Category: Uncategorised

Net2Phone (N2P) Canada is an affordable cloud-based phone system provider that offers international business communications solutions that are designed to help your small business grow. This is why it’s the best business phone system for low-cost international calling, scoring an overall score of 4/5.

In this N2P Canada review we’ll go through the key factors you should consider when choosing a phone system. These are pricing, inbound and outbound communication features, integrability, scalability, and customer support. Using our extensive research into the provider, we’ll compare N2P Canada’s performance in those sectors with other market leaders, highlight its standout features, and discuss its pros and cons.

You can also compare other phone system prices with our free quote-finding tool. Just answer a few questions about your business, and our top providers will reach out to you with obligation-free quotes.

Net2Phone Canada’s Pros and Cons

✓ Pro: Unlimited Nationwide and International Calling

Netting a score of 3.7/5 for features in our research, Net2Phone Canada’s communication technology has a wide reach because it offers free international calling to over 40 countries. This is especially beneficial for businesses with a global clientele. Another plus is this feature gives small businesses and startups the flexibility and the opportunity to provide services aimed at global markets.

✓ Pro: Affordable Plans

Our research team scores Net2Phone Canada a solid 4/5 for pricing because its affordable plans are packed with inbound communication features that are essential to businesses of all sizes. These features allow you to automate the simple processes, allowing you to focus on complex tasks. Some of these features include a virtual receptionist, spam prevention, and ring groups. In addition to this, all of its plans come with free international calling to over 40 countries.

✓ Pro: Reliable Customer Support Channels

N2P Canada provides easy-to-reach customer support channels to accommodate different user needs and issues, including a knowledge base, email, and phone support. In addition to this, N2P Canada will offer a reimbursement to users who experience 30 minutes or more of service interruptions, helping it earn 3.5/5 for customer support.

✘ Con: Limited Outbound Communication Features

While it may offer a host of inbound communication features on every plan, important outbound tools that help enhance the quality of your operations aren’t available on any of its plans. These include analytics, call-flow designer, and call monitoring.

Meanwhile, 8×8 scores a near perfect 4.8/5 for features because its plans offer more outbound communication features. These are custom call lists and document sharing, which N2P Canada doesn’t offer. However, Net2Phone Canada does offer more inbound communication features than 8×8, which is great for businesses that are in the hospitality or contact centre industries.

✘ Con:  Limited Integration Options

While every N2P Canada plan has access to the API feature, allowing users to develop custom software, it only scores 4.1/5  for scalability. This is because it doesn’t offer any other integration options on any of its plans, such as external, internal, or email integrations.

However RingCentral scores 4.9/5, the highest for scalability in our research, offering extensive security settings, more CRM and helpdesk integration options, and more management and collaboration features – especially on its Premium and Ultimate plans. These include call monitoring, document sharing, and analytics. Meanwhile, N2P has limited CRM and helpdesk integration options and lacks email, workspace, external, and internal integrations. However, it offers all inbound communication features on its plans, starting at $29.99, while RingCentral doesn’t offer call queue and ring groups on its Standard plan that also costs $29.99, scoring 3.5/5 for pricing against N2P Canada’s pricing score of 4/5.

How Much Does Net2Phone Canada Cost?

Its Business Lite plan only costs $29.99 per user, per month, and its web and mobile apps, video conferencing, and SMS features enable mobility, accessibility, and productivity. With the addition of unlimited international and nationwide calling services to the mix, you get a winning combination, scoring 4/5 for pricing for its affordability and functionality. However, outside of open API, it doesn’t come with integration features.

Meanwhile, Zoom, which receives the highest rating for pricing in our research ( 4.3/5), offers a richer range of integration options plus inbound and outbound communication features for a very low price of $13.30 per user, per month. But you need to upgrade to its most expensive Select plan to access the international calling feature unlike N2P Canada, which offers this feature on every plan.

If you’re still unsure about Net2Phone Canada, use our free quote-finding tool. Fill in a few details about your business and we’ll match you, with our top providers who will reach out to you with obligation-free quotes.

Net2Phone’s Standout Features

Automatic Call Recording

Net2Phone has an automatic call recording feature that stores all call recordings in the cloud for up to six months. This feature enables you to safeguard your company should you need to provide evidence in the event of a dispute. Monitoring every call also demonstrates adherence to organizational standards. In addition, when clients find out that calls are recorded, the customer experience is elevated to a new level because it demonstrates great service and conveys the message that you value call data seriously. However, this feature does come as an add-on and will require you to pay extra.

IP Door Intercom

The IP door intercom feature is a hands-free entry control that’s connected to the intercom. The delivery person needs to just press the call button on the intercom, and it will initiate a call to a configured extension. It can be to your phone, a security desk, or the receptionist. Visitors get access by keying in a door code on the keypad. Once activated, the access control will permit a quick unlock of the entrance. The pricing for this feature can be customized for your business. You will need to contact its  customer service directly to get a quote for this feature.

Web Calling

Using your Net2Phone business phone number, the provider’s WebRTC web calling feature will allow you to use your laptop or desktop to make and receive calls. This feature will also allow you to host conference calls and video meetings. All you need to do is open the web calling application using a compatible web browser, dial the number from the dialpad, and hit call.

What Kind of Business is Net2Phone Best For?

A majority of organizations use the global market as a resource for networking and commercial prospects. If you manage a company with international business partners, a corporation that recruits employees from other countries, a startup providing an online service, or a business in retail, Net2Phone Canada’s top VoIP features, 24/7 live phone support, and free international calling feature to over 40 countries are ideal.

How Does Net2Phone Compare With Other Phone Systems?

Below is an overview of how Net2Phone Canada scores based on the key factors you need to consider when shopping for a phone system.

Inbound and Outbound Communication Features

What’s great about Net2Phone Canada’s service is that all of its plans come with a call queue, ring groups, and virtual receptionist. However, it offers a poor range of outbound communication features. Power dialer, custom call lists, and auto dialer are some of the features that aren’t offered on any of its plans. These outbound automation features enable your operations to run smoothly and function perfectly, even if you are a low-cost business with limited  staff. Still, it scores a decent 3.7/5 for features.

Meanwhile, 8×8 gets 4.8/5 for features, the highest score in this category, because its plans come with lots of inbound and outbound communication features, extensive security settings, and various customer support channels, especially when you sign up for its higher-priced plans. But its Express plan has fewer inbound communication features than Net2Phone Canada. It lacks spam prevention, voicemail-to-text, call queue, and ring groups, which are all available on N2P Canada’s plans.

External Connections

Net2Phone Canada’s Business Lite doesn’t come with CRM, helpdesk, web conferencing, or analytics integrations. You can get access to these options when you upgrade to the Business Select, Business Premier, and Call Centre plans.

However, the options for business applications that you can integrate with the system are still limited. For example, its CRM integrations only offer Salesforce and Zoho CRM, while other providers, such as RingCentral, offer over 90 software integrations. The upside to this is that these CRM platforms are one of the best CRMs on the market. But it only receives 2.1/5 for external connections because integration options for email, workspace, internal, and external live chat integrations aren’t available on any of its plans.

RingCentral, on the other hand, scores 4.3/5, the highest for external connections, because it offers deeper integration options on its higher-priced plans, including external, internal, and email integration options, which aren’t included on any of N2P Canada’s plans.

Scalability

N2P Canada offers unlimited users, local numbers, ring groups, and some management and collaboration features, receiving a 4.1/5 score for scalability. These features, such as customizable call routing and call transcripts, allow you to automate your workflow so you can focus on more important tasks, like  providing exceptional customer care.

However, GoToConnect has services that are designed to develop a scalable business. It offers more outbound communication features than N2P Canada, including automation tools, such as document sharing and analytics, which are important for easy scaling. This gives GoTo Connect a solid score of 4.4/5 in scalability.

Customer Support

To accommodate its customers’ varying needs, Net2Phone Canada provides a variety of customer support options, including a knowledge base, email, and phone support. It doesn’t offer 24/7 live phone support, but it does have live chat support on all of its plans, seeing it score a 3.5/5 score in this category. If these are features that are make or break,  8×8, comes with a wider range of customer support channels, including 24/7 live support on every plan, earning a perfect score of 5/5 in this category.

Does Net2Phone Canada Have Good Customer Reviews?

Net2Phone Canada receives an impressive score of 4.7/5 for customer score because most users are satisfied with the service and the support it provides. Its plans come with live chat support which allows customers to get real-time support.

This is what some had to say about Net2Phone Canada:

Scoring a respectable 3.7/5 in our in-depth analysis of its value for money, Hostinger’s pricing starts at a low £2.59 per month and rises to £11.99 per month, depending on the length of your subscription. Since its recent integration with its subsidiary Zyro, it offers the best of both worlds with website building and hosting in one plan. 

Website builders like Hostinger often come with additional fees that vary with every plan, so we understand how confusing it can be. We’re here to take the research off your plate and explain Hostinger’s pricing plans, whether they’re good value for money, and the perks you can enjoy with them. 

Keep reading to learn more about Hostinger’s website builder prices. Of course, you can also jumpstart creating your website today by signing up through this link!

Hostinger pricing summary

Hostinger’s pricing plan: A breakdown

Hostinger’s website building service only comes in one package: the Website Builder and Web Hosting plan. For those not in the know, Hostinger merged with its subsidiary Zyro in 2022, whose main focus is to provide users with an easy-to-use and quick website builder. Hostinger, the parent company, was geared towards website hosting for businesses and agencies who want to venture out with multiple websites. Now in a single plan, you can take advantage of an intuitive website builder without worrying about paying for hosting and SSL certificates separately. 

So, what does Hostinger offer to its users, and are there any enticing discounts? Here’s a full breakdown of the Website Builder and Web Hosting plan, broken down into four discounted tiers based on your subscription length:

As you can see, you’ll enjoy more discounts if you sign up for a longer subscription period with Hostinger. Plus, if you opt for a 12-month subscription or longer, you’ll receive a free domain for one year, which is an added bonus. You can also avail of the renewal price, which is also lower if you opt for a longer subscription, once the initial period is over. For example, if you subscribe to Hostinger for 12 months, you will only have to pay £2.79 per month for the first 12 months, then pay £7.99 monthly after the first 12 months.

No matter the time period you choose, though, you’ll still get access to Hostinger’s 24/7 customer support. Moreover, you can enjoy its excellent 99.9% uptime guarantee, which ensures that your website will be live and accessible 99.9% of the time. With this, your customers and visitors can easily reach your website, which may potentially increase your traffic, click-through, and conversion rates. 

And since this plan also includes Hostinger’s web hosting services, you can unlock unmetered bandwidth for your website. This will allow you to enjoy unmetered traffic on your site – so even if lots of visitors access it simultaneously, your site won’t go down, and you can still transfer data without any hassle. 

Another thing that makes Hostinger’s offer unique among competitors is that it includes a free business email with 1 GB storage. Business emails are an excellent way to separate your professional messages from personal ones. Plus, it’s free advertising, since your logo and name will be displayed in every email! Even Wix, which tops our website builder researchers’ rankings with an overall score of 4.9/5, does not include this in its plans: to unlock a business email with Wix, you’ll need to purchase it separately for £4.50 to £8.50 per month on top of a Wix website builder plan, which start at £7.50 per month.

Unfortunately, Hostinger doesn’t offer a free plan. Still, you can enjoy a 30-day money-back guarantee on your subscription, so if you find that Hostinger isn’t your cup of tea, you can cancel your subscription and get a refund of the fees.

If you want a website builder and web hosting service in one like Hostinger, but want to enjoy a free plan – or at least a free trial as you learn the ropes – we recommend considering Wix. As the top scorer in our independent research with an overall score of 4.9/5, its outstanding website features and design functionality can help you easily create a website that fulfils your specifications, especially if you want to tailor it to a certain industry. Plus, it allows you to unlock dozens of free templates and create as many websites as you want. 

Of course, it’s worth noting that Wix’s free plan only unlocks its basic website features – so you won’t get a personal domain, and you’ll be limited to the platform’s free elements and templates. 

For other free plans, check out our page on the best free website builders.

Hostinger costs: Billing cycles, ongoing costs, and hidden fees

Hostinger stipulates that all plans be paid in full, rather than in instalments. The amount shown in our pricing breakdown is the total price of the product divided by the number of months your plan will be active. As a result, you’ll have to pay a significantly bigger price at the start of their subscription to cover the entire term. 

This could be intimidating, especially since you’ll have to shell out a larger free upfront. However, the silver lining here is that all your fees will be paid off immediately and won’t be an ongoing monthly cost, and you’ll only have to pay again once the period is over. By then, you’ll get to enjoy the discounted renewal fees.

Say, for example, you opt for Hostinger’s one-month term. You’ll be charged £11.99 per month, and you’ll pay the same amount should you choose to renew your subscription. However, if you find that Hostinger is not to your liking and you’d like to venture out to other website builders, you can make use of its 30-day money back guarantee. This can give you the wiggle room to explore the platform before fully committing to Hostinger’s long-term offers. 

It’s worth noting that the longer you subscribe to Hostinger, the bigger you save on monthly fees. For example, with the 12-month subscription, you’ll only pay £2.79 for each of those months, and once your contract renews after a year, this monthly cost will increase to £7.99. However, the best deal is the 48-month subscription, as you’ll only have to pay £2.59 per month, and you’ll get two months free. After the initial 48 months, you’ll only pay £5.99 per month once you renew your subscription. This gives you the best bang for your buck, but bear in mind, it’s a long commitment. So, if you’re only just venturing into ecommerce or website building, you might feel safer with the flexibility of a shorter subscription. 

Our independent researchers tested and evaluated 10 website builders, scoring them out of five in different criteria, including value for money. Hostinger scores 3.7/5 in our value for money analysis, just outdoing Wix (which scores 3.6/5 for value for money), which scores higher in our independent website builder research with an overall score of 4.9/5.

For as little as £2.59 per month, Hostinger allows you to unlock an intuitive website-building platform and an efficient web hosting service. It also provides a free domain for a year, which can help you save at least £6.99 monthly, which website builders usually add to your monthly subscription fees. In contrast, with Wix, you can enjoy a free domain on any plan, which start at £7.50 per month.

However, it’s worth mentioning that while Hostinger is more pocket-friendly than Wix, Jimdo’s the website builder that tops our value for money analysis, with a score of 4.5/5. For starters, its free plan already includes all the base features you need to create a website. Its lowest pricing tier, Start, which is available for only £9 per month, will unlock advanced SEO tools and a free domain for your site, helping you boost its functionality.

If you’re a particularly small business that doesn’t have loads of money to throw around, you might want to look at our page on the best website builders for small businesses. However, if you’re able to splash the cash on a website, you might want to look at the best website builders for large companies.

Hostinger does offer some perks that Jimdo doesn’t. With Hostinger, you can connect your own domain, including a forwarding email address for your business, and you’ll get access to 24/7 user support via live chat and email, which could benefit you more as you grasp the platform and create your own website.

Net2Phone is an affordable cloud-based phone system provider that offers international business communications solutions that are designed to help your small business grow. This is why it’s the best business phone system for low-cost international calling, scoring an overall score of 4.3/5.

In this N2P review we’ll go through the key factors you should consider when choosing a phone system. These are pricing, inbound and outbound communication features, integrability, scalability, and customer support. Using our extensive research into the provider, we’ll compare N2P’s performance in those sectors with other market leaders, highlight its standout features, and discuss its pros and cons.

You can also compare other phone system prices with our free-quote finding tool. Just answer some questions, and our top providers will reach out to you with obligation-free quotes.

Net2Phone’s Pros and Cons

✓ Pro: Unlimited Nationwide and International Calling

Netting a score of 3.6/5 for features in our research, Net2Phone communication technology has a wide reach because it offers free international calling to over forty countries. This is especially beneficial for businesses with a global clientele. Another plus is this feature gives small businesses and startups the flexibility and the opportunity to provide services aimed at global markets.

✓ Pro: Affordable Plans

Our research team scores Net2Phone a solid 4.5/5 for pricing because its affordable plans are packed with inbound communication features that are essential to businesses of all sizes. These features allow you to automate the simple processes, allowing you to focus on complex tasks. Some of these features include a virtual receptionist, spam prevention, and ring groups. In addition to this, all of its plans come with free international calling to over forty countries.

✓ Pro: Reliable Customer Support Channels

N2P provides easy-to-reach customer support channels to accommodate different user needs and issues, including a knowledge base, email, and phone support. In addition to this, N2P will offer a reimbursement to users who experience 30 minutes or more of service interruptions, helping it earn 3.9/5 for customer support.

✘ Con: Limited Outbound Communication Features

While it may offer a host of inbound communication features on every plan, important outbound tools that help enhance the quality of your operations aren’t available on any of its plans. These include analytics, call-flow designer, and call monitoring,

Meanwhile, 8×8 scores a near perfect 4.8/5 for features because its plans offer more outbound communication features. These are custom call lists and document sharing, which N2P doesn’t offer. However, Net2Phone does offer more inbound communication features than 8×8, which is great for businesses that are in the hospitality or contact center industries.

✘ Con:  Limited Integration Options

While every N2P plan has access to the API feature, allowing users to develop custom software, it only scores 4/5  for scalability. This is because it doesn’t offer any other integration options on any of its plans, such as external, internal, or email integrations.

However RingCentral scores 4.9/5, the highest for scalability in our research, offering extensive security settings, more CRM and helpdesk integration options, and more management and collaboration features – especially on its Premium and Ultimate plans. These include call monitoring, document sharing, and analytics. Meanwhile, N2P has limited CRM and helpdesk integration options and lacks email, workspace, external, and internal integrations. However, it offers all inbound communication features on its plans, starting at $29.99, while RingCentral doesn’t offer call queue and ring groups on its Standard plan that also costs $29.99, scoring 3.5/5 for pricing against N2P pricing score of 4.5/5.

How Much Does Net2Phone Cost?

Its Business Lite plan only costs $29.99 per user, per month, and its web and mobile apps, video conferencing, and SMS features enable mobility, accessibility, and productivity. With the addition of unlimited international and nationwide calling services to the mix, you get a winning combination, scoring 4.5/5 for pricing for its affordability and functionality. However, outside of open API, it doesn’t come with integration features.

Meanwhile, Zoom which receives the highest rating for pricing in our research ( 5/5), offers a richer range of integration options plus inbound and outbound communication features for a very low price of $13.30 per user, per month. But you need to upgrade to its most expensive Select plan to access the international calling feature unlike N2P , which offers this feature on every plan.

If you’re still unsure about Net2Phone, use our free quote-finding tool. Fill in a few details about your business and we’ll match you, with our top providers who will reach out to you with obligation-free quotes.

Net2Phone’s Standout Features

Automatic Call Recording

Net2Phone has an automatic call recording feature that stores all call recordings in the cloud for up to six months. This feature enables you to safeguard your company should you need to provide evidence in the event of a dispute. Monitoring every call also demonstrates adherence to organizational standards. In addition, when clients find out that calls are recorded, the customer experience is elevated to a new level because it demonstrates great service and conveys the message that you value call data seriously. However, this feature does come as an add-on and will require you to pay extra.

IP Door Intercom

The IP door intercom feature is a hands-free entry control that’s connected to the intercom. The delivery person needs to just press the call button on the intercom, and it will initiate a call to a configured extension. It can be to your phone, a security desk, or the receptionist. Visitors get access by keying in a door code on the keypad. Once activated, the access control will permit a quick unlock of the entrance. The pricing for this feature can be customized for your business. You will need to contact its  customer service directly to get a quote for this feature.

Web Calling

Using your Net2Phone business phone number, the provider’s WebRTC web calling feature will allow you to use your laptop or desktop to make and receive calls.. This feature will also allow you to host conference calls and video meetings. All you need to do is open the web calling application using a compatible web browser, dial the number from the dialpad, and hit call.

What Kind of Business is Net2Phone Best For?

A majority of organizations use the global market as a resource for networking and commercial prospects. If you manage a company with international business partners, a corporation that recruits employees from other countries, a startup providing an online service, or a business in retail, Net2Phone top VoIP features, 24/7 live phone support, and free international calling feature to over 40 countries are ideal.

How Does Net2Phone Compare With Other Phone Systems?

Below is an overview of how Net2Phone scores based on the key factors you need to consider when shopping for a phone system.

Inbound and Outbound Communication Features

What’s great about Net2Phone service is that all of its plans come with a call queue, ring groups, and virtual receptionist. However, it offers a poor range of outbound communication features. Power dialer, custom call lists, and auto dialer are some of the features that aren’t offered on any of its plans. These outbound automation features enable your operations to run smoothly and function perfectly, even if you are a low-cost business with limited  staff. Still, it scores a decent 3.6/5 for features.

Meanwhile, 8×8 gets 4.8/5 for features, the highest score in this category, because its plans come with lots of inbound and outbound communication features, extensive security settings, and various customer support channels, especially when you sign up for its higher-priced plans. But its Express plan has fewer inbound communication features than Net2Phone. It lacks spam prevention, voicemail-to-text, call queue, and ring groups, which are all available on N2P plans.

External Connections

However, the options for business applications that you can integrate with the system are still limited. For example, its CRM integrations only offer Salesforce and Zoho CRM, while other providers, such as RingCentral, offer over 90 software integrations. The upside to this is that these CRM platforms are one of the best CRMs on the market. But it only receives 2.8/5 for external connections because integration options for email, workspace, internal, and external live chat integrations aren’t available on any of its plans.

RingCentral, on the other hand, scores 5/5, the highest for external connections, because it offers deeper integration options on its higher-priced plans, including external, internal, and email integration options, which aren’t included on any of N2P’s plans.

Scalability

N2P offers unlimited users, local numbers, ring groups, and some management and collaboration features, receiving a 3.2/5 score for scalability. These features, such as customizable call routing and call transcripts, allow you to automate your workflow so you can focus on more important tasks, like  providing exceptional customer care.

However GoToConnect, has services that are designed to develop a scalable business. It offers more outbound communication features than N2P, including automation tools, such as document sharing and analytics, which are important for easy scaling. This gives GoTo Connect a solid score of 4.4/5 in scalability.

Customer Support

To accommodate its customers’ varying needs, Net2Phone provides a variety of customer support options, including a knowledge base, email, and phone support. It doesn’t offer 24/7 live phone support, but it does have live chat support on all of its plans, seeing it score a 3.5/5 score in this category. If these are features that are make or break,  8×8, comes with a wider range of customer support channels, including 24/7 live support on every plan, earning a perfect score of 5/5 in this category.

Does Net2Phone Have Good Customer Reviews?

Net2Phone receives an impressive score of 3.8/5 for customer score because most users are satisfied with the service and the support it provides. Its plans come with live chat support which allows customers to get real-time support.

This is what some had to say about Net2Phone:

Our independent research into website builders shows that Hostinger (formerly Zyro) packs a punch as the best website builder for uptime reliability. Scoring an overall 3.7/5 in our tests, its uptime reliability will ensure your website is live and accessible while its adaptive AI tools can help you build a website more conveniently.

In this review, we’ll explore Hostinger’s features, pros, cons, and pricing, and compare its website features, design functionalities, ease of use, and help and support with the other website builders we’ve investigated. 

Here at Expert Market, we investigate various website builders, like Hostinger, to help you find the right one for your business. Read on to learn more about Hostinger, or start building your website with Hostinger today!

Hostinger’s pros and cons

✔ Pro: 99.9% guaranteed uptime

Uptime reliability decides how long your website is online and running smoothly. It’s worth mentioning that 100% uptime reliability is a myth. So, Hostinger’s guarantee of 99.9% uptime reliability ensures that your website will almost always be live and accessible for visitors and potential customers.

To emphasise the power of Hostinger’s uptime, our overall top-scorer for website builders, Wix (overall score of 4.9/5), only offers a 99.8% uptime guarantee. Another plus for Hostinger is that it offers a free business email for your website, which is something you would need to purchase separately if you choose to go with Wix, starting at $6 per month, which goes on top of Wix’s price plans.

✔ Pro: 24/7 live chat support

Building a website is no easy feat, so it’s crucial to have a reliable help and support channel. Scoring 3.3/5 in our help and support analysis, Hostinger offers 24/7 live chat support, which comes in handy when you need urgent assistance. You’ll only have to click on the bottom right of the page to be assisted. 

Alternatively, you can also take advantage of Hostinger’s vast knowledge centre, where you can find various tutorials, such as building your website from the ground up. Squarespace, which tops our help and support analysis with a score of 4.8/5, also features a comprehensive help centre to guide you, but it only offers live chat support from Monday to Friday, from 10am to 6pm. Sure, Squarespace offers 24/7 support through email and social media, but having a 24/7 live chat channel on your website, as with Hostinger, is more convenient. 

✔ Pro: Adaptive AI-powered tools

There’s no denying that AI has redefined how we build websites, and Hostinger is following suit. You can create a personalised logo for your business using Hostinger’s AI Logo Maker. It also features a handy AI Writer tool, which you can use to cook up website copies. To use this, you only have to choose from its pre-selected topics and categories and the type of content you need for your website. Once you’ve chosen, the AI Writer will produce a coherent paragraph that you can use for your site. This will save you time and money, as you’ll no longer have to hire another set of hands to write content for you. But it’s worth mentioning that it may not sound as human as you’d expect it to, given that an AI writes the piece.

Hostinger also offers an AI Heatmap, a valuable tool that predicts how visitors will see and navigate your site. Once you upload an image of your website, the AI Heatmap tool will generate colour-coded markers to depict which elements need rearranging or switching up to help boost conversion (such as a successful purchase) on your site. 

✘ Con: Doesn’t offer keyword support

Hostinger’s score drops to 2.8/5 in our website features analysis, as our research shows that it doesn’t offer keyword support for search engine optimisation (SEO). Keywords help you understand what your visitors are searching for, so you can define your content strategy and increase organic click-through rates and website traffic. 

If you want to unlock keyword support for your website, Squarespace, which scores 4.6/5 in the same category, has a great offer. It has a Keyword Search Analytics panel, which monitors and identifies the keywords that drive traffic to your page.

✘ Con: Limited design flexibility

While Hostinger has a wide selection of 130 templates, it doesn’t allow you to switch templates. It’ll also let you preview how your page looks on both desktop and mobile to ensure that everything works and looks properly. So, if you decide to spice up the overall visual appearance of your website, you’d have to create an entirely new website first and then manually transfer all the content from your previous one, which is, to say the least, inconvenient and time-consuming. This is why Hostinger only scores 3.6/5 for design functionality.

If you want to experience more design flexibility, Squarespace which scores 4.2/5 in the same category, allows you to switch between various templates and even repopulates all of your content and elements for a swift visual upgrade. 

How much does Hostinger cost?

Hostinger scores 3.7/5 in our value for money analysis. For only $11.99 per month, you can unlock its comprehensive Website Builder and Web Hosting package. This plan includes 24/7 live chat and email support for your urgent needs and website-building assistance, free business email, an array of valuable AI-powered tools, and free SSL certificates to ensure your website stays secure. Hostinger also offers discounts to its new users, where you’ll only pay $2.99 per month and get three months free. Moreover, you’ll enjoy a discounted price of $6.99 per month when you renew your subscription. 

It’s worth noting that Hostinger one-ups our ecommerce overall top-scorer Wix, which only scores 3.6/5 in our value for money analysis. Although Wix offers a free plan, its free tier provides limited features, so you cannot take advantage of Wix’s promising website features. And unlike Hostinger which includes a free business email in its plan, you’ll have to pay upwards of $8.50 per month to unlock a business email (through Google Workspace) for your website with Wix. It also doesn’t provide round-the-clock support through email. 

Hostinger also beats IONOS in value for money, as this competitor only scores 3.1/5 in this category. Hostinger packs a lot of discounted rates across its plans while offering their full functionality. IONOS pricing does have a lower entry cost, but this provider packs less features than Hostinger in its more economical plans.

Overall, our in-depth analysis names Jimdo as the website builder with the best value for money with a score of 4.5/5. Aside from a free plan that grants you access to all its basic features, Jimdo also offers one of the lowest entry points among the website builders we’ve explored. For as low as $15 per month, you can enjoy a free domain, advanced SEO tools for your website, and you can create up to 10 pages for your site.

How does Hostinger compare with other website builders?

Here at Expert Market, we have a team of skilled online growth experts who probe the ins and outs of the top 10 website builders. We investigate and compare them according to:

• Website features
• Design functionality
• Help and support
• Ease of use

Website features

Hostinger ranks fifth in our website features analysis with an above-average score of 2.8/5. While it will provide you with everything to build your website and get it up and running, it is on the basic end of the spectrum. Hostinger doesn’t have an SEO-specific app that you can use to navigate Google’s strict ranking factors. It also doesn’t have keyword support, which could be handy for curating content for your website and improving click-through rates. Moreover, Hostinger doesn’t offer an App Market, which could be useful if you want to integrate valuable apps for ecommerce or marketing. If these are features you would want, then you should go with our top-scorer, Wix (4.8/5). As the top-runner in our website features analysis, it unlocks all of these features, which could help you boost your website’s functionality.

Still, Hostinger punches above its weight with its AI-powered tools that help boost your website’s functionality sans an extra set of hands. Its AI Logo Maker can produce a custom logo for your business within seconds – just input your preferences, and you can choose from the automatically generated logos! Hostinger also has an AI Writer tool that you can use to write website copies and content. Its power-packed tool is the AI Heatmap, which suggests page improvements, from the elements to the content, making it more appealing to your visitors.

Design functionalities

A well-designed website creates a good first impression for your visitors and promotes a good user experience. Hostinger scores an above-average 3.6/5 in our design functionality analysis. It offers over 130 templates that you can use to start building your website. You can choose from its pre-made templates divided into different categories to help match your niche: art, entertainment, gaming, electronics, and more. 

However, like Wix, its Achilles’ heel is that you can’t switch between templates. If you want to change how your site looks, you’ll have to start with a new website and manually transfer all your content. Squarespace scores 4/5 in the said category and will allow you to change your templates while retaining your content and elements. This means it’ll be much easier to update your site, as you won’t have to spend a lot of time starting from scratch.

Ease of use

Hostinger’s intuitive, beginner-friendly interface sees it score 3.9/5 in our ease of use analysis. It offers you the convenience of editing the look of your website on desktop and mobile, and its handy drag-and-drop editor removes any hassle from the process. It also provides helpful tips and tutorials if you need a boost when editing your website. Add in the grid-based editor, and your pages will look sleek and professional in minutes. 

However, if you want a faster website editing platform with more power-packed features, we recommend choosing Wix, which scores 4.4/5 in the same category. Wix employs the same drag-and-drop feature when editing your website. It also has more editing options than Hostinger, as you can easily customise your site with unique options for every element, plus helpful SEO prompts that can help you optimise your website as you’re building it. 

Help and support

Scoring 3.3/5 for help and support, Hostinger offers various customer support channels to promote a convenient user experience. You can seek helpful advice from its knowledge centre, which grants you access to video tutorials, help articles, and valuable tips for creating a website. Hostinger’s stellar 24/7 live chat support sees it score extra brownie points, as it ensures you’ll have assistance anytime, anywhere. You have access to live customer support, and you can seek help about any issue or inquiry about the platform. Hostinger also extends this round-the-clock support via email and social media.

However, Squarespace, which aces our help and support analysis with a score of 4.8/5, has a more extensive knowledge centre. This will be helpful if you need written and video guides as you build your website from the ground up. However, Hostinger still powers through, since Squarespace only has live chat support on weekdays, whereas Hostinger offers it around the clock. 

What kind of business is Hostinger best for?

Our independent research into the top website builders in the UK names Hostinger as the best for uptime reliability because of its guaranteed 99.9% uptime. 

As the internet is a crucial part of running a business today, having a reliable uptime ensures that your website is online and easily accessible. This directly impacts revenue, reputation, and productivity. In fact, even a few minutes of downtime can make your business lose a significant amount of money. Take Google, for example. When YouTube and other Google sites suddenly went down in 2020, it reported a total loss of $1.7 million in ad revenue, despite only being down for only 37 minutes. 

As such, Hostinger’s exemplary uptime reliability sees to it that businesses that rely heavily on the internet – say, for example, you own a small online shop – will always be open to customers. Live websites are easier for customers to find, and your customers will most likely stay on your page for longer. But if your website is suddenly down, customers might not return because of the inconvenience of waiting for your site to load. 

Does Hostinger have good customer reviews?

Our in-depth online growth research sees Hostinger with a customer score of 3.3/5. A deep-dive into customer reviews from G2, Trustpilot, and Capterra show that its users applaud its stellar customer service and easy-to-use interface. Here are some reviews:

Our independent research into website builders shows that Hostinger (formerly Zyro) packs a punch as the best website builder for uptime reliability. Scoring an overall 3.7/5 in our tests, its uptime reliability will ensure your website is live and accessible while its adaptive AI tools can help you build a website faster.

In this review, we’ll explore Hostinger’s features, pros, cons, and pricing, and compare its website features, design functionalities, ease of use, and customer support with competitor products. 

Here at Expert Market, we investigate various website builders, like Hostinger, to help you find the right one for your business. Read on to learn more about Hostinger, or start building your website with Hostinger today!

Hostinger’s Pros and Cons

✔ Pro: 99.9% Guaranteed Uptime

Uptime reliability decides how long your website is online and running smoothly. It’s worth mentioning that 100% uptime reliability is a myth. So, Hostinger’s guarantee of 99.9% uptime reliability ensures that your website will almost always be live and accessible for visitors and potential customers.

To emphasize the power of Hostinger’s uptime, our overall top-scorer for website builders, Wix, only offers a 99.8% uptime guarantee.

✔ Pro: 24/7 Live Chat Support

Building a website is no easy feat, so it’s crucial to have a reliable help and support channel. Scoring 3.3/5 in our help and support analysis, Hostinger offers 24/7 live chat support, which comes in handy when you need urgent assistance. You’ll only have to click on the bottom right of the page to be assisted. 

Alternatively, you can also take advantage of Hostinger’s vast knowledge center, where you can find various tutorials, such as building your website from the ground up. Squarespace, which tops our help and support analysis with a score of 4.8/5, also features a comprehensive help center to guide you, but it only offers live chat support from Monday to Friday, from 4am to 12am. Sure, Squarespace offers 24/7 support through email and social media, but having a 24/7 live chat channel on your website, as with Hostinger, is more convenient. 

✔ Pro: Adaptive AI-powered Tools

There’s no denying that AI speeds up website creation, and Hostinger is innovating in line with this trend. You can create a personalized logo for your business using Hostinger’s AI Logo Maker. It also features a handy AI Writer tool, which you can use to cook up compelling website text. To use this, choose from topics and categories, according to the type of content you need for your website. Once you’ve chosen, the AI Writer will produce a coherent paragraph that you can use for your site. This will save you time and money, as you’ll no longer have to hire another set of hands to write content for you. But it’s worth mentioning that it may not sound as human as you’d expect it to, given that an AI writes the piece.

Hostinger also offers an AI Heatmap, a valuable tool that predicts how visitors will see and navigate your site. Once you upload an image of your website, the AI Heatmap tool will generate color-coded markers to depict which elements need rearranging or switching up to help boost conversion (such as a successful purchase) on your site. 

✘ Con: Doesn’t Offer Keyword Support

Hostinger scores 2.8/5 in our website features analysis, as our research shows that it doesn’t offer keyword support for search engine optimization (SEO). It’s a really critical part of creating a business website because keywords help you understand what your visitors are searching for.

Without keyword research, you’re just taking a blind guess at your content strategy, and could struggle to increase organic click-through rates and website traffic. 

If you want to unlock keyword support for your website, Squarespace, which scores 4.6/5 in the website features category, has a Keyword Search Analytics panel which monitors keywords driving traffic to your page.

✘ Con: Limited Design Flexibility

While Hostinger has a wide selection of 130 templates, it doesn’t allow you to switch templates. It’ll also let you preview how your page looks on both desktop and mobile to ensure that everything works and looks properly. So, if you decide to spice up the overall visual appearance of your website, you’d have to create an entirely new website first and then manually transfer all the content from your previous one, which is, to say the least, inconvenient and time-consuming. This is why Hostinger only scores 3.6/5 for design functionality.

If you want to experience more design flexibility, Squarespace which scores 4.2/5 in the same category, allows you to switch between various templates and even repopulates all of your content and elements for a swift visual upgrade. 

How Much Does Hostinger Cost?

Hostinger scores 3.7/5 in our value for money analysis. For only $9.99 per month (paying for a year upfront), you’ll unlock the comprehensive Website Builder and Web Hosting package. This plan includes 24/7 live chat and email support for your urgent needs and website-building assistance, free business email, an array of valuable AI-powered tools, and free SSL certificates to ensure your website stays secure.

Hostinger also offers discounts to its new users, where you’ll only pay $2.99 per month for the first year and get three months free. You can snap up further discounts if you pay for a longer subscription term.

It’s worth noting one way in which Hostinger one-ups our overall top-scoring website builder Wix; Hostinger includes free business email in its plan. With Wix, you’d have to pay upwards of $6 per month for the same benefit. Learn more in our Wix pricing guide.

Overall, though, our in-depth analysis names Jimdo as the website builder with the best value for money, with a score of 4.5/5 in this category. Aside from a free plan that grants you access to all its basic features, Jimdo also offers one of the lowest entry points among the website builders we’ve explored. For as low as $9 per month, you can enjoy a free domain (for the first year) plus SEO tools. 

How Does Hostinger Compare With Other Website Builders?

Here at Expert Market, we have a team of skilled online growth experts who probe the ins and outs of the top website builders. We investigate and compare them according to:

• Website features
• Design functionality
• Help and support
• Ease of use

If price is your number one concern – and you only need one website – then you may be better off with IONOS, which costs $9 per month, compared with Hostinger’s $9.99 per month. Find out more in our review of IONOS’ website builder.

Website Features

Hostinger ranks fifth in our website features analysis with an above-average score of 2.8/5. While it will provide you with everything to build your website and get it up and running, it is on the basic end of the spectrum. Hostinger doesn’t have an SEO-specific app that you can use to navigate Google’s strict ranking factors. It also doesn’t have keyword support, which could be handy for curating content for your website and improving click-through rates.

Moreover, Hostinger doesn’t have an app market, unlike Squarespace, Wix, Shopify and other major competitors. That means there are hardly any integrations you can add to your website, and you won’t be able to connect it to external software tools you may use for accounting, inventory management, social media, and so on.

Still, Hostinger punches above its weight with its AI-powered tools that help boost your website’s functionality sans an extra set of hands. Its AI Logo Maker can produce a custom logo for your business within seconds – just input your preferences, and you can choose from the automatically generated logos! Hostinger also has an AI Writer tool that you can use to write website copies and content. Its power-packed tool is the AI Heatmap, which suggests page improvements, from the elements to the content, making it more appealing to your visitors.

Design Functionalities

A well-designed website creates a good first impression for your visitors and promotes a good user experience. Hostinger scores an above-average 3.6/5 in our design functionality analysis. It offers over 130 templates that you can use to start building your website. You can choose from its pre-made templates divided into different categories to help match your niche.

Text and color editing was the right level of complex yet workable. If I came to part of the design where the text didn’t seem clearly legible, I just clicked on it, and quickly found the option to add a colored bar behind it.

The best part was being able to easily dial up or down the transparency on a sliding scale. That’s an impressive level of design control for such a low-cost website builder.

Overall, the auto-generated content was generally well-though out, with attractive stock images balanced by clear navigation features.

However, like Wix, its Achilles’ heel is that you can’t switch between templates. If you want to change how your site looks, you’ll have to start with a new website and manually transfer all your content. 

Squarespace scores 4/5 in the design functionality category and will allow you to change your templates while retaining your content and elements. This means it’ll be much easier to update your site, as you won’t have to spend a lot of time starting from scratch.

Ease of Use

Hostinger’s intuitive, beginner-friendly interface sees it score 3.9/5 in our ease of use analysis. It offers you the convenience of editing the look of your website on desktop and mobile, with helpful tips and tutorials to support you along the way. 

I found the editor easy to use, and was pleasantly simple to work with. To edit a button or image, all you have to do is click on it, and a mini editing menu appears beside it. That made it straightforward to quickly change a button color, or reposition a text box that wasn’t quite where I wanted it to be.

However, if you want a faster website editing platform with more power-packed features, we recommend choosing Wix, which scores 4.4/5 in the same category. Wix employs the same drag-and-drop feature when editing your website. It also has more editing options than Hostinger, as you can easily customize your site with unique options for every element, plus helpful SEO prompts that can help you optimize your website as you’re building it. 

Wix has recently taken away its free plan, however. So if you’re looking for a simple website builder you can experiment with Jimdo has a free plan. Take a look at our Jimdo review to learn more about it.

Help and Support

Scoring 3.3/5 for help and support, Hostinger offers various customer support channels to promote a convenient user experience. You can seek helpful advice from its knowledge center, which grants you access to video tutorials, help articles, and valuable tips for creating a website.

Hostinger’s stellar 24/7 live chat support sees it score extra brownie points, as it ensures you’ll get support at the moment you’re experiencing difficulties. This is vital for busy entrepreneurs who need instant assistance so as not to lose out on sales or see their reputation damaged.

However, Squarespace, which aces our help and support analysis with a score of 4.8/5, has a more extensive knowledge center than Hostinger. However, Hostinger still powers through, since Squarespace only has live chat support on weekdays, whereas Hostinger offers it round the clock. 

What Kind of Business is Hostinger Best For?

Hostinger would suit a small business or startup with a budget on the lower end. It’s a versatile tool for companies in all kinds of sectors, including local businesses, healthcare, auto repairs, and personal services.

Best of all, Hostinger will save costs because you don’t need to hire a web developer or web designer to create your site from scratch.

It’s a helpful tool for scaling an SME because you can create up to 100 websites on just one account. That’s invaluable for businesses looking to create more than one brand that needs a home online.

If you’re looking to sell online, then we’d recommend Hostinger for small online stores only. Reason being you can only sell up to 500 products, which is a very low cut off point compared to Wix (with which you can sell up to 50,000 products) or Shopify (with no limit on the number of product listings).

Does Hostinger Have Good Customer Reviews?

Our in-depth online growth research sees Hostinger with a customer score of 3.3/5. A deep-dive into customer reviews from G2, Trustpilot, and Capterra show that its users applaud its stellar customer service and easy-to-use interface. Here are some reviews:

The age of analytics has spurred on the development of powerful technologies that can help you manage, analyze, and interpret vast amounts of data, leading to greater business success. Customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software are exactly these types of tools.

The difference between CRM and ERP is this: CRM is a database used to manage sales, customer service, and marketing data, while ERP is a database used to manage financial and operational data. But they’ve both revolutionized the way businesses manage their data, eliminating the need for multiple applications and making business operations  easier.

This guide to CRM vs. ERP will tackle the uses, benefits, similarities, and differences between both platforms. You’ll gain valuable ERP and CRM insights to help you choose the best option for your business, or work out whether a CRM-ERP integration is a good fit for you.

What is CRM?

CRM, or customer relationship management, is a kind of software that was originally developed as a marketing database for monitoring the customer’s life cycle. Over time, CRM has undergone groundbreaking changes, becoming  a unified interface that enables you to manage your relationships with your customers throughout the customer lifecycle, helping you to map out your marketing, sales, and customer service strategies, and generate data that you can use to predict business opportunities.

There are three kinds of CRM system:

1. A marketing CRM stores customer data, and can be used to create campaigns, such as email campaigns, that’ll generate leads and drive sales.

2. A sales CRM streamlines and enhances sales processes, with pipeline management, sales force automation, and data analysis.

3. A customer service CRM, now also known as helpdesk software, provides quick access to customer information, enabling your team to deliver a personalized customer service experience that fosters relationships and boosts customer retention.

What is ERP?

ERP, or enterprise resource planning, is a software that was created to help businesses migrate all their finance, manufacturing, and project management data into one place to streamline processes and improve data visibility. However, to keep up with technology trends, it has evolved to the ERP cloud system, enabling cost-effective automation of business processes, and unifying key functions across different departments, including  accounting, manufacturing, supply chain management, and human resources.

CRM vs. ERP: Uses and Benefits

CRM vs. ERP: What’s the Difference?

CRM is a platform used to manage customer data, including relationships and interactions, to improve marketing strategies and business relationships. ERP is a fully integrated back office suite of financial and operational systems that centralizes these business processes in a single source.

Front and Back Office Tools

CRM is primarily used in the front office, enabling organizations to communicate effectively with customers and monitor their interactions and transactions. It’s built with features for analyzing customer data to create strategies for customer retention and lead conversion.

In contrast, ERP is a back office tool that you’d use to manage crucial business operations, including accounting, operations, HR, manufacturing, logistics, and purchasing, while CRM is mostly used by customer-facing teams, such as marketing, customer support, and sales.

Sales and Profit Tools

CRMs come with data visualization tools that enable sales teams to track, predict sales metrics, and boost sales. Meanwhile, ERP focuses more on reducing costs because, with data from every back office team, it immediately identifies issues. In logistics, for example, ERP enables businesses to practice real-time monitoring of their stocks and inventory, which will help them avoid overstocking and lead to cost savings.

Business Sizes

Most large businesses or enterprises choose ERP to run their operations because this fully integrated system is capable of tracking so many movements or updates from backend departments, such as supply chain management, purchasing, or accounting, allowing businesses to have seamless management over costs, inventory, and people. Meanwhile, CRMs are designed for businesses of all sizes, with different price plans that cover the needs of different sizes.

Price Points

ERP systems are more expensive than CRMs because of the differences in the services each software offers. For a medium-sized business, an average ERP costs $9000 per user, per month, with an implementation fee that can cost between $150,000 and $750,000. This is because, as their name would suggest, ERP systems offer a wider range of features and services targeted at enterprises, such as supply chain management, financial data management, and employee life cycle automation.

Meanwhile, a CRM can range in price from free or cheap pay-as-you-go options, which start at $12 per user, per month, to several thousand dollars per user, per month, with feature-rich plans available and affordable for small businesses. Some of these features include built-in telephony, digital sales tools, and data visualization tools.

How Are CRM and ERP Similar?

CRMs and ERPs are applications that enable businesses to store, organize, and analyze large amounts of data to improve efficiency in our data-driven world. The key similarities between them are:

• These two software programs both come with on-premise or cloud-based options

• Both have CRM features, however, the CRM features on most ERP systems are lightweight

• CRM and ERP provide businesses with a data-first strategy to help them develop  coherent business processes and clearer business targets

Do I Need CRM, ERP, or Both?

Both systems are effective business solutions. However, before making a decision, you need to consider your business focus, complexity, size, and services to determine which system is the best fit for increasing your sales and profitability.

If your primary goal is  to improve your organization’s sales and marketing strategies, a CRM software is the solution you need – especially if your backend operations are running on entry-level. CRMs can accommodate data from small, midsize, and large businesses, allowing room for growth and easy scalability.

However, if you work for a larger corporation and need a full business application suite to manage operations across all departments, investing in an ERP system can fulfill your business and data management needs. This database will be able to support the growth of the company while mitigating cyber risks with excellent data security.

Meanwhile, a CRM and ERP integration provides the biggest advantage for big businesses. Instead of having two separate systems to handle the front and back office, integrating the two provides a streamlined process to manage financial structures, employee performance rates, and customer life cycles.

Should I Integrate CRM and ERP Together?

A CRM-ERP integration is an innovative synergy solution that you can adopt to gain a higher level of visibility into your business processes.

An ERP enables you to streamline business processes that need improvement, allowing you to address roadblocks and achieve scalable growth. However, if you find that your sales and marketing processes need to be more efficient, purchasing a separate CRM tool to address this can be impractical. Integrating the two systems creates a less expensive software that provides a simplified workflow, automates front and back office functions, and offers  real-time updates, resulting in dynamic business operations.

Next Steps

CRM and ERP systems enable businesses to practice a digital-first strategy. Both have the ability to manage a huge volume of data, the successful analysis of which can contribute significantly to a company’s success.

However, each of these systems has a different business focus. CRM allows you to manage customer data that’ll help drive sales, manage marketing, and deliver a quality customer experience, while ERP is used to enhance the operational aspects of the organization through data analytics and management practices.

CRM solutions are perfect for small and midsize businesses due to their  budget-friendly pricing, intuitive features, and supportive services, whereas  ERP solutions are designed for larger corporations that require a single tool to house all backend office data, from departments such as HR, accounting, logistics, and manufacturing. In many cases, large distributors or manufacturers use ERP systems to manage their business operations.

If you’re interested in getting a CRM software for your business, use our free quote-finding tool to find the providers that fit your business’ needs. Just answer a few questions about your business, and we’ll match you up with the best CRM providers for you. Sit back, and they’ll reach out to you with tailored, obligation-free quotes for you to compare.

While Pipedrive and monday.com both offer reliable customer relationship management (CRM) software,  Pipedrive outclasses monday.com by bagging higher ratings for features and scalability, seeing it score an overall 4.2/5 against monday.com’s score of 3.9/5.

Monday.com offers a free 14-day trial period and a free plan that allows a maximum of two users to enjoy the basic functionalities of a CRM platform. Pipedrive, on the other hand, doesn’t have a free plan, but it does offer a 14-day free trial, in which the subscriber can invite as many people as they want in their Pipedrive trial period.

Read on for a more in-depth review of how both compare with one another, or try our free quote-finding tool to check and compare other CRMs. Just answer a few simple questions about your business, and the top providers will reach out to you with obligation-free quotes.

Pipedrive vs. monday.com: Head to Head

Research shows that many businesses understand the benefits of in-house solutions that allow for CRM customisability that is based on their specific needs, and Pipedrive and monday.com offer these necessary customization options. We found that Pipedrive offers more tools for customising reports, allowing you to monitor trends and analyse data, while monday.com offers more tools for customising business processes, which ensures your existing processes reflect on the system.

Both features are essential to any business, but monday.com wins in the customization category by a point, because its top-tier Enterprise plan offers up to 250,000 actions per month for automating workflows, while Pipedrive only offers up to 100 actions per month on its top-tier Enterprise plan.

Below are their ratings and key features for features, customisation, and scalability:

Best Value: Pipedrive

If you’re a small business and are in need of a budget-friendly business solution, a free CRM software package is the perfect remedy. While Pipedrive doesn’t have a free plan on offer, its lowest plan only costs £14 per user, per month. Meanwhile, monday.com’s very-low cost Basic plan is £11 per user, per month. Aside from its extremely affordable plans, it also has a free plan available.

Below, we will look at the notable differences between the two CRMs, if one is greater than the other, and how their prices compare.

The priority of every business is to grow, so it would make sense to use a product that encourages this. Our research shows that Pipedrive is the best option for scalability, scoring a 3.2/5 in our research in this category. Its essential place includes VoIP, web conferencing and third-party integrations, providing a growing business with a scalable system. However, monday.com’s Basic plan does not include any of these features. These will be available when you upgrade to monday.com’s Standard, Pro, and Enterprise plans.

But if you’re looking to set up custom automated workflows, Pipedrive’s Advanced plan offers more customisation features for centralising all your documentation processes, such as chart builder, view data on each sales rep, and view data on each pipeline stage.

 While these data visualisation features aren’t available on monday.com’s Standard plan, it offers more business process automation features that enable you to improve your marketing, customer service, and sales efforts. These are custom objects, task types, and fully editable forms, which aren’t available on Pipedrive’s Advanced plan.

Both offer the custom automation builder feature, but Pipedrive’s Advanced plan is limited to 30 actions per month, while monday.com’s Standard plan can go for up to 250, but both score 3.1/5 for customisation.

When you’re planning on accelerating your digital sales channels, Pipedrive’s Professional plan offers more lead capture features than monday.com’s Pro plan. These are website visitor tracking, website chatbot, and web forms. Meanwhile, monday.com only offers web forms and email templates. Since Pipedrive offers more lead engagement options for lead tracking and communication, it gets 3.6/5 for features, while monday.com only receives 3/5.

You’d think by the time we reach their Enterprise plans, they’d both offer high-level services, right? Except monday.com lacks security settings on this plan, while Pipedrive’s Enterprise offers extensive security features, such as custom permission and IP restriction. This is why it’s the best CRM for data protection, thus scoring 4.2/5 in this category, while monday.com only gets 2.8/5.

Pipedrive vs. monday.com: Which Has the Best Free Plan?

monday.com has a free plan available, and its plans are extremely affordable. However,  with weak integration options and no lead engagement features, mapping out your marketing, sales, or customer service strategy will be a challenge.

Meanwhile, Pipedrive’s Essential plan starts at £14 per user, per month, and it offers more lead engagement features than monday.com’s most expensive plan. However, the lead communication and lead capture features – such as website visitor tracking, website chatbot, and website live chat – come as paid-for add-ons.

Best for Features: Pipedrive

Pipedrive is sure to give startups and small businesses a thrill as its plans come with more lead capture, lead communication, and lead conversion features than monday.com, allowing you to drive more sales . Other than that, all of its plans come with a mix of software and business training for free, whereas monday.com’s plans only come with software training.

Best for Customisation: Tie

Pipedrive offers a lot of options for data visualisation that can help you monitor your sales trends or understand data, such as chart builder and view data on each sales rep. While monday.com offers these features, they are only available on its most expensive Enterprise plan. Additionally, the platform offers a wide range of customisation options for business processes, such as custom objects, custom task types, and fully editable forms. Both offering rich customisation options with different business focus, thus earning 3.1/5 in this category.

Best for Scalability: Pipedrive

Pipedrive and monday.com vary widely when it comes to their ability to integrate with business applications. Pipedrive offers integration options for third-party, VoIP, and web conferencing integrations on all of its plans. On the other hand, monday.com doesn’t offer first-party and social media integrations on any of its plans. Other than that, its Individual and Basic plans don’t come with third-party, VoIP, and web conferencing integrations, seeing it score a low 2.3/5 for scalability, while Pipedrive gets a solid 3.2/5.

Our Methodology: How We Rated Pipedrive and monday.com

Small businesses need a CRM platform that has powerful plans that are built with enough features, as well as integration and customisation options to help their businesses scale. Our researchers compared the performance of both software based on these key factors to determine which platform is best for growing businesses.

• Features – check the presence of lead capture, lead communication, and lead conversion features, which are important for increasing online presence and can contribute to converting leads into customers.

• Customisation – we look at what options are included in the plans that make the system flexible and capable of being customised in such a way that it reflects your data or business processes.

• Scalability – we look out for plans that provide businesses CRM integrations that enable them to centralise other business applications and databases so their operations can reach their full potential.

You can run, but you can’t hide… from the fact your business needs a website. Even if you’re not a tech person, the truth is anyone can whip up a website because website builders make it so easy.

We’re talking click-click-drag easy. If Python seems more like a Harry Potter reference than a familiar programming language, you need our easy steps to no-code website creation.

Step-By-Step: How to Build a Business Website

We’ll cover these steps to help you make a fresh new business website:

1. Choose how to build your website
2. Pick your hosting provider
3. Get a web address (domain name)
4. Secure your web address
5. Pick and edit your website design
6. Optimize your site for search engines
7. Connect payment providers (for online sales)
8. Add extra features
9. Set up an email inbox

You can definitely do all of this in a week. If you really put your mind to it, you can do it in a day. If you want to take longer, that’s perfectly fine as well. Let’s get started on your website. 👩‍💻

1. Choose How to Build Your Website

There are a number of ways to build a website, and it can be difficult to decide which method is right for you. The simple way to approach this question is to consider the purpose of your website. After this, you can weigh up factors like how much time, expertise, and budget you have available.

To get started, let’s think about this question: do you want to sell things online? If yes, then you need an ecommerce website, also known as an online store. We’ve put together a separate guide to the best ecommerce platforms for small businesses which can help you find the right platform to build a website that’s geared for selling. If no, keep reading.

Next, we can think about the building options that are available based on your broader context.

• Lots of time and tech skills –> custom CMS such as Joomla or Drupal
• Some time, low tech skills, budget $0-$1,500 –> website builder such as Wix or Weebly
• Low on time, no tech skills, budget $5,500+ –> web design agency or contractor

Whether you’re briefing the work in-house, taking on the project yourself, or hiring a third party, it’s helpful to have an idea about what you want the website to do. You’ll have a better idea of costs because features and complexity dictate the nature of the website. However, lots of websites let you to change your mind later, allowing you to and add bits on as needed. Just be sure to check the possibility of making changes later down the line before you commit to a path.

Choosing a drag-and-drop website builder can keep website maintenance costs low because certain features are all included in the subscription price. If you commission a customized website, you’ll have to pay for security updates, hosting renewal, and design updates as separate charges.

Which Website Builder is Best for Me?

We’ve mentioned website builders that are suitable for anyone who’s willing to roll their sleeves up and get creative. Now, there are various tools that are better suited to different website types. Some have more storage space (for image-heavy websites), while others have better templates for certain industries.

You can use our website builder decision matrix, which is a simple summary table of our recommendations per website type. Cool name, useful tool.

To use it, look for your occupation type in the central column or check out your preferred website type in the left-hand column. You’ll find our top recommended website builders in the right-hand column.

Ready?

Did one or two of these catch your eye? Feel free to click any of the links to go straight to the website builder where you can start playing around.

Remember, the variety of features you need will affect the cost of a website, so remember to choose a plan with everything you’ll need – and no more.

2. Pick Your Hosting Provider

If you need a refresher on what hosting means, skip down to the FAQs at the end of the page. At some stage, you’re going to have to sign up for a hosting service. This is another cost to factor in, but there’s no need to spend more than around $100 a year to host a basic business website.

The type of hosting you need will depend on how much traffic (the number of visitors) you expect your website to get. You can get away with spending $4 or $5 a month if your website has few pages and around 1,000 or so people visiting it monthly.

Signing up for hosting is extremely easy. Simply go to the website of a hosting provider (big names include GoDaddy, Bluehost, and HostGator), then browse the hosting types on offer. Here are a few factors you should consider:

• The size of your website (in GB)
• Whether you expect spikes of traffic at certain times
• If you want extra security or privacy
• Whether you can install it yourself or will need assistance

Then all you have to do is add your preferred hosting package to the online cart and checkout.

Unless you’re a seasoned webmaster, it’s unlikely you’ll have to go as far as comparing and purchasing web hosting yourself. It’s a specialist area, but worth knowing about if you find the hosting charges on your invoice and want to know what it’s all about.

High performance websites, such as large online stores, will need premium quality hosting services. The reason is you’ll need more server resources to cope with lots of website visitors and fast loading times. These can cost in excess of $200/month, so don’t assume that a hefty price tag means you’re being overcharged.

3. Get a Web Address (Domain Name)

The web address is a rented location for your webpages. It’s a virtual location that all internet users can access, much like a folder where you store your documents (such as on your computer).

This bit isn’t hard, but there are a few new words coming your way. So buckle up.

Domain name: the middle bit of your website name, eg: “Expertmarket.com”
Top level domain (TLD): the end bit of your website name, eg: “.com”
Registrar: the company you buy your domain name from

Your job is to choose a registrar and then think up a cool website name. You should choose a major registrar (such as GoDaddy, Namecheap, or BlueHost) so you’ve got a better chance of good customer service. Then, go to their website and type in your chosen website name and click “Search.”

From there, you add your domain name to your cart and buy it via the online checkout.

Most domains cost around $11-$25 per year (you’ll have to pay for it every year.) It’s best to buy several years in one block for the best price. This is also the most convenient way of buying a domain name because you won’t need a reminder to do it each year. Remember, if you forget to renew your domain then anyone else can buy it.

A high value domain name will cost a lot more, to the point where it’s possibly easier to change your company name than to outbid the current domain holder. For instance, “noahsbark.com” costs $23,898.47, according to a GoDaddy estimate. The reason it’s so expensive is because the trade name is commercially valuable (for some reason).

Top Tips for Choosing a Domain Name

We’ve put together some top tips based on the latest industry expertise, including Google’s guidance on domain names. Some of this advice relates to search engine optimization (SEO). We’ll cover this topic further down.

Pick something short and memorable

If you’re The Cheesecake Factory, your domain name should be “www.thecheesecakefactory.com” (which it is). Don’t try and get clever here with something like “www.yikesIamHungry.org” or another fun-but-tricky website name.

Remember, you want your website name to appear when customers type your business name into a search engine. And web users won’t make time to copy down long website names that are difficult to spell.

However, there may be a case for choosing a simpler domain name than the full name of your business. If you run a real estate agency called Crooker, McIrving, Westley, and Co. you could go for “www.sellmyhome.com” (if you can afford to buy it – likely others will want to compete to buy that domain), or simply “www.crookerandco.com.”

Avoid numeric symbols (eg. 0-10)

These are generally harder to remember, with customers wondering if they should try the number as a numeric symbol or as a word. Also numbers relating to your business may change over time – for instance English website www.everything5pounds.com faces an awkward mismatch now that inflation means its products cost more than £5.

Make it relevant to your business

Because you want your website to come up in web searches of your business name, you should target keywords. You’ll get a better idea of what these should be once you’ve carried out your competitor keyword analysis.

This works best if your business has a unique name. For instance, “www.TastyBakes.store” could get lost on search engine results pages (SERPs), but “www.CarlottasCupcakes.store” will have less competition.

Consider if your business name is too generic to stand out online, particularly if you’re relying on search engines to generate a lot of your revenue.

Buy a couple of TLDs with the same domain name

Because you don’t want your customers going to the wrong website with a similar business name, invest in buying different domain names that sound similar. For instance, “www.CarlottasCupcakes.net” and “www.CarlottasCupcakes.com” and “www.CarlottasCupcakes.store”.

This may seem expensive, as you have to pay for each domain separately. However, you could lose more revenue than you’d care to think about if a scammer bought a similar website name and ripped off your customers.

Avoid punctuation

Adding a hyphen, underscore, comma, etc, is going to make it harder for customers to remember your domain name. We used to recommend avoiding hyphens, in particular, but John Mueller, from Google’s search team, has recently come out and these are “fine,” but noted that you should avoid using spaces, commas, and colons in your URL.

In summary, you should consider your domain name from the perspectives of marketing, memorability, and SEO strategy. Consider the decision carefully, as you’ll want to avoid having to change the domain later down the line.

4. Secure Your Web Address

If you were wondering when to start thinking about cybersecurity, the answer is now. As you buy your domain, you may see a package offer to buy an SSL security certificate with it.

You should definitely buy an SSL certificate. It prevents basic cybersecurity attacks on your website, which could pull it offline or, worse, steal data from your customers (or you).

There are different types of SSL certificates, which you can learn about in the FAQs at the end of this article. You can either buy your SSL certificate from your domain registrar or from a separate company. You can actually get a free one from Let’s Encrypt. You’ll need a little know-how to install it, or you can hire a web design expert to do it for you.

If you’re using a website builder like Wix, your SSL certificate will be included in your monthly subscription cost.

5. Pick and Edit Your Website Design

How you design your website depends on the build method you’ve chosen. If you’ve chosen to work with a freelance web designer, you can expect a greater level of customization. On the other hand, a low-cost or free website builder tool will offer basic editing capability.

We’re going to focus on using website builder tools because they’re readily available and cost-effective for most smaller-sized businesses.

Most people like to choose a pre-made template, and replace the placeholder images and text with their own. We like this way of creating a website because it gives you a running start. With hundreds of website templates available, you’re highly likely to find one you like enough to begin customizing.

Unsure of how to choose the right website design? We have a few suggestions:

• Think about the mood you want to create. If you’re running a kindergarten, it makes sense to choose bright colors and a fun design. If you’re offering financial services, you need to create a more serious tone. Consider the impression your website gives, and whether it matches your aims.
• Showcase your business clearly. Make your message understood from the second a visitor lands on the homepage – or any page – of your website. If you sell shoes, add pictures of them. If you’re a legal firm, ensure your specialty and location is written in large, clear letters.
• Guide your users. Who is using your website – and why? If you mainly have a website to capture email addresses, then include an email form high up on the main page or use a pop-up. If you need visitors to call you, make sure the “Contact us” button is large, central, and clear. Ensure it’s easy to navigate around your website by including links to other pages.

Most website builders have an editor workspace that lets you make creative changes. Here, you can edit different elements of your webpages by clicking on the section you want to change. A set of icons should appear that will allow you to change colors, fonts, styles, and the layout.

Indeed, every website builder works slightly differently, so our advice is to pay attention to the on-screen help guides. For instance, GoDaddy and Wix won’t let you click and drag design elements the way Squarespace will. You’ll get used to the quirks of your chosen program as you become familiar with it.

That said, it’s worth knowing what you’re getting yourself into, so check out our GoDaddy website builder review for a clearer picture of how it works. Alternatively, we’ve written a Wix review if that’s of greater interest.

With its new “Fluid Engine” editor, Squarespace allows you to drag and drop text boxes or images precisely where you’d like them to be. A grid appears in the background to help you align design elements alongside one other.

So, if you’re looking for more design control, we’ve written a review of Squarespace for your information.

The Weebly editor is somewhere in between, allowing you to move design elements up, down, left, or right, but only relative to other design elements. While you can move a text box beneath a button, you can’t position it precisely on the page.

To do this, hover the mouse over any section, and wait until eight dots appear in a rectangle at the top of the box. Then click and drag once the mouse turns into a four-directional arrow. You’ll see the object you’re moving snaps into place, rather than land where you position it.

6. Optimize Your Site for Search Engines

Search engine optimization is a technical field which you could spend years learning about. However, there are some basic guidelines we can share with you that can give your site an advantage.

First of all, you’ll need to get familiar with the different parts of your webpages that search engine bots “scan” for. We’ll take Google as the example because it’s the most widely-used search engine.

Google’s technology ranks websites based on how well they align to certain principles. The most important of these include:

• A website should publish content about which its writers have sufficient knowledge. A domain builds its authority in a topic over time. For instance, an electronics website should not expect much search engine visibility if it starts publishing blogs about skincare.
• Every web page should be clearly structured. Formatting your page is critical, so you should break down every page with different text styles such as H2 (subheadings), H3 (sub-subheadings), and paragraph text.
• Web pages should load quickly. Your domain will be rated more favorably by Google if your website’s pages have a short loading time. So it’s best to avoid large videos on autoplay, or adding too many multimedia content items to one page. Compress large images to improve loading speeds.
• Web pages should link logically to one another. If you publish a guide to shaving, you should include links to other blog posts on your site about related topics, such as types of razors and hair removal techniques.
• A website should not publish new content that is repetitive, unhelpful, or lacks detail. Every new article, video, or audio post should convey useful information to your audience. This means no lifting content from other websites (which is illegal under copyright law). You should also avoid publishing a new page for the sake of two short paragraphs.

The above are just five simple ways to improve your “on-page SEO,” meaning tweaks you make to your website in an attempt to gain more traffic from search engines. You can learn more in our guide to on-page vs off-page SEO.

Before you head to the next section, make sure you’re aware of the meaning of the “SEO title” of a page.

Website content management systems (CMS) will have various ways of editing the SEO data for each page. You should pay attention to the “SEO title” of each web page, because this is the blue text that Google will pull into the SERP. You want to make it really clear what your webpage is about, and encourage users who search for similar phrases to click it.

The meta description is often re-written by Google, so it’s not a big concern to write this perfectly.

7. Connect Payment Providers (For Online Sales)

It’s not difficult to start taking payments through your website. You’ll usually need to sign up to a premium subscription package on your chosen website builder to access this feature. The exceptions are Square or Weebly (now owned by Square), which both allow you to start selling products on their free plans. Instead, you’ll only pay payment processing fees.

Connecting payment providers is a very similar process for all website builders. You click on “Commerce” or “Sell Online” or “Store Payments,” on your account dashboard. Then select “Connect a payment processor.” Here’s how it looks with Squarespace:

Now, simply click the payment processor you want to start with. You can come back and add more later. In the case of a Squarespace account, clicking on Stripe brings up a separate, smaller window. On this new screen, you follow the instructions to authenticate yourself as the Stripe account manager.

Authentication can take the form of validating your email address and confirming your phone number with a specific pin. You’ll need to type in your business details, including the registered business address and its legal name. Make sure you’ve got your IRS paperwork with your Employer Identification Number (EIN) because you’ll need to include this as well.

Remember, the payments company is responsible for carrying out basic checks to ensure it’s not aiding financial criminals.

Squarespace guidance warns that you, as the merchant, are responsible for monitoring whether fraudulent payments come through your business. Stripe does have some detailed fraud prevention advice that can help you out.

If you encounter problems with Stripe down the line (such as banned products or declined charges), you’ll have to contact Stripe rather than Squarespace to sort these out.

The process for connecting any other payment provider is very similar – simply look for the payment processor of your choice in the website builder’s options, and follow the on-screen instructions.

Note that each ecommerce platform (a fancy name for an “online store” website builder) only allows you to connect certain payment processors. For instance, Squarespace only has three options (Stripe, PayPal, and Square Point of Sale), while Wix has over 20 (including Klarna and various Crypto services.)

8. Add Extra Features

Depending on your method of website creation, you’ll approach adding additional features in various ways. Most commonly, you can connect external software programs using APIs, plugins, or “apps.” Many website builders have app stores, including the Wix App Market, the Shopify App Store, and the Weebly App Store.

In the latter case, all you’ll have to do is search through the app store of your chosen website builder for the feature you need. For example, if you go to the Weebly App Store and search for “marketing,” you’ll find a list of third-party tools that will improve customer engagement on your website:

Some things to bear in mind when choosing the apps to add to your website:

• There’s often an extra subscription cost to pay
• Adding too many can slow down your website
• You may be able to find one app that combines the functions of several apps
• Read customer reviews to find out if the app is currently working well

9. Set up an Email Inbox

One of the best things about launching your own website is the opportunity to include a professional email address with it. There are a few different ways to go about this:

Launching email from your hosting control panel

In the event that you choose to manage your own hosting, you can set up email inboxes from the control panel (often known as cPanel). Navigate to the “Email” section of your hosting control panel, and click “Email Accounts.” Next, pick your settings and click “Create account.”

Creating email accounts via WordPress

Email is available as an upgrade option through WordPress. You’ll need your own domain name, so you’ll have to buy that (which you can do through WordPress.) WordPress partners with a product called Titan, which provides features such as read receipts, schedule email send, and template creation.

Find “Upgrades” on the left-hand toolbar, then select “Emails.” This is where you’ll find email subscription plans. Simply follow the on-screen instructions to purchase your favored option. You can then manage settings from within your dashboard.

Starting email through your website builder

Website builder products – particularly those from hosting providers – often offer email as a perk when signing up. You may even get the first year free, such as with GoDaddy. If not, there’s usually an option to sign up for a personalized email account.

For instance, IONOS includes an email address inbox with every website builder plan:

This is relatively unusual because most providers require you to pay separately for email services. One exception is Hostinger, which gives you a free email inbox (1GB mailbox) with its $6.99 per month Website Builder and Web Hosting plan.

Check out our complete review of Hostinger website builder if you’re curious about its other features and value for money.

Other website builder subscriptions include a sign-up deal with Google’s Gmail.

Signing up with email from Google

In any case, you can go straight to Google and sign up for one of its Workspace plans. Google’s pricing is fairly steep, particularly if you have many users that require a lot of storage space. For that reason, we recommend sharing account inboxes where possible.

At a minimum, you’re looking at $72 per year for a custom email name, such as “info@utahweddings.com.” However, the professional impression this email gives may bring it much more new business than you’d otherwise get without it.

All personalized Gmail inboxes are connected to a particular domain name. This is the second part of the email address. So you can either use your domain purchased from a separate registrar, or you can purchase one through Google.

It’s worth being aware that Squarespace will take over Google domain registrations. So, if you had a Google domain your contract will remain the same, but you’ll become a Squarespace customer instead.

Making the Most of Your New Website

Congratulations! You’re now the proud owner of a snazzy new business website 🎉 Your hard work will pay off in the following ways:

• Growing your online presence, appearing to customers or investors who search for your business name online
• Adding credibility to your brand
• Giving you a place to showcase your work
• Selling items or services (if you choose to)
• Opportunity to capture customer email addresses
• Providing a place to publish news, articles, pictures, and videos

However, there are still a few more things to do: now is the time to research SEO services to improve the chances of people finding your website through search engines. You can also look into social media marketing to boost the popularity of your brand, and publicize your website’s awesome content.

But first, don’t forget to celebrate your hard work.

A diverse workplace is a much easier idea to back than to enact – and in real life scenarios that go beyond PR tactics, companies face a specific set of challenges when it comes to making that idea into a reality.

Hiring biases can deal a killer blow when it comes to achieving diversity in your business – and it can also compromise your employee satisfaction. For example, a survey by fact checking organisation Fullfact reported that candidates with white-sounding names were 74% more likely to be called for interviews than candidates with ethnic-sounding ones. If you fall into this trap, you could be missing out on finding the key talent your business needs to thrive and grow.

If you run a small business and don’t have a dedicated HR team, it can be particularly difficult to develop and roll out processes that tackle hiring biases. To help you, in this article, we’re going to examine the steps that you can take to avoid falling victim to hiring bias. These steps are:

What is a recruitment bias?

Recruitment bias is an unconscious assumption held by hiring team members that favours certain people in detriment of others. It’s a form of subtle discrimination that reinforces stereotypes and prevents diversity in an organisation.

A recruitment bias can target any trait from a candidate, from age and gender to ethnicity and sexual orientation. What characterises them is the fact that they are unconscious and therefore hard to be acknowledged and addressed.

Case in point: the traits targeted by biases just mentioned are listed in the Equality Act 2010 as characteristics that can’t be discriminated against. However, proving this discrimination in a hiring process poses a problem, since a company can easily argue that a particular candidate wasn’t hired because they didn’t have the required skill set.

Because of that, to promote diversity, tackling recruitment biases at the source is way more productive than after the damage is done. However, as something many recruiters themselves might not be aware of, there must be a conscious effort from your company towards avoiding it. To find out what you can do, just keep on reading.

Today, most businesses are familiar with the terms ‘diversity’, ‘equity’, and ‘inclusion’ – or DEI for short. What remains unclear is whether or not businesses truly understand these principles and why they are important. For entrepreneurs and people managers, embracing DEI is a powerful way to foster innovation and excellence in your venture, as well as to massively contribute to your employee satisfaction.

A study published in November 2022 by Wildgoose, a team building firm, found that over half of the participants witnessed discrimination or lack of inclusion in the workplace, and one in five think their company isn’t inclusive.

Inequality and lack of inclusion are highly corrosive factors for any business. It goes far beyond simply being a bad image for a company – although this can be hugely damaging in itself. It also leads to unwanted situations, such as poor productivity and difficulties in retaining or hiring quality staff.

While bigger companies often have the support of well-staffed and trained human resources departments to help foster a healthy work culture, smaller businesses often rely on the management and leadership structure for matters related to  DEI.

Before a company can address issues surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion, it is imperative that there is a keen understanding of what each term means individually, and how they work together to create a motivated, collaborative, and productive workforce.

That is what we will examine in this article.

• What is diversity?
• What is equity?
• What is inclusion?
• What’s the difference between diversity, equity, and inclusion?
• What are the benefits of DEI?
• DEI: key takeaways

What is diversity?

Diversity refers to a workplace or organisation’s aim to represent  people of all walks of life. This can ensure that a workplace isn’t dominated by one social group – especially the ones favoured in society or perceived as majorities.

Work towards diversity happens across the board and is usually quite gradual. For instance, the 2023 Financial Times Stock Exchange Women Leaders Review celebrated the fact that 40% of the board members of Britain’s 350 biggest listed companies were women.

However, this only came about after a decade of intense behind-the-scenes work, since this number was just over 9% in 2011. It also begs the question: ‘How do other society sectors factor into this?’

It’s also worth remembering that the discussion around diversity, at its basic level, has less to do with company betterment and more to do with the law. As a term, diversity stands in contrast to discrimination, since discriminatory biases prevent the diverse recruitment and progress.

On that note, it’s extremely important that your business looks into ways of reducing recruitment bias. Beyond its ethical implications, this will raise your chances of staying compliant with the Equality Act 2010, which outlines nine characteristics that can’t be discriminated against:

• Age
• Disability
• Gender reassignment
• Marriage and civil partnership
• Pregnancy and maternity
• Race
• Religion and philosophical belief
• Sex
• Sexual orientation

Despite not being mentioned in the legislation, educational and socioeconomic backgrounds are crucial subjects to tackle on the road to diversity. Classism has been identified as the most prevalent diversity-related problem in UK workplaces, with one third of UK companies needing to improve their ways to address it.

To tackle classism in your company, it’s important to look into ways of bridging socioeconomic gaps. Supporting your staff’s side hustles, for example, can be an efficient way of allowing some of your employees to earn extra income while still contributing to your company.

What is equity?

Equity is a set of internal actions that aim to level the playing field for employees. They do so by embracing their differences in abilities and backgrounds, and granting them parity in contributions and career opportunities within the company.

People come with various behaviours, skill sets, and personal histories. The key to give them the same opportunities as everyone else in a work scenario isn’t to treat them equally, but to treat them differently in accordance to their particularities.

One simple example of an equity measure is a flexible shift, in which employees work for the same number of hours but are allowed different start and finish times, therefore embracing the variety of people’s productivity throughout the day. Besides accommodating, this measure can also boost productivity.

However, the issue runs deeper: an effective equity strategy can make sure everyone in your company have fair chances at promotions – a key factor for staff retention – from female hybrid workers to employees without a college degree, for example. Eliminating biases related to referrals, college degree, and previous experience are paramount to level the playing field. These are known to be affected by traits such as age, gender, and ethnic background.

What is inclusion?

Inclusion is the feeling of acceptance and worthiness that an employee experiences in a workplace setting. It means workers feel comfortable to be their true selves at work by bringing their ideas to the table, knowing they will be respected and their input equally considered

As a feeling, inclusion is closely related to mental health from a personal perspective. Happiness and safety go a long way to ensure someone is comfortable enough to show up and develop the activities they’re expected to do without the risk of burnout.

From a managerial perspective, this is usually tied to staff retention. Where employees don’t feel welcome and at ease, the psychological pressure and sheer discomfort is likely to prompt them to leave.  As a whole, if the company culture isn’t inclusive, you are bound to lose employees and teams will rarely be fully staffed.

What’s the difference between diversity, equity, and inclusion?

In short, the difference between diversity, equity, and inclusion is that diversity refers to the variety of social groups represented in a workforce, whereas equity refers to members of these different social groups being afforded equal footing for growth in the company, and inclusion relates to the feelings of safety, worthiness, and belonging that an employee feels in their work environment.

It’s likely you’ve seen diversity, equity, and inclusion bundled together or even used interchangeably, but it’s important to note their differences when you develop your strategy to bring these ideas into your company. This is because each will call for a specific set of actions and measurement methods.

When correlating them, diversity is an objective situation while equity is a series of procedures actioned on this situation. Inclusion is a feeling that usually derives from the two. Because of its psychological nature, inclusion is harder to establish and measure, which means it’ll be something you should be always checking in on, either via informal chats or surveys.

What are the benefits of DEI?

The benefits of DEI are numerous, including talent attraction, staff retention, boosted productivity, better staff health, and bigger employee engagement. Investing in DEI is also one of the ways of showing employee appreciation and, as mentioned in our interview with Maryam Din (client account manager at LGBTQ charity Stonewall), it’s an initiative small business can definitely do.

For companies renewing their workforce and keen on tapping into the jobseekers now entering the market, DEI is a no-brainer. In a survey conducted in 2022, almost 7 in 10 employees said they’re likely to work for a company with a diverse workforce for five or more years. This means diversity is a factor that affects both their job search and their potential tenure with their employer. When coupled with inclusion promotion, the resulting feeling of belonging among staff commonly leads to better employee engagement.

It goes further: a massive study conducted in 2021 concluded that inclusive company cultures contribute to an increase of staff happiness and an overall improvement of their health. This is a major plus for companies fighting the current employee absenteeism trend.

For its part, the correlation between DEI and productivity has been consistently pointed out by studies, with one published by management consulting firm McKinsey & Company in 2019. It states that gender and ethnically diverse companies are up to 36% more likely to outperform companies that aren’t.

That said, diversity alone doesn’t cut it: academics Robin J. Ely and David A. Thomas noted in a 2020 article that companies should, beyond hiring people from underrepresented groups, make efforts to tap into their experience-related knowledge to learn how work more efficiently.

DEI: key takeaways

You now know the difference between diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as how they work together towards creating a healthier, more collaborative work environment that fosters productivity and engagement.

Your ability to provide that environment can be a key factor for staff retention levels in the near future. The resignation of Dominic Raab over “intimidating” behaviour goes to show that anywhere can become a toxic work environment.

As you move towards implementing these policies, it’s important to remember that DEI initiatives are not developed under a tokenist mentality – as illustrated by the “diversity hire” concept – but fully ingrained in the company culture as a whole.

Beyond its obvious PR aspect, DEI is about embracing and respecting the whole spectrum of the human experience. It’s not only about getting underrepresented groups through the door. It’s also about making sure that once in, they thrive.

Zoho One’s best offer is an annual subscription that costs between $37 and $90 per user, per month, but you also have the option to be billed monthly for the higher price of $45 to $105 per user, per month. What we like about Zoho One is that it doesn’t tie you down to any long-term contracts, and offers a 30-day free trial with no credit card required.

Zoho One is an all-in-one business application suite that gives you access to over 40 integrated apps to help you run all your business operations – including sales, marketing, customer support, HR, recruitment, and finance – under one affordable pricing plan.

In this guide to Zoho One’s pricing, you’ll learn about its rates and plan details, and we’ll help you decide which package provides the right business suite for your organization.

Zoho One Pricing Summary

Zoho One’s Pricing Plans: A Breakdown

We explore Zoho One’s pricing plans so you can find the right one for your business:

Zoho One All Employee Pricing – $37-$45 Per User, Per Month

Zoho One’s All Employee Pricing plan costs $45 per employee, per month when billed monthly. However, if you choose to pay annually, the rate drops down to $37 per employee, per month. This plan comes with over 40 of Zoho’s business applications, including Zoho CRM Enterprise, Zoho Books, and Zoho Social, which we recommend for enterprises as it allows you to bring these necessary stand-alone systems together in one place, and manage your customers and business processes in a systematic way.

Aside from getting access to the majority of Zoho’s individual products, this plan can be integrated with other third-party applications too, giving you more options aside from Zoho’s own apps, including Google Drive, Zapier, and Trello. If something’s still missing, you can use Zoho Creator, an app development platform, to create custom apps specific to your business’s needs.

The most important thing to understand about the All Employee Pricing plan is that you must purchase a license for every employee in your company. As per the license agreement, if you don’t have licenses for all of your employees, Zoho will ask you to add licenses for every single one of them, or it’ll move you to the Flexible-User Pricing plan (which provides all the same apps and features, but costs significantly more per employee).

Zoho One Flexible User Pricing – $90-$105 Per User, Per Month

Zoho One’s Flexible User Pricing package comes with the same enterprise-level features as the All Employee Pricing, but costs more at $105 per user, per month, or $90 per user, per month if you pay annually. Like the All Employee Pricing plan, it includes over 40 Zoho business apps, the same third-party integrations, and Zoho Creator.

The key difference here is that there’s no minimum license required when you sign up for this plan. This means there’s no need to purchase a license for every employee – you can purchase as many (or as few) licenses as you want under this package.

User Support Packages

The standard user support service that’ll come with your Zoho One package is dubbed the Classic Support plan. It comes with email, chat, and phone support channels that are available for eight hours a day, from Mondays to Fridays, with a maximum response time of eight hours.

If you need a faster customer support response time than what the Classic Support plan has to offer, you can upgrade to one of Zoho One’s paid support plans. The Premium plan will cost 20% of your Zoho subscription fee and comes with 24/5 email, chat and phone support, with maximum response time of three hours, so you can resolve problems much faster. The Enterprise plan, on the other hand, will cost 25% of your subscription fee. It comes with everything that the Premium plan has, with an even faster maximum response time of one hour, and a technical account manager to personally assist you.

These two paid support plans also include product onboarding and configuration assistance, neither of which are included on the Classic Support plan.

Does Zoho One Have a Free Plan?

Zoho One doesn’t have a free plan available, but it does offer a 30-day free trial, during which you get a whole month to maximize this application suite for running your business operations, and investigate whether it works for you. It offers a fully-integrated CRM system that your sales, marketing, and customer service teams can access to get updates on deals, leads, and customers. Not only that, but we found that other company departments, such as finance, recruitment, and HR can access and edit your business processes to run an effective holistic business operation.

If you’re looking for a CRM system primarily, rather than a full suite of business apps, there are other CRM market leaders that offer a forever-free plan, including HubSpot and Freshsales. If you’re keen on Zoho, Zoho CRM, Zoho’s own CRM platform, also boasts a free plan.

Zoho One Costs: Billing Cycles, Ongoing Costs, and Hidden Fees

What we like about about Zoho One is that it gives you full control of your billing cycle. You can indicate your billing interval on the ‘Bill Every’ system setting, specifying the number of times you’ll be charged.

You can choose between two billing cycle options – auto renewal until cancellation, or expiry after a specific number of billing cycles, which you can key in yourself. This is great, especially for startups and small businesses, as you can easily settle payments when the bill comes, without worrying about surprise bills.

Aside from this, there’s no need to worry about renewal costs or additional annual charges. In fact, you can save more if you choose an annual subscription, on which you can settle payments online through Visa, MasterCard, and American Express. Zoho also accepts checks, PayPal (you must have a PayPal account), and wire transfers. Meanwhile, if none of this is applicable to you, offline payments can be arranged with Zoho’s sales team.

How does Zoho One’s Pricing Compare With CRM Platforms?

Of course, Zoho One comes with a CRM app, but it’s not a CRM system itself – it’s a holistic, comprehensive business application suite that can also help you take care of your other business operations, such as finance, recruitment, and HR. With over 40 of Zoho’s apps included for just one price, it offers excellent value for money.

However, if you don’t need the complete suite of apps and are just looking for a CRM system, there are plenty to compare here. War between businesses and the fight over customer loyalty is in full swing. The most important weapon in this battle is CRM software. These top CRMs offer a unified interface that allows you to get a 360-degree view of your customers so you can expertly wield this software however it’s packaged, whether it’s pre-built or comes with the ability to be customized specific to your business. It must come with plans that have features that enable you to strategize, strike, and follow-through with your marketing, sales, and customer service strategies.

There are several CRMs that offer great value for money that you can choose from. monday.com, for example, isn’t the cheapest CRM on the market but each of its plans offer a great package, such as  lead capture, sales, and marketing automation capabilities. HubSpot, on the other hand, offers lead conversion features across all of its pricing tiers at affordable rates. Meanwhile, Freshsales offers affordable plans that are packed with lead generation features.

Our independent research into website builders shows that Hostinger (formerly Zyro) packs a punch as the best website builder for uptime reliability. Scoring an overall 3.7/5 in our tests, its uptime reliability will ensure your website is live and accessible while its adaptive AI tools can help you build a website faster.

In this review, we’ll explore Hostinger’s features, pros, cons, and pricing, and compare its website features, design functionalities, ease of use, and customer support with competitor products. 

Here at Expert Market, we investigate various website builders, like Hostinger, to help you find the right one for your business. Read on to learn more about Hostinger, or start building your website with Hostinger today!

Hostinger’s Pros and Cons

✔ Pro: 99.9% Guaranteed Uptime

Uptime reliability decides how long your website is online and running smoothly. It’s worth mentioning that 100% uptime reliability is a myth. So, Hostinger’s guarantee of 99.9% uptime reliability ensures that your website will almost always be live and accessible for visitors and potential customers.

To emphasize the power of Hostinger’s uptime, our overall top-scorer for website builders, Wix, only offers a 99.8% uptime guarantee.

✔ Pro: 24/7 Live Chat Support

Building a website is no easy feat, so it’s crucial to have a reliable help and support channel. Scoring 3.3/5 in our help and support analysis, Hostinger offers 24/7 live chat support, which comes in handy when you need urgent assistance. You’ll only have to click on the bottom right of the page to be assisted. 

Alternatively, you can also take advantage of Hostinger’s vast knowledge center, where you can find various tutorials, such as building your website from the ground up. Squarespace, which tops our help and support analysis with a score of 4.8/5, also features a comprehensive help center to guide you, but it only offers live chat support from Monday to Friday, from 4am to 12am. Sure, Squarespace offers 24/7 support through email and social media, but having a 24/7 live chat channel on your website, as with Hostinger, is more convenient. 

✔ Pro: Adaptive AI-powered Tools

There’s no denying that AI speeds up website creation, and Hostinger is innovating in line with this trend. You can create a personalized logo for your business using Hostinger’s AI Logo Maker. It also features a handy AI Writer tool, which you can use to cook up compelling website text. To use this, choose from topics and categories, according to the type of content you need for your website. Once you’ve chosen, the AI Writer will produce a coherent paragraph that you can use for your site. This will save you time and money, as you’ll no longer have to hire another set of hands to write content for you. But it’s worth mentioning that it may not sound as human as you’d expect it to, given that an AI writes the piece.

Hostinger also offers an AI Heatmap, a valuable tool that predicts how visitors will see and navigate your site. Once you upload an image of your website, the AI Heatmap tool will generate colour-coded markers to depict which elements need rearranging or switching up to help boost conversion (such as a successful purchase) on your site. 

✘ Con: Doesn’t Offer Keyword Support

Hostinger scores 2.8/5 in our website features analysis, as our research shows that it doesn’t offer keyword support for search engine optimization (SEO). It’s a really critical part of creating a business website because keywords help you understand what your visitors are searching for.

Without keyword research, you’re just taking a blind guess at your content strategy, and could struggle to increase organic click-through rates and website traffic. 

If you want to unlock keyword support for your website, Squarespace, which scores 4.6/5 in the website features category, has a Keyword Search Analytics panel which monitors keywords driving traffic to your page.

✘ Con: Limited Design Flexibility

While Hostinger has a wide selection of 130 templates, it doesn’t allow you to switch templates. It’ll also let you preview how your page looks on both desktop and mobile to ensure that everything works and looks properly. So, if you decide to spice up the overall visual appearance of your website, you’d have to create an entirely new website first and then manually transfer all the content from your previous one, which is, to say the least, inconvenient and time-consuming. This is why Hostinger only scores 3.6/5 for design functionality.

If you want to experience more design flexibility, Squarespace which scores 4.2/5 in the same category, allows you to switch between various templates and even repopulates all of your content and elements for a swift visual upgrade. 

How Much Does Hostinger Cost?

Hostinger’s pricing scores 3.7/5 in our analysis. For only £8.99 per month (paying for a year upfront), you’ll unlock the comprehensive Website Builder and Web Hosting package. This plan includes 24/7 live chat and email support for your urgent needs and website-building assistance, free business email, an array of valuable AI-powered tools, and free SSL certificates to ensure your website stays secure.

Hostinger also offers discounts to its new users, where you’ll only pay £2.59  per month for the first year and get three months free. You can snap up further discounts if you pay for a longer subscription term.

It’s worth noting one way in which Hostinger one-ups our overall top-scoring website builder Wix; Hostinger includes free business email in its plan. With Wix, you’d have to pay upwards of £4.60 per month for the same benefit. Learn more in our Wix pricing guide.

Overall, though, our in-depth analysis names Jimdo as the website builder with the best value for money, with a score of 4.5/5 in this category. Aside from a free plan that grants you access to all its basic features, Jimdo also offers one of the lowest entry points among the website builders we’ve explored. For as low as £9 per month, you can enjoy a free domain (for the first year) plus SEO tools. 

How Does Hostinger Compare With Other Website Builders?

Here at Expert Market, we have a team of skilled online growth experts who probe the ins and outs of the top website builders. We investigate and compare them according to:

• Website features
• Design functionality
• Help and support
• Ease of use

Website Features

Hostinger ranks fifth in our website features analysis with an above-average score of 2.8/5. While it will provide you with everything to build your website and get it up and running, it is on the basic end of the spectrum. Hostinger doesn’t have an SEO-specific app that you can use to navigate Google’s strict ranking factors. It also doesn’t have keyword support, which could be handy for curating content for your website and improving click-through rates.

Moreover, Hostinger doesn’t have an app market, unlike Squarespace, Wix, Shopify and other major competitors. That means there are hardly any integrations you can add to your website, and you won’t be able to connect it to external software tools you may use for accounting, inventory management, social media, and so on.

Still, Hostinger punches above its weight with its AI-powered tools that help boost your website’s functionality sans an extra set of hands. Its AI Logo Maker can produce a custom logo for your business within seconds – just input your preferences, and you can choose from the automatically generated logos! Hostinger also has an AI Writer tool that you can use to write website copies and content. Its power-packed tool is the AI Heatmap, which suggests page improvements, from the elements to the content, making it more appealing to your visitors.

Design Functionalities

A well-designed website creates a good first impression for your visitors and promotes a good user experience. Hostinger scores an above-average 3.6/5 in our design functionality analysis. It offers over 130 templates that you can use to start building your website. You can choose from its pre-made templates divided into different categories to help match your niche.

Text and colour editing was the right level of complex yet workable. If I came to part of the design where the text didn’t seem clearly legible, I just clicked on it, and quickly found the option to add a coloured bar behind it.

The best part was being able to easily dial up or down the transparency on a sliding scale. That’s an impressive level of design control for such a low-cost website builder.

Overall, the auto-generated content was generally well-though out, with attractive stock images balanced by clear navigation features.

However, like Wix, its Achilles’ heel is that you can’t switch between templates. If you want to change how your site looks, you’ll have to start with a new website and manually transfer all your content. 

Squarespace scores 4/5 in the design functionality category and will allow you to change your templates while retaining your content and elements. This means it’ll be much easier to update your site, as you won’t have to spend a lot of time starting from scratch.

Ease of Use

Hostinger’s intuitive, beginner-friendly interface sees it score 3.9/5 in our ease of use analysis. It offers you the convenience of editing the look of your website on desktop and mobile, with helpful tips and tutorials to support you along the way. 

I found the editor easy to use, and was pleasantly simple to work with. To edit a button or image, all you have to do is click on it, and a mini editing menu appears beside it. That made it straightforward to quickly change a button colour, or reposition a text box that wasn’t quite where I wanted it to be.

However, if you want a faster website editing platform with more power-packed features, we recommend choosing Wix, which scores 4.4/5 in the same category. Wix employs the same drag-and-drop feature when editing your website. It also has more editing options than Hostinger, as you can easily customise your site with unique options for every element, plus helpful SEO prompts that can help you optimise your website as you’re building it. 

Help and Support

Scoring 3.3/5 for help and support, Hostinger offers various customer support channels to promote a convenient user experience. You can seek helpful advice from its knowledge center, which grants you access to video tutorials, help articles, and valuable tips for creating a website.

Hostinger’s stellar 24/7 live chat support sees it score extra brownie points, as it ensures you’ll get support at the moment you’re experiencing difficulties. This is vital for busy entrepreneurs who need instant assistance so as not to lose out on sales or see their reputation damaged.

However, Squarespace, which aces our help and support analysis with a score of 4.8/5, has a more extensive knowledge center than Hostinger. However, Hostinger still powers through, since Squarespace only has live chat support on weekdays, whereas Hostinger offers it round the clock. 

What Kind of Business is Hostinger Best For?

Hostinger would suit a small business or startup with a budget on the lower end. It’s a versatile tool for companies in all kinds of sectors, including local businesses, healthcare, auto repairs, and personal services.

Best of all, Hostinger will save costs because you don’t need to hire a web developer or web designer to create your site from scratch.

It’s a helpful tool for scaling an SME because you can create up to 100 websites on just one account. That’s invaluable for businesses looking to create more than one brand that needs a home online.

If you’re looking to sell online, then we’d recommend Hostinger for small online stores only. Reason being you can only sell up to 500 products, which is a very low cut off point compared to Wix (with which you can sell up to 50,000 products) or Shopify (with no limit on the number of product listings).

Does Hostinger Have Good Customer Reviews?

Our in-depth online growth research sees Hostinger with a customer score of 3.3/5. A deep-dive into customer reviews from G2, Trustpilot, and Capterra show that its users applaud its stellar customer service and easy-to-use interface. Here are some reviews:

While Pipedrive and monday.com both offer reliable customer relationship management (CRM) software,  Pipedrive outclasses monday.com by bagging higher ratings for features and scalability, seeing it score an overall 4.2/5 against monday.com’s score of 3.9/5.

Monday.com offers a free 14-day trial period and a free plan that allows a maximum of two users to enjoy the basic functionalities of a CRM platform. Pipedrive, on the other hand, doesn’t have a free plan, but it does offer a 14-day free trial that allows the subscriber to invite as many people as they want to join the Pipedrive trial period.

Read on for a more in-depth review of how both compare with one another, or try our free quote-finding tool to check and compare other CRMs. Just answer a few simple questions about your business, and the top providers will reach out to you with obligation-free quotes.

Pipedrive vs. monday.com: Head-to-Head

Research shows that many businesses prefer in-house solutions that allow for CRM customizability that is based on their specific needs, and Pipedrive and monday.com offer these necessary customization options. We found that Pipedrive offers more tools for customizing reports, allowing you to monitor trends and analyze data, while monday.com offers more tools for customizing business processes, which ensures your existing processes reflect on the system.

Both features are essential to any business, but monday.com wins in the customization category by a point, because its top-tier Enterprise plan offers up to 250,000 actions per month for automating workflows, while Pipedrive only offers up to 100 actions per month on its top-tier Enterprise plan.

Below are their ratings and key features for features, customization, and scalability:

Best Value: Pipedrive

If you’re a small business and are in need of a budget-friendly business solution, a free CRM software package is the perfect remedy. While Pipedrive doesn’t have a free plan on offer, its lowest plan only costs $12.50 per user, per month. Meanwhile, monday.com’s very-low cost Basic plan is $9 per user, per month. Aside from its extremely affordable plans, it also has a free plan available.

Below, we will look at the notable differences between the two CRMs, if one is greater than the other, and how their prices compare.

The priority of every business is to grow, so it would make sense to use a product that encourages this. Our research shows that Pipedrive is the best option for scalability, scoring a 3.2/5 in our research in this category. Its essential place includes VoIP, web conferencing and third-party integrations, providing a growing business with a scalable system. However, monday.com’s Basic plan does not include any of these features. These will be available when you upgrade to monday.com’s Standard, Pro, and Enterprise plans.

But if you’re looking to set up custom automated workflows, Pipedrive’s Advanced plan offers more customization features for centralizing all your documentation processes, such as chart builder, view data on each sales rep, and view data on each pipeline stage.

While these data visualization features aren’t available on monday.com’s Standard plan, it offers more business process automation features that enable you to improve your marketing, customer service, and sales efforts. These are custom objects, task types, and fully editable forms, which aren’t available on Pipedrive’s Advanced plan.

Both offer the custom automation builder feature, but Pipedrive’s Advanced plan is limited to 30 actions per month, while monday.com’s Standard plan allows  up to 250 actions. This is why it gets 3.2/5 for customization, while Pipedrive only gets 3.1/5.

When you’re planning on accelerating your digital sales channels, Pipedrive’s Professional plan offers more lead capture features than monday.com’s Pro plan. These features are: website visitor tracking, website chatbot, and web forms. Meanwhile, monday.com only offers web forms and email templates. Since Pipedrive offers more lead engagement options for lead tracking and communication, it gets 3.6/5 for features, while monday.com only receives 3/5.

You’d think by the time we reach their Enterprise plans, they’d both offer high-level services, right? Except monday.com lacks security settings on this plan, while Pipedrive’s Enterprise offers extensive security features, such as custom permission and IP restriction. This is why it’s the best CRM for data protection, thus scoring 4.2/5 in this category, while monday.com only gets 2.8/5.

Pipedrive vs. monday.com: Which Has the Best Free Plan?

monday.com has a free plan available, and its plans are extremely affordable. However, with weak integration options and no lead engagement features, mapping out your marketing, sales, or customer service strategy will be a challenge.

Meanwhile, Pipedrive’s Essential plan starts at $12.50 per user, per month, and it offers more lead engagement features than monday.com’s most expensive plan. However, the lead communication and lead capture features – such as website visitor tracking, website chatbot, and website live chat – come as add-ons.

Best for Features: Pipedrive

Pipedrive is sure to give startups and small businesses a thrill as its plans come with more lead capture, lead communication, and lead conversion features than monday.com, allowing you to drive more sales . Other than that, all of its plans come with a mix of software and business training for free, whereas monday.com’s plans only come with software training.

Best for Customization: monday.com

monday.com offers a wide range of customization options for business processes, such as custom objects, custom task types, and fully editable forms. Pipedrive, on the other hand, doesn’t have these features on any of its plans. Pipedrive does offer a lot of options for data visualization that can help you monitor your sales trends or understand data, such as chart builder and view data on each sales rep. While monday.com offers these features, they are only available on its pricier, Enterprise plan, scoring 3.2/5 for customization, while Pipedrive gets 3.1/5.

Best for Scalability: Pipedrive

Pipedrive and monday.com vary widely when it comes to their ability to integrate with business applications. Pipedrive offers integration options for third-party, VoIP, and web conferencing integrations on all of its plans. On the other hand, monday.com doesn’t offer first-party and social media integrations on any of its plans. Other than that, its Individual and Basic plans don’t come with third-party, VoIP, and web conferencing integrations, seeing it score a low 2.4/5 for scalability, while Pipedrive gets a solid 3.2/5.

Our Methodology: How We Rated Pipedrive and monday.com

Small businesses need a CRM platform that has powerful plans that are built with enough features as well as integration and customization options to help their businesses scale. Our researchers compared the performance of both software based on these key factors to determine which platform is best for growing businesses.

• Features – check for the presence of lead capture, lead communication, and lead conversion features, which are important for increasing online presence and can contribute to converting leads into customers.

• Customization – we look at what options are included in the plans that make the system flexible and capable of being customized in such a way that it reflects your data or business processes.

• Scalability – we look out for plans that provide businesses CRM integrations that enable them to centralize other business applications and databases so their operations can reach their full potential.

IONOS offers the most affordable website building plans today, with monthly fees for as low as £1 per month, with its highest plans costing upwards of £25 per month. This gives IONOS an overall rating of 3.1/5 in our independent deep dive into the top website builders in the UK. 

In this pricing guide, we’ll explore all of IONOS’s plans in detail, along with its included perks and features, to help you find the most suitable one for your business.

Here at Expert Market, we’ve been researching different website builders for years. Our research experience shows a change in price trends across website builders like Hostinger. Additional fees, such as transaction fees and plug-ins, also change from time to time. To help you navigate through these changes, we’ve got the answers right here for you. Read on to learn more! 

IONOS pricing summary

IONOS’s pricing plans: a breakdown

Starter – £9 per month

We’re starting this pricing guide with IONOS’s entry-level plan, Starter, available for only £9 per month. Our in-house team of researchers say it’s perfect for creating a website because it offers all the essentials to start a business: a free domain for the first year, professional email with 2GB of storage space, and professional templates that include pre-built sections for faster, easier setup.

Even on its basic plan IONOS will give you access to Marketing Radar, a valuable tool that allows you to monitor your website’s presence on social media, review websites, and online directories. A bonus is that you can also track the performance of your competitors on Google’s search rankings and social media sites. IONOS collects this data for you and then provides it via an easy-to-read feed, so you can easily find any items on your website that require attention.

Moreover, you can unlock 10GB of webspace and create 10 pages for your website. You can also customise your colour scheme if the pre-selected ones aren’t to your liking. This plan offers a fast way to set up your website – just choose your theme, insert your content, and it’s ready! It also grants you access to over 17,000 royalty-free images that you can use for your pages. 

If you’re a first-time IONOS user, you can sign up to the Starter plan for only £5 for the first six months. 

However, the Starter plan doesn’t include access to an online booking tool and IONOS’s Ranking Coach, which can help provide in-depth SEO guidance for your pages. You also can’t edit or change the layout of the pre-built elements in your chosen templates. Still, you can enjoy IONOS’s Onboarding Wizard tool and Project Guidance Dashboard, which can help you handle your projects more efficiently. If you want to unlock a comprehensive SEO tool and a more fluid website editing experience, Squarespace offers this in its basic plan, Personal, available for £12 per month. It’s costlier than IONOS, but it has more features you can take advantage of.

Plus – £15 per month

Plus offers the best value for money among IONOS’s plans. This is because first-time users can sign up for only £1 for the first 12 months, then pay £15 per month afterwards. 

It also lets you enjoy five times the storage of the Starter plan: 50GB of webspace and 12GB of email storage. This plan offers better flexibility as you can customise the templates and add a custom HTML to your website’s backend. You can move around your elements and photos, unlike the Starter plan, which limits you to IONOS’s pre-built elements and designs. The ultimate distinction between this and the basic plan is that it offers SiteAnalytics and an online booking tool. 

While the online booking tool will give your site’s visitors a convenient way to book your services, SiteAnalytics will collect the essential metrics about your website’s performance, including the length of time a visitor stays on your page, browser type, location, and dwell type. Dwell type is a crucial SEO metric that depicts the time a user spends analysing a web page before returning to search results. A low dwell time on a web page most likely indicates that the page did not match the user’s search intent. By understanding your site’s dwell time, you’ll gain a better understanding on how to ensure that your content stays relevant for your visitors, possibly helping you improve your conversion rates (such as sales).

Like the Starter plan, you can access its wide array of over 17,000 royalty-free images, a one-year free domain, Marketing Radar, the Onboarding Wizard tool, and 24/7 customer support through live chat, phone, email, and social media. It’s worth mentioning that this is where IONOS one-ups our website builder top-runner Wix, which scores an overall 4.9/5 in our independent research. This is because Wix doesn’t cater to customer inquiries via email, and you’ll have to upgrade to their most expensive plan to receive priority customer support. 

Pro – £25 per month

IONOS’s last pricing tier is the Pro plan, available for £25 per month. Our research finds it as the best for improving your website functionality and SEO because it offers a comprehensive package of website and marketing tools for larger businesses who cater to a wider clientele or want to scale their online presence.

Like the Plus plan, you have the flexibility to customise the templates, including your colour scheme and elements, and even add custom HTML to your backend. It also includes IONOS’s Marketing Radar tool, which tracks your brand’s presence in significant digital channels such as social media, online directories, and review websites. It then organises this data for you in an easy-to-read stream, allowing you to quickly identify any issues that require your attention. This can help your business improve its online presence and scalability, so you can stay on top of your competitors. Additionally, you’ll have access to the upgraded SiteAnalytics Plus tool, a valuable tool that generates and exports PDF reports of the essential metrics of your website’s performance.

Moreover, the Pro plan offers unlimited webspace and pages, a huge distinction from the other plans IONOS offers. It also employs active email syncing on all devices and 50GB storage, giving you sufficient space to send, receive, and store important emails and documents.

The cherry on top of this package is IONOS’s search engine optimisation (SEO) tool, the Ranking Coach Essential. It’s a simple, do-it-yourself tool that guides and assists you in completing tasks to improve your search engine ranking. It uses video instructions and step-by-step guides for the tasks, providing helpful insights about Google’s SEO ranking factors, such as keyword support and mobile responsiveness. This can further improve your scalability as it can boost your ranking on Google searches, which helps customers find your site faster.

Does IONOS have a free plan?

Unfortunately, IONOS doesn’t offer a free trial or plan. You’ll have to pay upfront to use its services and start building a website. 

If you’re looking for a free website builder, we recommend choosing the top scorer in our website builder research, Wix (4.9/5). Unlike other website builders, you can start creating your website with Wix without necessarily upgrading to its Premium plan. However, it’s worth noting that Wix’s free plan only unlocks its basic features, so you won’t have a free domain or SEO analysis tool, which IONOS offers in its Starter plan, available for as low as £1 for the first 12 months. Signing up for this plan will link you with IONOS’s website builder for a year, and your contract will automatically renew afterward.

IONOS costs: Billing cycles, ongoing costs, and hidden fees

All of IONOS’s website builder plans grant you access to the following:

• 24/7 customer support through phone, email, live chat, and social media
• Competitor tracking using Marketing Radar
• Free domain for one year
• Free SSL certificate
• Professional themes and templates
• Onboarding Wizard tool
• Over 17,000 royalty-free images for your website

IONOS subscription fees are billed monthly, except for domain names. You can choose either a monthly rolling contract or a 12-month contract. If you opt for the latter, you can enjoy the marked down prices we mentioned earlier and get a 30-day money-back guarantee. If you opt for a monthly rolling contract, you can cancel your subscription at any time, but you’ll miss out on the introductory offers. Renewal prices, on the other hand, vary depending on your package and needs. But in a nutshell, you’ll save more if you opt for a 12-month contract with IONOS. 

It’s also worth noting that IONOS’s prices are exclusive of 20% VAT, so you’ll have to add that on top of your monthly subscription fees. 

How does IONOS’s pricing compare with other website builders?

IONOS receives an above-average score of 3.1/5 in our value for money analysis, but it does offer one of the lowest entry points among the website builders we’ve investigated. For as low as £1 for the first 12 months, you can unlock its medium-tier plan, Plus, and its flexible customisation offers. It also includes helpful tools and resources to boost your website’s functionality, like the SiteAnalytics tool, which provides metrics on visit length, dwell type, and visitor location. 

However, IONOS has limited website features and design functionality to ensure your website is sleek and efficient. Our research suggests that you’ll get more value for money with Jimdo, which scores an excellent 4.5/5 in our value for money analysis. It offers a free plan, unlike IONOS, that unlocks its basic features so you can create a functional website for your business. Moreover, its entry-level subscription plan, Start, costs a low £9 per month, which is at par with IONOS’s Starter plan, except it has more features you can utilise as you build your website.

Our in-depth research found IONOS (formerly 1&1) is a snappy yet somewhat basic business website builder. With an overall score of 3.2/5, we weren’t blown away by its design features but found it best suited to busy entrepreneurs who need to get online fast.

With plans costing between £84 and £300 plus VAT annually, IONOS is a relatively affordable option particularly well suited to local businesses.

Our in-house team of specialist researchers scored IONOS’ website features, design functionality, value for money, customer support, and ease of use. All the key elements that mean the most to you as a business leader with a to-do list longer than England’s World Cup losing streak.

Read on to learn whether IONOS is right for you. 

IONOS website builder at a glance

We reviewed IONOS against objective criteria that we use to score the best website builders on the market. Unfortunately, its performance didn’t shine in most categories.

All scores are out of five:

We’ll go into more detail about the strengths of weaknesses of the IONOS website designer below. But, for now, here are the main features which all price packages include:

• Drag-and-drop visual editor
• No code needed
• Hosting included
• Email inbox as standard
• Customer support (phone, email, web chat)
• No IONOS adverts on your website
• Royalty-free image library
• Separate mobile design view
• SEO tag editing and speed optimisation

That’s more than enough to set you up with a professional website – with surprisingly little effort required. The only reason its score seems relatively low is because website builders are an extremely competitive market right now. That’s great for the likes of you and me because it means the standard is high.

IONOS pros and cons

✓ Pro: Quick editing process

You don’t need professional design skills to create an appealing website with IONOS. Handy on-screen hints pop up just when you need them to, so you can get creating without reading through long instruction guides.

That’s extremely useful for anyone intimidated by building a website from scratch. What you need is a website that works well and looks good. IONOS delivers this – fast.

There’s even a stock image library to save you time searching for royalty-free pictures elsewhere.

✓ Pro: Stellar customer support 

Website builder support is often patchy on lower cost products. Not so with IONOS – you’ll get 24/7 assistance from a real person, no matter what you need. While some website builders like Wix and Squarespace make you jump through some hoops before you can reach a real human, IONOS customer service staff freely hand out their email address.

This perk is available on all of IONOS’ plans, even if you stick to its basic tier, Starter. Providers like Wix make you upgrade to a higher tier before you can access better customer care.

✓ Pro: Email inbox included

As a hosting provider first, IONOS excels at core web services such as uptime guarantees and domain name provision. But a key reason for getting a website is to gain access to a professional email inbox – yet this is often forgotten about at the product comparison stage.

Most providers will charge extra for a Google or Microsoft email inbox, for instance. But IONOS includes an email inbox with a minimum of 2GB storage. That gives customers a chance to get in touch with you, meaning you’re less likely to lose out on sales leads.

✗ Con: Just one website

It’s easy to miss this, but you won’t be able to edit and publish multiple websites from your IONOS subscription. If you want to use the drag-and-drop visual editor, you get just one website.

If you really want to publish multiple websites with IONOS, you can subscribe to a hosting package. But you’ll need to use a content management system like WordPress or Joomla to edit them.

Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, Square, GoDaddy and Jimdo (yes, even Jimdo) all allow you to edit and publish more than one website from a single subscription.

✗ Con: Can’t precisely position images

IONOS designs are fairly restrictive, so you can’t just drag-and-drop an image to anywhere on a web page. You have to edit pages within sections, which have certain layout limitations. So if you’re a burgeoning Jackson Pollack, you’re going to have to learn to design within the lines.

✗ Con: Very few templates

Website builders vary in their range of template offerings, but IONOS is at the stingier end of the scale. While Wix has over 900 ready-made web designs, IONOS offers… around 20.

How much does IONOS cost?

There are three main price plans to build a website without online sales features:

For as low as £1 for the first 12 months, you can subscribe to IONOS Plus. This plan allows you to enjoy five times the storage (50 GB) of its entry-level tier, Starter. Moreover, it includes bonus resources and website features that you can use to improve your professional website, like SiteAnalytics, which tracks how long visitors stay on your site, their location, browser type, and other related data.

However, its comprehensive plan, Premium, offers more flexibility. It has an advanced SiteAnalytics Plus tool, allowing you to generate and export PDF reports of the key metrics of your site. You also unlock active syncing on your professional email to boost your efficiency.

However, IONOS’ limited website features and design functionality could be a deal-breaker. Squarespace, which scores 4/5 for pricing, may cost more (starting at £16 per month), but it does offer a far richer web design experience than IONOS.

Like IONOS, it also provides a free domain for the first year of subscription. So, if you’re willing to pay more to unlock a more comprehensive set of website-building features, Squarespace is a more viable option. 

How does IONOS compare with other website builders?

IONOS is the 8th most popular simple website builder on the internet, with Wix, Squarespace and GoDaddy taking the top three spots. But popularity isn’t everything, and just because other products are more widely marketed doesn’t mean they’re better by default.

Now we’ll look at its performance in comparison with major rivals.

Website features: Basic Betty

IONOS only scores 2/5 in our website features analysis. Although it has all the basics, you can’t get beyond basic functionality because of its lack of integrations. Like GoDaddy and Jimdo, IONOS doesn’t have an app market. Yet it sadly lacks inbuilt features which would compensate. 

For instance, there are very few social media options. While Squarespace and Wix have social media post creation tools, the most you can do with IONOS is… link to your social media profiles. Which we’ve been able to do since, you know, 2001.

For a more versatile website, we’d recommend Wix, which scores an excellent 4.8/5 for website features. It has an app market to expand the range of tasks your website can perform. It also integrates with Google Analytics, the gold standard for SEO analysis.

Design functionalities: Snappy but limited

IONOS scores a 2.9/5 in our research for design functionality. That’s lower than Wix, Squarespace, Shopify and… most of the other top website builders, in fact.

IONOS web design editor is not difficult to use, but it’s a little limited. For instance, you can easily crop or re-size an image, and we particularly like the right-click menu options to rearrange image layers. This is a feature you’ll be used to using in PowerPoint, Word or even Paint.

But you can’t position images exactly where you’d like them on the page, because you have to stick within the section design limits. You may find this curbs your creative ambition – although you won’t lose hours perfecting every detail because the design process is rapid overall.

The “new flexible editing experience” IONOS launched this year does not offer the flexibility of the equivalent feature in Squarespace. With the latter, you can situate an image anywhere at all on the page.

For a better design experience, we recommend Wix, which scored 4.3/5 in design functionality, the highest of all website builders we tested. Wix has hundreds more theme options than IONOS, and supports more image editing options.

However, it’s worth mentioning you cannot switch themes with Wix after you’ve started editing – you can only choose a different one and build it from the ground up once again. This isn’t the case with IONOS.

Ease of use: Simple and straightforward

Despite being an excellent option for small businesses, our research found that IONOS is not the most user-friendly platform we’ve explored, scoring an underwhelming 2.8/5 for ease of use. Its interface is straightforward to use, though it feels – in the words of one test user – “clinical”.

Factor in its limited theme options, and you’ll grasp the idea of how much IONOS has to improve in terms of user experience. Users also report how slow the backend is, making it harder for them to complete tasks.

If you’re wanting an intuitive platform with wider customisation options, Wix will suit you best. As the front-runner in our analysis, Wix allows you to freely explore the platform – you can choose from its multiple element options and themes as well as customise your page as much as you want.

Help and support: Rapid and helpful

IONOS punches above its weight and redeems its score with a solid 4.5/5 score for customer help and support. Unlike almost all other similar platforms, IONOS allocates a single web design consultant to your account. 

They’ll be accessible via email, live chat, or phone for guidance, ensuring a single point of contact throughout your web build journey. When we contacted IONOS web chat with questions about using the website builder, the response was almost instant – even though it was 18:30 in the evening.

For a quick comparison: a simple question to Jimdo took weeks to get a response – with several email requests asking for confirmation that I even wanted a response. And after all that, the answer finally came: “Sorry, we can’t help you”.

What kind of business is IONOS best for?

IONOS is handy for newbies to website creation, as its uncomplicated interface is unlikely to feel overwhelming to most.

IONOS also offers a variety of themes tailored to many industries, from gardening, to architecture, to art, culture, and design. To ensure expand your reach overseas, IONOS allows you to translate your content into 60 different languages, including Spanish, Mandarin, or French! This feature makes it a great choice for small businesses that also want to expand their reach globally. 

Unfortunately, it’s not best suited to ambitious online merchants. If you’re keen to expand a retail business, you should check out our guide to the best small business ecommerce platforms for our recommendations there.

Does IONOS have good customer reviews?

IONOS scores an average 3.2/5 in our customer score analysis. Users compliment its attentive and helpful personal consultants, which proves to be one of its unique selling points when it comes to customer service. 

However, some users wanted more from its website functionality, with one reporting that it proves to be much slower than its competitors. This was notably evident when accessing the backend of the websites, which takes up much more time than usual, as noticed by Neels V., a small business owner.

We recommend website building tool Wix for small business owners in almost any sector, but particularly for services-based industries such as hospitality, health and fitness, and online coaching. We put Wix through its paces in our rigorous review process, scoring it 4.9/5 overall.

We’ve tested dozens of website builders over the past decade, and it takes a lot to impress us. Yet its versatile website features, handy business tools, and marketing automations make Wix a great all-rounder.

We carried out tests in all the areas you care about: functionality, ease of use, support options, pricing, and the all-important design process. For a quick summary, check our research category scores (each out of five):

Or read on for our in-depth take on Wix’s features, pricing, weaknesses, use cases, and first-hand user experiences.

How Much Does Wix Cost?

Wix has seven price plans – four to build a regular website, and three to build an online shop. And there’s custom pricing for very large and enterprise businesses. You can check out our detailed guide to Wix pricing or take a quick look at the table below for an easy comparison:

In our testing, Wix only scored 3.6/5 for ‘Value for Money’, given its prices have gone up a little since this time last year. Wix is more expensive than GoDaddy or Weebly, but its creative editor is far higher quality. So if you’re serious about scaling up your business with a functional and attractive website, Wix is the way to go.

Here’s a bonus: you can score a sweet 10% discount on Wix plans with our code: TAKE10

Of course, prices alone won’t mean much until you’ve got a solid idea of what you’re getting for your money. Let’s get a quick overview of Wix’s strengths and weaknesses.

The Pros and Cons of Wix

✅ Tons of Templates: Better Navigation

Wix has added more templates this year, so you can now choose from close to 900 templates for your website. For a comparison, we counted some 150 templates on Squarespace. The new Wix templates have clearer navigation options than its older designs, allowing for a better user experience (UX) for your visitors.

We like the fact you can choose between templates with placeholder content or blank canvas styles, depending on which you find easier. Here are some examples of each template type:

✅ Easy to Customize Your Website

Our test users were pleasantly surprised by the easy-to-use website editing tools. That’s reflected in the solid 4.4/5 Wix scored in our ‘Ease of Use’ research category. We liked the toolbar feature in the main dashboard that would take you back to the last section you were editing. That helped ensure a smooth, continual set-up process that didn’t waste time.

The design editing space (known as the ‘Editor’) was detailed, yet clearly laid out. We definitely recommend following along with the pop-up help guides otherwise you’ll get lost pretty quickly.

“So many elements are available to add,” said one focus group participant. “Everything is there – premade – and you only have to customize it for your site.” Some users found the Editor became a bit cluttered while using it, though. If you start to struggle, make sure you use the zoom in and out options for a clearer view.

✅ Improved Search Engine Visibility

Did you know it’s possible to tweak your website so it’s more likely to appear for certain web search results? So if you’re selling custom baseball caps, you want your website to pop up when people type in “buy custom baseball caps” on Google.

The official name for these tweaks is “search engine optimization” (SEO). According to our research, Wix is the best ecommerce platform for SEO. That means it offers the best tips and technical set-up for anyone looking to boost their website’s search engine visibility.

Wix has provided its users with strong SEO advice for several years already. But its recent integration with leading SEO tool Semrush builds on this. Now you can create keyword tracking lists that you can monitor and update over time.

❌ Hard to Access Support via Phone

There’s no publicly advertised phone line for Wix customers (nor is there for WordPress.com or Squarespace, either). But this isn’t universal; Weebly, IONOS, and GoDaddy all offer a phone line for their customers. Instead you can request a callback, but you may have to wait some hours before that comes through. We explain this in more detail further down.

❌ A Little Slow to Load

We found ourselves staring at loading screens a few times during the Wix set-up process. That’s perhaps to be expected, given the entire website creation process is taking place through your web browser, rather than a program downloaded onto your computer.

But even with a fast internet connection, the loading time between stages can be 5-10 seconds long. So we’re not talking hours of wasted time, by any means. But you’ll need some patience.

Wix Key Features Explained

1. Swiss Army Functionality

If you need a website that takes payments, schedules appointments, makes videos, and does a backflip, Wix is ready. (Alright, maybe not the last one). Scoring 4.8/5 in our ‘Website Features’ category, Wix is clearly trying hard – and succeeding – at holding onto its reputation as the best website builder on the market.

It does this by offering a bunch of essential business tools you’d usually have to buy separately. While its logo maker, social post creator, and email marketing are standard features you can expect of any website builder, some of its others are uniquely helpful.

For instance, Wix’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools and freelancer marketplace make it easy to automate marketing and hire creative talent on demand.

2. Order Management: Straightforward but Solid

If you choose to upgrade to one of Wix’s business/ecommerce plans, you can take payments for services and appointments, sell subscriptions or ship physical items. Wix’s sales, inventory, and order tracking features are streets ahead of GoDaddy or Squarespace.

You won’t get end-to-end order fulfilment on the ‘Light’ plan ($16/month), though. To get that, plus the ability to print shipping labels, you have to upgrade to the ‘Core’ plan at $27/month.

Those prices are still small potatoes compared with Shopify, though, whose prices range from $39/month for its ‘Basic’ plan, through to $399 every month for its ‘Advanced’ one. Though Shopify affords you more sophisticated features than Wix, such as more in-depth reporting. So larger online sales businesses would be better off with Shopify than Wix.

3. Payment Processing: Whole Lotta Options

Wix is a great choice for online sellers because of its very wide range of payment processing options. We know that offering a variety of payment options increases the chance of customers completing the checkout process.

Wix allows you to connect dozens of payment types (we counted 31 plus Wix’s own payment gateway), including buy-now-pay-later options and payment with cryptocurrencies. With Squarespace, on the other hand, you can only add a very limited range of payment processors to your web shop.

4. Help and Support: Decent Online Guides

When it came to troubleshooting website editing, Wix performed fairly well in our tests. The knowledge centre was a helpful resource when it came to simple technical questions about meta tags and page redirects. Wix scored 4.8/5 in our ‘Help and Support’ testing category, meaning you should be able to resolve most problems you’re likely to face.

But if you want to speak to a real human – even about an issue as vital as billing – Wix makes it somewhat hard to access direct contact. As we’ve mentioned, there’s no public phone line. Instead you can request a callback, which may come in several hours after your request.

By the way, we couldn’t find this callback option easily. It was only after asking the bot directly “How can I speak to a human?” that this service even presented itself. At least you can easily find the chatbot through the ‘?’ symbol on several Wix pages.

We were underwhelmed by the Wix community discussion forum, too, which appears to be unmoderated. There’s no option to report spam. As a result, almost all recent comments seem to be bot generated to promote spam links.

It seems limiting access to support staff may be a way to keep operating costs low, as Wix continues to cut its workforce this year.

What Kind of Business is Wix Best For?

With its dual set-up areas of the Dashboard (for functions and features) and Editor (for visual layout), Wix is best suited to a wide range of business folk. Wix is for people who need their website to perform specific actions that help run their business.

In this vein, Wix has a versatile set of tools that equip you to run events, book appointments, set up meetings, sell subscriptions, stream videos, send out marketing emails, track sales, and so on. It’s a truly useful all-rounder for a relatively low price.

That said, it can be a little hard to use as a beginner. Wix is likely to be overkill if you don’t need fancy features such as lead tracking and sales management. If you want a website that’s more of a landing page with contact details or a simple showcase for images, you’re better off with Squarespace or Weebly.

We recommend Wix for the following types of business users:

1. Small or Medium Online Sellers

If you want to bring in more revenue by selling services, physical goods, subscriptions or other digital products, a Wix website is a good idea. As a fairly mature platform (beginning in 2006), Wix has market-leading tools for small to medium sized web retail businesses. In fact, its sales features are such good quality that we’ve named Wix as the best ecommerce platform for a small business.

Examples of industries well-suited to Wix include: sporting goods retailers, fashion and accessories, homeware, arts and crafts, gift shops, pet supplies, healthcare products, and digital education course providers.

2. Hospitality, Restaurants, and In-Person Entertainment Venues

Wix has recently added table reservation management to its existing restaurant-specific features (which include food delivery services and menu display). All three features are suggested by the website creation engine if you select your business type as ‘Restaurant’ when you first get started with Wix.

This shows Wix has really put themselves in your shoes as a restaurateur, immediately showing you the priority features you need for your hospitality business. You can also save some time and admin effort by setting up food delivery services directly through the special ‘Food Orders’ feature.

3. Consultants, Coaches, Legal Firms, Medical Facilities, and Health Clubs

Wix is an attractive option for services-based businesses thanks to its reliable appointment scheduling features. If you need your website to funnel curious customers into your in-person office or to book video appointments with you, we can safely recommend Wix.

What sets Wix ahead of competitors is its successful Spaces by Wix app, which allows users to buy products from and book appointments with their favourite businesses. Already five million users strong, it’s one of several app-based options for reeling in more customers.

Health and fitness businesses can specifically benefit from the Fit by Wix app (free to download without a premium subscription). It allows you to take bookings for gym classes, offer memberships, set up community groups, host discussions, and sell merchandise.

How Does Wix Compare to its Competitors?

Wix’s closest competitor is Squarespace. And the two performed very strongly in our research overall, scoring 4.9 and 4.8 respectively. But Wix is the clear winner, thanks to its slightly more advanced business features.

They’re both beginner-friendly tools: Wix and Squarespace had the joint highest score in our research category for ‘Ease of Use’: 4.4/5. Yet Wix scored higher than Squarespace in both ‘Website Features’ and ‘Design Functions’ categories. Wix is therefore the better choice for most people.

We’d stress that Wix is a great do-it-yourself style website maker. If you’re after a more custom scalable site for building an online shop, then you should look into WooCommerce on WordPress. It’s one of our top ecommerce platforms for large companies.

Does Wix Have Good Customer Reviews?

Yes, Wix is backed by many positive customer reviews across several major review platforms. Our ‘Customer Score’ category analyses the popularity of website builder tools, and Wix scored an impressive 4.8/5 here.

Wix has seen its Trustpilot score improve massively over the past six to eight months. Although there are a fair number of one-star reviews, they’re now heavily outweighed by five-star reviews.

In general, Wix reviews mention appreciation for the range of features you can set up for your website (including extra ones you can find via the Wix App Marketplace). Many feel it’s good value for money, too.

What Did Our Test Users Have to Say?

Our research participants were divided over how easy Wix is to use. Scoring a 4.3/5 in the ‘Design Features’ category means the average person can get to grips with the editing tools. But broadly speaking, it takes some concentration and effort to learn to use Wix properly.

This comment from one focus group attendee sums up the general feeling pretty well: “It’s a funny one because so much of it [using Wix] is really easy, and then some things just feel like they’re a headache for no reason.”

AI content writing tools have exploded almost overnight. Despite the fact that AI can help your business massively in most cases, often it’s its shortcomings that grab the attention of those working in marketing or content creation roles. Although ultra-advanced tools such as Jasper and ChatGPT seem to be able to mimic human-written content so well that it could be published, there are valid questions being raised about its impact on SEO rankings.

This article will delve further into how artificial intelligence could, and is already, affecting SEO as a result of being released into the web.

What is SEO intelligence?

SEO intelligence refers to the use of AI to improve SEO tactics, with the end goal of improving page rankings on search engines such as Google.

How has it grown in terms of past, present and future SEO?

Google has long worked with AI tools to determine the most worthwhile pages to suggest in response to particular search queries. Always prioritising user experience, Google is pretty hot on suggesting pages that tick its ‘E-E-A-T’ boxes, which stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. In order to score a top Google ranking, authors and articles must ideally demonstrate these four values. General SEO best practices are also important, such as keyword inclusion, solid link-building and social presence.

It’s notoriously difficult to consistently rank highly on Google, as they change their algorithm thousands of times per year and multiple times per day. To maintain their own reliability as a search engine, they make it difficult for authors to take shortcuts, and rightly so. The only way to ensure consistency is to regularly update pages so that they stay relevant.

How is AI condoned by Google as usable in SEO?

Google has not put a blanket ban on the inclusion of AI-written or partly AI-written content in their search results. In a February 2023 update, Google stated its position on search engine rankings and how its system is “designed to surface reliable information”. Reinstating the importance of EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) above all else, in order to reward quality content.

Google discusses how automation can be used in malpractice to manipulate search engine rankings and that its SpamBrain tool continues to work to weed out these instances. With that being said, they acknowledge that with the most recent advancements, AI tools are capable of creating helpful content that offers sound, well-researched information.

It is only when AI-written content is unhelpful, spammy and geared to manipulate rankings that it will attract penalties from Google. If the content is genuinely helpful, there is no indication as to why it shouldn’t rank well. However, AI tools cannot check themselves for spam or for whether their information is correct – this is still a step that requires human editing, so the process cannot be entirely automated.

How can AI improve your website’s SEO ranking?

The best way to weave AI into your practice to avoid search engine penalties is to use it as an assistant. You can shoot your shot at using AI-written content as there is no hard and fast rule against doing so from Google, unless it deems your content to be deliberately intended to manipulate search results. Ensuring your content hits Google’s EEAT values will require human attention, as will fact-checking it, since AI writing tools can’t always be trusted to provide correct information.

Prefer to steer fully clear of AI-written content? There are other ways AI can help optimise your content and website.

• Generating content ideas
  • AI tools can be valuable in helping the ideation process of content creation. Using them as a brainstorming tool is a smart way to generate ideas and maximise your time while using AI at no expense to your search engine rankings.
  • You can also ask ChatGPT to reformat content from an article into other formats, such as into social media posts, which increases your social presence while also increasing the authority of your website.
• Identifying keywords
  • AI tools are a really handy way to identify keywords. With competition already tough on the most popular search terms, you can use an AI tool to discover less saturated keywords, topics and other SEO opportunities. By targeting relevant keywords and achieving better rankings, you can increase the visibility of your website, which allows you to achieve the ultimate goal of attracting relevant traffic to your content.
• Identifying content gaps
  • This is a method of optimising your website as a whole, rather than just your individual pieces of content. Using a tool to discover content gaps in your existing website content is a great way to target less popular topics or topics you may have overlooked
• Staying on top of ever-changing algorithm updates
  • Through running a thorough scan of your website, AI tools can identify any potential weak spots that might attract penalties. This allows you to make the necessary changes before it’s too late.

In conclusion

AI is clearly a powerful tool that is already changing the way we create, process and distribute information. Since so many websites and content writers are already using AI tools, it’s a great time to start exploring how it can improve your SEO rankings.

GoDaddy is the fastest way to get a business website live on the internet, and with its affordable plans, it’s one of the best website builders for small businesses.

Of course, speed and price aren’t the only factors that count when choosing a website builder. You want your website to look good, and more importantly, be functional for both you and your customers.

Plus, with more and more customers going to the internet to find services, it’s never been more important to put your best foot forward online.

So, is GoDaddy up to the task? I’ll let you know in this review. I’ll go over GoDaddy’s pros and cons, its pricing, key features, and assess how it compares to the other top website builders on the market.

Pros and Cons of GoDaddy

Here’s what I liked and didn’t like about GoDaddy:

✅ Quick and easy to set up

GoDaddy is the fastest website builder tool, so it’s a good choice if you’re short on time and need your website live ASAP. Its AI website builder assistant, released in early 2024, can create a basic website for you in just two steps, and under 30 seconds.

All I needed to do was answer two questions (“What kind of website do you want?” and, “What are some features your website needs?”) and I was taken straight to the site editing workspace. From there, I could easily get right into altering the preset layout, images, and text to suit my tastes.

If you get stuck during the web design process, the “Next Steps” checklist in the top right-hand corner of the editor ensures you stay on track. You can approach any of the steps as you feel ready, so you’re not forced into one course of action.

GoDaddy, along with other website builders like Wix and Squarespace, has been expanding its AI suite. You can now use AI to speed up the process of not only creating a website, but logos, a business email, and product descriptions too.

✅ Great value for the money

GoDaddy is one of the most affordable website builders on the market, and you get a decent number of features for the price.

Its plans start at $10.99 a month, going up to a maximum of $16.99 for its ecommerce plan, which is the starting price for competitors like Wix and Squarespace.

GoDaddy by no means provides as many advanced features as its more expensive counterparts, but you’ll still get a website equipped with key business features, such as appointment booking, ecommerce functionality, and marketing tools.

✅ Very reliable hosting

Unlike competitors such as Squarespace or Wix, GoDaddy is known first and foremost as a domain registrar and website hosting platform.

That means it’s famous for providing website URL names and owning physical servers that keep websites online. GoDaddy websites have fast page load times, and new users get a free domain for a year.

Load time isn’t something to be overlooked. I’ve noticed that site load times are much slower on people’s favorite website builder, Wix, than they are on GoDaddy. If I found the slow load time frustrating, there’s a good chance your customers will as well.

GoDaddy’s hosting service also comes with daily website backups, and it guarantees 99.9% uptime, which means your website should almost never come offline due to technical failures.

❌ Limited design options

With GoDaddy, there’s less focus on tweaking website design to make it exactly match your vision. This means your website can sometimes look quite generic.

There are just 22 templates (Wix has over 800), which limits the range of visual layout possibilities. This wouldn’t be a big deal if GoDaddy gave users a lot of creative freedom when customizing the templates, but it doesn’t.

There’s no drag-and-drop function on the GoDaddy editor, which means you can’t move specific design elements to unique places. You have to edit elements within predefined sections. This makes it difficult to create a unique website that stands out from the millions of other GoDaddy websites out there.

❌ Limited selection of business features

GoDaddy lags behind competitors like Wix, Shopify and WooCommerce when it comes to the breadth of its business features.

There’s no app store (unlike Squarespace or Wix), so you don’t have many business integrations available. This is extremely limiting if you already have business software you use and like, and it means you’re stuck with GoDaddy’s basic offering.

The built-in business features (social media and email marketing, appointments management, ecommerce) are suitable for small businesses, but they’ll probably feel too surface level for growing businesses.

For example, GoDaddy doesn’t let you customize the checkout page on your ecommerce website, and as your business grows, having uniform branding is important.

❌ Not great for designing mobile-friendly sites

GoDaddy doesn’t let you preview how your website will look on a cell phone when you’re editing your site from a desktop. To do this, you’d need to access your site from your cell phone.

This isn’t very user-friendly, and is a major blow for GoDaddy, when competitors such as Wix and Squarespace do offer mobile previews. If you rely on customers to find your business by using Google Maps, for example, they’ll almost certainly be using the mobile version of your website.

A majority of internet users view websites from their phones, so being able to make sure your website looks good and works on vertical screens is very important.

How Much Does GoDaddy Cost?

GoDaddy is in the mid-range of website builder products, with pricing between $10.99 and $26.99 a month (after your first discounted year). It also has a free plan, which is useful for trying GoDaddy out before committing to it.

There are four price plans, only one of which is for selling online. Compare each price plan by clicking the arrows:

Overall, GoDaddy is relatively good value for the money. It’s cheaper than most of its competitors, and gets a decent number of features for the price.

If you’re looking for a more high-tech website, however, you’ll get better value for your money on one of Wix or Squarespace mid-tier plans.

GoDaddy’s Key Business Features

GoDaddy offers the following basic business features on all of its plans:

• Website editor (phone and desktop)
• Appointments booking
• Email marketing (max 100 per month on cheapest plan)
• Social media content creator (with templates)

You’ll have to subscribe to the more expensive plans for more advanced social media, email marketing, and booking features. For example, SEO (search engine optimization) guidance isn’t available on GoDaddy’s cheapest Basic plan.

We’ll go over GoDaddy’s key features in more detail in the following sections:

Bookings management

One area GoDaddy shines in is its comprehensive booking management features.

These are very limited on the Basic plan, where customers can only book one-time appointments through your website.

Once you get up to the Premium plan, however, you’ll be able to set up recurring appointments or group events (useful if you teach in-person classes), and be able to send text or email reminders to your customers.

Booking features can be accessed via the GoDaddy dashboard, from which you can categorize services and add new ones, enable customer accounts, and add staff profiles. There’s also a calendar view where you can track upcoming appointments.

The true selling point of GoDaddy’s bookings system is that businesses can accept payments from customers for just $22.99 on the Premium plan, without having to upgrade to GoDaddy’s ecommerce plan.

Social media and email marketing

GoDaddy has all the basic social media and email marketing features a business needs.

For socials, it integrates with Facebook, Instagram, Google, and Yelp. However, if you’re on the Basic plan, you’ll only be able to choose between one of these platforms. The Standard plan gives you access to three, and the Premium and Ecommerce plans give you an unlimited number.

You can track your social media posts’ engagement, and even reply to customers from the GoDaddy platform (the number of replies is limited on the lower tier plans).

There’s also a content creation app, GoDaddy Studio, which is listed as “Content Creator” in the sidebar of the dashboard. From there, you can design logos, social media posts, and event flyers. GoDaddy’s AI assistant can create instant designs for you by asking you a few questions, but as is the case with GoDaddy’s website editor, you’re a little limited in how creative you can be.

AI is a relatively new addition to GoDaddy’s website builder, only launching in 2024, but it’s definitely sped up the website and brand building process, even if it doesn’t produce the most creative and unique results.

GoDaddy’s email marketing suite has all the basic functions a business needs, from campaign creation to email scheduling and analytics. You’re limited to 100 emails a month on the Basic plan, but this goes up to 25,000 on the Premium and Ecommerce plans.

At the end of 2023, GoDaddy added email automation to its email marketing suite, meaning users can now trigger automatic email templates, replies, and scheduling.

However, GoDaddy’s lack of third-party integrations means that you won’t be able to connect more advanced marketing tools such as HubSpot or MailChimp to your GoDaddy website. This isn’t the case with platforms like Wix or WooCommerce.

Online store

You can only run an online store with GoDaddy if you choose the $26.99 a month Ecommerce plan.

Compared to dedicated ecommerce platforms like Shopify or BigCommerce, GoDaddy’s ecommerce offering is pretty basic. You can list products, run discounts and sales, and accept payments on your GoDaddy online store, but it doesn’t have as many accepted payments as competitors, in-depth sales and inventory tracking, or the ability to accommodate third-party integrations, such as accounting tools.

GoDaddy’s accepted payments including credit and debit cards, PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Pay. At the end of 2023, GoDaddy also introduced a new payments integration, Paze, a digital wallet service used by many US banks.

Its ecommerce tools will be enough for small online sellers, who’ll appreciate the absence of transaction fees for payments, but if you want advanced sales tools, you’re better off going with another website builder.

One example is that if you have an existing POS system for your physical store, you won’t be able to sync online sales with in-store sales using GoDaddy, since it doesn’t allow for many third-party integrations. The only way to do this is to sign up for GoDaddy Payments, and buy GoDaddy supplied card machines.

If you want a simple online store that integrates seamlessly with a POS system, and doesn’t cost the moon, Square is a cheaper option, and is one of the best ecommerce platforms for small businesses.

Help and support

GoDaddy’s customer support options are healthy: there’s a phone line, with the company readily publishing their number online.

By comparison, Wix makes it a bit awkward to talk to someone on the phone; you’ll have to click through online options and request a callback. Squarespace doesn’t even have a customer service number.

You also don’t need to upgrade to a higher plan to access over-the-phone customer care with GoDaddy, as is the case with Wix.

GoDaddy also has a community forum, and help center, where a lot of common questions get answered. You have a fair chance of getting real help on the GoDaddy community forum, too, as opposed to the Wix equivalent, which is full of spam comments on its posts.

What Kind of Business is GoDaddy Best For?

GoDaddy is best for small businesses that want to get online quickly, are new to website builders, and aren’t hung up on having the most aesthetic site on the internet.

Who it’s definitely not for are ambitious online merchants that need scalable sales tools, or businesses that market themselves on having a trendy and modern aesthetic. For scalable online stores, you’re better off with Shopify, WooCommerce or BigCommerce, and for a beautiful website, Squarespace is your best bet.

Here are some examples of business types that’d get along well with GoDaddy:

Service-based small businesses:

Hairdressers, pet grooming, fitness classes, online consultation

If you want customers to be able to book appointments with you online, GoDaddy is a good choice.

For consultants, coaches, or therapists who don’t always do in-person meetings, you can allow customers to book Zoom meetings on your GoDaddy website, or add a link to your preferred virtual meeting platform.

Hairdressers, beauticians, yoga teachers, and other in-person business owners can easily manage and advertise all their bookings and services with GoDaddy.

Just bear in mind you’ll only be able to take payments for appointment bookings at the Premium subscription level, which renews after the first year at $21.99 per month. Still, GoDaddy’s lack of transaction fees is appealing for local businesses for whom every penny counts.

Time-poor businesses owners with no need for a high-tech website:

Clinics, private carers, plumbers, mechanics

GoDaddy is one of most beginner friendly website builders out there, that’s part of its appeal.

If you can edit a text box, then you can edit a GoDaddy website. You don’t need to know code to use it, and GoDaddy’s lack of complex features actually works to its advantage when it comes to usability.

Platforms like Wix, which has more features than GoDaddy, tend to be less user-friendly because of this.

If you work in a busy industry like the care profession, youth work, animal rescue or similar, you might want a website to help promote your business, but not have the time or energy to do this.

GoDaddy can be a great help in this regard, and if you don’t really care about making your website unique, you can basically let the AI assistant do all the work for you, you just need to answer its questions.

How Does GoDaddy Compare to Competitors?

We’ve touched on a few points of comparison above, but it makes sense to look at GoDaddy’s subscription packages in direct comparison with its rivals:

You’ll get unlimited storage and bandwidth on your GoDaddy website, same as you will with Squarespace, but not Wix. That’s worth bearing in mind if you want to upload videos and large images to your website.

The lack of transaction fees with GoDaddy is also appealing, but by no means unique (it’s also the same with Wix and some Squarespace plans). There’s also fewer payment provider options with GoDaddy than Wix, which could put off some customers from making purchases with your business.

If you’re looking for the absolute cheapest option, the IONOS website builder is the way to go, although be warned, it’s even more basic than GoDaddy.

Does GoDaddy Have Good Customer Reviews?

GoDaddy generally has good customer reviews. Expert Market had a group of ordinary customers test the GoDaddy website builder, and they rated it a 4.6 out 5.

Here’s a look at the feedback we received from GoDaddy customers:

GoDaddy has mixed customer reviews on third-party review websites. It’s got a high TrustPilot rating of 4.7/5, but poor reviews on platforms like Sitejabber and ConsumerAffairs.

Negative reviews complain about hidden costs (especially when it comes to web hosting), increasing prices, and slow customer service.

It’s hard to draw any conclusions about GoDaddy from such mixed responses, but if I can advise you on anything, it’s a good idea to look closely at GoDaddy’s pricing structure before you sign up for a premium plan to avoid any nasty surprises.

Methodology: How We Tested GoDaddy

Expert Market uses a comprehensive testing methodology in all its website builder reviews.

We evaluated GoDaddy with the average US business owner in mind, and scored and rated it across six main categories. These include features, usability, aesthetics, customer support, price, and feedback we received from everyday users of GoDaddy.

We then gave each category score a ‘relevance weighting’, with features and functionality given the most weight, to ensure the product’s final score perfectly reflects the needs and requirements of the average US business owner.

Here’s what we considered when rating GoDaddy:

• Features and tools: the features GoDaddy has, and how useful they are for the average business (SEO, marketing, online store, blog tools, AI assistant etc.)
• Aesthetics and design: the variety of templates GoDaddy has, and how easy they are to customize to create a unique website that reflects a business’s brand
• Customer support: the availability of GoDaddy’s customer support team, how many ways there are to contact them, and the usefulness of its support center and online forum
• Cost and fees: the balance between what GoDaddy costs and the benefits it provides
• Customer feedback: how easy GoDaddy is to use for the average customer, and their satisfaction levels with it as a website builder

Armed with data from our independent market research, we can confidently say nobody does fleet maintenance like Verizon. As the overall best fleet maintenance software system, it has top-tier features and checks all the boxes to help you run your business more smoothly and efficiently. 

But that’s not all we’re tackling in this article – we’re also shining the spotlight on other vehicle tracking systems we’ve researched, which also have promising fleet maintenance software features. Here, we’ll compare them and see how they match up according to their vehicle diagnostics, maintenance scheduling, and maintenance record-keeping features. We’ll also sprinkle in additional perks that will help boost your productivity and performance!

Read on to find out more about these fleet maintenance systems. Don’t forget to check out our free quote comparison tool to find the best prices from top providers for your business.

Verizon: the best overall fleet maintenance software

Verizon has an impressive 4.7/5 score in our research, and it very much deserves the best overall title. It helps you schedule maintenance checks regularly to ensure all your vehicles are in tip-top shape before setting off. Moreover, it sends automatic alerts if it detects any damage. So, if a faulty system lights up, you can receive vehicle diagnostic reports in a snap!

If you ever miss a check-up or scheduled maintenance, it will automatically reflect on your fleet maintenance records. Speaking of, your fleet maintenance records are all intact with Verizon’s system. In case of a faulty system, it will automatically sync this information to your records and suggest the nearest maintenance centres. You can also create service plan templates to calculate maintenance costs and how often you should do them.

So far it has been smooth sailing, but we’re hitting the brakes when it comes to Verizon’s pricing plans. The provider only scores 2.5/5 in our pricing analysis. True enough, it has a reasonably low average entry point at around £20 to £40 per vehicle, per month or around $37 to $74. But it is still not the most affordable choice in the market today. That’s Radius, which scores 4.3/5 in our research for value for money.

Verizon will also tie you into a three-year contract. As such, we don’t recommend Verizon for small fleets that don’t cost a lot to manage or those who’d prefer short-term contracts.

Teletrac Navman TN360: the best fleet maintenance software for managing drivers

Driver management is a viable feature to analyse when looking for the best fleet maintenance software. Your drivers contribute to your business – so if they’re driving aggressively, you’d have to shell out more money to fix mechanical faults or vehicles that have broken down. This is where Teletrac Navman TN360 shines best, scoring a perfect 5/5 in our driver management analysis and an overall 4.6/5 in our research.

With this software, you can easily monitor your drivers’ performance, history, routes, and get alerted if they drive harshly or get into unwanted incidents. This benefits your fleet managers and your drivers as it makes every task easier for them. 

But its flat tire comes with vehicle diagnostics. To know whether or not you have a faulty system or hardware, you have to do the work yourself. If you detect damages and take your vehicle to a service centre, Teletrac will reflect this on your fleet maintenance records. Maintenance scheduling is also manual, so if this is a dealbreaker for you, we recommend vying for other suppliers, such as Verizon (with an overall score of 4.7/5), as it offers these services.

Radius: the best fleet maintenance software for smaller fleets

Radius, scoring 4.3/5 in our pricing analysis, is another budget-friendly option for fleet maintenance, with price plans starting at just £7.20 per vehicle, per month or around $13.35. It’s the cheapest starting price offered by any of the suppliers we’ve looked at. And on top of its affordability, Radius also allows you to utilise the pay-as-you-go option for up to two years. This is a great perk, especially for smaller fleets who do not need to manage frequent vehicle maintenance. 

Radius also makes vehicle management a breeze, thanks to its efficient fuel reports that you can break down into volume, distance, and usage. It also provides automatic vehicle diagnostics by integrating information from your vehicle, such as when a faulty system alert lights up. 

However, Radius has major drawbacks when it comes to other fleet maintenance essentials. For starters, it does not retain your fleet maintenance records. It only gives you the option to set self-reminders to stay on top of your records, unlike our top-scorer Verizon, which automatically syncs data into your records whenever it detects any damage in your vehicle. Fleet maintenance records are important because they retain the history of any repairs or work done on your vehicle. Radius also does not support automatic maintenance scheduling, as it only provides reminders based on your mileage. This is again another area where Verizon shines best, since it automatically schedules maintenance checks, provides service plan templates, and even directs you to the nearest service centre if need be.

How Did We Compare The Best Fleet Maintenance Software?

Here at Expert Market, our team of skilled and dedicated researchers analysed 5 of the best and most popular vehicle tracking systems with fleet maintenance features. They then compared each provider against one another by examining specific categories:

• Vehicle Management – How efficient is it at keeping track of your vehicle’s overall health? Does it keep maintenance records?
• Price – How much does it cost? Is it value for money, considering its features? 
• Tracking – How effective is its system when it comes to tracking your vehicles? How fast does it refresh data? Does it factor in traffic or help you optimise routes?
• Driver Management – Can it track your drivers’ performance? For example, does it report dangerous driving behaviour and incidents? Can you reach your driver for urgent concerns?
• Product Features – Aside from these features, what other perks does it offer? A mobile app? Satellite navigation integration? 
• Customer Support – What communication channels can users of the system use to request help and support? Are the channels open 24/7 for any urgent queries?

Factoring all these in alongside input from our readers and how each supplier scores in these factors, we were able to calculate each system’s overall score. All that’s left to do is rank them and identify which area they shine brightest!

Frequently Asked Questions