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
LemonStand (Discontinued)
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
LemonStand was an eCommerce platform bulit for professionals with features such as design fliexiblity and checkout customization. LemonStand was acquired by Mailchimp March 2019, and June 2019 LemonStand was discontinued.
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 …
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.
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.
LemonStand has a limited number of templates. Each template has a different set of features that can be modified in the back office theme customization area.
LemonStand claims their templates are highly customizable. To accomplish this, they expose individual web page code in page templates and widget blocks. These are windows into the template where you can modify, add and delete html code. However, as in all PHP/CSS/HTML templates, even those written with Twig as LemonStand templates are, the coding goes very deep through many files. I don't think it would be cost or time effective for a small company to attempt more than superficial customization. This is pretty much the same for Shopify and PrestaShop. As a store front and blogging platform, LemonStand is elegant but it is not a website development tool like Wix, Weeble or even Squarespace.
LemonStand manages this expectation with excellent email support. There is no user forum and no third party templates for LemonStand, and this is a good thing. When I wanted to modify a specific aspect of the template, I emailed the issue/question to LemonStand support and consistently received advise including instructions on how to adjust the widget or exposed page code to resolve my problem.
Documentation is out of date and could use a good proofread. Videos and tutorials are too simple to be really helpful.
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.