Best Free Website Builders in 2026: 8 Free Plans Compared
Short answer: Carrd is the best free plan for a one-page site, and GitHub Pages or Cloudflare Pages are the only free options here that let you use your own domain. Wix, WordPress.com, Webflow, Framer and SITE123 are free but keep their branding or ads, and each needs a paid plan before the site looks like yours. Prices below were read on each vendor's pages in October 2026.
The catch with every free website builder is the same: the free plan is a trial of the editor, not a site you can put on a business card. Most publish on the vendor's subdomain with the vendor's badge, so the real question is what it costs to remove both.
Quick comparison
| Builder | Custom domain on free | Ads or branding on free | Free limits | Cheapest plan that removes branding |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wix | No | Wix branding | Wix subdomain | Light (price set by your location) |
| WordPress.com | No | WordPress.com ads shown to visitors | 1 GB storage | Personal, $4/mo billed yearly |
| Webflow | No | "Made in Webflow" badge | 2 static pages, 1 GB bandwidth | Basic, $15/mo billed yearly |
| Framer | No | Framer subdomain | 1 GB bandwidth | Basic, $10/mo billed yearly |
| Carrd | No | "Made with Carrd" branding | 3 sites | Pro Lite, $9/yr (Pro Standard, $19/yr, adds a custom domain) |
| SITE123 | No | SITE123 floating tag | 250 MB storage, 250 MB bandwidth | Premium (price shown by plan length) |
| GitHub Pages | Yes | None | 1 GB site size, 100 GB soft bandwidth a month | Free |
| Cloudflare Pages | Yes | None | 500 builds a month, 20,000 files | Free |
Toolradar data: Toolradar evaluated 201 website builder tools as of October 2026, and 8 of the 10 top-ranked tools offer a free plan, per its best website builders ranking. Our own count across the eight below is narrower: only 2 of 8 free plans let you connect a custom domain, and both are developer tools with no editor.
What does "free" actually buy you?
A free website builder gives you hosting and an editor at $0, and almost always a web address on the vendor's domain. That means yourname.wixsite.com rather than yourname.com, which matters if the site is meant to win clients or rank in search.
The second cost is visible branding. Wix, Webflow, Carrd and SITE123 add their own mark to the page, and WordPress.com shows ads to your visitors. A badge in the corner is fine for a school project and wrong for a freelancer's portfolio. If you also need a contact form, our best free form builders cover the free options, and AI tools for creating websites cover prompt-to-site starts.
For a broader ranking that includes paid-first tools, see our best website builders guide, and for prompt-driven tools our best AI website builders.
Carrd: the best free plan for a one-page site
Carrd's free plan allows 3 sites and publishes them with "Made with Carrd" branding. That is a better deal than it sounds, because a link-in-bio, a product waitlist or a personal profile needs nothing more than one clean page.
The cheapest way out of the branding is Pro Lite at $9 a year, which removes it but keeps you off a custom domain. Pro Standard at $19 a year is the plan most people want, since it adds a custom domain, forms and embeds. Both prices are per year, not per month, so Carrd has the cheapest paid step in this list by a wide margin.
The weakness is scope. Carrd builds one-page sites, so a site with a blog, a store or ten pages is the wrong tool, and you would be paying to work around it.
Wix: the most polished free editor
Wix has a permanent free plan with a drag-and-drop editor and thousands of templates, published on a Wix subdomain with Wix branding. Wix states that a Premium plan is what lets you connect your own domain and remove that branding.
The first Premium step is Light, with 2 GB of storage and a free domain for the first year. Wix sets prices and currency by location and includes local tax in the figure it shows, so check the Light price on its plans page from your own country. For the field after Light, see Wix vs Squarespace.
The catch is that the free plan is a long way from the plan you will need. Light is 2 GB and lists no ecommerce, so anyone planning to sell online should price the next tier up, Core, with 50 GB, before treating Wix as cheap.
WordPress.com: free hosting with ads
WordPress.com's free plan gives you 1 GB of storage and unlimited pages and posts on a wordpress.com address. It shows ads to your visitors, and it does not support custom domains or plugins.
Personal is the step that fixes this. At $4 a month billed yearly, it turns the ads off, adds a free custom domain for the first year and raises storage to 6 GB. Billed monthly it is $9 a month, so the yearly commitment saves more than half.
That is the cheapest paid route here that bundles a domain, which is why it wins the cost comparison below. The trade-off is that you stay on hosted WordPress.com, so plugins remain a paid-plan feature.
Webflow: a free plan that proves the tool, not the site
Webflow's Starter plan is free, but it caps you at 2 static pages, 1 GB of bandwidth and 50 form submissions, and it publishes on a webflow.io address with the "Made in Webflow" badge. Two pages covers a landing page and a contact page, and nothing more.
The paid Basic plan costs $15 a month billed yearly and lifts that to 300 static pages, 10 GB of bandwidth, unlimited form submissions and a custom domain. Webflow's pricing table starts both the badge removal and the custom domain at Basic, not Starter.
Webflow suits designers who want precise layout control and plan to pay. For a hobby site on a $0 budget, the page cap makes it a poor fit.
Framer: free to design, paid to publish on your domain
Framer's free plan includes a Framer domain, 1 GB of bandwidth and 500 AI credits to try. A custom domain is not part of it.
Basic costs $10 a month billed yearly, includes a free custom domain, 50 GB of bandwidth and 2 CMS collections, and caps a site at 30 pages. That is the lowest monthly price among the design-led builders here, $5 under Webflow's Basic.
Framer works best for a polished marketing page or portfolio where look matters more than page count. If you need more than 30 pages or ten CMS collections, the Pro plan is $30 a month, which changes the math.
SITE123: the smallest free allowance
SITE123 is free indefinitely with no credit card, but the allowance is small: 250 MB of storage and 250 MB of bandwidth on a SITE123 subdomain. A site with a few photos will find that limit quickly.
Premium removes the SITE123 floating tag, connects your domain and raises storage and bandwidth to 3 GB each. Premium also includes a free domain for the first year, and its price depends on the plan length you pick (3 to 36 months).
The weakness is lock-in: SITE123 states you cannot download your website, so moving later means rebuilding it by hand.
GitHub Pages: free, with your own domain, and no editor
GitHub Pages hosts a site straight from a public repository on a free GitHub account. It supports custom domains, shows no ads, and allows sites up to 1 GB with a soft limit of 100 GB of bandwidth a month.
There is no visual editor, so you write HTML or use a static site generator. GitHub also says Pages is not meant to run an online business, an e-commerce site or a SaaS product, so a store belongs somewhere else.
That makes it the cheapest lasting option for a developer portfolio, a project page or documentation, and a poor one if you have never used Git.
Cloudflare Pages: the free host with the most headroom
Cloudflare Pages hosts static sites on its Free plan with up to 20,000 files per site and 500 builds a month. It also allows up to 100 custom domains per project, which is far more than a free builder usually offers.
Like GitHub Pages it has no editor, so you deploy from a Git repository. The Free plan runs one build at a time, which is enough for a site you update by hand.
Choose Cloudflare Pages over GitHub Pages when you plan to run several domains, or when the site is a business that GitHub's usage terms discourage.
What does $0 cost you over a year?
A free plan is $0 only if you accept the subdomain and the branding. Here is the first-year cost of removing both, using the cheapest paid plan on each vendor's page, billed yearly.
| Route | First-year cost | Domain included |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub Pages or Cloudflare Pages | $0 | No, buy one elsewhere |
| Carrd Pro Standard | $19 | No, buy one elsewhere |
| WordPress.com Personal | $48 (4 x 12) | Yes, first year |
| Framer Basic | $120 (10 x 12) | Custom domain supported |
| Webflow Basic | $180 (15 x 12) | Custom domain supported |
Among builders with an editor, WordPress.com Personal is the cheapest route at $48 a year, and it is the only one in this table that bundles a domain for the first year. Wix and SITE123 are left out of this table because neither shows a single US list price on its plans page. The $0 and Carrd routes win on price only because you buy and manage the domain yourself, and none of these vendors' pages put a price on that.
How to choose
Pick Carrd for a one-page site you want live today, and budget for Pro Standard to put it on your own domain.
Pick WordPress.com if you need a multi-page site or blog with a custom domain for the least money, and are willing to pay $4 a month.
Pick Wix if the editor matters most and you are ready to pay for Light once the site matters. Compare it with Squarespace in our Wix vs Squarespace breakdown first.
Pick GitHub Pages or Cloudflare Pages if you can use Git and want a free site on your own domain with no branding.
Pick Webflow or Framer if design control is the point. Treat the free plan as a trial and plan for $15 or $10 a month.
For a business site you will pay for, our website builders for small business list covers ten options with ecommerce in mind.
Methodology
We compared the free and cheapest paid plans of eight builders using each vendor's own pricing or documentation page, read in October 2026: Wix plans, WordPress.com pricing, Webflow pricing, Framer pricing, Carrd Pro, SITE123 pricing, GitHub Pages limits and Cloudflare Pages limits. Yearly costs are the monthly price multiplied by 12, billed yearly. We did not run speed or uptime tests. The Toolradar count comes from its live ranking, and Toolradar also publishes its own free website builders guide.
FAQ
What is the best free website builder in 2026?
Carrd for a one-page site, because its free plan allows 3 sites and the paid step to a custom domain is $19 a year. For a multi-page site, WordPress.com's free plan gives 1 GB of storage, and removing its ads costs $4 a month billed yearly.
Can you make a website 100% free?
Yes, but only on the vendor's subdomain or with a developer host. GitHub Pages and Cloudflare Pages are free and support your own domain, though you still pay a registrar for the domain name.
Which free website builder lets you use your own domain?
Of the eight here, GitHub Pages and Cloudflare Pages allow a custom domain on a free account. Wix, WordPress.com, Webflow, Framer, Carrd and SITE123 all require a paid plan for it.
Is Wix really free?
The Wix plan is free with no expiry, but it publishes on a Wix subdomain with Wix branding. Connecting your own domain and removing the branding needs a Premium plan, starting with Light, whose price Wix sets by location.
Do free website builders put ads on your site?
Some do. WordPress.com shows ads to visitors on its free plan and turns them off with Personal at $4 a month billed yearly. Wix, Webflow, Carrd and SITE123 show their own branding or badge instead of ads.
Which free plan has the most storage?
GitHub Pages allows sites up to 1 GB and WordPress.com's free plan includes 1 GB. SITE123 is the smallest at 250 MB, and Webflow limits you to 2 static pages and 1 GB of bandwidth.
When should you upgrade from a free plan?
Upgrade when you need your own domain, when the vendor's branding hurts credibility, or when you hit a limit such as Webflow's 2 pages. For most small sites that is the first week, so price the cheapest paid step before you build.
Cite this: Dupple, "Best Free Website Builders in 2026: 8 Free Plans Compared", October 2026.
Start free if you are testing an idea, and budget for the paid step if the site is meant to bring in business. Start your free 14-day Dupple X trial →
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