Wix Editor vs Wix ADI: Which Should I Use?

Wix ADI is Wix’s artificial design intelligence tool which helps you to build a customized website based on your answers to a few simple questions about your goals, aims, and preferred layout. When comparing Wix ADI vs Wix Editor, Wix Editor, is best described as a more traditional, DIY website builder. 

Wix ADI is easier to use because Wix does more of the heavy lifting for you, whereas Wix Editor is a more immersive option that will give you more control over the smaller details that go into making a website. Importantly, Wix ADI and Wix Editor cost the same because they’re both available options inside every Wix plan.

If you’re new to website building, you can use Wix ADI to build a website instantly and easily transfer it over to Wix Editor if you’d like more control over the customizable elements of your website builder. In this guide to Wix ADI vs Wix Editor, we’ll look at the strengths and drawbacks of both versions of the Wix builder. Sections include:

• Wix ADI vs Wix Editor: Pros and Cons
• Our Wix Scores Explained
• What is Wix ADI and How Does it Work?
• What is Wix Editor and How Does it Work?
• When Should I Use Wix ADI and Wix Editor?
• Wix Editor vs Wix ADI: Detailed Review
• Wix ADI vs Wix Editor Pricing
• About Our Research
• Verdict: Should You Use Wix Editor or Wix ADI?
• Frequently Asked Questions

Wix ADI vs Wix Editor: Pros and Cons

Understanding Our Wix Scores

Here at Tech.co, our independent research team tests all the products we write about (more on this later). In our last round of website builder testing, Wix scored the highest out of the twelve website builders we tested with an impressive 4.8/5 overall.

It scores particularly highly for “help and support” thanks to a useful knowledge center, as well as live chat and phone-based support. It also has a vast range of SEO features that outpaces competitors like GoDaddy and WordPress. You can also take advantage of Wix’s vast app market to add additional features and functions to your site.

Wix ADI and Wix Editor are not actually different products. They’re better described as two “options” or “modes” you can choose to build your Wix website.

We’ve tested them both and came up with our own verdicts on the two different types of Wix tools  – for instance, Wix ADI is easier to use. However, Wix as an overall product got the joint highest ease of use score (4.4/5) on our last round of testing, so don’t leave this page thinking Wix Editor is crazy difficult to master! Quite the opposite, it’s actually a very smooth experience.

What is Wix ADI and How Does it Work?

Wix “ADI” – which stands for “Artificial Design Intelligence” – effectively re-assigns many of the tasks you’ll have to do to set up a website with an AI designer, building you a custom website from scratch.

All you have to do is answer a few questions about the goals and aims of your site, as well as what tools you’ll want on it, what “theme” you want it to have (as seen below), and a bit of personalized information like your website’s name.

The Wix ADI uses this information, as well as data about how other users have built their website with Wix – as well as website builder best practices – to make you an optimized site. You’ll still be able to choose website aspects like colors, fonts, and other design features, for which Wix will provide you with a range of options.

Taking the onus off of the user to build their perfect site and mechanizing much of the process makes setting up quicker, easier, and simpler with Wix ADI compared to Wix Editor.

What is Wix Editor and How Does it Work?

Wix Editor, at least compared to Wix ADI, is what you may presume a website builder to be like, and is effectively just Wix’s name for the platform you use to build your website if you’re not using Wix ADI.

With Editor, you’ll be able to customize your website from the ground up using a drag-and-drop interface and the wealth of tools, features, and apps Wix has to offer.

This method of website design with Wix puts a lot of emphasis on the user making the effort to design their own website. You’ll still be able to choose from templates provided by Wix, but on your end, you’ll have to do a lot more building.

When Should I use Wix ADI and Wix Editor?

• If you’re new to website building and have never built a website before, use Wix ADI.
• If you’re making your third or fourth website, use Wix Editor.
• If you’d like to get up and running as quickly as possible, use Wix ADI.
• If you’ll need access to Wix’s app market, use Wix Editor.
• If you want your website to rank well in Google but know nothing about SEO, use Wix ADI.
• If you’d like complete control over what you’d like your site to look like, use Wix Editor.
• If you don’t have a desktop computer or laptop and want to edit on mobile, use Wix ADI.

What about Editor X?

Although Wix ADI vs Editor is the key head-to-head here, another service offered by Wix is Editor X. Editor X is a website builder aimed at designers and creative agencies and can facilitate the creation of more complex and intricate sites.

Much like the other ways you can build a website with Wix, there’s no coding knowledge required to use Editor X, and you won’t need any high level of technical knowledge to design a great site.

Editor X gives you a super flexible CSS grid layout that makes element docking, anchoring, stacking, and scaling pretty straightforward. Overall, the design features offered are more complex and useful (if you don’t find that intimidating).

Max-Content, for instance, is an advanced width sizing unit within which grid blocks and other Wix elements fit themselves around to the maximum content size of text blocks and other elements inside them. This is just one example of Editor X’s advanced tools.

Editor X pricing starts at $22 per month for the Essential plan. There’s also the Extra plan available for $35 per month and the Ultra plan for $49 per month.

Best of Ease of Use and Usability: Wix ADI

The whole point of Wix ADI is that it is easier to use than Wix Editor – it literally takes over large and important chunks of the typical website-building process.

With Wix ADI, all you really have to do to get yourself to a point where your website is ready to go live is answer a few questions about what you’d like it to look like, and Wix takes over.

Remember, however, that Wix Editor isn’t exactly difficult to use – it still scores 4.4/5 for ease of use, and this was the second-highest usability score out of the 12 website builders we’ve tested.

Wix Editor is the perfect solution for those looking for creative freedom. It still utilizes an intuitive drag-and-drop mechanism for moving elements and blocks around on your website. But, of course, the ADI version is easier.

Best for Design and Customizability: Wix Editor

This is, in a way, an unfair comparison to make – of course, Wix Editor is better for customizability because Wix ADI’s whole purpose is to do most of the work for you, especially with regard to the initial setup.

Wix is a highly customizable program and scores 4.9/5 for website features – whatever you want to do with your site, from publishing a photography blog to selling t-shirts, there’s a function inside Wix to help, and plenty of design templates to suit exactly what you’re trying to do.

That being said, Squarespace scores much higher (4.7/5) than Wix (3.3/5) for design functionality – and although Wix Editor is customizable, the more you’ve got going on on your site, the slower and more complicated continuous building will become.

Best for SEO Features: Wix Editor

Wix scores the highest out of all the providers we tested for SEO features, including meta descriptions for pages and articles, canonical tagging, Google analytics, 301 redirects, social media integration, and SEO-specific apps, all while ensuring your site is providing a great experience for mobile users. Overall, Wix was awarded a score of 5/5 for SEO.

One of the only minor differences is that you can’t manage specific URL pages with Wix ADI, whereas you can with Wix Editor – and is quite integral to ranking highly in search engines. As we’ve covered, you won’t have access to the same apps with Wix ADI, so you can’t use things like Google Analytics (or other SEO-specific apps) in the same, integrative way.

Best for Accessing the Wix App Market: Wix Editor

As previously mentioned, the Wix App market is available to Wix Editor users in its entirety. Wix ADI users will have to make do with a restricted app market that only allows you to access the apps Wix thinks you’ll need based on the information you submitted when you were setting your website up.

Granted, if the idea of an app store with an endless string of apps to choose from seems quite daunting, and you wouldn’t be really sure when to start anything, you’ll appreciate the way ADI makes the decision for you and saves you time. The bottom line though, Wix Editor users have a much better choice of apps.

Best for Help and Support: Draw

This is a draw. Luckily, you don’t have to choose between different levels of support when you choose between Wix Editor and ADI because they both come with access to Wix’s help features.

Wix users are entitled to support via email and a phone line, but if you’re the type of person that likes to troubleshoot their technical issue on their own, you can refer to the community forum or knowledge base to see if the answer is hiding somewhere in a guide, article, or comment.

Best for Ecommerce: Draw

There’s nothing to split the two website-building options Wix provides when it comes to ecommerce – the ecommerce features you’ll get are dictated by the Wix pricing plan you select, rather than whether you opt for Wix Editor or Wix ADI.

For more information on Wix’s ecommerce features – as well as how they stack up in comparison to other ecommerce builders – check out our best ecommerce builders page.

Transitioning from Wix ADI to Wix Editor

Transitioning from Wix ADI to Wix Editor could not be simpler, and you can complete the process in seconds:

1. Click on “Site” on the top bar inside Wix ADI.
2. Select “Go To Editor” right at the bottom.
3. In the pop-up menu, Click “Switch to Editor”.

Remember, once you’ve switched to Wix Editor, you will not be able to switch back to Wix ADI. Also, be warned, if you’ve been editing on your mobile with Wix ADI, you’ll have to switch to a desktop or a laptop in order to use Wix Editor – but we’d argue that working on a desktop is the best way to make a website anyway.

Wix ADI vs Wix Editor Pricing

Wix ADI and Wix Editor cost exactly the same because they’re just two different ways to set up a website within a Wix subscription. Here are the Wix pricing plans currently available:

Our Research and Methodology

Here at Tech.co, our research & insights team has put Wix, Squarespace, and 12 other top website builders through their paces, testing them against a rigorous set of testing criteria to determine which one truly is the best website builder.

During testing, we focused on six key areas: website features, design functionalities, value for money, help & support, customer score, and ease of use. Each website was awarded a score for each category based on how well it performed.

These scores allow Tech.co to remain editorially independent – all of our opinions, conclusions, and analysis are based upon research and research alone. We do have commercial relationships with some of the providers we talk about in this article and across our site, but this never affects our rankings or verdicts.

Frequently Asked Questions