Complete Duda Review: Build a Website in 1 Hour or Less

Duda is a simple website builder that you can use to create a high-performance website for your small business with its self-proclaimed “breakneck speed.” This software was primarily designed for small business owners looking to offer services to clients.

In this review, we will walk you through some of Duda’s most important aspects; including features, plans, and pricing. We’ll then outline the pros and cons so you can decide whether this website builder is right for you. Read on to learn more about what Duda has to offer.

• Fast: Duda promises users the ability to create a website with “breakneck speed.”
• Easy to Use: The drag-and-drop functionality makes customizing premade templates a simple and straightforward process.
• Scalable: Duda offers a fairly wide variety of client service features for users as they move up the platform’s pricing tiers.

• Limited Customization: The website editor can feel clunky and limited at times.
• Few Apps: Duda does not offer a wide variety of apps, and the apps that are available are not as useful as they could be.
• Limited search engine optimization (SEO): Duda disappoints in terms of the features available to help your ranking in popular search engines.

You’ll have several different options for Duda plans. Duda offers all new users a 14-day free trial automatically when they sign up for the site. To get started, simply navigate to Duda.co and click the link labeled “Start Free Trial” on the homepage. You will be then asked a few questions about your business and prompted to create an account by entering your email address and choosing a password.

Your 14-day free trial will give you access to all of the platform’s website-building features. However, you will need to purchase a premium plan to publish your website. Continue reading to learn more about the plans that are available through Duda.

The Duda Basic plan includes a lot of the site’s core offerings. It is a great starting point for smaller businesses and those looking to use their site as a portfolio. Duda Basic Plan features come standard with every Duda plan. While many of them are boilerplate, understanding the platform’s core offerings is key to making a decision about whether this website builder is right for you, as well as which plan suits the needs of your business.

Duda Basic Plan Features

• One Website: This plan covers the creation and hosting of one business website. Amazon Web Services (AWS) Hosting: All Duda plans include cloud hosting from AWS. This means Duda websites have no bandwidth or storage restrictions — regardless of the plan they use.
• Email Support: This plan includes email support from the Duda team.
• Website Personalization Features: Use these handy tools to create a unique experience for your online visitors. Choose from premade features like pop-up windows and notification banners or create your own.
• Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) Encryption: This type of encryption increases your website’s security, safeguarding sensitive customer data like credit card numbers.
• Multi-Language Translation: Duda translates your website into multiple languages can help your business reach a global audience. 
• Plenty of Apps to Choose From: Duda offers a wide variety of apps to your site to enhance its functionality. Each app provider sets the price of its app, which can vary from free or a free-trial period to requiring a paid subscription.
• Millions of Free and Premium Images: The Duda website builder comes fully stocked with premade content, including professional images.
• Limited Content Library Access: Duda’s content library enables you to easily import and manage content from social media platforms like Facebook. However, the Duda Basic plan can’t connect imported content to widgets, sync an external website’s content, or sync site content with an external data set.
• Access for One Team Member: You can create and share any template or content from your library with one other team member.

When to Use

The Duda website builder is a great option for smaller businesses looking to create a very basic digital touchpoint for their customers, as well as freelancers and other service-based professionals who wish to use Duda to create a portfolio.

While the Duda Basic plan is not designed for larger businesses, it can be a great place to begin for those just starting out, with the option to upgrade their plan as their business grows.

The Duda Team plan provides all the same core offerings as the Duda Basic plan, with a few helpful additional tools. These include:

• One Website: Although this appears to be the same as the Duda Basic Plan, adding more websites comes at a lower cost with the Duda Team Plan. See the Pricing section below for further details.
• Email, Chat, and Phone Support: This plan gives you more ways to reach Duda’s helpful team of customer support representatives.
• Full Content Library Access: Going beyond the limitations of the Duda Basic plan, the Duda Team plan allows you to collect and connect information for your own business or that of your clients. You can sync this information to widgets within the Duda website builder, increasing the speed and ease of creating your business site.
• Five Websites: Rather than just offering the ability to create a single website, users can build multiple websites with the Duda Team plan.

Duda Team Plan Collaboration Features

The Duda Team plan sets itself apart in this area by boosting the number of permitted collaborators and adding several key features.

• Access for Up to Four Team Members: This plan allows for more collaboration between you and your employees or clients.
• Customizable Permissions: This feature enables you to assign each member of your team permissions that correspond to their specific role or job function.
• Shareable Assets: This handy feature allows you to create, save and share your own website templates with other members of your team. You also can share these assets across all sites within your account.
• Fulfillment Channel Access: This feature takes the hassle out of finding agencies and individuals who specialize in working with the Duda platform. Just fill out a brief form and you’ll be connected to professionals who can help you with everything from web design to creating your own widgets.

Duda Team Plan Client Management Features

The Duda Team plan includes a myriad of client management services, each designed to support small business owners who need personal branding for their work with multiple clients.

• White-Label Client Access: “White labeling” allows you to present your or a client’s brand professionally and cohesively by creating a unique template or website, which is then populated with brand-specific content.
• White-Label Statistics and Analytics: This feature provides comprehensive site statistics and analytics reports — as well as regular email reports — for you or your clients.
• White-Label Sales and Marketing Materials: With this feature, you can include your branding on professionally designed marketing materials.
• Expanded Users and Permissions: This feature enables your clients or team members to manage and edit any websites on your plan.
• Site Comments: By gathering feedback from your customers, clients, and teammates, this feature streamlines communication and collaboration among individuals with access to your website.

When to Use

The Duda Team plan ideally suits web designers, web developers, and web writers looking to grow their businesses. This plan includes features that help you monitor several clients at once. The Duda Team plan also allows you to white-label offerings to help you showcase your branding skills.

Beyond the advanced tools and core, team collaboration, and client management offerings included with the Duda Team plan, the Duda Agency plan provides some additional benefits and features. The Duda Agency plan includes all the same core offerings as the Basic and Team plans, with a few additional features:

• Up to Four Websites: With built-in support for up to four websites, the Duda Agency plan saves you the time and money, as well as the hassle of adding websites to your plan. 
• Priority Email, Chat, and Phone Support: With the Duda Agency plan, you can cut to the front of the line whenever you need assistance from the Duda support team.
• Access for Up to Ten Team Members: This plan helps you build your brand and stay connected by enabling you to collaborate with up to ten team members or clients at a time.

Duda Agency Plan Advanced Tools

The Duda Agency plan includes the most advanced tools of any plan mentioned so far. These tools will help you build, expand and export any business website you work on in the Duda website builder.

• Website Export Tool: Users can download and export a ZIP file of all the images, files, cascading style sheets (CSS), hypertext markup language (HTML), and JavaScript for each individual website on this plan.
• Widget Builder: This handy tool enables you to create custom widgets that will increase your design capabilities and even integrate third-party services into your websites.
• Unlimited “Dynamic Pages” With Internal Collections: The Duda Agency plan includes full access to these features, allowing you to create as many “Dynamic Pages” as you need.
• Limited “Dynamic Pages” With External Collections: This incredibly useful tool enables you to create and display content using third-party datasets as well as build websites that include member profiles, real estate listings, restaurant menus, and more.

When to Use

The Duda Agency plan works well for freelance web professionals with a large client roster or small web production agencies looking to streamline their workload. Startup entrepreneurs also will find these features useful and versatile as they work to keep their clients and employees happy and connected.

Business owners looking for more advanced features like access to Duda’s application programming interface (API), onboarding and account management, and unlimited access to team and client management features can contact Duda for additional information about building a custom plan, as pricing for this plan is only available by quote.

Seeing how Duda can measure up to a similar competitor is a great way to find out if Duda is the best website builder for your business. Not only does this showcase where Duda may be lacking or excelling, but also can provide a quick way to glance at pricing and features for a Duda alternative.

We chose GoDaddy, our pick for the best website builder for startups.

While Duda has a few great features that can scale with your business, it’s still not our top pick for small business owners. The GoDaddy website builder remains at the top of our Best Website Builders list due to benefits like endless customization options, powerful add-ons, and 24/7 live customer service. GoDaddy offers an affordable, easy-to-use website builder that allows you to quickly have a website up and running. In just a matter of minutes, you can create a fast, mobile-friendly business website with very little effort.

For more information, read our GoDaddy Website Builder Review.

Pricing: GoDaddy offers a Free Plan, coming with some limitations. GoDaddy Website Builder plans begin at $9.99/month, including email and social media marketing tools.

Features: GoDaddy is very simple to use, even for beginners. You don’t have to be tech-savvy to have a great-looking GoDaddy website running within minutes. GoDaddy websites are automatically optimized for mobile, so you never have to worry about losing a visitor to slow pages. Your new startup website also comes with valuable SEO, email, and marketing tools to help you grow your business. 

Customer Support: Both GoDaddy and Duda offer priority customer support to higher-level plans, but GoDaddy consistently offers more support for all its customers. 

Number of Users:  GoDaddy is fairly popular, boasting over 20 million customers worldwide, beating out Duda at just 17,000 customers.

Despite some of its drawbacks, Duda is still an easy-to-use platform that offers surprisingly powerful client-service tools. Duda isn’t a great option for companies looking for extensive customizations, SEO offerings, or a wide app selection. However, Duda can be a worthwhile option for users looking for the basics with an added dose of client support tools.

For more information, read our other articles on Duda’s website builder, including our step-by-step guide on How to Make a Duda Website and our more advanced tutorial on How to Use the Duda Website Builder.