Weebly offers different types of upgrade plans for using its site builder features in order to cover all segments of users. Choosing a suitable plan for your site depends on the features you need and the cost you ready to spend on monthly basis. You need to look into Personal or Professional plan if you are not creating an online store. In this article, let us explore the comparison of Weebly Personal and Professional plans for you to select the one quickly.
Offer: Get 10% discount on all Weebly plans.
Weebly Pricing Plans
Below are the plans offered by Weebly at this moment.
| Premium Plans | Target Segment of Users |
|---|---|
| Free | All type of users wants to create a showcase site with few pages and a blog with no additional features. |
| Personal | Users want to build a basic site with minimal features. |
| Professional | Users want to build professional looking site with own branding like self hosted video player, search box and header slideshow. |
| Performance | Full fledged online store with discount coupons, gift cards and sending abandoned cart email to users. |
| Premium | Includes all features available in Weebly without restrictions. |
Note: Personal plan was earlier called Starter and Professional as Pro. Premium plan can be seen only in your Weebly account while upgrading and not seen on the generic pricing plan page.
Why You Need to Upgrade?
Before we compare the features of Personal and Professional plans, first we list out the points why a Weebly user needs to upgrade to premium plan. In other words, the restrictions of free users which force them to upgrade.
- Free weebly.com site can’t be used for any professional purposes.
- Connecting to custom domain is not possible for free users. This was also a feature initially offered by Weebly for free.
- Free users can’t display ads like Google AdSense. Again, this was also the feature removed over the period of time from initial days.
There are many other reasons for you to go for upgrade based on the needed features.
Weebly Personal Vs Professional Features
Once you decided to go for the upgrade, next comes the question to choose Personal or Professional plan? Assuming you don’t need ecommerce features, choosing between Personal or Professional plan is the only option for you to upgrade. Here, we attempt to address the questions by means of comparing the features and pricing. Below table shows the complete list of features comparison of free, Personal and Professional plans from Weebly to show what you will get under each plan. Prices are per month when billed annually.
| Features Including ecommerce | Free (Life time) | Personal ($10 per month) | Professional ($12 per month) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free Site Builder | ✔︎ | ✔︎ | ✔︎ |
| Free Web Hosting | ✔︎ | ✔︎ | ✔︎ |
| Storage Limit | 500 MB | 500 MB | ✔︎ |
| Custom Domain Connect | ❌ | ✔︎ | ✔︎ |
| One-year Free Domain | ❌ | ❌ | ✔︎ |
| Remove Footer Ad | ❌ | ✔︎ | ✔︎ |
| Drag & Drop Footer | ❌ | ✔︎ | ✔︎ |
| Custom Favicon | ❌ | ✔︎ | ✔︎ |
| Complete Site Statistics | ❌ | ❌ | ✔︎ |
| Priority Support | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Editor Permissions | ❌ | ❌ | ✔︎ |
| File Upload Limit | 100 MB | 100 MB | 250 MB |
| Custom Font | ❌ | ❌ | ✔︎ |
| Header Slideshow | ❌ | ❌ | ✔︎ |
| Audio Player | ❌ | ❌ | ✔︎ |
| HD Video Player | ❌ | ❌ | ✔︎ |
| Page Password Protection | ❌ | ❌ | ✔︎ |
| Site Search Box | ❌ | ❌ | ✔︎ |
| Site Members | ❌ | ❌ | 100 |
| Member Registration | ❌ | ❌ | ✔︎ |
| Unlimited Products | ✔︎ | ✔︎ | ✔︎ |
| PayPal Payment | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| SSL Certificate | ✔︎ | ✔︎ | ✔︎ |
| Domain Shopping Cart | ❌ | ✔︎ | ✔︎ |
| Selling Digital Goods | ❌ | ✔︎ | ✔︎ |
| Inventory Management | ✔︎ | ✔︎ | ✔︎ |
| Shipping Details | ❌ | ✔︎ | ✔︎ |
| Tax Calculator | ✔︎ | ✔︎ | ✔︎ |
| Offer Coupon Codes | ✔︎ | ✔︎ | ✔︎ |
Now, the task is to analyze the exclusive Professional plan features which are not part of the Personal plan. Let us discuss one by one with alternative options in the below table:
| Exclusive Pro feature not part of Personal plan | Alternative Options / Remarks | Conclusion – Needed or not? |
|---|---|---|
| Header Slideshow | Consider whether you need such a slideshow on your site. This is generally added only on a landing page. If needed it can be added by modifying source HTML / CSS. | You may need Professional plan to have a header slideshow without hassle. |
| Audio Player | Embedded audio players with play list are available. Example: Soundcloud | ❌ |
| HD Video Player | Video embedding is easy with YouTube or Vimeo, this also will reduce the size of the site and improve page loading speed. | ❌ |
| Password protection on page level | No free alternative option available. But check whether you need page level password protection for your site. it is not required for a general usage. | You may need if you want to protect individual pages. |
| Search box | Google custom search provides better options to search whole the web or only the site. Search boxes can be easily added in a Weebly Personal site and monetized if you have AdSense account. | ❌ |
| Membership | Member limit of 100 without registration option raises the need of separate Professional package. Better membership features can be added using third party applications. | ❌ |
| File Upload Limit | Up to 100 MB file upload is sufficient in general cases. Or else you can use embedding option to link the source file anywhere in the cloud. | ❌ |
| Editor Permissions | Only needed for multi author blogs. If you have multiple authors then Weebly is not definitely the choice regardless of Personal or Professional plan. | ❌ |
For a normal user, we assume password protection and adding slideshow on a single landing page is not mandatory things compared to having custom domain and unlimited pages which are already part of Personal plan. There are also many ecommerce features even not available for Professional users like accepting PayPal payment. It is obvious that Weebly concentrates more on its Performance and Premium plans without focusing on Professional package. This indicates Weebly may soon restructure their features by combining Personal and Professional plans together.
Check out the comparison of Weebly Free Vs Personal and Weebly Free Vs Professional.
Let us checkout the pricing of Personal and Professional plans.
Pricing of Weebly Personal and Professional Plans
All Weebly pricing plans are valid for maximum of 2 years with the option to upgrade for 1 month, 1 year and 2 years. Below is the pricing table comparing each Personal and Professional versions for each timeframe.
| Timeframe | Personal (Per Month) | Professional (Per Month) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 month | $13 | $16 |
| 1 year | $10 | $12 |
| 2 years | $9 | $10 |
For 2 years plan Weebly Professional will cost you $240 (plus $19.95 for one year domain cost) and Weebly Personal plan will cost you $216. Instead of paying this much price, the other option here is go for a paid hosting with self-hosted platforms like WordPress (.org version) which offers unlimited features like site memberships and slideshows. You can check SiteGround hosting which offers managed WordPress hosting with Weebly Cloud.
Conclusion
When you look into the features and pricing, Weebly Professional has minimal features compared to the pricing and Weebly Personal is placed in a better position with appropriate features / cost mix. On other hand, if you want readymade drag and drop elements like search box or header slideshow without the hassle of looking for alternatives and modifying source HTML / CSS, then Professional pack is more suitable.
