Weebly vs Wix For Teachers – Which Is Better?

The internet is at the core of the changes facing the education sector, and teachers have so much to benefit from this, as do students.

Children are also becoming more familiar with technology, and the internet thus serves as a great way for schools and teachers to incorporate new learning methods.

Today, teachers can use the web for educational purposes in many different ways, including creating a school website, to make teaching interesting and interactive.

A website also holds information that outlines the working processes of the educational institution, and is oriented towards the school’s administration, teachers, parents, and pupils.

A website can therefore contribute effectively to the fruitful cooperation and harmony between these groups.

Why Teachers Need Websites?

Unlike the traditional system of teaching, the contemporary teacher’s image and activities have changed a lot. In the 21^st century, the teacher’s image and skills are a crucial and indispensable part of the education process.

Teachers who have personal websites have higher chances of expanding the field of activity. It also offers an opportunity for growing their reputation and recognition among their students, colleagues, and parents.

Building a learning platform online can seem time-consuming and daunting, but with the right website builder, it’s possible to create one with the best correlation of ease of use, convenience, and functionality.

Website builders offer an array of features, niche-focused elements, tools, and characteristics that help create, customize, and manage decent teacher websites.

If you’re thinking of launching a teacher website using a website builder, you need to know the best services available, and how to choose one that’s just right for your needs.

We narrowed down our review of the best website builders for teachers to Weebly and Wix, and what follows is a comparison of the two builders.

Weebly vs Wix: Which Website Builder Is Best For Teachers?

We’ll review both platforms, looking at their features, major parameters, and what each has to offer for teachers. Read on to explore more and find out which website builder takes the crown.

Also Read: Weebly vs Wix For Photographers

What Is Weebly?

Weebly is one of the top website builders suited for beginners and professionals. It has an easy to use interface and drag and drop editor, so anyone, no matter their age or technical experience, can create a website from scratch in no time. Not to mention, Weebly also has templates for teachers.

For teachers and schools, Weebly created an educational tool dubbed Weebly Education, which allows users to build and launch websites for projects, educational purposes, and student portfolios.

The builder also considers student, teacher, and parent confidentiality as its system allows teachers to set up passwords for their students’ accounts.

They can then decide the information they want kept hidden or displayed from the accounts, so the information is kept secure and the passwords are also kept safe.

Weebly also offers a blogging feature through which teachers can publish home assignments, updates and class news, and information directed towards parents.

Furthermore, students can express their thoughts and share ideas on certain topics and get comments from other users.

It also supports an unlimited number of blogs which teachers can connect to their websites, so they can easily create open/closed dialogues and manage comments.

The Weebly Campus Edition is available for schools and districts to create professional campus websites, and their project admins can manage the teacher and student accounts from an integrated dashboard.

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Weebly For Education: Features

Weebly for Education is a superb tool that teachers can use to create project and educative websites as well as student portfolios.

It also offers opportunities for students or teachers to reveal their creative abilities using multimedia features, while controlling the creative process and securing the data provided.

The content elements are the website’s building blocks, and with the Weebly drag and drop functionality, users can select themes, add text, place photos, pages, and eventually publish the site.

Users have the option of using their own site URL or house their sites on weebly.com subdomains.

The Weebly educational version allows teachers to set up accounts with access available for up to 40 students, who log in with their usernames and passwords assigned by the teachers. They can track the students’ progress continuously via the website.

With a paid premium account, teachers can add over 40 students and integrate audio and HD video players to their websites.

Students too can build websites through intuitive and well-organized instructions. Teachers can guide them by allowing them to practice uploading images, rotating, cropping, or fading the opacity.

Alternatively, they can select from several template designs, and add written content and headers.

Unlike public sites for students, Weebly for Education manages privacy concerns by offering a safe learning environment through privacy settings that can be enabled to classroom-only viewing.

You can control the account through your teacher dashboard in Weebly, view recent updates on students, and even disable sites if necessary.

Teachers can also upload tutorials and assignments using the “Assignment Form” tool, and accept homework assignments from their students.

On the other hand, students can login to Weebly students’ sites with their login details given by their teacher, but they can only use very limited features for student sites.

For example, each student can only create one site with a limit of five pages, but if the teacher upgrades the account to Pro, they can create 10 sites with unlimited pages alongside pro features from the Weebly education version.

Students can also download assignments and upload them again to the teacher’s site, or create projects and update their sites with the details and the teachers can view them online.

Note: As of August 1, 2022, the Weebly For Education platform has been discontinued. However, Weebly has partnered with Edublogs for transitioning users.

Weebly For Education: Customer Support And Resources

Weebly provides support for customers via an extensive help center. The help center features a knowledge base of more than 150 articles on using Weebly.

Aside from that, there’s the Weebly Blog and Inspirational Center where you can find helpful articles that’ll improve your knowledge about using the Weebly platform.

You can access these help resources without logging into your Weebly account. However, you can get better support recommendations when you log in.

Notably, Weebly has an online community which you can’t access if you don’t login. The community is a place where you can interact with other users, learn how to use the platform, and scale your business in the long run.

If you want to reach the Weebly support team directly, you can use the contact form to send an email. To do this, you must login to your account.

Weebly doesn’t give any timeframe for replying contact forms, but you should expect a quick reply if you contact them during standard business hours.

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Weebly Pricing

Weebly offers a free plan and three premium plans. The free plan offers more than enough features to get most students and teachers started.

For individual tutors or freelancing teachers with few students, the free account may suffice.

Here are the Wix premium pricing plans:

• Connect – $5 per month when billed annually
• Pro – $12 per month when billed annually
• Business – $25 per month when billed annually

Weebly Pros and Cons

Pros

· Free plan is feature-packed

· Drag and drop editor

· Easy to use

· Walks students helpfully through website creation

· Chat and email support

· Dashboard gives teachers privacy and access controls

Cons

· No video tutorials on features and design

· The Weeby platform for educators has been discontinued

Check Out: Best Weebly Themes For Artists & Teachers

What Is Wix?

Wix is a popular website builder known for its versatility and wide variety of templates. It’s great for teachers or schools and students seeking a simple and affordable tool to build sites on a budget.

However, price isn’t the only benefit teachers can get from Wix. Its mobile-friendly templates offer a variety teachers can choose from in the Education category.

These include templates for kindergarten, private schools, language and music schools, plus much more.

The website building platform can be used by even the most novice of users, as it is simple, easy to use, and intuitive, plus there are free and paid options with great features to choose from.

Wix Features

Wix offers a variety of features such as the hundreds of free mobile-friendly templates specific to the grade (preschool, elementary and more) or subject matter (health & wellness, education, creative arts).

If you don’t want a specific theme under Community and Education, you can browse through other templates to find one that you really like for your teacher website.

Templates are fully customizable with content elements like homepage, images, sub-headers, blogs, and more. You can also edit or add and delete content when you want, so you can maintain a neat and updated, easy to navigate site.

If you’re not sure what you want, or lack coding skills, Wix ADI (Artificial Design Intelligence) tool is available to help you build a website.

It guides you through a set of industry-specific questions and automatically creates a website based on the content you submit on request.

Wix offers mobile optimization for your site so your students and parents can access from other devices. A member login feature is available that allows others to join your website and you can add a forum to share and communicate with students.

There’s also an App Market from which you can select multiple extensions and apps to integrate into your site.

These include Wix Pro, Online Calendar, Wix Events, Wix Chat, Scheduling Pro, Latest News, Comments, Wix Video, Voice Comments and more.

The builder also allows you to sign up for free and begin designing your website. Once you register for Wix, you can start designing your site and upgrade to paid plans whenever you’re ready.

Wix Customer Support And Resources

If you need support with using Wix, the help center should be your go-to web page.

The help center features articles on thirty different categories. It’s hard not to find an article that solves whatever problem you’re having with using Wix.

Some of the categories covered in the help center include getting started, using the Wix editor, connecting domains, billing, managing site members, and accepting payments.

At the bottom of the help center, you’ll find trending topics, which gives you an idea on what issues others are having.

You can only contact the Wix customer team directly when you log into your account.

The help center isn’t the only resource in Wix’s arsenal. You’ll also find web design inspirations and there’s Wix Learn, where you can take online courses on using the platform.

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Wix Pricing

Wix offers a free plan with limited features and free hosting. Paid plans come in five different levels, but they generally offer extras like storage and bandwidth, plus your own domain name if you desire one.

However, the free version also gives you options to create a lovely website.

The cheapest plan costs $4.50 per month and the most expensive costs $24.50 per month. A custom domain will cost you $5 per month to connect, but for teachers, a plan with more storage is recommended.

You can try Wix’s unlimited plan that costs $12.50 with 10GB storage, free domain for a year, and unlimited bandwidth.

Wix Pros and Cons

Pros

· Modern, aesthetic templates

· Free version has great features

· Versatile

· Applicable to any industry

· Simple and easy to use

· Accessible from several devices

· Fair-priced unlimited plan

· Responsive templates

Cons

· Lacks many features for teacher websites

Also Read: Wix vs Divi

Wix vs Weebly – Which is better?

We’ve looked at the unique features and traits of Weebly and Wix website builders. Both are extremely popular as they make it easy for you to create a website without needing to code or technical knowhow.

The two builders also serve millions of customers worldwide, with Wix serving more than 200 million, and Weebly over 50 million.

These numbers don’t necessarily mean one is stronger than the other, but there’s something unique about each of them that draws their customers to use them.

But what sets them apart when it comes to using Weebly or Wix for teachers’ websites?

While the two have similarities, there are some differences that can help teachers decide which builder would work for them based on their teaching needs.

We’ll compare the builders based on the following factors so you can see how they fair when pitted against each other:

· Ease of use

· Design flexibility

· Backup and restore options

· Support

· Pricing

Ease of Use

Both Weebly and Wix are drag and drop website builders, making them very easy to use as it’s a matter of dragging items across the pages until you like the final look. But this doesn’t mean they’re similar.

Wix is purely drag and drop, so you can drag items around your page, but Weebly’s templates are more structured, giving it more consistency, plus you can switch templates until you settle on one you like.

Overall, Wix’s drag and drop editor wins in ease of use as it’s simple to personalize templates so novices have complete flexibility. Wix also offers more choices and creative freedom, easy navigation, and design in just a few clicks.

On the other hand, Weebly’s structure design makes for a rigid editing experience, which users may find difficult, even though it’s aimed at newbies with zero coding knowledge.

Weebly is also less intuitive than Wix, whose Wix ADI tool helps create sites in a matter of minutes. If you don’t want the hassle of dragging and dropping, customizing, and designing your site, Wix’s ADI helps you set up your website fast.

All you do is enter some information like what your site is for, the name, and pick a design you like – the ADI uses this information to create the site.

You can always change the layout and design or move your site into Wix Editor if you want to be more hands on.

Otherwise it’s personalized and ready to go live and you have creative control without the stresses of designing page layouts on your own.

The ADI makes design less painful, effortless, quick, and it looks great.

While Weebly is user-friendly, Wix overtakes it in flexibility and ease of use, but personal preference will determine which one you enjoy or feel restricted when creating your site.

Design flexibility

A winning template is more than just the appearance of the website on the page. It includes factors like mobile friendliness/responsiveness, ability to switch templates after publishing the site, variety of templates, and customization.

Wix offers more than 500 professionally designed templates for any industry and use. You can also build from scratch so there’s something for every type of user.

The templates are all fully mobile responsive so you don’t miss out on visits from mobile users.

Weebly offers high quality templates, but the designs are fewer than Wix, though they’re professional and also mobile responsive. The themes are industry-specific and they have a special focus for Education sites for teachers, students, and schools.

When choosing a template, you’re spoiled for choice with Wix, but both let you preview your template – though only Weebly will let you switch templates after publishing your site.

Wix falls short on design flexibility because if you switch templates once the website is live, you have to start all over again.

Customization also influences the choice of website builder because if you want something, you can tweak it to your liking. A builder with customizable and high quality themes is desired, and both Weebly and Wix offer high quality designs.

Wix’s templates use the drag and drop design so you can tailor it to whatever you like or wherever you want content elements to go.

Weebly’s structured editing can be limiting for some users but others may find it relieving. Either way, you still get to create a personalized and unique site.

Weebly also lets you use coding to customize your site, which is included in the editing menu automatically such that you can embed code into your page, but it’s optional. You can still use Weebly even if you don’t have coding knowledge or experience.

With Wix, you can’t code. Instead, you have to enable Wix Code so as to create custom functions and content on your site, like building databases or making it more interactive.

However, Wix is more beginner-friendly than Weebly in terms of coding, but Weebly lets you embed HTML code straight into your web page with its editor.

Weebly takes the crown in design flexibility as you can switch templates once the site is live, and you can embed code to your web page.

Backup and Restore options

Wix allows you to save as many versions of your website as you like, so you can always revert to a recent version if you delete something accidentally.

Weebly allows you to export your site and download it to a zip file, but you may not be able to use drag and drop outside of its editor. You also can’t upload the site back into the website builder.

While Weebly has a backup and export option, it isn’t convenient, but you can undo changes you make as long as you don’t publish the site or leave the editor.

If you delete pages, you have to wait for Weebly support to restore the site, which is really slow and can affect your site.

Weebly isn’t user friendly in terms of backup and restoration so Wix wins on this front.

Support

Wix offers email and phone support across all paid plans, making it easy for its users. Every step of the website building process has a help button that links back to the guide for the specific tool. It also offers video tutorials and a community forum for further assistance.

Weebly offers email support across its plans, but phone support is limited to the top three paid plans. It also offers live chat support, a help center, and community forum.

Wix still wins in support, though it lacks live chat, but all paid plans get phone and email support.

Pricing

Weebly offers a free plan, just like Wix does, but there are paid plans in both builders. Weebly’s three paid plans remove the pesky ads and allow you to connect your own domain. Its prices may be slightly higher than Wix, but offer more value.

Wix packs a lot into its packages, but to connect your domain name, you need to upgrade to one of its premium plans. This also gets rid of the Wix ads. Plans range from $4 to $24 per month, while Weebly’s range from $5 to $25 per month.

Overall, the winner on price and value for the money is Weebly.

Similarities And Differences: Wix And Weebly

Similarities

• Both platforms are website builders
• Both Wix and Weebly support the drag and drop functionality
• Both feature pre-made templates
• They both support site backup
• With either Wix or Weebly, you are provided with a free plan
• Both platforms have a similar pricing range
• Both Weebly and Wix have staunch customer support channels

Differences

• Wix has more templates than Weebly
• Weebly is more flexible than Wix
• Wix supports more backup versions than Weebly

Conclusion

The battle between the two website builders is stiff, but there are some areas where they both fall short, and other strengths that make it hard to decide which one to choose as a teacher.

While Wix is easy to use, navigable, with great support and backup options, it may not be the best if you want to switch templates, and doesn’t offer good value for the money.

Weebly may seem rigid in its design structure, and the backup and restoration of websites isn’t as good as Wix. Support options are limited to paid plans, though the nifty live chat feature is an advantage, and it does offer value for your money.

Wix wins on ease of use, design flexibility, backup and support, while Weebly trumps it on value and ease of switching templates once the site goes live.

The choice depends on your actual needs. There are Weebly and Wix fans with different concerns like creative freedom or ability to switch templates, or those who want a robust but reliable system, but generally, Wix is the winner in our comparison.