Duda Review

Wednesday, March 3rd

2021 Website Builder Reviews

Duda

• Cost: From $14 to $44 per month

While Duda includes a website builder in its offering, it's actually so much more than that. Duda is a platform that caters to the individual who is looking for a way to build a website, but also to teams of creatives who create websites for others. In that way, Duda is more of a platform than a builder.

Everything You Need

The website builder has all the components needed to build a functional and beautiful website. Whether you join the free trial or pay for a Basic plan at $14 to begin your site, you'll be able to import your content from another site, or start fresh with an instant website. You'll have access to a library of "widgets" to introduce interactive areas of content and share those widgets across sites and with clients. Duda also gives you the ability to produce multiple dynamic content pages based on a single master page design. Dynamic content pages let you display personalized content for individual users.

Connect To Other Services

In situations where you need to connect your site and content to a third party service using an Application Programming Interface (API), Duda supports the REST API system. You can easily connect to your data, or data from other sites, to include and interact with on your own site.

Many Website Templates Available

There are many different mobile-enabled website templates available in the Duda database for everything from a single page website to an online store with eCommerce capabilities. You just need to choose the template that best represents your brand or business, then enable it and customize it from there.

Team Collaboration Tools

When working with a team to develop sites for clients, Duda provides team collaboration tools, including a section builder to share common page sections across sites, templates that you continually reuse, widgets for data exchange and live chats, and permissions controls to help your team distribute the workload.

Share Your Design

And, if you need to simplify your web design client management, Duda lets you share a designed site with inline commenting so that clients can provide their feedback instantly and in context with the design element they're critiquing. Controls help you limit what your clients can do within the Duda platform, such as receive analytics emails, edit site design, connect domains, publish sites, manage SEO settings, and use development tools. For gathering customer content, Duda has a content import algorithm to pull a customer's text and images from across the web and into the platform.

Hide The Duda Branding

If your agency is sensitive about showing that you're using Duda, there is the option to "white label" or hide Duda branding and replace it with your own so that it looks like your agency owns and operates all of its capabilities.

ECommerce Integration Built-in

If you need your Duda-built site to be an eCommerce site, you will have that option, including using Authorize.net, PayPal for payment and UPS, USPS, FedEx, Canada Post, Brasil Correios, or Australia Post for shipping. You can send automated marketing emails and newsletters with MailChimp plus track abandoned carts and send marketing emails to prompt people to complete their purchases.

Mostly Positive Reviews

Reviews of Duda are mostly positive, with people giving it high marks for features and usability. Unfortunately, there aren't a whole lot of design template choices and you won't experience a lot of flexibility in creative freedom. Blog posts cannot be imported from one site to another, so if you're going to be bringing your existing blog over to Duda, you'll have to manually copy and paste all your posts. That's a big problem for people who have hundreds of posts already. And, if you decide to move to another website system, you won't be able to export your eCommerce store or personalization rules. Plus, SEO features are more limited with Duda than, say, WordPress or other more sophisticated content management systems.

Good Choice

Duda does a very good job of providing a platform where people can collaborate on website design and building. You can certainly create a beautiful, functional website with it. However, the lack of template choices and export/import limitations helps to land Duda in the middle of our rankings.