Wix is one of the most commonly used, and most popular, website building platforms in the world. Its easy to use, relatively inexpensive, and can deliver a simple, good-looking website all without asking you to write custom code. However, those selling points can also be viewed as limitations. Because Wix is cheap and user-friendly, it doesn’t offer many advanced functions or ways to build a truly unique website - but Wix is hoping to change that with Wix Studio.

Wix Studio is a platform similar to Wix but distinct in a few important ways. Its a bit more functional, a bit more flexible, and really provides you the tools to do a lot with your Wix website. With that in mind, let’s look at some of the unique ways that Wix Studio stands out and explore whether or not its worth the investment.

This post is specifically about Wix Studio, a new creative suite created by Wix that is separate from their main editor. For more information about the standard version of Wix, check out our blog comparing the features, pricing, and functionality of Wix and Squarespace.

Wix Studio at a Glance

Wix Studio is a tool from Wix based around their traditional editor but with more ways to customize your designs. Where Wix was designed with beginners in mind, emphasizing user-friendliness and a streamlined design process over robust design features, Wix Studio was designed with professionals in mind - and they give you much more flexibility with how you design your websites because of that focus.

That doesn’t mean you have to be a professional web designer to use Wix Studio - it just means that the platform has a bit more design capabilities than the standard Wix editor, and thus can be a little overwhelming for a beginner.

How Wix Studio Differs From Wix

Wix Studio is similar to the standard Wix platform with some new tweaks and features catered to professional web designers and design agencies. Many of the features in Wix Studio revolve around more advanced functions that give professional designers more ways to fill out a website. We’ll look at some of Wix Studio’s specific features later, but in a big-picture sense, these tools include more design, e-commerce, and code-writing features.

Collaboration is another big emphasis in Wix Studio. The main Wix editor is designed primarily for solo designers - individuals trying to create a web presence for their business without a team behind them. However, since Wix Studio was created with design agencies in mind, it allows multiple people to work on a website simultaneously. 

Wix Studio’s Advanced Toolkit

SEO Technology

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) knowledge is a must-have for growing your website and business in 2024, but it's also something that not everyone has the time to learn. Wix Studio strives to take the guesswork out of SEO setup by letting you use their default SEO settings, which automatically compress images for faster load times, generate 301 redirects, cache your pages, and more.

But the truly cool aspect of Wix Studio’s SEO technology is what it lets you do on your own rather than what it can do for you automatically. In addition to standard SEO settings like page descriptions and tags, Wix Studio lets you connect with several Google programs instantly. Among other things, Wix Studio promotes instant page indexing on Google and integration with Google Search Console, Merchant Center, and Business Profile.

E-Commerce

Wix Studio is built for e-commerce integration far more than the standard Wix editor, but it's far more than an improvement over just Wix. Wix Studio gives online shop managers a lot of tools to play with and a lot of ways to reach more customers.

One of the standout features of Wix Studio’s e-commerce platform is… 

You can also sync your website’s shop to several other platforms with Wix Studio, from eBay and Amazon to social media sites like Facebook and Instagram.

Another cool element of Wix Studio’s e-commerce toolkit is the number of payment processors available. You can sync up to 80 payment gateways on a Wix Studio e-commerce platform, giving your customers a lot of different ways to shop. Wix also offers their in-house payment processor, Wix Payments, on top of other popular options available across the globe, including PayPal, Stripe, Klarna, and more.

Custom Code

Wix Studio gives you more opportunities to integrate custom code into your website. While you don’t have to know how to code to use Wix Studio, which is the same as the standard Wix editor, you can use your coding ability to create unique animations and design elements with Wix Studio.

Prebuilt Design Animations

You don’t need to know how to write custom code to integrate fun animations into your website. Wix Studio has a bunch of fun pre-built animations you can plug into your website to make the pages more dynamic. Wix Studio also has a nice collection of pre-designed assets you can plug into your pages rather than custom-designing them yourself, saving you time on your overall project.

These features are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what Wix Studio has to offer. You can read more about Wix Studio’s specific features and capabilities here.

How Wix Studio Compares to Other Platforms

Squarespace

Squarespace and Wix are both strikingly similar platforms. They cost nearly the same, have similar features, and both exist for a similar purpose - to give people a more user-friendly and accessible platform to build a website.

But Wix Studio is a slight deviation from that purpose since it was designed for designers. It’s a bit more advanced than Squarespace and provides more ways to customize a website and really fine-tune the details to your liking. If accessibility is your top priority, we would still recommend Squarespace. But if you do have some design skills and want to dive into making your website your own, you’ll likely prefer Wix Studio to Squarespace.

WordPress

As we’ve looked at, Wix Studio is a very designer-friendly platform, offering a ton of tools and plug-ins for you to take your website to the next level. In that way, the platform is a bit more similar to WordPress than the standard Wix editor - but these two website builders are still vastly different. WordPress still provides a lot more design flexibility, but as a result, it's far less user-friendly than either version of Wix. WordPress demands a lot more research to find the right plug-ins for the right jobs, and without the right editor tools, a lot more coding knowledge.

Wix Studio does offer a lot of apps and plug-ins, but it's not on the same level as WordPress.

Shopify

Shopify is the premier platform for building an online shop, and there’s nothing included in Wix Studio that can knock Shopify out of the top spot. However, Wix Studio has some useful e-commerce evolutions not available in the standard Wix editor making it a strong e-commerce builder, even if it's not the best. 

One of the biggest reasons Wix Studio has such a strong e-commerce platform is because of its third-party integrations. The Wix Studio App Market has over 500 external applications for e-commerce alone, each designed to make your life as a shop manager and your customers' lives as consumers easier. Some of these apps let you ship products to more countries, some let you create custom price plans with membership and subscription options, and some give you accounting tools to manage your finances and taxes, and that’s just the start.

Again, Shopify is still the premier platform for building an online shop. But as far as secondary options go, Wix Studio is a great one - especially since you can do more with it than just e-commerce, whereas Shopify is restricted to just letting you build an online store.

Wix Studio Pricing

The advanced design and collaboration features discussed above are available in all of Wix Studio’s price tiers, from their cheapest $19-a-month option to the priciest $159-a-month subscription. The difference between the tiers comes down mainly to 

Wix Studio tries to match its pricing with the size of your business. The least expensive tier is intended primarily for solo entrepreneurs or small businesses with only a few employees. As you go up the list, the subscriptions get pricier while giving you more storage, more CMS items, and more slots for site collaborators. 

Let’s look closer at the specific details of each subscription tier so you can find out exactly what you’re getting.

Basic: $19/Month

The first available subscription tier on Wix Studio is also the most limited, but it still gives you 10 GB of media storage, 1,500 CMS items, website analytics, a unique domain, and space for up to three website contributors.

Wix Studio Basic is a great starter tier. Even if it doesn’t give you the same access as Wix Studio’s other subscriptions, you can use it to test out the platform and see if the design-friendly features are worth the cost.

Standard: $27/Month

Wix Studio’s Standard plan provides a bit more than the Basic plan. Still, it's pretty limited relative to the two pricier subscription tiers. With this one, you will receive 50 GB of media storage, 5 website contributors, and 4,000 CMS items. The big unique selling point the Standard plan has over the Basic one is that it allows you to accept payments from customers, whereas Wix Studio Basic doesn’t include that function.

Plus: $34/Month

Wix Studio’s Plus plan is yet another step up. The highlights are that it offers 10,000 CMS items, 120 GB of media storage, 10 spots for contributors, and gives you access to premium support, unlike the first two tiers. 

Elite: $159/Month

The Elite tier is a massive jump in price, but an equally big leap in functionality. This subscription will take you from 10,000 CMS items to 100,000 - and from 120 GB of media storage to unlimited media storage. Obviously, not everyone will need a website this big - and $160 a month won’t be practical for everyone. But if you’re in the market for a higher-capacity website, Wix Studio Elite is a great option.

In addition to the storage and CMS items, the Elite tier gives you up to 15 spots for website contributors and customized analytics reports, which are a bit more detailed and tuned specifically to your website than Wix’s standard analytics data.

Wix Studio’s pricing, at least the elite tier, might scare of some new users. But we believe the advanced functionality is worth the cost if you have a big enough business, and if you’re a small business owner, one of the cheaper tiers will be a great fit.

Want to learn more about the best platforms for your website? Book a consultation and chat with our team today.