With tons of options on the market for building a website, it’s hard for any company to stand out. They all have great looking templates and easy-to-use tools, but our latest entry, Duda, has found its niche by focusing on agencies and web professionals. The entire experience is designed with client management in mind, from team collaboration to billing and white labeling.
Duda makes it fast and easy to spin up dozens or even hundreds of websites and manage them right through your own white-labeled platform. Think of it like WordPress if WordPress were super easy to use right out of the box. With over 14 million sites created on the platform already, Duda will have your website-building business growing in no time.
Duda Compared to the Best Website Builders
Duda is a great all-around tool for agencies and web professionals to create websites for small and medium-sized businesses. While it has enough features to support ecommerce, blogging, and membership programs, other platforms may still be better suited for individual use cases. Below is a quick rundown of our favorite alternatives, but you can also check out our full list of best website builders to learn more.
Squarespace has a wide-range of beautiful image, video, and content-focused templates, so it’s great for blogs and other sites that showcase visual content. Sign up for a 14-day free trial of Squarespace.
WordPress is an open-source platform with an endless array of widgets, tools, and templates for building almost any type of website. Get your website started with WordPress.
Wix is the best out-of-the-box website builder and it’s great for building both personal and business websites alike. Sign up for a free Wix account now.
Weebly has the best free website builder on the market, with tons of tools and features available without paying a dime. Build your website on Weebly completely free.
Duda: The Good and the Bad
Duda has all the templates, widgets, and customization options you need to whip up elegant and modern websites with minimal expertise, but what sets it apart is its focus on web development experts. It comes with an entire client management backend that makes it perfect for agencies and web professionals looking to build incredible websites for their customers.
On the flipside, Duda is also somewhat limited when it comes to third-party integrations, and it lacks features in certain use cases, such as websites that are blog-heavy or those that require advanced web development.
What Duda Is Good At
Great for Agencies and Freelancers
If you’re looking for tools that make working with clients easier for you while providing a great experience for them as well, Duda checks both of those boxes.
Your clients will be able to review their websites and provide feedback directly on the platform via access that you grant them, which you can later revoke whenever you need to make edits. You can also say goodbye to frantic late-night calls due to a client’s site going down, as Duda’s solid uptime means your clients’ pages will always be up and running.
Duda streamlines the management of multiple clients and websites through a single dashboard, allowing you to clone sites by using the same template for different clients. Duda also simplifies the billing process so you can create and send payment requests with automated billing triggers based on whether clients pay on time.
For agencies and individuals wanting a fully professional look, Duda’s White Label plan lets you rebrand the entire experience so that your clients will log in to an interface with your own agency’s branding, never knowing Duda powers it all.
Impressive Customizations
Duda gives you all the tools you need to build stunning, functional websites for your clients. Whether you want to start from scratch or use one of Duda’s stylish templates, it’s a breeze to add new pages, tweak content, and customize the design.
With Duda’s selection of widgets, including everything from sliders and popups to maps, coupons, and appointment schedulers, you’ll have no trouble crafting modern and engaging sites without writing a line of code. That said, if you ever need to add custom HTML and CSS, Duda provides an intuitive code editor for doing just that.
Want to see how sites will appear on any device and customize the experience for each one? Duda gives you full control of fonts, navigation elements, color palettes, and more to create a tailored look. Plus, with global editing, it’s easy to make sweeping changes that transform the look and feel of an entire site at the push of a button.
Easy to Use
Compared to more technical options, Duda is incredibly easy to use. With drag-and-drop tools and click-to-edit features, you can craft custom sites, edit pages, and publish your work in just a couple of hours—no coding required.
Duda offers an intuitive, visual experience with structured templates that follow design best practices, so your sites always look polished. Forget about patching together a Franken-site from mismatched plugins and parts—building a site with Duda means you’ll have an end-to-end solution that’s thoughtfully designed to work together from the get-go.
Great Support Services
For agencies and web professionals, it’s essential that support is fast, helpful, and available.
At the Agency and White Label tiers, Duda delivers 24/7 phone and live chat support that’s reliable and effective. Even Duda’s web form support is relatively speedy, with response times of less than 24 hours. We reached out ourselves and got a detailed reply in under two hours.
Duda also hosts an active community forum where knowledgeable users answer frequently asked questions. With this multi-channel support, you’ll have peace of mind that any questions or issues will be addressed promptly by specialists who understand your needs.
Built for SEO
For web agencies, a platform built for search engine optimization is incredibly important. Luckily for you, Duda offers you a website builder that’s finely tuned for SEO.
With its built-in tools, you can easily add meta tags, keywords, titles, and descriptions yourself, while Duda auto-generates sitemaps and robots.txt files for you. Duda also makes it easy to add alt text and image descriptions, and it simplifies 301 redirects to eliminate the hassle of migrating from an older site.
Better yet, all sites and pages made with Duda are automatically optimized to ace Google PageSpeed tests, and Duda tops other CMS options in core web vitals scores as well. Duda’s global content delivery network reduces load times while dynamic serving optimizes display for any device. This means your clients’ sites will load lightning fast, optimizing their search potential right out of the gate.
Strong Ecommerce Platform
While other website builders offer ecommerce as an afterthought, Duda built it in from the start. You can easily manage products, categories, orders, payment gateways, shipping, and taxes—all directly on Duda. For web professionals, that alleviates the pain of cobbling together third-party tools to launch an online store.
The native ecommerce functionalities for Duda come in three separate, add-on plans. The Standard plan costs $7.25 per month paid annually and lets you sell 100 products with eight variants per product, the Advanced plan costs $19.25 per month annually for 1,000 products and 300 variants per product, and the Unlimited plan costs $39 per month annually for unlimited products with 300 variants per product.
With Duda’s ecommerce platform, your clients will get an online store tailored to all of their needs, and many new features are coming soon. As for now, they can manage inventory, calculate shipping and tax rates manually, accept payments with no additional transaction fees, and fulfill orders all from one place. For your clients’ businesses, Duda’s complete ecommerce solution can transform their website into a lead-generating powerhouse.
Innovative Membership Platform
Whether you want to build and host a community, offer exclusive content, or all of the above, Duda makes launching a membership site simple. You can easily add, edit, and remove members right from Duda’s membership dashboard, and you can also integrate with platforms like Azure, Okta or Auth0 for seamless membership management.
Duda’s membership platform also provides a toolbox for strengthening client loyalty and unlocking new revenue streams. You can offer paywalled videos, blogs, courses, or events that only paid members can access.
In order to enable memberships, Duda offers three plans. The Starter plan is free and allows up to five members. The Pro plan is $7 per month and allows up to 1,000 members. And the Business plan costs $15 per month and allows up to 10,000 members, plus it adds paywalled content and subscription sales as options.
Dynamic Pages
With Duda, you can create dynamic pages that tap into internal or external data sources, generating unique pages with a consistent look by connecting them to content collections. This is a key advantage over some other website builders that may require you to create new pages manually or code dynamic pages from scratch.
Duda’s dynamic page capabilities also open up new possibilities for better lead generation and SEO performance, as updates to external content sources are instantly reflected to keep your sites fresh.
Potential Duda Drawbacks
Lack of Advanced Development Tools
While Duda provides a robust platform for building beautiful websites quickly, it may not fit the bill for agencies seeking advanced customization options.
For example, you won’t have full access to API calls, you can’t utilize frameworks like Vue.js or React, and Webhooks failures won’t trigger alerts.
To some users, constraints like these won’t matter much, but to web professionals with development chops, the inability to deeply customize sites may be too limiting. That said, Duda still allows custom code snippets and its support for web integrations is expanding, so your mileage may vary as time goes on.
Few Third-Party Integrations
Duda offers a big selection of tools and templates, but its third-party integrations lag behind some competitors. Compared to WordPress in particular, Duda’s library is far more limited. And for Europeans especially, Duda lacks region-specific features that its US audience enjoys.
Duda’s smaller pool of available integrations and templates likely won’t matter for some agencies, but if you rely on niche third-party tools or prefer open-ended customizations, Duda may not work well enough for you.
It’s important to ensure that any add-ons you consider vital to your business are sufficiently supported before choosing Duda—because despite how well Duda’s in-house support performs, it has little or no control over the quality or availability of third-party support.
Limited Blogging Tools
While Duda allows creating, editing, and managing blog posts, its blogging features pale next to competitors like Squarespace and Wix. Not only does Duda lack portfolio-style templates for visual content, but its content management options are also basic with no native backup or restore function.
For web professionals and/or clients focused heavily on blogging, Duda’s sparse features may not be up to snuff. It has what it takes for most agencies and small businesses to craft a modest blog presence as part of a broader web strategy, but if you’re looking for advanced templates, integrated SEO wizards, and built-in backups, you’ll have to look elsewhere.
Duda Plans and Pricing
Beyond the 14-day free trial, Duda offers four paid tiers. For those looking to build a personal or company website, the Basic and Team plans provide all the functionality you’ll need, with Basic aimed at individuals and Team aimed at, well, teams. At the Agency tier, you have everything you need to support a growing website-building business. And at White Label, you’ll be able to brand your client platform and further legitimize your professional business.
Basic
Duda’s Basic plan provides essential website-building tools at an affordable price. For $14 per month billed annually or $19 per month billed monthly, you’ll get a low-maintenance web solution with intuitive design features and guided workflows.
The Basic tier is best suited for small businesses and individuals who are new to building websites. Duda’s drag-and-drop design tools require no coding skills, and the AWS hosting provides a rock-solid infrastructure to build upon due to its high performance and availability.
For capturing leads and customer information, Duda’s built-in web forms allow you to create whatever you need to stay in touch with visitors and generate new opportunities.
If you need more than one website, additional sites at this tier cost $19 paid monthly or $171 paid annually, making Duda’s Basic plan a simple, budget-friendly solution for businesses with modest web presence needs.
Team
For small teams seeking a collaborative website-building solution, Duda’s Team plan delivers. At $22 per month billed annually or $29 per month billed monthly, up to four members can work together to build and maintain your site.
Similar to the Basic plan, Team includes just one website with AWS hosting. However, additional sites at this tier have a reduced price of $14.99 per month or $144 per year.
In addition to collaboration features like customized user permissions and shareable design assets, upgrading to the Team plan also unlocks access to site HTML/CSS, limited dynamic pages, and it allows you to work with certified platform professionals known as Duda Experts.
Perhaps most importantly, the Duda Team plan provides an entry-level solution for client management and client billing—you can add multiple brands, delegate temporary site access to clients, and issue invoices directly through Duda’s dashboard.
For organizations seeking a multi-user solution to build their website, Duda Team delivers the essentials to get the job done. Its powerful collaboration tools and client management capabilities make it a great fit for freelancers and agencies in search of a painless entry point into client services.
Agency
For growing organizations and freelancers ready to scale up, Duda’s Agency plan provides powerful functionality to fuel your growth. At $44 per month billed annually and $59 per month billed monthly, Agency includes four premium websites with AWS hosting and access for up to 10 team members. Additional sites are available at this tier for just $12.99 per month or $119 per year.
In addition to gaining access to priority live support via chat, phone, and email, upgrading to the Agency plan allows users to build custom widgets, create dynamic pages with external data sets, export sites, and publish pages individually.
For web professionals who are ready to scale their agency or freelance business, Duda Agency hits the sweet spot.
White Label
For established agencies, Duda’s White Label plan provides a premium solution to brand the platform as their own. At $149 per month billed annually and $199 per month billed monthly, White Label allows you to customize the entire client experience—from branded login screens and domain names to customized email domains, analytics reports, and marketing materials.
Duda’s White Label plan includes the same four AWS-hosted sites as the Agency plan, and additional websites cost the same $12.99 monthly and $119 annual rates as well. The difference here is the boosted credibility that comes with a white label, so this plan is best suited for established website-building businesses and agencies that want an independent looking exterior with a powerful support system under the hood.
Final Thoughts
Duda is a highly serviceable option for agencies and up-and-coming web professionals looking to grow their website-building businesses. It has all the tools on the backend for collaborating with team members and managing clients, plus it has key customization options that can give you a fully professional look.
If you’re in need of a powerful website-building tool that feels tailor-made for agencies, you really can’t go wrong with Duda. That said, if you’ve got other needs on your plate, you might want to head over to our list of best website builders to find another solution.
