Hostinger vs Wix: which is better in 2026?

The quick verdict

Pick Hostinger if the lowest total cost matters most and you can pay for four years up front. For a simple small-business site, it costs well under half of what Wix does over three years, and its cheapest plan already includes a store with no sales commission.

Pick Wix if you want more templates, a free plan to try first, built-in scheduling and a bigger app market, and you would rather pay year by year. You pay more for that, and both platforms make it hard to move your site somewhere else later.

Side by side

Hostinger is a web hosting company first. It no longer sells its builder on its own: the AI Website Builder comes inside its Premium, Unlimited and Cloud Startup hosting plans, as its Website Builder page shows. The headline prices need a 48-month term paid up front. Hostinger’s pages we used did not show 1-month, 12-month or 24-month prices.

Wix shows only yearly prices on its plans page. Month-to-month prices appear at checkout, and Wix sells 2- and 3-year terms at bigger discounts it does not publish.

Cost over 3 years

This is where Hostinger’s pricing needs the most care, because you cannot buy just three years at the advertised price. You buy four.

The example site: a local service business with about 8 pages, a contact form, a .com domain and one business email address. No online store yet.

How we got these numbers:

• Plan. Hostinger Premium is “48 months for $143.52,” per Hostinger’s pricing. Wix Light is $17 a month and Wix Core is $29 a month, both billed yearly and paid in full each year. We include Wix Core because it is the cheapest Wix plan that can take online payments, while Hostinger Premium already can.
• Domain. Both include a free domain for the first year. Neither publishes its .com renewal price on the pages we used, so we use Namecheap’s listed $18.48 a year as a stand-in for years 2 and 3.
• Email. Hostinger Premium includes 2 mailboxes per website free for the first year. Its price after that is not on the pages we used, so we budget Google Workspace Business Starter at Google’s listed $7.00 per user per month on the annual plan ($84 a year). Wix does not include email, so that is $84 for all three years. See email hosting for the basics.

The fine print on Hostinger’s price

• You pay for year 4 on day one. The $143.52 covers 48 months. If you leave after three years, the fourth year is already spent. Plan on the full 48 months being used up.
• The renewal jump is steep. After the first term, Premium renews at $10.99 a month, nearly four times the $2.99 intro rate. Hostinger lists the “regular” price for the 48 months as $575.52 ($11.99 a month). Its page does not say which term length the renewal price applies to.
• Even after renewal, it stays cheaper. At $10.99 a month, a year of Premium costs $131.88, compared with $204 a year for Wix Light at today’s prices.
• Bigger plans follow the same pattern. Unlimited is $191.52 for 48 months and renews at $16.99 a month. Cloud Startup is $383.52 for 48 months and renews at $25.99 a month.

The fine print on Wix’s price

• Yearly, not monthly. Listed prices are for yearly plans paid in full at purchase. Monthly billing costs more, but Wix shows that price only at checkout.
• Multi-year discounts exist. Wix offers 2- and 3-year terms at bigger discounts. It does not publish those prices, so our example may overstate Wix’s cost a little if you prepay.
• Tax is extra. Wix says listed prices exclude tax, which depends on your billing address.

The bottom line on cash: Hostinger asks for $143.52 on day one, and Wix Light asks for $204. Over three years, Hostinger costs about $552 less than Wix Light and about $984 less than Wix Core in this example. Want to run your own numbers? Use the website cost calculator.

Design and ease of use

Both are drag-and-drop builders that can generate a first draft with AI. Hostinger offers 400 or more templates. Wix says it has “1000’s of templates” on its plans page.

Wix is the bigger platform by far. W3Techs counts Wix on 4.2% of all websites and the Hostinger Website Builder on 0.2%. A bigger user base usually means more tutorials and more designers who know the tool.

Storage works differently. Hostinger Premium gives you 20 GB of storage and up to 3 websites, with weekly backups. Unlimited raises that to unlimited websites, 50 GB and daily backups. Wix Light includes 2 GB of storage, Core 50 GB and Business 100 GB.

Hostinger’s pages we used do not say what custom code you can add, so if you need custom scripts or embeds, check during the 30-day money-back window.

Store, blog and SEO

Store

Hostinger includes ecommerce on every builder plan, starting with Premium. You can sell up to 1,000 products, including physical goods, digital goods, services, appointments and donations. Hostinger says it does not charge any sales commission on store purchases. You pay only your payment provider’s fees through Stripe, PayPal or dLocal Go, and Hostinger does not publish those rates.

Wix’s store starts on Core, with basic eCommerce. Business adds standard eCommerce, and Business Elite adds advanced eCommerce. Core and Business also include scheduling, which helps if you sell appointments. We could not confirm Wix Payments’ US card rate from the plans page.

Blog

Wix has a built-in blog plus CMS collections, which are simple databases for things like listings or team members. Hostinger’s pricing pages do not describe its blog tools, so test them in the money-back window if blogging matters to you.

SEO

Hostinger includes an AI SEO Assistant that suggests keywords and helps optimize pages. Wix includes built-in SEO tools. Both cover the basics. Neither will rank a site by itself.

AI features

Hostinger packs a lot of AI into a low price: an AI site and store generator that builds a site in under a minute, an AI writer, an AI logo maker, AI image generation, an AI Product Generator for descriptions and the AI SEO Assistant. The catch is the credits. Premium includes 5 AI credits and Unlimited and Cloud Startup include 15, one time only, not each month. Cloud Startup also adds 20 credits for the Hostinger Agent AI assistant.

Wix’s flagship is Wix Harmony, launched January 21, 2026. It mixes vibe coding (describing what you want in plain words and letting AI build it) with Wix’s visual editor. An AI agent called Aria works inside Harmony and understands your whole site. Harmony rolled out in English first.

Leaving later

Both score 3 out of 10, but for different reasons. Hostinger lets your pages leave; Wix lets your products leave.

Hostinger has a semi-automatic export to a WordPress site that moves your regular pages, text, images and files. According to its help article, it cannot move styles and layout, the online store, integrations, forms, form submissions or SEO settings. Store data, including products, is not part of the transfer, and no product CSV export is documented. You also cannot move a builder site to another Hostinger account, and moving it between plans in the same account carries a duplication fee.

Wix says your site must run on its servers and cannot be exported to another host. Blog posts cannot be exported either. You can export CMS collection content and products to CSV (up to 5,000 rows per file, no digital products).

If you think you might move to WordPress one day, Hostinger gives you a better head start on pages. If you run a store, neither is a good exit, but Wix at least hands you a product file. Our guide to leaving your website builder covers the steps, and the exit scores page compares every builder.

Pick Hostinger if…

• Keeping costs low is the top priority, and you can pay 48 months up front.
• You want to take payments without moving to a pricier plan or paying a sales commission.
• You want room for up to 3 sites on Premium, or unlimited sites on Unlimited.
• You may move to WordPress later and want your pages and images to come along.

Pick Wix if…

• You want to build on a free plan before you pay anything.
• You would rather pay yearly than commit to four years.
• You want scheduling, a large template library and a big app market in one place.
• You want Wix Harmony’s AI tools with a visual editor for hand-tuning.

Neither? Look at these

• Self-hosted WordPress scores 10/10 on exit: you own every file and the database, and any WordPress host can run it. It takes more setup. We build on WordPress every week; see Wix vs WordPress.
• Squarespace costs more than both but is known for polished templates and scores 5/10 on exit. See Squarespace vs Wix.
• Read the full Hostinger review for more on its plans and renewals.

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