Useful website building
In the early days of the internet, you couldn’t build a website without coding. These days, website builders like Ucraft help you create a web presence without needing to code. It lets you whip up beautiful, modern, mobile-friendly pages with tools that bring the site builder further in line with rival services. However, Ucraft’s interface is less intuitive than those of its competitors, and its free version is disappointingly limited. Overall, Ucraft is a good tool, but you’d be better off creating a website with Duda or Wix, our Editors‘ Choice winners for premium and free website builders, respectively. The former offers more intuitive site-building tools, while the latter has more than 2,000 templates.Plans and Prices
You get started by signing up for an account, which requires only a name, email address (with verification), and password. You can start with a free account, which includes Ucraft branding, an SSL certificate, 24/7 support via web chat, unlimited monthly data transfers, and limited website customization. Unlike Wix, Ucraft imposes numerous limitations on free site design options (more on that later), and you can only create one site per account.
Paid accounts start at $14 per month for the Website tier, which removes Ucraft branding and includes a custom domain name. It also comes with full site customization options and the ability to sell up to five products online. Next up the ladder is eCommerce Starter ($21 per month), which increases the product ceiling to 20 and adds more online store features. eCommerce Growth ($48 per month) increases your inventory to 500. Ucraft’s top-level eCommerce Unlimited plan ($125 per month) features unlimited products, inventory locations, and page collection items.
Ucraft’s pricing is generally in line with other website builders. For comparison, Wix starts at $17 per month and increases to $159 for its top business offering. Meanwhile, Squarespace charges between $25 and $139 per month.Building a Website With Ucraft
As with just about every other DIY online website builder, you get started by selecting a template. The designs are stylish, with many featuring full-page images and minimal navigation. However, Ucraft has a little more than 70 templates in total, while Wix has more than 2,000. Once you choose a template, you must select a domain name. Free sites get domains in the form of yoursitename.ucraft.ai. Ucraft’s AI tool, called Ucraft Copilot, generates layouts, designs, and descriptive text based on your prompts.
Starting my testing with a free account, I discovered that most customization options, including the visual editor, are not available to free account holders. That’s unfortunate; Weebly and Wix’s free versions provide nearly all the same features as their paid counterparts, aside from e-commerce and large storage and bandwidth options.
With a premium account, you can use the usual page design elements: Images, galleries, titles, paragraphs, videos, icons, logos, buttons, and social buttons. I like that there’s a search field within the widgets, blocks, and overlays panel to quickly find items.
