Zoho Sites review (2026): the website builder in the Zoho suite

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What it is and who it’s for

Zoho Sites is the website builder inside Zoho’s family of business apps, which also includes Zoho CRM, the smaller Bigin CRM and the Zoho One bundle. Zoho relaunched it on September 21, 2026 as an “all-new” AI-first builder. You describe your business, AI generates the full site, and you edit it visually or by asking Zia, Zoho’s AI assistant.

The main reason to pick it is the link to Zoho CRM. A CRM (customer relationship management tool) is a shared address book for your leads and customers, with their history and follow-ups in one place. Zoho Sites can embed a Zoho CRM form, and every submission lands in the CRM as a new lead or contact.

Zoho Sites fits best when:

• You already run your business on Zoho CRM or Zoho One and want your site forms to feed it.
• You need a very cheap one-page or small site, from $1 a month billed yearly.
• You want a free CRM for up to 3 users and a paid site that costs less than most builders.

It is a poor fit for online stores, or for sites over 100 pages unless you pay for page add-ons. Sites on the old Zoho Sites plans keep running on their current plan, Zoho says.

Plans and what they really cost

Zoho Sites on its own

Zoho Sites is priced per site, not per user. There is no free plan. Instead you get a 15-day free trial with no credit card, limited to 5 pages, 2 forms and 50 form submissions in total.

The yearly prices come from Zoho’s launch announcement. Zoho’s pricing page shows prices by visitor location, and we couldn’t read monthly figures there, so the monthly column comes from a third-party price tracker (PricingSaaS). Confirm it at checkout. Taxes are extra, and Zoho says yearly billing saves “up to 50%.”

What else each plan includes, according to the Zoho Sites pricing page:

• Lite: 100 MB storage, 500 MB bandwidth a month, 1 form, 1,000 AI credits a month. Made for link-in-bio and single-page sites.
• Basic: 500 MB storage, 8 GB bandwidth, 2 forms, 2,000 AI credits. A small business site with up to 5 core pages.
• Plus: 4 GB storage, 20 GB bandwidth, 10 forms, 3,000 AI credits, 2 collections (20 items) and redirects.
• Advanced: 10 GB storage, 50 GB bandwidth, 50 forms, 6,000 AI credits, 2 collections (50 items), 10 custom fonts, a members portal and site search.

Collections and dynamic pages let you store repeatable items, such as services or team members, and generate a page for each one, the way a CMS does. Paid add-ons cover extra pages (sold 100 at a time), users, portal members, bandwidth, collections and AI credits, but Zoho doesn’t show add-on prices. Zoho also offers a paid Jumpstart setup service.

Zoho Sites with Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM is a separate product with its own pricing. Its free edition is free forever for 3 users, with storage for 5,000 records, 150 emails a day, 5 active workflow rules (automations that act when something happens, like a new lead arriving), 1 web form per module, 10 email templates and iOS and Android apps. It leaves out custom fields, custom reports and dashboards, and forecasting.

Paid editions are priced per user, from Zoho’s CRM comparison page:

If you mostly need a pipeline (the stages a sale moves through, like “new lead,” “quote sent” and “won”), Zoho’s Bigin is cheaper. Bigin Free is 1 user, 500 records and a single pipeline. Bigin Express is $7 a user a month billed yearly, with 50,000 records and 3 team pipelines.

Connecting the two takes a few steps. You create a web form in Zoho CRM first (Web-to-Lead, Web-to-Contact or Web-to-Case), then add it in Zoho Sites under Add, Form, Zoho CRM. Zoho doesn’t say which Sites plan you need for this.

Zoho Sites inside Zoho One

Zoho One bundles Zoho CRM with what Zoho calls “15+ unified business apps” for collaboration, finance, marketing, service and HR. There are two ways to pay:

• Flexible user: US$90 per user a month with annual licensing, per Zoho’s pricing page. A third-party source lists $105 billed monthly.
• All-employee: cheaper per head, but you must license every employee on your payroll. A third-party source lists $37 a month billed yearly ($45 billed monthly); the figure didn’t show on Zoho’s page when we checked.

Upgrading or downgrading between editions applies to all users. Whether Zoho One includes the new Zoho Sites plans, and at which tier, isn’t confirmed on the pricing page. Ask Zoho before you count on it.

A 3-year cost example

Zoho sells domains through Zoho Domains but shows the price only at checkout, and email at your domain is a separate product (Zoho Mail) that we didn’t check. So for both we used published stand-ins: a .com from Namecheap and Google Workspace for email hosting.

The math: Basic is $8 x 12 x 3. Plus is $15 x 12 x 3. CRM Standard is $14 x 3 users x 12 x 3. The domain is $11.28 for the first year (Namecheap’s sale price) plus two renewals at $18.48. Google Workspace Business Starter is $7.00 per user a month on an annual plan.

Zoho One for the same team on the Flexible plan is $90 x 3 x 12 x 3, or $9,720 over three years before domain and email. It only makes sense if you will use the other apps.

For comparison, HubSpot’s free plan gives you up to 30 website pages and a CRM for 2 users at $0, with HubSpot branding. See our HubSpot review and the full HubSpot vs Zoho comparison.

What you can build

Zoho says Sites handles company sites, catalogs and directories built with collections, multi-author blogs, landing pages and member portals. Layouts are AI-generated, and Zoho doesn’t give a template count.

• AI editing: Ask Zia edits the site for you, and Zoho says you can choose the AI model or bring your own API key.
• Blog: multi-author blogs are supported; plan limits aren’t shown.
• Store: there’s no real store. Zoho points sellers to Zoho Commerce, a separate product. Sites can show a product catalog through collections.
• SEO: the pricing table lists an automatic sitemap, a custom 404 page, a schema generator, verification files and 301 redirects (Plus and up, per Zoho’s plans overview).
• Custom code: code snippets and header and footer code are listed, though the plan mapping is unclear. Developers can build React-based custom elements.
• AI tools: an MCP connector lets AI tools such as Claude and Cursor create, edit and publish sites. A marketplace for developer extensions is planned.

You can buy a domain from Zoho Domains inside Zoho Sites, or register it at an outside domain registrar and connect it. We suggest the second route, for reasons covered next.

What happens when you leave

Zoho Sites scores 6/10 on our exit score. The skill needed to leave is medium.

The website. Zoho’s help guide for the classic Zoho Sites describes a “Download Site” option that gives you a password-protected zip of the HTML version of your site as of the last publish. Zoho doesn’t say whether posts, images, forms or collections come out in a structured format, or whether the option exists on the new platform. Plan to rebuild the site.

The CRM. This part is solid. Zoho’s CRM export guide says each module exports to CSV (up to 200,000 records per export) or Excel (50,000), and you can request a full data backup with all module data, attachments and settings. Daily export caps apply: 10 on Free, 100 on Standard, 250 on Professional, 500 on Enterprise and 1,000 on Ultimate. And because Zoho CRM is a separate product, you can leave Zoho Sites and keep the CRM.

The domain. If you bought it through Zoho Domains, the transfer-out steps aren’t documented in the article we checked. A domain registered elsewhere simply stays with you. Our guide to leaving your website builder covers redirects and the rest of the move.

Zoho Sites vs WordPress

WordPress is free software, but you pay for hosting. SiteGround’s StartUp plan, for example, is $2.99 a month for the first 12 months, prepaid, then renews at $17.99 a month. Zoho Sites Basic is $8 a month billed yearly with hosting included, so Zoho is cheaper and simpler for a 5-page site.

WordPress wins on control and on leaving. It has no page caps beyond what your host allows, and it scores 10/10 on our exit score because you own every file and the database. We build on WordPress every week, and the trade-off is real upkeep: updates, backups and security are your job. On WordPress you connect your forms to whatever CRM you choose, usually with a plugin or an embedded form. Read our WordPress review for the full picture.

Gotchas

• Tight page caps. Lite allows 1 page and Basic 5 pages per site (Zoho Sites pricing page).
• Form submissions are capped monthly. From 50 on Lite to 10,000 on Advanced (pricing page).
• No store. Selling online is Zoho Commerce, a separate product (Zoho Commerce help article).
• Zoho One’s All-employee plan means licensing every employee on payroll (Zoho One pricing page).
• Bigin Free is 1 user and 500 records (Bigin pricing page).
• Zoho CRM Free allows only 10 data exports a day (Zoho CRM export article).
• A quiet stretch before the relaunch. Community users asked whether Sites was still being developed, as What’s New showed no updates after Q1 2025 (Zoho community thread).

Who should pick it, who should not

Pick Zoho Sites if

• You already use Zoho CRM or Zoho One and want site leads to land in it.
• You need a tiny site or link-in-bio page for $1 a month billed yearly.
• You want a free CRM for up to 3 users next to a low-cost site.

Skip it if

• You sell products online.
• You want a free website plan to start.
• Your site will grow past 100 pages, or you want a design you can move to another host.

Alternatives worth a look

• HubSpot: a free website (up to 30 pages) with a free CRM for 2 users; scores 7/10 for leaving.
• HubSpot vs Zoho: the two all-in-one setups side by side, with 3-year costs.
• Wix: a built-in contact list on every site and plans from $17 a month billed yearly, but it scores 3/10 for leaving.
• Squarespace: a contacts panel on every plan, from $19 a month billed yearly ($25 billed monthly); scores 5/10.
• Website builders with a CRM: all 10 options compared.