Hosted builders are good products and they have made decent-looking websites available to businesses that could never have afforded bespoke work. For a small business that needs a credible online presence, one of them is very often the right answer and we would rather tell you that than take your money. The reason to know where the ceiling is, is that migrating off a builder later is disproportionately painful.
| Dimension | a website builder | Kamo |
|---|---|---|
| Time to launch | Days, and genuinely good-looking | Weeks to months |
| Cost | A monthly subscription; nothing up front | A project cost up front, lower ongoing |
| Design freedom | Wide within the system, absolute limits at its edges | Whatever the brief requires |
| Technical SEO control | Partial — some platforms restrict markup, redirects and structured data | Complete control of every technical signal |
| Performance ceiling | Bounded by the platform's own output, which you cannot change | Bounded by what is physically possible |
| Integration with business systems | Limited to the platform's integrations, plus embeds | Anything with an interface, built to fit |
| Getting your site out later | Difficult — content is exportable, the site is not portable | It is a repository and a container image; take it anywhere |
When a website builder is the better choice
- You need a credible, good-looking site quickly and cheaply, and that is genuinely the whole requirement
- Nobody on your side will ever maintain code, and you want that to remain true
- Your site is a brochure rather than a system your business depends on
- You are validating a business and should not spend money on a website yet
The honest verdict
Start on a builder if a builder solves your problem. The point at which it stops is recognisable: you want a technical change the platform will not allow, an integration it does not offer, or a performance improvement you cannot reach. Businesses usually discover it about two years in, having built content and rankings inside a system they now have to migrate out of — which is the cost worth knowing about at the start.
Questions we get asked
Other comparisons
Tell us what you are trying to do
A short conversation is usually enough to tell whether we are the right people. If we are not, we will say so and point you somewhere better.