Duda, the eponymous platform from the company in Palo Alto, is a web design platform for companies that offer web design services to small businesses. The company serves customers from freelance web professionals to digital agencies, all the way up to the large hosting companies, SaaS platforms and online publishers.
$25
per month
Jekyll
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
Jekyll is an open source static site generator useful as a blog publishing system.
When comparing WIX to Duda, Duda is a breeze. Duda is better in every aspect I can think of from customizing, designing, to hosting. I am proud to use Duda as our website builder, we have built well over 200 different sites on Duda.
Really good visual editor. Easy to use, predesigned templates and sections that are easy to add and update. White labeling for previewing sites with clients.
Duda lets me customize the entire page. With Squarespace, many of the templates were limiting on editing the header and footer. Also in the past, I couldn't change the page title and page header to be different in Squarespace. This was not good for SEO. Wix is good but also a …
I can't speak to why my agency selected Duda, but I can say from personal experience that building a website in Duda is much easier, and backed by better support than any other website builder I've used.
Duda allows me, as a web designer, to still create great looking and unique …
Much easier for non-tech team members to work on building and maintaining websites. Previous Adobe-based websites clients have been very happy with Duda. Overall, clients can do a lot more on their own, if they choose, than with other website platforms we have used, or that …
The big alternatives to Jekyll are of course things like WordPress or Drupal, but they are almost something completely different: a full-blown CMS with a backend language and a database. Jekyll loses some of the niceties of these CMS solutions, like easily updating content from …
Jekyll has a much lower technical overhead in terms of server and hosting requirements to launch a site, but at the same time has a much more technical "interface" and doesn't have the dynamic capability, user management, or permission system as a standard CMS like Drupal or …
All the other CMS's I've used try to make it easy for the nontechnical user to manage a website, at the expense of adding complexity and weight to the system. Jekyll takes the exact opposite approach, eschewing all unnecessary complexity. If you know what you're doing in a code …
Jekyll is integrated into GitHub Pages, which made it an easy choice. Using Jekyll was also easier as there's not really a server or a database to configure and you can just get things started from day one. Running and verifying content changes locally for developers is super …
Duda is great for small to medium sized websites building, where some level of animation is ok and mostly for presenting online information, and its SEO performance is very good then. But for very large or heavily interactive websites it may not be the best choice.
Jekyll is well suited for users who would like to have all content within source control (Git) along with the code used to produce the website. Because everything it produces is static assets (HTML, CSS, etc.), sites created with Jekyll are super fast, with very little needed on the server side of things. There are also a few really great free solutions for deploying and serving Jekyll websites. Jekyll will be tough to maintain for users who are not web developers, comfortable using Git to update content. There are 3rd party solutions for maintaining Jekyll-based sites without having to touch the code, but this will cost extra money. Also, because there is no server-side language, you will need to look elsewhere to handle things like contact forms.
Ongoing Education for agencies and users. Anton has done what he does best and turned Duda into a go-to-source for information, ideas, and practical implementation.
UX - The ability to create simple yet highly customizable sites.
Speed - Sites take much less time to build and maintain, allowing agencies to scale and business owners to spend more time on growing their core revenue channels.
Reliability - From technical reliability, reduced down-time to support, Duda is a reliability option.
Straight out of the box, Jekyll lacks a friendly WordPress-style back-end. You'll be working in Liquid (HTML), Sass (CSS), and Markdown (content) files. If you're already comfortable with these languages, you'll feel at home in no time. If not, you may need to consider getting someone else's expertise to set up the site, and then use another back-end (probably paid) to make editing your site's files less intimidating.
If you use GitHub Pages for the free hosting, be forewarned that GitHub only white lists a few plugins for their own compilation. This usually isn't a problem (you can compile on your own computer if need be), but can be annoying at times.
Upon using the builder for the first time, I found Duda to be extremely intuitive and easy to figure out, but also has a high skill-ceiling. After 5 years of building in the drag-and-drop builder, I continue to teach myself new tricks and methods to continually improve my process and design capabilities within the platform. I've built dozens of Duda sites and each one is better than the last.
Duda lets me customize the entire page. With Squarespace, many of the templates were limiting on editing the header and footer. Also in the past, I couldn't change the page title and page header to be different in Squarespace. This was not good for SEO. Wix is good but also a little bulky and glitchy.
All the other CMS's I've used try to make it easy for the nontechnical user to manage a website, at the expense of adding complexity and weight to the system. Jekyll takes the exact opposite approach, eschewing all unnecessary complexity. If you know what you're doing in a code editor, Jekyll will probably feel like a breath of fresh air to you.