posts, pages, custom post types, comments, custom fields, categories, tags, custom taxonomies and users, ready to import into another WordPress site (WordPress documentation). That list doesn't mention media files or theme settings, so expect to move uploads and design yourself. Still: a documented, machine-readable path. I'd weigh that as a real, if hard to quantify, discount on the whole four-year bill.

Scenario 1: what does a personal developer blog cost?

One author, no payments, a .com, four years. Assumptions: the displayed rates hold at renewal (the WordPress.com and Wix pages don't print renewal prices), the domain baseline is $11.81 a year, and I list the Wix Light tier because it's the cheapest paid one.

• Static site on a free host plus a domain: 4 × $11.81 = $47.24
• WordPress on Hostinger Premium: $119.52 for 48 months, plus domain years 2 to 4 (3 × $11.81 = $35.43) = $154.95
• WordPress.com Personal on a two-year term: $3.25 × 24 = $78 per term, × 2 = $156, plus $35.43 for the domain = $191.43
• Wix Light: 4 × ($17.77 × 12 = $213.24) = $852.96, plus $35.43 = $888.39
• VeloCMS Pro billed yearly: 4 × $86.40 = $345.60, plus a $47.24 domain bought elsewhere = $392.84

For the static option I used Cloudflare Pages' Free plan, whose limits page lists 500 builds a month, 20,000 files per site, a 25 MiB cap per asset and 100 custom domains per project (Cloudflare Pages limits). GitHub Pages also works for a personal blog, but its docs say it isn't meant "as a free web-hosting service to run your online business" and set a 1 GB site size and a soft 100 GB-a-month bandwidth limit (GitHub Pages limits).

The gap between Hostinger and Wix Light is $888.39 minus $154.95, which is $733.44, or $15.28 a month across 48 months. At an illustrative $50 an hour, that's about 18 minutes of upkeep a month before Wix comes out ahead. After month 48, Hostinger Premium renews at $10.99 a month, so a year costs $131.88 plus the domain's $11.81, or $143.69, against $225.05 for Wix Light plus the same domain. That's $81.36 a year apart, $6.78 a month, or about 8 minutes.

If you SSH into servers for a living, a WordPress install isn't 18 minutes a month of anything you resent. If you'd rather never think about it, 18 minutes is the margin you're deciding on. The static site beats both on cash and on maintenance exposure, since there's no plugin list. It loses on everything a non-developer wants from a CMS.

Scenario 2: what does a small business brochure site plus blog cost?

Five brochure pages, a blog, a contact form, maybe bookings. Four years, same assumptions. This is where daily backups and a paid theme start to matter.

• WordPress on Hostinger Unlimited with a free theme: $167.52 + $35.43 domain = $202.95
• The same, plus GeneratePress One for one site: $202.95 + (4 × $99 = $396) = $598.95
• WordPress.com Business at $25 a month billed yearly (SSH, Git deploy and real-time backups): 4 × $300 = $1,200, plus $35.43 = $1,235.43
• Wix Core (payments and scheduling included): 4 × ($29.77 × 12 = $357.24) = $1,428.96, plus $35.43 = $1,464.39
• Wix Light, if you need neither bookings nor payments: $888.39
• VeloCMS Pro billed yearly: $392.84

Against Wix Core, self-hosted WordPress is $1,261.44 cheaper without the premium theme, which is $26.28 a month of slack, and $865.44 cheaper with it, which is $18.03 a month. The premium theme and block toolkit eat about a third of the gap by themselves. Add a form plugin or a licensed backup service and it shrinks further. I couldn't read a current price for a specific one, so treat the $865 as a ceiling.

WordPress.com Business is worth pausing on. It's the closest like-for-like with self-hosting (SSH, WP-CLI, Git), and at $1,235.43 it lands about $229 under Wix Core. If you want the portability of WordPress without running a server, that's the price of not running one, assuming the displayed yearly rate holds.

Scenario 3: what does a small shop cost?

Assume 40 orders a month at $50 each, $2,000 a month in sales. These are illustrative; swap in your own. Card processing at 2.9% plus $0.30 is $1.45 + $0.30 = $1.75 per order, so $70 a month, $840 a year, $3,360 over four years, identical on Wix Payments and WooPayments per the published schedules above. I left VeloCMS out of the processing math because it uses Stripe, and the Stripe page I could fetch showed the UK schedule, not the US one. Check Stripe's pricing for your country.

Platform cash, four years, domain included:

• WooCommerce on Hostinger Unlimited: $167.52 + $35.43 = $202.95 (WooCommerce itself is offered as a free download on the WooCommerce site)
• WordPress.com Commerce at $45 a month billed yearly: 4 × $540 = $2,160, plus $35.43 = $2,195.43
• Wix Core: $1,464.39
• Wix Business (standard eCommerce): 4 × ($39.77 × 12 = $477.24) = $1,908.96, plus $35.43 = $1,944.39
• VeloCMS Pro billed yearly: $392.84 (it lists e-commerce on Pro, with no platform fee on Stripe sales, per its pricing page)

Add the $3,360 of processing to the first three and you get $3,562.95 for self-hosted WooCommerce, $4,824.39 for Wix Core and $5,555.43 for WordPress.com Commerce. The WooCommerce versus Wix Core gap is the same $1,261.44 as in scenario 2, or $315.36 a year. That's your budget for shipping and tax extensions, subscription add-ons, a backup service, and the hours spent keeping a store patched, where an unpatched plugin hurts most because it holds order data. Don't treat the whole gap as profit.

I haven't priced specific WooCommerce extensions for shipping, tax or subscriptions, or specific paid Wix apps, because I couldn't read a price. Those lines decide whether the headline gap survives, so price your list before you commit.

What else could you price?

You aren't limited to the two names in the title, so here are four options on equal footing.

A static site on a free host. Cloudflare Pages has a Free plan (limits quoted above), and GitHub Pages is the other obvious host. You write Markdown or HTML, push to Git, and the host serves it. Strength: the cash cost is the domain, and the attack surface is small. Weakness: no admin UI, forms, commerce or comments unless you wire third-party services, and a non-technical co-author can't use it. GitHub's docs also say Pages isn't meant to run an online business, so a commercial site belongs on a host whose terms allow it.

Ghost. Ghost(Pro)'s pricing page showed Starter at $18 a month billed yearly for 1,000 members, Publisher at $29 and Business at $199, with Marketplace themes listed as "No" on Starter (Ghost pricing). Strength: it's built around publishing and newsletters, so there's nothing to assemble. Weakness: pricing follows audience size and the page defines members as free or paid accounts, so a growing free list costs you, and I saw no store feature on it.

Squarespace. Its pricing page, read as a UK render in pounds with VAT included, showed Basic at £14.40 or £19.20 a month depending on billing (the page text didn't label which was which), Core at £20.40 or £28.80, a 2% fee on online-store sales on Basic and 0% from Core (Squarespace pricing). Strength: a polished editor and store tied to one plan. Weakness: I couldn't read a US price list, and like Wix it's a closed hosted platform, so I'd verify what export covers before building a large site on it.

VeloCMS. Three plans: Pro at $9 a month, Business at $29 and Agency at $69, with yearly billing at $86.40, $278.40 and $662.40 (VeloCMS pricing). There is no free plan. Every plan starts with a 14-day trial that takes a card unless you hold a cardless trial code, and the first charge lands on day 15. Pro lists a custom domain, a page builder with 70+ blocks, newsletters, memberships, e-commerce, 5 GB of storage and 5,000 subscribers. Strength: blog, newsletter, paywall and store in one bill. Weakness: a small catalog, since its marketplace page says "59 free integrations" (VeloCMS marketplace) against the 50,000+ and 60,000+ plugins WordPress.com's pricing page quotes.

Who is each option cheapest for?

Self-hosted WordPress is cheapest for someone who already maintains servers and doesn't price their time high. Watch the renewal jump and the plugin licenses.

WordPress.com is cheapest for someone who wants WordPress portability without running a stack, provided the renewal price on checkout matches what you modeled. Business is where it starts competing with Wix Core.

Wix is cheapest once your hours are priced high and you need payments or bookings without assembling plugins. The math says that threshold is around 18 minutes a month for a simple site and bigger for a shop. It costs more in cash and buys less portability.

A static site is cheapest for a developer writing alone. A free host plus a domain beats everything above on cash.

Ghost is cheapest for someone who just publishes and sends newsletters at modest list sizes. Squarespace fits a visual-first brochure site where you value the editor.

VeloCMS undercuts Wix on these four-year numbers ($392.84 against $888.39 for Wix Light and $1,464.39 for Wix Core), but not self-hosted WordPress, WordPress.com Personal ($191.43) or a static site. It fits a solo creator who wants a blog, newsletter and small store in one subscription and can live with a smaller catalog.

When is VeloCMS the wrong choice?

Several cases, and they're not edge cases. If you want a free plan, it doesn't have one, and the trial needs a card unless you hold a cardless code. If you need WordPress's catalog (a niche LMS, an obscure CRM sync), 59 integrations won't cover you. If you want to own the server, VeloCMS is a hosted service, and I didn't find a self-hosting option on its pricing page. If your budget is a few dollars a month and you enjoy admin work, a Hostinger plan or a static site is cheaper on cash.

Check portability claims for yourself too. VeloCMS's homepage FAQ says posts, members, media and settings export as JSON, CSV or Markdown from the admin panel (velocms.org). That's the vendor describing itself, so test an export on the trial first.

FAQ

Is WordPress really free? The software is. WordPress.org describes it as open source under the GPL (WordPress.org). You still pay for hosting, a domain and whatever you license.

Does Wix take a cut of my sales? The Wix Payments page lists processing at 2.9% plus $0.30 per US card transaction and doesn't itemize a separate transaction fee (Wix Payments fees). Accepting payments needs Core or higher.

Is WordPress.com cheaper than Wix? On the displayed yearly rates, yes at the low end: Personal is $4 a month against Wix Light at $17.77. At the high end it's similar: Business at $25 and Commerce at $45, against Wix Core at $29.77 and Business at $39.77. The WordPress.com renewal price wasn't printed on the page, so confirm it at checkout.

Can I move a Wix site to WordPress? Wix's help says the site must run on Wix's servers and that exporting blog posts isn't currently possible (Wix help). Plan for a manual rebuild.

What happens when the intro hosting price ends? On the pages I read, renewals ran from about 2.5 to 4.9 times the intro rate. Model the renewal price, not the intro price, if you plan to keep the site.

Last verified: 2026-11-02. Prices change, Wix's change by country, and the scenario assumptions (four years, $11.81 domain, 40 orders at $50) are mine. Re-run the arithmetic with your own numbers.