Website builders have made website creation accessible, making them perfect for first-time website builders who don’t love learning new tech or simply don't have the time to. Many companies have debuted AI site generation tools. I’ve tested many AI website builders by creating simple websites in minutes. However, some AI tools produce shoddy websites while others use collaborative processes to build beautiful sites that match your unique vision. I’ve extensively researched how various AI website builders use your data and built websites with several to determine their effectiveness. Here are the best AI website builders that provide customizable, collaborative site setup processes.
Our Picks
What is the best AI website builder right now?
Squarespace’s Blueprint AI is the best AI website builder, providing a uniquely collaborative design process to help you create a website that matches your vision. You can choose elements like your brand colors and fonts, then select the pages you want it to build. You can regenerate the site -- both the overall look and individual pieces of content -- as often as it takes to get something you’re happy with.
Squarespace offers a moderately intuitive site editor, fast and reliable server performance (uptime and site speed) and robust security protocols. You’ll get all this, plus unlimited storage and bandwidth, for $16 a month (billed annually), which is significantly less than you’ll pay for comparable plans on other website builders.
Best AI website builder overall
Pros
- Collaborative AI website builder gives you more control over the end result than other tools
- Unlimited storage and bandwidth
- Good server performance
- Full ownership of your creations
Cons
- Customer service can be unreliable
- High transaction fees for e-commerce sales on low-tier plans
- Must actively opt out of your data being used for training AI
Squarespace is a popular website builder powering over four million websites (and, through sponsorships, several of your favorite podcasts).
Who it’s best for
Squarespace is the best AI website builder if you want a fully collaborative design process that will help you build a custom website in minutes. The cost may be steep for hobby or personal websites, but it’s similar to -- or more affordable than -- other AI website builders, and quite reasonable for small businesses.
Why we like it
Squarespace offers the most advanced, collaborative AI of any website builder I’ve tested. Where most AI website generators only ask for your site name, industry and possibly a color scheme, Squarespace lets you choose design factors such as brand tone and fonts. This granular level of control helps you create a fully customized website that you can plug your content into and publish with minimal adjustment.
Squarespace performed well in my hands-on testing, with a relatively intuitive site builder, excellent uptime and solid site speed. Squarespace provides a robust security toolkit alongside 24/7 security monitoring and two-factor authentication, making Squarespace safer than many web hosts. You’ll get Secure Sockets Layer or SSL certification to encrypt your (and your visitors’s) data, firewall protection to prevent malware from infecting your site and anti-DDoS (distributed denial of service) protocols to prevent malicious traffic from flooding your server.
I had issues with customer support, and Trustpilot reviews suggest this isn’t an unusual occurrence. However, the 1,400 Trustpilot reviews and my singular review are statistically insignificant compared to the millions of sites using Squarespace. Moreover, there’s a good chance you won’t need to deal with support much. I’ve only contacted customer service a few times in over 10 years of hosting websites, so these issues are unlikely to affect you much.
Ownership and training
Squarespace’s Blueprint AI is trained on OpenAI and Google models. According to its Content Generation Terms, Squarespace reserves the right to use your input (brand information and other prompts) and output (the content created based on those prompts) to train its AI, as well as the right to share that data with third-party AI creators. However, you can opt out of having your data used for training, both by Squarespace and by third-party services, in the settings area.
The good news is that Squarespace doesn’t claim ownership over your site. All of the information you enter into the Squarespace AI -- and everything it creates for you -- belongs to you.
Pricing
Squarespace Basic costs $16 a month, billed annually. Basic includes unlimited storage, so you can publish as many pages as you want, and unlimited bandwidth (sometimes called data transfer), so your site can handle unlimited monthly visitors. Basic works for hobby sites, portfolios or service-based business websites. However, it’s not ideal for e-commerce, as Squarespace charges 2% to 7% transaction fees on top of payment processing fees on this plan, forcing you to either raise your prices or lose money.
If you’re starting an e-commerce store, you’ll want to spring for Core, priced at $23 a month (billed annually). Squarespace doesn’t charge fees for regular transactions made on sites using Core and only charges 5% for digital content and memberships (rather than the 7% charged for subscriptions on Basic). Core also includes additional tools for shipping, sales tax calculation and marketing.
You can drop digital content and membership transaction fees down to 1% by choosing Plus, priced at $39 a month (billed annually). Or, if you want to avoid transaction fees entirely -- and you’re confident you’ll sell enough to make up the difference -- you buy Advanced for $99 a month (billed annually). However, this only eliminates Squarespace transaction fees; payment processing fees will still be applied to your users’ purchases.
Best AI website builder for e-commerce stores
Pros
- AI generator provides multiple options for each prompt
- Your content is not directly used to train AI
- Full suite of e-commerce features, including intuitive checkout
- Extensive inventory and shipping management features
- Shipping discounts
- Sales tax calculation and collection tools
Cons
- AI process isn’t fully collaborative
- Starting plan is expensive compared to other options
Shopify is a specialized website builder for e-commerce, currently powering over 4.4 million online stores. Shopify can help you grow offline, too, with point-of-sale tools for selling at pop-up shops and even permanent retail locations.
Who it’s best for
Shopify is ideal if you want to create an e-commerce store with AI. Shopify’s tools are particularly powerful if you’ll be selling physical products, as you’ll get advanced shipping and inventory management tools, plus shipping discounts and even tools for in-person sales. However, Shopify’s AI site generation is less advanced than Squarespace Blueprint, so you’ll need to do more site editing if you choose Shopify.
Why we like it
Shopify maximizes your choices from the outset by creating snapshots of three website templates rather than immediately generating a whole site based on your prompts. However, I found its ability to personalize those templates based on my prompts to be limited, especially when compared to the Squarespace AI site builder.
Still, Shopify has a lot of potential. In my experience, Shopify has relatively intuitive systems for site and account management, the best site speed I’ve encountered and excellent uptime. Shopify also offers robust security protocols similar to what Squarespace offers, plus an extensive suite of e-commerce and marketing tools. I even had a good experience with Shopify customer service, though Trustpilot reviews suggest Shopify might be inconsistent.
Shopify offers advanced e-commerce tools for inventory management, shipping and sales tax calculation, simplifying the process of selling physical products online. You’ll also get email marketing software, something you’d have to buy an extension or use a third-party service for with other website builders.
Ownership and training
According to the Shopify Magic FAQ, Shopify’s AI is trained on a mix of proprietary data aggregated from Shopify’s databases and “the world’s leading large language models”, according to its help center. Shopify may use your existing store-level data to customize your results, but this data won’t be shared with other merchants or used for more general training.
In conversation with a live chat representative, I confirmed that Shopify grants you ownership over all content you create with AI. You also retain ownership over the prompts you enter into its systems.
Pricing
Shopify’s Basic plan costs $29 a month, billed annually. Basic includes unlimited storage and bandwidth, plus access to Shopify’s email marketing system with unlimited contacts. You’ll also gain access to most of Shopify’s tools for inventory and shipping management, plus shipping discounts of up to 77% for USPS, UPS and DHL. This is a great plan for small stores focused on selling physical products.
Medium-sized e-commerce operations can choose the Shopify plan, priced at $79 a month, for increased shipping discounts (up to 88%) and additional staff accounts (up to five). You can also opt for the Advanced plan, priced at $299 a month, which includes improved checkout capacity and up to 15 staff accounts.
Enterprise businesses can take advantage of Shopify Plus, which offers full checkout customization, inventory management for 200 locations, unlimited staff accounts and up to 200 POS Pro locations. Shopify Plus starts at $2,300 a month and requires you to work with a sales associate to create your unique plan.
Best for AI website builder for WordPress users
Pros
- Collaborative design process
- Full control over site map during site generation
- Flexible drag-and-drop editor based on Elementor
- Your data will not be used for AI training
- Robust security
Cons
- Plans are expensive for what they provide
10Web is an AI website builder based on WordPress -- the most popular content management system for creating content like blog posts and web pages -- and Elementor, a popular visual design tool for WordPress. This provides experienced WordPress users with both a user interface that feels familiar and the power of AI site generation. 10Web has a 4.8 out of 5 star rating on Trustpilot based on almost 2,000 reviews.
Who it’s best for
10Web is a great choice if you want the user experience of WordPress and Elementor with the added benefit of AI website and content generation tools. However, you’ll pay a premium for its services, so you should only consider 10Web if you have a significant budget.
Why we like it
10Web offers a collaborative AI site generation process similar to what you’ll get from Squarespace. You get to choose your site name, purpose and colors. You’ll also get to create a site map, dictating both the pages themselves and the sections generated on each page. This may reduce the amount of editing you’ll need to do after the site is created. The only downside is that you can’t view individual pages during generation or easily regenerate them the way you can in Squarespace Blueprint.
What really makes 10Web unique, though, is its basis in WordPress technology. After the initial site generation, you’ll be able to use a site editor based on Elementor, one of the most popular page builders for WordPress. This makes it really easy to adapt to if you’ve used Elementor before, without complicating setup for users unfamiliar with WordPress.
10Web secures every website with SSL certification, firewall protection and anti-DDoS protocols. Furthermore, 10Web teams perform continuous security monitoring and patching on all of its servers. Malware scans are also performed on a semi-regular basis. 10Web will automatically notify you and begin the malware removal process if malicious software is found on your site.
Ownership and training
10Web is trained entirely on “top large language models like GPT3”, as stated in the pricing page FAQ. On speaking with the live chat representatives, I confirmed that 10Web doesn’t use your prompts or content for training purposes, and you retain ownership over all content.
Pricing
10Web’s AI Starter plan can work for a small business website, but its high long-term cost makes it a poor choice for hobby sites. It costs $13 a month for the first year and $25 a month afterward. This plan includes full access to 10Web’s AI tools, including unlimited image generation, 5,000 words of content generation plus enough bandwidth for 10,000 monthly visitors and enough storage to host at least 100 websites.
10Web offers its AI Premium and Ultimate plans, which can be effective for business websites, but are cost-prohibitive for personal or hobby sites. The mid-tier AI Premium plan costs $18 a month in the first year ($36 a month afterward) with enough bandwidth for 50,000 monthly visitors and enough storage for at least 150 pages. AI Premium provides up to 50,000 words of content generation and unlimited AI image generation.
There’s also an AI Ultimate plan priced at $28 a month for the first year ($55 a month afterward) with enough bandwidth for 100,000 monthly visitors and enough storage for at least 200 pages. You’ll get unlimited AI image and text generation with AI Ultimate.
10Web offers separate e-commerce plans starting at $14 a month ($26 a month on renewal). These plans can work for small-to-medium-sized e-commerce operations, but there’s no unlimited option, so you may have to switch website builders as your store grows. 10Web’s e-commerce plans feature unlimited product creation and order management tools. You’ll also get enough bandwidth for at least 30,000 visitors and enough storage for at least 100 pages. All plans come with unlimited AI image generation and range from 10,000 to unlimited AI text generation allowances. 10Web charges transaction fees of 0.5%, plus standard payment processing fees.
Fastest AI website builder
Pros
- Fast, high-quality AI website builder
- AI text, image and logo generation on some plans
- Great server speed and uptime
- Robust security, including 24/7 site monitoring
- More affordable than other website builders
Cons
- Must sign up for four-year plan to get the best discount
- Minimal collaboration during AI site creation
- Customer support can be slow
Hostinger is our top-ranking web host thanks to its intuitive account interface and excellent server performance. Hostinger also offers an AI website builder that creates a site for you in under two minutes based on your website name and description -- and unlike other website builders, you can access it for the same prices as regular shared hosting. Moreover, the recently released Hostinger Horizons tool makes it possible to generate web apps in minutes.
Who it’s best for
Hostinger is the best AI website builder for creating a site on a tight budget. The first four-year contract will save you over $10 a month compared with using the other website builders on this list for the same length of time -- and you’ll still be saving money when the contract renews.
Hostinger’s new Horizons tool also makes it a great choice if you’re interested in building a web app with no coding expertise. You can use this tool to create a simple web app, like a word count tracker, in minutes and connect it to your Hostinger website for free. However, the app is only free for the first seven days. After that, you'll need to pay for a Horizons plan, starting at $15 per month, to continue using the app you've created and building new apps.
Why we like it
Hostinger’s AI website builder generates a full site, including relevant images and text, based on your site name and description. The more detailed your description is, the more personalized your website will be; a progress bar shows when you’ve added enough info for Hostinger to create something unique. Hostinger then creates a site layout and lets you choose a color scheme. However, you won’t get to choose fonts, site pages or other elements during site generation like you can with Squarespace.
Hostinger also recently introduced Horizons, a web app builder that can create simple web apps -- things like image compressors or QR code readers -- for you in minutes. This tool is currently free, and the apps even come with a subdomain-based web page (like yourapp.hostinger.com) so you can publish them right away. You can also connect them to your existing domain or Hostinger website. This can help you create something interactive and memorable for your visitors, strengthening your brand.
Hostinger has several broader hosting benefits, including excellent server performance and intuitive account management tools. Furthermore, sites created by the Hostinger AI website builder are protected by SSL certification, firewall protection, anti-DDoS protocols, 24/7 site monitoring and automated backups created every time you update the site.
The downside of Hostinger is its inconsistent customer service. You can only access support through live chat, and it can take half an hour or more to reach a human representative.
Ownership and training
While Hostinger’s privacy policies don’t fully flesh out AI permissions, I was able to confirm via live chat that you’ll retain full ownership of all of your website data. Data you enter into the system won’t be used to train the AI, either.
Hostinger representatives further confirmed that data used to create websites and web apps through the AI site builder and Hostinger Horizons are not used in training. Both the website builder and Hostinger Horizons are built by configuring commercial LLMs -- like OpenAI and Anthropic -- with custom instructions. Hostinger then performs post-processing on the code generated by these customized LLMs to improve results.
Pricing
Hostinger offers a specialized website builder plan for $3 a month (renews at $8 a month) based on a four-year contract. This plan is great if you want to add your own content to an AI-generated site template, as it includes the full AI website builder. However, it’s less than ideal if you want to rely entirely on AI, as it doesn’t include AI text or image generation beyond the initial site creation. As for resources, you’ll get enough storage for at least 250 pages and unlimited bandwidth.
If you’re building an e-commerce store, you’ll want the Business Website Builder plan. This plan costs $4 a month (renews at $14 per month) when you choose a four-year contract and includes AI text, image and logo generation. You’ll also get access to e-commerce features including order management, inventory management and payment processing, plus enough storage for at least 500 pages. However, you’ll only be able to sell up to 500 product types, so you may want to choose a different website builder if you intend to sell a wide range of products.
You can also gain access to the AI website builder through Hostinger’s shared hosting plans.
Pro tip: Include an AI disclosure
Many people are concerned about the ethics of how AI is trained and powered. It’s generally considered best practice to disclose your use of AI somewhere on your website. Your AI disclosure doesn’t need to be prominent -- one great option is to put this information in the footer, where a copyright message would usually go -- but it should be relatively easy to find and obvious. This helps your audience make an informed decision about how they want to interact with your website.
Factors to consider when choosing an AI website builder
Ethical and environmental concerns
AI models are trained by consuming massive amounts of data. This data may be gathered by scraping millions of websites without securing consent from -- or providing compensation for -- their creators. As a result, there are several leading copyright lawsuits (including a prominent lawsuit against Stable Diffusion) against AI firms. You may want to avoid using AI -- or choose an AI website builder that’s transparent about its training models -- if you’re concerned about ethical and legal complications.
There are also significant concerns around the amount of power, water and rare minerals used to power AI data centers. This demand for resources causes both local issues, such as AI straining the US power grid, and global issues, such as increased carbon emissions. As such, you may want to avoid using AI if you’re worried about climate change.
Ownership and training
Think about the ownership of content and how large language models are trained. Who owns the AI-generated websites -- you, or the website builder company? Will the company use your creation to further train its AI, and if so, does that apply only to the content generated during the initial site creation or does it apply to content published on your site later? Can you opt out of your data being used to train the AI?
You can typically find this information in the privacy policy or terms of service of the AI website builder you’re considering. We’ve already reviewed these documents for the companies on this list, but you may want to double-check them if you have specific concerns.
Moreover, you may want to consider more general terms of ownership over AI content. Specifically, AI content without significant human editing cannot be copyrighted in the US at this time. Work “with AI elements” may be copyrightable, but if you’re concerned about copyright, it might be better to avoid AI.
Type of hosting
Website builders typically use either shared hosting or cloud hosting.
Shared hosting splits a web server’s processing power, bandwidth and other resources between many websites. Each site is allotted a specific percentage of these resources. This can complicate things for fast-growing sites, as they might experience issues if they exceed the limits, but most plans include more than enough processing power and storage for small-to-medium-sized websites. Shared hosting is also affordable, often starting at $2 to $5 a month. Traditional hosting companies like Hostinger use shared hosting for website builders.
Cloud hosting stores your data in a web of interconnected web servers. This makes it easy to scale, as your site can pull resources from multiple servers. Cloud hosting may also provide better uptime when compared with shared hosting, as your site can pull from a secondary server if the primary server goes down. However, cloud hosting tends to cost more, often starting at $15 to $20 a month. Website builder companies such as Squarespace use cloud hosting.
Some companies may also let you use their website builders with other hosting types, like virtual private server or VPS hosting, but this is less common.
Design flexibility
The best AI website builders create a fully customized website for you based on multiple inputs like your industry, business name and brand colors. You should also be able to personalize every aspect of the completed design, from individual image placements to site-wide fonts and color schemes, at any time.
Many AI website builders offer a free trial or even a free plan so you can test their design capabilities before you commit. You can also read in-depth reviews or watch video tutorials to better understand a website builder’s design options without creating an account.
Ease of use
Once you get past the initial site generation, there are major discrepancies between AI website builders’ interfaces. Moreover, what feels intuitive to me might feel overly complicated to you. I recommend watching video tutorials or testing the website builder you’re considering through a free trial or plan before you make a purchase.
Storage
Storage determines how many files (like images or videos) you can upload to your site and how many web pages you can host. Many AI website builders offer unlimited storage so you don’t have to worry about this.
Some website builders do have strict storage limits. Generally, 1GB of storage can host 10 large pages (like product pages with lots of high-resolution images) or 100 small pages (like blog posts with one or two high-resolution images). I’ve seen estimates as high as 1,000 pages per 1GB, but I prefer using the smaller estimates. I also recommend buying a plan with more storage than you think you’ll need, as you’ll have to either stop publishing content or upgrade your plan if you exceed the limit.
Bandwidth or data transfer
Bandwidth is technically a measurement of how much data your site can send per second. However, most website builder companies use the term bandwidth to describe data transfer, which is the amount of data your site can send in a full month.
Many website builders offer unlimited bandwidth, so you don’t have to worry about your site being overwhelmed by an influx of visitors. Others list the specific number of monthly visitors your site can handle on each plan.
If the website builder you’re considering lists bandwidth or data transfer as a measurement like 10GB, you can estimate the amount of bandwidth you need by assuming 1GB is equivalent to 10,000 visitors -- or just take the “more is better” approach.
Uptime
The percentage of time a host’s servers (and, in turn, your website) spend online. If people can’t access your site, they will often go elsewhere, which may result in lost traffic and audience trust. Uptime is even more important for business websites, as lost traffic often equals lost revenue.
Most website builders offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee, meaning your site won’t have more than 10 minutes of server-related downtime per week.
Site speed
The number of seconds your site takes to load. I recommend aiming for a site speed of 3 seconds or less, as bounce rate -- the percentage of people who leave your site after viewing only one page -- increases by 32% when loading times go from one to three seconds.
Site speed is largely controlled by your website design, but there are a couple of techniques website builders can use to improve your site speed:
- Caching: A specialized data storage process that uses the CPU instead of the traditionally used RAM to improve site speed. This works because the CPU is typically faster than the RAM. Some forms of caching also store static information (information that doesn’t change often) on visitors’ browsers to improve loading times on repeat visits.
- Content Delivery Network or CDN: A method of storing data in several interconnected servers in different countries so visitors’ devices can pull from the server closest to their location. This can be faster than pulling data from a server on the other side of the world.
Security
Your website builder should keep your website safe. Specifically, it should use at least two security protocols:
- Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certification: A protocol that encrypts data sent to and from your site, like email addresses submitted through a contact form. This makes the data difficult for malicious users to intercept or abuse. SSL certification also tells browsers and VPNs your site is safe; some won’t open a site without it. Moreover, Google penalizes sites without SSL, potentially making it harder for sites without it to rank well.
- Firewall protection: Filtration software that scans traffic to your site and blocks anything that appears malicious -- kind of like the website equivalent of using a filtered pitcher to remove sediment from your drinking water. A firewall may not protect you from everything, especially with over 450,000 malware programs being created each day, but it should protect your site from common threats.
Many website builders offer additional security protocols like distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection, which prevents your site from being overwhelmed by floods of malicious traffic, and multifactor authentication to keep unauthorized users out of your account.
Customer support
You should have 24/7 access to customer support through your preferred communication method, whether that’s live chat, email or phone. Representatives should respond within a few minutes on live chat or phone (or 1 to 2 hours via email) and be capable of helping you with most common issues.
Pricing
There are two website builder pricing models:
- Traditional web hosting pricing: Used by traditional hosting companies like Hostinger, this pricing model is built around a steep introductory discount (often 50% or more) for long-term contracts (often two to four years). You’ll have to factor the higher renewal cost into your long-term budget if you choose a company using this model.
- Simplified website builder pricing: Used by companies like Wix, this pricing model doesn’t offer any discounts, but the price also doesn’t change when your contract renews. This makes your long-term accounting easier, as you don’t need to calculate renewal increases, but it can be more expensive.
You’ll also want to consider the additional costs of hosting a website. The most common is domain registration, which may be free for the first year (though I often recommend buying your domain elsewhere) but will cost $10 to $30 a year afterward.
How CNET tests website builders
My research process starts with examining various website builders’ plans to assess their features, price and relative value. If a company offers high-quality features at good prices, I check reviews on sites like Trustpilot to get a feel for its overall reputation. I also check the company’s Better Business Bureau page (if it has one; only US companies do) for complaints.
Next, I perform hands-on testing using our framework for testing web hosting. This involves creating a website and taking one week to evaluate the site builder in five key areas:
- Ease of use: How simple it is to buy a plan and build a website.
- Performance: Uptime (the percentage of time a site spends online) and site speed (how many seconds it takes a site to load).
- Customer support: The number of support channels available and how effective each channel is.
I also take a closer look at the security measures and overall pricing structure to determine how the website builder measures up to its competition.
I may perform partial testing for AI website builders, which involves generating a website to see how effectively the AI follows my prompts, but does not include the full week of evaluation.
Other AI website builders we've tested
GoDaddy
GoDaddy is a popular web hosting company that performed reasonably well during my hands-on testing, with great server performance and solid customer service. The website builder also has better security than GoDaddy’s basic shared hosting plan, with SSL certification, firewall protection and anti-DDoS protocols.
The downside is that GoDaddy’s website builder is inflexible on the design front. You don’t get much opportunity to customize things during the AI generation process, and the site editor is too simplistic to create a truly unique website. It can be effective for a simple portfolio site, but you’ll want to choose a different site builder if you’re creating anything more complex -- especially since the price rises from $10 a month to $17 a month after the first year.
Wix
Wix has been a popular website builder for a long time, with good reason -- it’s fast, reliable and comes with better customer service than most of the website builders I’ve tested.
Unfortunately, the AI website generation process is the one area where Wix majorly disappointed me. The sites it created used layouts that haven’t been popular since the early 2000s, combined with images and text that rarely related to the type of site I created -- and Wix makes it unusually difficult to switch templates later, so you’ll be stuck with the terrible design. Moreover, you’ll pay $17 a month to host your poorly designed AI website. While I do recommend using Wix with a template, I can’t recommend its AI website builder.
Site123
Site123 is a freemium AI website builder that thoroughly impressed me during my tests of the best free website builders. Site123 has impressed many others, too, earning a 4.2 out of 5 star ranking on Trustpilot based on 8,500 reviews.
Site123 builds an entire website for you in seconds with only a site name and purpose. Once it’s built, your site can be edited with a combination of AI and manual editing tools. You’ll also get access to great SEO tools, including an automated SEO auditor -- something you won’t get from other website builders.
As with most free things, however, there’s a catch: Site123 is unclear about how its AI is trained and who owns your data. This may be acceptable if you’re building a site for fun, but it means Site123 should be avoided if you’re creating a professional or business website.
