A Wix AI alternative for owners who want to keep the pieces
Wix is one of the best-known hosted website platforms, and hosted platforms make a specific trade: they handle everything, and in exchange the site lives inside them. For a great many businesses that trade is correct and this page will not pretend otherwise.
It stops being correct at a predictable moment — when the site becomes valuable enough that you want to know what happens if you leave, or when a requirement arrives that the platform does not cover and you have no way to add it yourself.
Siteglade takes the other side of the trade: the generated site is an ordinary Next.js or Vite React codebase you can export, and the domain is registered in your name at a third-party registrar. This page is about what that difference means in practice.
What a hosted platform is really good at
It is worth naming the strengths honestly, because they are substantial and they are why the model dominates. A hosted platform gives you one vendor, one bill and one support line. Hosting, certificates, backups, uptime and updates stop being your problem. There is usually a large ecosystem of add-ons for bookings, storefronts, newsletters and payments, so a non-technical owner can assemble a working business site without ever seeing a config file.
If that describes your situation — you want the site to work, you do not want to think about it again, and everything you need is available inside the platform — a hosted builder is a rational choice and you can stop reading here.
The comparison only gets interesting when you have a reason to care about the layer underneath.
The questions to ask before you commit
Lock-in is rarely announced. It shows up as a series of small dependencies that are individually reasonable and collectively hard to unwind. These are the questions worth answering early, while the site is still small:
- If you left tomorrow, what exactly would you take with you, and in what format?
- Is the domain registered in your name at a registrar you can log into, or held on your behalf?
- Can you add something the platform does not offer, or are you limited to its add-ons?
- Who owns the visitor analytics data, and can you export it?
- What appears on the published site that you did not put there?
How Siteglade answers each of those
The code: generated projects are standard Next.js or Vite React. You can read every file in the built-in Monaco editor, download the source through a temporary link on any plan, export to your own GitHub repository on Pro and Max, or use signed git clone tokens on Max. Exported projects build and deploy anywhere.
The domain: Siteglade searches availability and shows at-cost pricing through Cloudflare Registrar, then hands the purchase to the registrar checkout — Siteglade is never the merchant of record. A domain you already own connects through generated DNS records with automatic verification. Custom domains are a Pro and Max capability.
The extras: because it is a real codebase, anything you can build in React you can add, by describing it to the agent or by writing it yourself in the editor. Analytics are first-party on Pro and Max, with sessions, page views, sources and devices from a beacon baked into your published site. And the only platform mark on a deployed site is the Siteglade badge on Free, which Pro and Max remove.
Compliance is not an afterthought
This matters more in Europe than the average builder comparison admits, and it is somewhere Siteglade has done specific work rather than generic work.
The product ships full bilingual legal coverage in English and German: privacy policy, terms, cookie policy, DPA and AVV, Impressum, accessibility statement and abuse reporting. The Paragraph 312k BGB cancellation route is deliberately reachable without logging in, because a cancellation flow behind a login is not a cancellation flow.
Generated sites also carry machine-readable AI provenance markup — IPTC DigitalSourceType trainedAlgorithmicMedia expressed in JSON-LD and meta tags — aimed at EU AI Act Article 50(2) transparency for AI-generated content. Because it is markup in your project source, it travels with the code when you export it rather than being injected by a platform layer you no longer have.
When a hosted platform is honestly the better pick
If the site is a means to an end and nobody on your team wants to think about the web at all, a full hosted platform will serve you better. The same goes if you need a specific commerce, booking or point-of-sale integration that already exists as an add-on in that ecosystem — reimplementing it from scratch to gain portability is a bad trade.
It is also the better pick when there is no one to maintain the site. Generated code is yours, and yours includes the dependency updates.
Choose Siteglade when the site is a real asset, you want the source and the domain in your own hands, and you want to be able to add whatever comes next without asking permission.
| Question | Siteglade's answer | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| What do I take if I leave? | A complete Next.js or Vite React project | A mainstream stack can be picked up by any web developer |
| Who holds the domain? | You, at a third-party registrar; Siteglade is never merchant of record | A domain you control can be pointed anywhere, any time |
| Can I add custom functionality? | Yes, it is your codebase | You are not limited to what an add-on catalog offers |
| What is on my published site? | A Siteglade badge on Free only; removed on Pro and Max | Paid sites carry no platform branding |
| Is it EU-ready? | Bilingual legal pages plus AI provenance markup in the source | Transparency and cancellation duties are handled up front |
Frequently asked questions
Can I move an existing Wix site to Siteglade?
There is no automatic importer. The practical route is to rebuild: paste your existing page copy into the prompt, attach screenshots of the current design by picker, paste or drag and drop, and let the build start from that. Rebuilding is usually faster than converting anyway.
Will I lose my search rankings if I rebuild?
The main risks with any replatform are changed URLs and missing metadata, not the tool. Keep your URL paths identical where you can, set the title and description in site settings, and put redirects in place for anything that had to move.
Do I need a developer to maintain a Siteglade site?
Not for ordinary changes. Copy edits, new sections and styling go through chat or the click-to-edit visual editor. A developer becomes useful if you export the project and take maintenance in-house, which is optional.
Is hosting included, or do I pay separately?
Included. Publishing to real production hosting is available on every plan including Free. Free deploys keep the Siteglade badge and the generated URL; Pro and Max remove the badge and allow a custom domain.
Does Siteglade handle cookie banners and privacy pages for my site?
The bilingual legal coverage described above is for the Siteglade product itself. For your generated site, the agent can build the pages and notices you ask for, but the legal responsibility for your own site remains yours — that is true on any platform.
Can I see where my visitors come from?
On Pro and Max. A beacon baked into every published site posts to an ingest endpoint, and the Analytics view shows aggregated sessions, page views, traffic sources and device breakdowns for sites you own.