Strikingly is a free website builder that helps anyone create a responsive, mobile-friendly website—including those of us with zero coding and design skills. Founded in 2012, the company aims to help individuals and SMBs launch the website of their dreams.
Strikingly also offers paid plans with extra site storage, custom branding, live-chat widgets, multi-language translation, and ecommerce capabilities.
Strikingly Compared
Despite its range of offerings, Strikingly didn’t make our list of the top website-building services. Instead, we recommend Shopify for anyone launching an ecommerce business. Join Shopify’s one million+ users with a three-day free trial of the ecommerce powerhouse.
- Shopify – Best for selling products and services
- Wix – Best website builder for your first website
- Zyro – Best for keeping website costs low
- Bluehost – Best for WordPress websites
- Squarespace – Best website builder for creators of all stripes
- Weebly – Best for solopreneurs
- GoDaddy – Best for building your website from your phone
Take a closer look at each of these services in our list of the best website-building tools.
About Strikingly
Strikingly provides free or low-cost website-building services to users with little to no experience with coding or designing. The company has been in business since 2012. Strikingly customers can choose from dozens of templates to quickly build an online store, blog, business site, portfolio, service page, or startup website.
Strikingly makes it a point to offer easy website building to people around the globe. Its Happiness Officers—aka customer service team members—provide 24/7 chat services in a range of languages from English and Japanese to Norwegian and Arabic. However, I advise taking this seemingly good quality with a large grain of salt. As I’ll discuss below, customer service is one of Strikingly’s weak points.
Strikingly Health and Stability
Strikingly is a privately held company founded in 2012 by David Haisha Chen (CEO), Dafeng Guo (CTO), and Teng Bao (CDO). The website-building service is backed by Y Combinator, which is the same startup accelerator that helped launch Airbnb, DoorDash, Twitch, and Stripe.
The company has offices in China and California. On-site employees report a positive work culture with long hours. But remote customer service agents (called Happiness Officers) worldwide reported salaries as low as $6 an hour—before PayPal’s cut on payday.
Not surprisingly, Strikingly customers consistently give the company’s customer service a low rating. Poorly paid employees and unhappy customers are a lose-lose for everyone. These factors can cause low morale, slowed profits, and high onboarding costs, suggesting the company may not be as stable as it seems.
Strikingly Pricing
Strikingly offers a forever-free website building plan, but you’ll have to use a Strikingly.com domain. If you want to use a custom domain, you must upgrade to one of Strikingly’s paid plans. These plans are reasonably priced, and you can always get started for free and upgrade if you’re a fan.
Strikingly Pricing Structure
Lots of users sign up for Strikingly’s free plan, which offers the bare bones of what you need for just about any website. You’ll get five web pages, the ability to sell one product, 5 GB of bandwidth each month, and 500 MB of storage.
The next plan costs $12 per month if you charge the card monthly or $8 if you pay for the year upfront. But you still only get to sell one product or service, and there’s a 5% transaction fee. Plus, just one GB of storage is included.
For $20 per month, you’ll nab 20 GB of storage, unlimited bandwidth, the ability to sell up to 300 products, custom branding, and a 2% transaction fee. Move up to the highest level, and you’ll pay $59 per month to avoid transaction fees altogether, get 100 GB of storage space, and support a live chat widget on your site.
Strikingly Pricing Comparison
When compared with competitors, Strikingly is more budget-friendly. First of all, you can’t beat a free plan. Second, even Strikingly’s mid-tier plan costs less than Shopify’s base tier plan.
Shopify’s least expensive plan costs $39 per month if you pay monthly. Unlike Strikingly, it’s 100% geared toward ecommerce sellers. The basic plan comes with the ability to sell unlimited products across multiple—up to 1,000—inventory locations. You also get two staff accounts, 24/7/365 email, chat, and phone support, and a discount of up to 77% on shipping.
If you compare Strikingly with Zyro, you’ll find that Strikingly is ultimately more expensive for what it offers. Zyro doesn’t provide a free forever plan, but it does provide you with a free custom domain and free web hosting for just $2.59 per month. You’ll need to pay for your domain after the first year.
The Zyro business plan costs $3.59 per month and is geared toward ecommerce sellers. You get everything in the basic plan plus the capacity to sell up to 500 products, accept payments in 20+ ways, provide booking services, and manage your inventory. Strikingly does not offer custom domains, inventory management, or 500 product slots for a price that low.
Strikingly Trials and Guarantees
If you want to take Strikingly for a test run, sign up for the website building service’s free forever plan. You may find that you need to upgrade to a paid plan after your business starts growing. Or, if you’re simply running a fun personal blog, Strikingly’s free plan may be all you need.
You can also try Strikingly’s Pro or VIP plans with a two-week free trial.
Strikingly Website Building Review
From its free and low-priced plans to its templates and ease of use, Strikingly is a solid website-building service. The Strikingly-made websites I browsed are bright, beautiful, and mobile-responsive—just as promised.
But Strikingly isn’t one of my favorite website builders. You can browse my top choices in this list of website-building services.
What Makes Strikingly Website Building Great
- Easy to use: Strikingly was founded to make website building quick and easy for anyone. In this sense, it delivers. If you need a landing page, blog, freelance portfolio, or a site to sell a single product or service, Strikingly can get you going in a snap. The drag-and-drop interface is simple and intuitive. The customization tools and page editors are conveniently located on the left side of the dashboard. If you need extra help, you can always click the Take Tour button in the dashboard’s lower left-hand corner. Or you can connect with a Happiness Officer via live chat.
- Many template choices: Even in Strikingly’s free plan, you can choose from dozens of templates until you find the perfect one for your website. Once you select a template, you can easily change the color scheme, fonts, header and navigation settings, buttons, animations, and text size. Your options will be limited on the free plan, but the paid plans offer more variety.
- Budget-friendly pricing: Who doesn’t love a free product? One of Strikingly’s biggest draws is its forever-free website option. It’s ideal for anyone who isn’t concerned about having a custom domain and just needs to get up and running. And you can always upgrade to a paid plan if you need to—without emptying your wallet.
- Large image library: If you need to add a stock image to your website, Strikingly’s built-in image library has hundreds of high-quality stock photos for you to browse. User reviews praise how easy it is to select just the right image and upload it to your website. Do you need a field of flowers for your website background? What about a cool, blue brick wall? Perhaps a colorful array of vegetables? You can type a keyword into the search bar or browse the photos by category. Find it all in the Unsplash-powered Strikingly image library.
Where Strikingly Website Building Falls Short
- Frequent glitches: We noticed two things when we tested our mock Strikingly site. First, the site speed is slow. Navigating from one customization option to another takes more time than most of us are used to. Second, it’s glitchy. Changes take a while to implement—or they don’t load at all. For example, we initially chose the Clean & Shine template pictured above. When we tried to switch templates to Massage Therapist, the website appeared to be working on the change. But instead of implementing it, our dashboard told us we were currently editing the Massage Therapist template. However, the site was stuck on Clean & Shine. This type of glitch frustrates customers and slows them down when they’re trying to get their website up quickly.
- Not great for ecommerce: Yes, Strikingly has ecommerce options if you pay for a plan. But these options are limited. Even in the most expensive plan, VIP, you’ll pay $59 per month just to get unlimited product slots. Compare this to Shopify, where the base plan of $39 per month gets you unlimited product selling capabilities, customer segmentation, ecommerce automations, shipping discounts, sales tax calculations, and fraud analysis.
- Poor customer support: Calling a customer service team Happiness Officers doesn’t automatically make them happy or ensure they’ll make customers happy. Dozens of workplace reviews claim Happiness Officers received low wages, odd training hours, and insufficient preparation for starting the job. Turnover appears to be high, too. On the customer end, countless reviews complained of poor customer support. Investing more time and money into customer service could go a long way for Strikingly.
- Limited customization options: Customization isn’t necessarily supposed to be Strikingly’s strong point. However, users might find it difficult to scale if they start a website on Strikingly. Say you start with a small ecommerce business, for example, and it starts going gangbusters after the first year. You begin to need a site that can accommodate more traffic, products, shipping options, coupons…you get the idea. Strikingly doesn’t necessarily make this easy, and you’d be better off starting with Wix or Shopify.
Strikingly Website Building Services Compared
Even though it can be a decent option for those who want a website for personal or low-traffic use, I don’t recommend Strikingly for most users. Instead, take a look at Shopify, Wix, and the other services on our list of the top website builders.
- Shopify – Best for selling products and services
- Wix – Best website builder for your first website
- Zyro – Best for keeping website costs low
- Bluehost – Best for WordPress websites
- Squarespace – Best website builder for creators of all stripes
- Weebly – Best for solopreneurs
- GoDaddy – Best for building your website from your phone
Final Verdict
Strikingly helps users build their first website within minutes and provides basic ecommerce services to online sellers. Most appealing is Strikingly’s free forever plan, which can be a great starting point for some.
However, Strikingly isn’t my first choice when it comes to website builders. If you’re going the ecommerce route, we recommend Shopify. For a low-cost personal or freelancing website, try Zyro. And if you’re just getting started, Wix is your best bet.
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