Adobe Portfolio vs Wix – Which Website Builder Should You Use?

Regardless of whether or not you host your online course on your own website, it’s borderline essential to have one in order to promote your brand. 

To create an engaging website that gathers traffic and potential customers for your online course, you will need an effective website builder. 

In this post, we’ll look at two such website builders: Adobe Portfolio and Wix. 

We’ll discuss how they work, their strengths and weaknesses, and their ease of use to determine which one’s best for online course creators.

Features	Adobe Portfolio	Wix
Pricing	4 stars	4 stars
Ease of Use	4 and a half stars	4 stars
SEO features	3 stars	4 stars
Flexibility	2 and a half stars	4 and a half stars
Domain and Hosting Solutions	1 star	4 stars

The above table serves to give you a quick look into what each website builder has to offer. Now, let’s delve deeper to figure out which one would be most suitable for you:

Adobe Portfolio Review – Affordable and User-Friendly

Adobe Portfolio is one of several tools in Adobe’s arsenal which caters to artists, photographers, and entrepreneurs who want to create a website to promote their brand. 

As an online course creator, it’s essential for you to realize that Adobe Portfolio works best to create a portfolio website. 

Thus, if you want to create a dynamic website on which you could host your online course, then Adobe Portfolio may not be the best option for you. 

However, if you just want to create a website to showcase your brand and the online courses you have to offer, then Adobe Portfolio can do that effectively for you. 

You can use Adobe Portfolio to create an engaging and attractive website, no coding skills are required.

It also comes with a library of ready-to-use templates that you can utilize in order to save time. 

Pros	Cons
• Fully usable with other Adobe Creative Cloud tools • Decent library of attractive templates • Budget-friendly • Beginner-friendly • Options to edit HTML and CSS for veterans who want extensive control	• Fairly rudimentary SEO features • No eCommerce tools

Benefits of Adobe Portfolio

If you’re a new online course creator, there’s a high chance that you may already be an Adobe Creative Cloud subscriber. 

If you are, then you already have access to Adobe Portfolio free of charge as it’s part of the subscription. 

On the other hand, if you don’t have a CC subscription, you can get access to Adobe Portfolio (as well as other useful Adobe tools) only for $9.99 per month. 

As we mentioned earlier, Adobe Portfolio comes with ready-to-use templates for many different types of pages that you may have on your portfolio website. 

This portfolio builder has options for novices as well as seasoned veterans. 

If you want to stay simple, you can just choose a template, make minor changes to it, add your content, and you’ll have a website ready to be published. 

On the other hand, if you want finer control over how your website looks and functions, Adobe Portfolio has options to accommodate you via in-line HTML and CSS editing. 

Adobe also gives you access to Adobe Stock which is a vast library of stock images that you can utilize to give your online portfolio that extra edge. 

When it comes to website building, Adobe Portfolio can definitely help you create a professional portfolio that will impress visitors and compel them to buy your online course(s). 

Factors to Consider Before you Decide to Buy Adobe Portfolio

Pricing

As mentioned earlier, Creative Cloud subscribers can use Adobe Portfolio as part of its package.

A CC subscription that contains all of the tools offered by Adobe (such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Premiere Pro, etc.) costs $52.99 per month.

On the other hand, if you don’t have a CC subscription, then you can get Adobe Portfolio along with a few other Adobe tools such as Photoshop and Lightroom for $9.99 per month.

It’s quite likely that you may already have a Creative Cloud subscription as an online course creator but even if you don’t, we feel that $9.99 per month for Adobe Portfolio is a pretty good deal. 

User-Friendliness

Adobe Portfolio is extremely user-friendly thanks to the fact that you don’t need any coding skills to create a compelling website for your online course business. 

Furthermore, the templates you have access to are great to get your website off the ground if you don’t want to start from scratch. 

After all, creating an elegant and engaging website requires knowledge of design and that may be something you don’t have. 

These templates fix that and allow you to have a strong foundation into which you can add your own content. 

Flexibility

When you compare Adobe Portfolio to other website builders such as Wix, WordPress, Squarespace, etc., you’ll find that it’s not as flexible as any of them. 

As mentioned earlier, Adobe Portfolio is mainly a portfolio builder and thus, if you need your website to be anything more than that, Adobe Portfolio will struggle to deliver. 

SEO Features

While Adobe Portfolio has basic SEO tools and features to help you rank online, it’s fairly basic compared to its competitors. 

It does not provide you anything in the way of analytics nor do you get much when it comes to A/B testing of certain keywords, etc. 

The SEO settings it offers are fairly rudimentary. 

This is especially worrying because the main purpose of building a website as an online course creator is to widen your reach and increase your audience base. 

If a website builder hinders this process, then it essentially defeats the main purpose of why you’re building the website in the first place. 

Domain and Hosting Solutions

Adobe Portfolio does not offer any domain and hosting solutions as part of its package. 

You can only create your website with it but in order to make it available to everyone else online, you will need to manually find a separate web hosting service. 

This is less than ideal because you may run into compatibility issues. 

Furthermore, it’s not ideal financially as well because you’ll have to pay a separate monthly fee to the web hosting service as well. 

What Do the Customers Think?

Adobe polishes every one of its tools to the point where they are very refined and intuitive to use. 

Adobe Portfolio is no exception and its users love how easy to use it is. 

The ready-made templates are a common source of praise because they allow less tech-savvy people to come up with compelling websites for their businesses. 

Best Website Builder to Build a Portfolio Website

The best website builder to build a portfolio website is Adobe Portfolio. It’s very simple to use and allows you to create dynamic galleries that you can use to showcase the salient features for your online course(s). 

Wix Review – Dynamic, Flexible and Simple to Use

Since its inception back in 2006, Wix has been refined to become one of the best website builders in the market today. 

It has all the bells and whistles necessary to create many different types of websites. This means that, unlike Adobe Portfolio, Wix has the capacity to create much more than just portfolio sites. 

Similar to Adobe Portfolio, you don’t need to have HTML and coding knowledge to create an engaging website for your customer base. 

It features an easy drag-and-drop Wix editor that is visual in nature. Thus, you’re able to see exactly what your website will look like as you make changes to its layout. 

Furthermore, it has over 500 templates to choose from which target different types of websites including online businesses like yours. 

Pros	Cons
• Extensive SEO tools • Vast template library • Useful widget library • Responsive customer support • Intuitive drag-and-drop Wix editor	• Templates are not interchangeable • Your website is not transferable to other platforms • The free version forces Wix ads and branding

Benefits of Wix

The first thing to talk about in terms of benefits is its lenient pricing. Wix has four different plans but its Unlimited plan which is meant for entrepreneurs and freelancers would be the best option for you. 

It costs only $12.50 per month. While this is more expensive than what you’d pay for Adobe Portfolio, the amount of value you get for these $12.50 is much higher than what you get with Adobe Portfolio. 

The unlimited plan comes with a custom domain and hosting solution that is valid for one year. 

Furthermore, the website builder is extremely easy and intuitive to use. The WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor is perfect for individuals that don’t have a background in web development. 

Everything is visual and it’s easy to see how your website will look and make changes accordingly. 

If you need more fine-tuning, then Wix supports inserting HTML code to incorporate elements that are not native to Wix. 

The hosting solution provided by Wix is also great in terms of performance and speed. We tested it for 6 months and monitored the uptime using UptimeRobot. We got a 99.9% uptime during these 6 months which is more than satisfactory. 

Factors to Consider Before you Decide to Buy Wix

Pricing

As mentioned earlier, Wix offers four different plans. 

While there are cheaper plans than the unlimited plan, the features those plans offer may be inadequate for online course creators. 

The unlimited plan costs $12.50 per month and while this is more expensive than Adobe Portfolio when you look at the value for money you get, it’s much better. 

User-Friendliness

The days of creating websites using HTML are long gone with website builders such as Wix coming up with intuitive ways to use drag-and-drop editors. 

The editor for Wix is extremely intuitive and you will be able to pick it up and gain value out of it in your very first session with the website builder. 

The menus are neat and self-explanatory and everything you need is within a couple of mouse clicks. 

The templates you get with Wix are also fully customizable. So, you can use one as a foundation and then, make all the appropriate changes you need to create a compelling website to either just market or even host your online course(s). 

Flexibility

As mentioned earlier, Wix is a website builder that can be used to create a wide variety of websites. 

It’s extremely flexible when it comes to the type of website you want to create, how you want it to look, how you want the users to navigate through it, and how it functions. 

SEO Features

Unlike Adobe Portfolio, Wix is a website builder that boasts extensive features and options to make your website as friendly to search engines as possible. 

It provides all the functionality you’d need for perfect search engine optimization. 

You can fill in keyword tags, meta descriptions, meta titles as well as tags for images on all pages of your website. 

Furthermore, Wix also allows you to change the URL of every page on your website according to your needs so it’s as SEO-friendly as possible. 

Lastly, we mentioned above how you get access to their Site Booster and Visitor Analytics apps as part of their unlimited plan. 

The Site Booster app helps your website rank higher in search results and helps you get your site listed on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. 

The Visitor Analytics tool provides you with detailed metrics of the visitors to your website. This allows you to judge whether the content you’ve put up on your website is working well to attract traffic or not. 

Depending on the analytics, you can make appropriate changes to your website and its content to attract as many potential customers for your online courses as possible. 

Domain and Hosting Solutions

Domain and hosting solutions are something that Wix provides to you as part of its package. 

You get a custom domain with all of their plans and the unlimited plan gives you a free domain for 1 year. 

The performance of the hosting solution is more than satisfactory in terms of speed, uptime as well as security. 

This is great because you will not have to go through the hassle of finding a web hosting service that is compatible with Wix. Furthermore, you won’t have to pay a separate fee to a third-party hosting service either. 

What Do the Customers Think?

As expected, people who have used Wix are extremely satisfied with their services. 

People love how you don’t need to have knowledge of web design or coding in order to create a robust and compelling website for your business. 

The huge number of widgets you can get for added functionality is also something that many of the reviews we found praise about. 

Best All-in-One Website Builder

The best all-in-one website builder is Wix because not only does it give you tools to create a website but it also offers services to host and market it. Not only can you build your website but you can also rank it on search engines using tools within Wix.

Website Builders – Buyers’ Guide

It can be confusing to choose the most appropriate website builder because many of them are aimed at individuals who want to achieve different things. 

As an online course creator, you need to be aware of certain features and aspects that a website builder has to offer. 

Here are some of the factors you need to keep in mind when you choose a website builder for yourself:

Pricing

As an online course creator that is about to start to create their website, you don’t want to go overboard when it comes to the amount you pay for your website builder. 

After all, you’re not earning any revenue yet and you will most likely need to pay for other tools for online course creation as well. 

Thus, you need to ensure that the price you pay for a website builder is as low as possible. 

We recommend that you opt for a website builder that costs less than $15 per month. 

User-Friendliness

Naturally, you want your website builder to be user-friendly. 

As a rule of thumb, you should be able to pick it up on the first day and be able to familiarize yourself with its different functions within the first session. 

If every part of the editing process is confusing and is requiring you to look up tutorials for the website builder, it’s not ideal. 

This is because you want to spend as little time as possible learning the website builder because this is precious time that you could spend refining your online course and its marketing strategies. 

Flexibility

When it comes to web design, you want the site builder to be as flexible as possible. 

What we mean by flexible is that it should have the capabilities to incorporate different types of layouts into your website in whatever way you want. 

Depending on the type of niche of your online course, you may have certain wants and needs when it comes to how you want your website to look and function. 

Thus, it’s important that you opt for a tool that enables you to create one the way you want. 

You should avoid builders that offer ready-made templates with few options to adjust and customize them. 

SEO Features

We mentioned above how the fundamental purpose of you creating a website for your online course business is to increase your online presence and reach a wider audience. 

SEO is essential when it comes to boosting your online presence. Thus, whatever tool you choose needs to have extensive SEO settings and options which enable you to rank on engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. 

There are many builders out there that actually hinder the SEO process and make your website unfriendly to such engines. Avoid these at all costs. 

Domain and Hosting Solutions

Ideally, you should go for a website builder which offers domain and hosting solutions as part of its package. 

Finding a web hosting service that is fully compatible with your builder can actually be much harder than it sounds. 

Furthermore, the need to have a separate web hosting service will mean that you’ll have to pay a separate monthly fee to that service as well. 

Not only is it a hassle but it’s also more costly. 

Adobe Portfolio vs Wix – Final Verdict

This brings us to the conclusion of our comparison post for Adobe Portfolio vs Wix. 

In the end, it’s pretty clear that Wix is the winner. While Adobe Portfolio does allow you to create a basic website to showcase your online course. Its options for the type of website you can create are fairly limited. 

Wix is highly flexible and allows you to create whatever type of website you want. Not only that but it also addresses all major SEO parameters and allows you to market your website dynamically as an online course creator. 

Which website builder did you use to create your website? Let us know in the comments below.