What is Brixels? An Honest Comparison vs Wix, WordPress, Webflow & More · Brixels
Honest comparison
What is Brixels, and why should you care?
I've spent 20 years building websites on every platform below. Here's what each one genuinely does well, where they'll waste your time, and why I built Brixels instead.
LW
Lee WalpoleFounder ·
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Let's compare. And before you ask: yes, the guy writing this built Brixels, so there's bias baked in. I'll own that properly at the end. But I've also spent nearly twenty years building websites on every single platform below, so this isn't guesswork either.
Wix and Squarespace
They make buying domains, hosting and getting online simple. Credit where it's due. But the drag-and-drop editor IS the product, and no tradesman knows (or wants to know) how to use a page editor.
Wix has improved tons since I first tried it. But honestly? Instead of playing designer, I'd rather just fill in my business info, hit go, and let dedicated AI agents do the research, design the pages and write copy that's been inspired by the best designers and copywriters in the world. That's the entire idea behind Brixels.
If you genuinely enjoy spending evenings tweaking text and reorganising images on a page, then Wix is your friend. Or WordPress, if you want the "free" version. More on those quote marks in a minute.
The single-prompt AI builders (Lovable, Bolt, Replit, Airo)
The designs used to be hit and miss. They've got 10x better. Genuinely great for simple landing pages.
But if you're trying to rank on Google, good luck. The output looks like every other AI-generated site, and there's no real research behind the words on the page. The focus is design-first, ranking-last.
Worth saying honestly: I'm confident these tools will catch up eventually, and build full websites that genuinely drive traffic. But right now, one prompt in means one guess out. The Brixels builder runs 20+ sequential research steps (real search demand, real competitor results, real customer language) just to gather context before it even thinks about writing your content.
Free and freaking awesome. I love WordPress and have been building websites on it for nearly twenty years.
My beef is the treadmill: plugin maintenance, theme upgrades, and endless site babysitting. Every plugin and theme you install is another way your site can get hacked, crash, or break. And "free" quietly becomes a subscription stack once you add the plugins a serious site actually needs, plus hosting that can run them all.
Brixels took what the best of those plugins do (SEO, speed, forms, schema) and baked it into the builder itself. Nothing to update. Nothing to get hacked through. Nothing extra to renew.
Framer and Webflow
Most of the award-winning web designs you'll see are built on Framer and Webflow. They're simply stunning. That's exactly why every Brixels template is built to the same standard.
But they're built for designers. If you're a designer who's not fussed about ranking on Google and wants to control every pixel on the page, then Brixels is NOT for you. Framer or Webflow is your friend, genuinely.
If you want that same standard of design, already optimised for Google and AI search, without doing any of the designing? That's Brixels.
Shopify
For e-commerce (aka online shops), Shopify is simply the better tool, and it's what I'll still recommend if your website is mostly about selling products. Their checkout converts better than anyone's, and at $29/month to start it's fair money. Yes, the app fees stack up as you grow. But if you're serious about your shop, just use Shopify. A simple shop module is on the Brixels roadmap, but it will never out-Shopify Shopify, and I won't pretend otherwise.
GoHighLevel
Great idea. Sadly, what a f*cking mess.
If you're running the white-label agency model, few platforms do it better. Credit where due. But honestly, I can't think of one thing the platform does exceptionally well, and nobody I've ever spoken to uses more than a fraction of the features they're paying for.
So we took the part agencies actually use and built it straight into the website: a full sales pipeline, automatic follow-ups on new enquiries, job distribution to your providers, and commission billing through your own Stripe account. AI chat assistants are there if you want them, and a voice receptionist is coming soon. No complicated setup, no n8n-style workflow architecture. Enter your business details, approve, done.
Google Analytics, Tag Manager and Search Console
Shameful admission: I hate looking at these dashboards. SEO, CRO, AIO and every other acronym for the metrics that matter. Building weekly client reports is one of the most important parts of an agency's job, and one of the most boring.
And most clients, especially tradesmen, only care about one question anyway: "Is this website making me money, or costing me?"
So we built the leanest dashboard you can imagine: visits, clicks, enquiries, jobs, revenue. That's it. Every Brixels site tracks it first-party with zero setup. And for the nerds who love numbers: when you publish, Brixels automatically creates GA4 and Tag Manager in YOUR Google account, so you can go and enjoy Google's infamously simple analytics dashboard 🙄 whenever you like. Everyone else gets just the data that matters.
Ahrefs and Semrush
Two of the best SEO platforms on the market, and I've loved and used both for years. But like GoHighLevel, most of what you're paying for goes unused.
Here's the thing though: the research those tools power (keyword demand, competitor analysis, search difficulty) is exactly what the Brixels pipeline runs for you at build time. It's how the builder decides which services and areas deserve pages before writing a word, and it's included in the price. A full reporting suite with rank tracking, site audits and client-ready dashboards is on the roadmap. I won't claim we replace a research tool on your desk today, because we don't. We just make it so most tradesmen and agencies never need one.
Honest verdict?
Look: the guy who wrote this article (me) is the guy who built Brixels, so there's a little bias, to say the least. I built Brixels exactly the way I wanted it, to make my own life easier. Building websites for tradesmen clients and running lead-gen sites without the plugin treadmill, the cockpit dashboards, or the four-figure agency invoice. I quite literally took the best of every tool I've used over the past two decades and built the simplest, most powerful website builder I could.
But don't take my word for it. If you've got a spare five minutes, build your site and see it for yourself. It's free to build, and you don't pay a penny until you publish. $25 a month when you're live, cancel anytime. And if you're not happy inside your first 30 days, cancel and we'll refund you in full.
