Export Best Website Builder to HTML

Everyone wants to know the best website builder. Here's the honest answer: they're all fine for building. They're all terrible for owning.

Let's run through the usual suspects.

Wix is the easiest. Drag anything anywhere. Templates for everything. $17-159/month depending on features. The catch? Your site lives on their servers, built with their proprietary code. No export button. Stop paying and it vanishes.

Squarespace has the best templates. Clean, minimal, modern designs that actually look professional. $16-52/month. They have an "export" feature that spits out XML, raw content without design. Completely useless for keeping your actual website.

Webflow is the designer's pick. Visual builder that generates real code. CSS animations, interactions, the works. $14-39/month for hosting, more for workspaces. They do let you export code, but only on paid workspace plans. Free users are stuck.

WordPress is the flexible choice. Open source, thousands of plugins, runs on any hosting. The price of that flexibility? Security nightmares and constant updates. Every plugin is a potental vulnerability. Sites get hacked constantly.

Here's my hot take: the best website builder is the one you export FROM.

Think about it. You're not choosing a tool for life. You're choosing a tool to build something. Once it's built, why keep paying $200-600/year to display some pages?

All these builders are rentals. You're paying monthly to access your own work. Miss a payment and years of effort disappear. That's not ownership, that's hostage-taking.

The smart play? Use whatever builder clicks for you. Wix, Squarespace, Webflow, doesn't matter. Build your site. Get it looking good. Then export the whole thing as static HTML and host it for free.

Netlify's free tier handles most sites. GitHub Pages costs nothing. Cloudflare Pages, Vercel, all free for static content. Your $204/year Wix site becomes a $0/year website.

You lose dynamic features. Forms need services like Formspree. Comments need Disqus or similar. E-commerce won't work. But for a portfolio, restaurant menu, small business brochure, sites that are basicaly digital business cards, static HTML does everything you need.

Stop asking which builder is best. Start asking which one lets you leave.