Wix gives you a canvas and 800 things to put on it. Clay gives you a finished site made out of your own business, and a handful of decisions that matter.
Wix can build anything, and that is exactly the complaint. A drag-and-drop canvas means every element is a decision — this box two pixels left, that heading one size up — and the site is never finished, it is only abandoned.
Clay has no canvas. Your site is composed from your business: a header with your best photograph, your menu or your products, your hours, a map, your reviews. You choose the colour, the typeface and the shape of the corners; the layout is already right on a phone, which is where nearly everyone will see it.
Wix wins the two rows below where it should. It is the more powerful editor by a distance.
Wix keeps a separate mobile layout, and it is the reason so many Wix sites look untended on a phone: the desktop one gets the attention and the phone one silently drifts.
Clay draws a phone page that is its own design rather than the desktop squeezed — one column of cards, the bar at the top with your one action in it — and it is drawn from the same content, so it can never be out of date.
On Wix, a template is a commitment: switching means rebuilding. On Clay the design and the content are two different things, so you can try every theme on your own real page and land on one at three in the afternoon without losing a word.
Type your name — Clay pulls your photos, hours, reviews and contact details straight from your Google listing.
Choose a look and Clay builds a full site around your content. Change anything with a tap — no code, no templates to wrestle.
Publish to your own name.clay.site in minutes. Add a custom domain and connect your own tools whenever you're ready.
Open one. It is the live site in a frame, not a screenshot — so what you see is what it looks like right now.
Much, and it is a smaller thing. Wix is a design tool that can build any website; Clay builds one kind of website — a business's own site — and does the first draft for you. If you want to lay out a page yourself, Wix is the better product.
No. The free Clay site carries a small “Made with Clay” badge in the footer and nothing else — no banner, no interstitial, no branded subdomain bar across the top.
Yes. Design and content are separate: pick another theme and your words, photographs and hours stay exactly where they are. This is the single biggest difference from a template-based builder.
One field — your business name. Clay looks it up, and everything it needs comes from your Google listing. You see the finished site before you decide whether you want it.
You can still build one from scratch, and it is worth listing on Google anyway — for most local businesses that listing brings more visitors than the website does.
There is no importer, and for a business site there is usually little to import — the photographs, hours, map and reviews come from your Google listing, and the rest is a few paragraphs to paste.
One page, drawn as its own design for a phone rather than the desktop squeezed — one column of cards with the bar at the top. It cannot drift out of date because it is built from the same content.
Search your business and see your site in seconds — free, no signup.