Webflow, WordPress, Wix, Odoo, Silex: My Experience as a Designer

Like many others, I’ve spent a lot of time looking for the “perfect” website builder. As a graphic designer, I have now built multiple websites. I started creating websites fully in HTML and CSS but it quickly became complicated to manage in the long-run and my team realised that the SEO was really not good. We then started to look for existing web-builders like Webflow or Wix, but the price kept going up as I developed the website. That is why my team and I now decided to opt for open-source solutions. By now I have worked on Wix, Webflow, WordPress, Odoo and Silex, so I believe I can share with you all their pros and cons.

In this article I share my experience on four key questions:

• Which ones are free if you already have your own server ?
• Which ones are fastest for a basic website ?
• Which builders give you the most freedom as a designer ?

At the end I add a comparison table and a conclusion on why open source builders are now my preferred option.

Paid Platforms vs. Open Source

When you start searching online for a “website builder”, the first names that appear are almost always Wix, Webflow, or other paid platforms that look very polished and very easy to use. They can absolutely be good solutions, especially for people who prefer to pay a subscription and not think about servers at all. The problem is that, as your site grows or your needs become a bit more advanced, the cost grows too. Extra pages, CMS limits, multiple languages, custom domains and higher traffic all gently push you toward more expensive plans.

What we realised over time is that there is another category of tools that almost never appears at the top of those searches: open source solutions. WordPress, Odoo and Silex can feel less glamorous in comparison, but they have one big advantage. If you already have your own server, you can run them for free. The only thing you pay is the server itself.

The good side of open source goes beyond money. When the code is open, communities can audit it, improve it and build extensions around it. Bugs are not hidden behind a support ticket system, they are visible and can be fixed by many people and if a feature does not exist, someone can make it. One day if you want to change hosting provider, you can just take your site with you. For me this creates a sense of stability: my site is not tied to the financial health of one company or to one pricing page.

Build with templates or bring out your creativity

Quickly make a simple website

Sometimes you do not need a perfect custom design: you just want a simple, clean site that works. For that kind of project, Wix and Odoo are clearly the fastest in my experience. The templates are ready, you change text and images, and your site can be online very quickly. This is ideal for a small company or a self-employed person who has zero web design knowledge and simply needs a brochure site, a basic blog or a small online shop without any strong design ambition.

Odoo in its open source Community edition already offers a lot for a small business website. You get a visual website builder, a blog and basic CMS features, and multilingual support if you want to manage several languages. Because it is part of a full business suite, you can also connect your site to apps for customer management, invoicing, e-commerce or email marketing. All of this runs on your own server, so you keep control over your data and can customise the code if needed.

More advanced tools like Webflow or Silex are amazing when you care about the details of the layout, but they are not the easiest choice for beginners who just want to drag and drop a ready-made template and go live. WordPress can also be very efficient once you have chosen your theme and plugins, but that choice itself takes time. For pure speed and simplicity for non-designers, I honestly think Odoo is the most reassuring starting point.

Create with freedom

As a graphic designer with good knowledge of CSS, I really enjoyed using Webflow. Class management is clear, responsive controls make sense and I can follow my mockup almost pixel by pixel. The problem appeared when my project grew: more pages, more CMS items, a custom domain, language management and suddenly the monthly price jumped a lot. For a simple portfolio it is fine, but for a more advanced site with several languages it becomes a big cost.

Among the open source tools I tried, Silex is the one that gave me the closest feeling to Webflow. It gives me a lot of creative freedom, the class system is easy to work with, and I can shape the layout exactly as I want. For static pages, it really feels like a great substitute. I can stay in a visual workflow, add a bit of custom CSS only when needed, and still get something that looks very close to my original design without paying a subscription.

On the another hand, my experience with design freedom in Odoo was more complicated. For one project, we ended up going deep into the HTML and CSS that Odoo generated to personalise the site the way we wanted. The structure of the HTML is quite complex, so adding IDs, classes or direct CSS felt tedious and a bit scary, because there is always the fear of breaking the page. For me, Odoo is a very good open source option to replace Wix, but not to replace Webflow, because it simply does not offer the same level of design freedom in the visual editor.

WordPress was somewhere in between. I knew it could be powerful, but I did not really know where to look for a fully customisable experience close to Webflow. I used the Blocksy theme, which already gave more control than the default one, but I still felt limited compared to Silex or Webflow. I am sure there are page builders or premium themes that would get me closer to that level of freedom, but I did not have time to search for them.

Overview of the five website builders I tested

After working with all five tools, I realised that each one answers a different need. Some are better for quick template based sites, others shine when you want full creative control, and open source tools add the benefit of owning your data. To make everything easier to compare at a glance, here is a table that sums up how I see Webflow, Wix, WordPress, Odoo and Silex.