Google Sites vs Wix (2026): The Free-Forever Tool vs the Platform With a Bill

Google Sites vs Wix is a comparison between two products that agree on almost nothing — not price, not ambition, not even what a website is for. Google Sites is a free feature bundled with every Google account, maintained by a team of indeterminate size. Wix is a publicly traded company's entire reason to exist. Documenting them side by side is useful anyway, because they are frequently the two finalists for the same small job: a simple site, stood up quickly, by someone with no interest in becoming a webmaster.

Method note: the Google Sites figures below come from Google's own documentation via our fact base. For Wix we describe capabilities rather than quote prices — Wix revises its pricing often enough that any number printed here would be a future correction. Google Sites' standing among its peers is recorded in our register of big-tech website builders; Wix appears there only as the destination Google itself names when people leave.

Two different products wearing the same category

Google Sites is free with any Google account and included in Google Workspace; there is no paid tier of the product itself, which is another way of saying there is no revenue line anyone is defending. Development reflects this. The Google Workspace updates feed tagged exactly two Google Sites features in all of 2025 — search within embedded content, and AppSheet app embeds — and nothing in 2026 as of this writing. The product is maintained, not developed.

Wix is the opposite case: a flagship with templates, an app market, hosting infrastructure and quarterly earnings calls that depend on people building websites. A free tier exists, parked on a wixsite.com address with Wix branding attached; essentially everything that makes Wix attractive in practice — your own domain, no ads, commerce — sits behind the subscription. One product has no bill and modest ambitions. The other has real ambitions and definitely has a bill.

Design freedom

Google Sites uses a section-based editor: you stack rows, drop blocks into a grid, and the grid decides where things go. There is a small set of themes, plus "custom themes" — your fonts, colors and logo — added in September 2023 and still the most recent significant design feature. There is no CSS or HTML access to the page itself; custom code runs only inside sandboxed Embed iframes. The output is tidy, consistent, and unmistakably a Google Site.

Wix offers hundreds of templates and an editor that lets you place elements more or less anywhere, adjust typography and animation, and extend the site through an app market. On raw design capability the gap is not close and never has been. In fairness to the grid: Sites' rigidity makes it genuinely difficult to produce an ugly Google Site, a safety guarantee Wix's freedom cannot extend.

Forms and the working parts

Google Sites has no native form builder. The documented pattern is to embed a Google Form, which works reliably, looks exactly like a Google Form, and files responses into Sheets. This is representative of the product's actual pitch: native embeds of Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, Calendar, Maps and Drive folders, plus collaborative editing with visible cursors, like a Doc that happens to be a website. Inside a Workspace organization this is quietly excellent.

Wix ships its own forms, and its app market adds bookings, membership areas, live chat and the rest of the small-business toolkit as native citizens rather than iframes. If your site needs working parts that face customers rather than colleagues, this category goes one way.

SEO controls

Google Sites exposes almost nothing to configure: no redirect manager, no structured-data interface, no meaningful per-page metadata controls. You get page titles and a publish switch, and the publish switch includes an option to ask search engines not to look. For an intranet, irrelevant. For competing in search results, it is bring-your-own-miracle.

Wix maintains dedicated SEO tooling — editable titles and descriptions, redirects, sitemaps, the standard apparatus. Whether any builder's SEO panel wins rankings is a separate question, but Wix at least hands you the controls; Sites hands you a title field. There is a certain honesty in a Google product declining to pretend that SEO settings are the hard part of ranking on Google.

Commerce and domains

Commerce is the shortest section in this document. Google Sites has none: no cart, no checkout, no payments, no product catalog anywhere in the product. The only documented route is embedding a third-party widget — a PayPal button, say — through the Embed element. Wix, on its commerce plans, runs an actual store: products, cart, checkout, payments. If selling is the point of the site, the comparison ended a paragraph ago.

Domains cut the other way. Google Sites connects a custom domain at no charge from Google — you pay only your registrar — with a cap of 5 custom domains per site, a hard limit of 20 domain mappings per week, CNAME-based setup, and 24–48 hours of propagation. One catch: the site must be published "to the world," or the custom domain quietly redirects back to the sites.google.com URL. On Wix, a custom domain is a paid-plan feature; the free tier keeps you on wixsite.com with the platform's name on your address.

The bill, and one quiet cost

Google Sites costs $0 and there is no paid tier to upsell you toward. It does have one cost that never appears on an invoice. Google's documentation states it plainly:

"Sites and the content you embed in sites count toward your Drive storage quota." — Google Workspace documentation, Google Sites requirements

Your website and your inbox share a quota, and images added to a site are stored inside the site file itself — delete the file, lose the content. Wix's cost structure is the conventional kind: a subscription whose exact figures we decline to print, because the structural fact matters more than this month's number — the useful product is the paid product.

Which one should you pick

Pick Google Sites when the site is informational, internal, or budgetless: a team wiki, a club page, a class hub, documentation for an organization already living in Workspace. In that habitat it is the correct tool and arguably the best free one anywhere. The complete accounting of its limits is in our Google Sites review.

Pick Wix when the site is a business: customer-facing forms, search visibility, anything sold online, a domain of your own. And pick early if you can — Google Sites has no export, so the only migration is a rebuild. If there is a realistic chance you need the full platform within a year, starting there is cheaper than moving there; the arithmetic of that decision is worked through in our guide to outgrowing the free tiers.