Duda vs Zenfolio: Comprehensive comparison guide for 2024

Final verdict

Duda and Zenfolio both offer unique strengths tailored to different user needs, but Duda emerges as the more versatile and robust platform overall.

• 
  Duda (Overall Grade: 7.8/10)
  
  is a powerful website builder that excels in providing a wide range of customizable templates, intuitive user interface, and comprehensive ecommerce features. It is particularly well-suited for agencies and designers who need to manage multiple client websites. Duda’s strong hosting quality, extensive marketing tools, and superior customer support make it a reliable choice for businesses looking to create professional and responsive websites without coding knowledge.
• 
  Zenfolio (Overall Grade: 6.4/10)
  
  is specifically designed for professional photographers and visual artists, offering elegant and mobile-friendly templates tailored for showcasing and selling their work. While it provides robust ecommerce capabilities and tools for marketing, client proofing, and secure photo storage, Zenfolio’s limitations in design flexibility and user management may not fully cater to those seeking extensive customization or collaborative website management. However, it remains a valuable platform for photographers looking to grow their online presence.

Best for ecommerce

Verdict

: Duda is a versatile choice for general ecommerce needs, while Zenfolio is tailored specifically for photographers and visual artists.

• 
  Duda
  
  : Duda offers a comprehensive set of ecommerce features suitable for a wide range of businesses. It includes product and inventory management, payment processing, and advanced SEO and marketing tools. Duda’s flexibility and white label options make it a strong contender for agencies and designers managing multiple client websites. However, when comparing Duda vs Zenfolio, Duda’s general approach may not cater to niche markets as effectively as Zenfolio.
• 
  Zenfolio
  
  : Zenfolio is designed specifically for photographers and visual artists, providing ecommerce features that cater to selling visual content. It includes tools for multiple currency support, discount coupons, and order management. While Zenfolio excels in its niche, it may lack the broader ecommerce functionalities that Duda offers, making it less suitable for businesses outside the photography and visual arts domain.

Best for informational & business websites

Verdict

: When it comes to creating informational and business websites, Duda outshines Zenfolio with its versatile design options, ease of use, and comprehensive features. Duda scores 8.4, making it a robust choice for a wide range of business needs, while Zenfolio, with a score of 6.9, is more specialized for photographers.

• 
  Duda
  
  : Duda is a powerful website builder that offers a wide array of customizable templates and features, making it ideal for creating professional and responsive websites. Its intuitive user interface and extensive design functionalities make it accessible for users of all skill levels. Duda also provides robust hosting solutions, excellent customer support, and comprehensive security measures, making it a top choice for informational and business websites.
• 
  Zenfolio
  
  : Zenfolio is tailored specifically for photographers and visual artists, offering elegant and mobile-friendly templates to showcase and sell their work. While it provides specialized tools for marketing, client proofing, and secure photo storage, it may not offer the same level of versatility and customization as Duda for broader business needs. Zenfolio is best suited for those in the photography industry looking to create a professional online presence.

Detailed comparison

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Winner: Duda.

If you’re looking for a platform that offers more creative control, a wide array of design features, and a larger selection of templates, Duda is the preferred choice.

Duda offers a wide variety of templates and designs for its website builder. With over 180 templates to choose from, users have the flexibility to create a website that suits their unique needs and style. The templates are professionally designed and cover various industries, ensuring that businesses of all types can find a suitable option. Additionally, Duda allows users to customize the templates further, giving them the freedom to personalize their website’s design and layout.

Duda Themes

On the other hand, Zenfolio offers a variety of customizable templates and features specifically tailored for photographers, with a focus on showcasing and selling their work. While it provides several customization options, including blocks for different layouts and styles, it may not offer as much versatility outside of photography-specific needs.

Zenfolio Themes

🏆 Winner: Duda

. With a score of 8.4, Duda is praised for its intuitive user interface and a wide range of customizable templates, making it accessible for users of varying technical skill levels. Zenfolio, scoring 6.3, offers a specialized platform for photographers but has limitations in design flexibility and might not fully cater to those seeking extensive customization.

Learning Resources

🏆 Winner: Duda

. Duda’s learning resources are comprehensive and high-quality, catering to both beginners and advanced users with a wide range of documentation, video tutorials, and an active community forum. Zenfolio, on the other hand, offers a set of tutorials and articles in their help center, but users have expressed a desire for more comprehensive learning resources.

Duda and Zenfolio both offer ecommerce capabilities, but they cater to different needs. Duda is a more general website builder that includes ecommerce features like product and inventory management, payment processing, shopping and tax settings, coupons and discounts, SEO and marketing tools, and analytics and reporting. Zenfolio, on the other hand, is specifically designed for photographers and visual artists, offering ecommerce features such as multiple currency support, discount coupons, order management, gift certificates, and tax management.

Duda ecommerce features:

• Product and Inventory management
• Payment processing
• Shopping and Tax settings
• Coupons and discounts
• SEO and Marketing tools
• Analytics and reporting

Zenfolio ecommerce features:

• Multiple Currency Support
• Discount Coupons
• Order management
• Gift Certificates
• Tax management

Ecommerce themes & templates

Duda offers a small variety of ecommerce templates designed to help businesses create professional, responsive online stores. These templates are specifically tailored to support a wide range of ecommerce functionalities such as product catalogs, shopping carts, checkout processes, and payment gateways integration. Zenfolio provides customizable website templates with integrated e-commerce features for photographers, designed to showcase and sell their work across various genres. These templates include essential online selling tools such as secure payment options, product management, and marketing integrations.

Product page customization

Duda allows for easy addition of variations such as size and color directly from the product management section, defining attributes like small, medium, and large or red, blue, and green. Custom pricing and inventory management for each variation enable setting specific prices, promotional offers, SKU numbers, and inventory levels. Zenfolio users can detail their product pages with descriptions, images, and options such as size or color. This allows for each product page to be adjusted to clearly display its unique attributes.

Payment processing

Duda’s website builder integrates with Stripe and PayPal for payment processing, offering various methods like credit cards and AliPay. Duda also allows integration with third-party payment providers for flexibility and supports client billing using Stripe. Zenfolio supports Stripe and PayPal for payment processing, integrating them seamlessly into its platform designed for photographers to sell their work online. The platform charges a commerce fee of 7% per order (excluding tax and shipping) and a payment processing fee for transactions through Stripe or PayPal.

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Winner: Duda

. Duda, with a score of 8.3, offers a user-friendly platform designed for creating responsive websites with ease. It features a drag-and-drop interface, a wide range of customizable templates, and integrated SEO and marketing tools. The platform also offers ecommerce capabilities, collaborative tools for client management, and ensures websites are optimized for all devices. Hosting and security are taken care of by Duda, providing a comprehensive solution for building and managing professional websites efficiently.

Zenfolio’s editor, scoring 7.6, is tailored for photographers, featuring drag-and-drop customization, a wide array of templates, and a powerful Custom Layout block for personalized designs. Its integrated eCommerce capabilities enable selling both digital and physical photography products, supported by comprehensive security features for protecting photographers’ work. However, it does have limitations in terms of customization options and photo storage capacity, which could be a drawback for some users.

Mobile editor/app

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Winner: Zenfolio

. Both Duda and Zenfolio offer mobile editing capabilities, but Zenfolio takes the lead with its dedicated mobile app. Zenfolio’s mobile app allows users to manage their websites and galleries directly from their mobile devices. It includes features for receiving notifications, managing galleries, handling sales-related tasks, and showcasing photos through a client presentation mode. Additionally, the app supports uploading and editing photos, as well as accessing various tools for reports, CRM, bookings, and blog management.

On the other hand, Duda does not have a dedicated website editor app. It supports mobile editing through its platform, allowing users to perform limited editing and republish sites directly from mobile devices. While this is a useful feature, it does not match the comprehensive mobile editing capabilities offered by Zenfolio’s dedicated app.

In summary, Zenfolio receives a higher rating due to its dedicated mobile app and comprehensive editing capabilities, while Duda offers limited mobile editing features and does not have a dedicated app.

Overall Result

:

Tie

. Both Duda and Zenfolio score 8.4, each with their unique advantages in product testing. Duda offers the benefit of testing all features of each plan during its 14-day free trial, allowing for a complete, albeit brief, evaluation. Zenfolio, on the other hand, allows testing of premium features during the free trial.

Zenfolio offers a more affordable starting price, but Duda provides more advanced features and options, especially for agencies and larger businesses.

Winner: Duda

. Duda offers robust hosting solutions on Amazon Web Services (AWS) with high speed and no storage or bandwidth limitations. It also boasts a 99.99% uptime guarantee. Zenfolio, on the other hand, offers cloud hosting with storage ranging from 15GB to unlimited. However, it does not disclose any information about its uptime statistics or the locations of its data centers, which puts it at a disadvantage compared to Duda.

🏆 Winner: Duda

Both Duda and Zenfolio prioritize website performance and page speed, but Duda takes the lead with a more comprehensive approach to speed optimization.

Duda has a comprehensive approach to website speed optimization, focusing on efficient code and file minification, content distribution networks (CDN), image optimization, mobile-responsive designs, and Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) support. Duda’s load times and PageSpeed scores vary widely, depending on the optimization and user’s location. They also place a strong emphasis on improving Core Web Vitals, specifically Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).

On the other hand, Zenfolio’s approach to speed optimization is more limited, focusing mainly on mobile responsive design. Their load times and PageSpeed scores also vary, depending on the optimization and website complexity. However, Zenfolio does not provide any information on their Core Web Vitals improvements.

🏆 Winner: Duda.

With a score of 7.7, Duda offers a more comprehensive set of plugins and integrations compared to Zenfolio, which scores 6.5. Duda’s built-in widgets, app integrations, and the ability to create custom widgets provide users with a wide range of functionalities. Zenfolio, on the other hand, offers a focused set of plugins and integrations specifically designed for photographers. While both builders offer valuable extensions, Duda’s broader range gives it the edge in this category.

Duda Applications

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Overall Winner: Duda

. Duda stands out for its comprehensive marketing tools, especially in SEO and analytics. Zenfolio, while strong in email marketing and social media integration, lacks in advanced SEO and analytics tools.

🏆 Winner: Duda

. In the Duda vs Zenfolio comparison, Duda takes the lead with a customer support score of 7.5. Duda offers 24/5 support through email and live chat for its Team and Agency plans, with additional support options available for Enterprise customers. This includes priority email, chat, and phone support, as well as dedicated account management and ongoing training.

Zenfolio, with a customer support score of 6.7, provides comprehensive support through email 365 days a year, LiveChat from Monday to Thursday, and phone support for Advanced plan subscribers. While Zenfolio offers a rich Support Center with self-help resources, it lacks the extensive enterprise support options that Duda provides, making Duda the better choice for businesses needing robust customer support.

🏆

Winner: Duda

. Duda’s security measures are comprehensive, including automatic SSL certificates, a Web Application Firewall (WAF), DDoS protection, regular updates and patches, secure hosting, two-factor authentication (2FA), access controls, backup and recovery options, and monitoring with alerts. Duda also adheres to global standards like GDPR and provides tools to support GDPR compliance, showcasing its commitment to data protection.

Zenfolio also emphasizes security, providing SSL encryption for all its websites, watermarking, password-protected galleries, and cloud backup. However, it falls slightly short of Duda in terms of the overall security score and the range of security features offered.

🏆 Winner: Duda

. Duda, with a score of 7.3, offers a range of AI features designed to streamline website creation and optimization. These include AI eCommerce capabilities, AI content generation, and additional AI features. Zenfolio, scoring 2.4, does not have an AI website builder or AI content generation features, but it does offer AI-driven eCommerce features.

🏆 Winner: Duda

. Duda and Zenfolio have different approaches to user management.

• Duda allows for collaborative website management, with the number of users and permissions varying by subscription plan. Higher-tier plans enable more users to participate, offering roles like Owner/Administrator, Designer, Content Editor, and Developer, each with distinct access levels. Some plans also allow for the creation of custom roles, providing flexibility in team management. For the most up-to-date details on user permissions and plan options, consulting Duda’s official resources is recommended.
• Zenfolio, on the other hand, allows only one user to edit and manage a website. This could be a limitation for larger teams or projects that require multiple collaborators.

Unfortunately, there are no user roles tables available for either platform.

Additional Features

User Feedback

Duda garners positive reviews for its user-friendly interface, extensive customization options, and responsive customer support. Users appreciate its drag-and-drop features, diverse integrations, and ability to cater to both novices and experienced developers. However, some note complexities with certain features like Duda Flex and occasional inconsistencies in design. Despite this, Duda remains a valuable tool for quick and efficient website development and management, offering a balance of ease-of-use and customization.

Users appreciate Zenfolio for its elegant and affordable site/portfolio designs, highlighting the platform’s suitability for photographers looking to showcase and sell their work online. The Starter plan is praised for its value, though some users express a desire to upgrade to the Pro plan for its enhanced client interaction features and customizable marketing tools. Criticisms include dissatisfaction with the platform’s handling of photo albums and a desire for more privacy and faster loading times. Overall, Zenfolio is valued for its ability to organize and share professional photographs and files, despite some navigational and performance issues.

FAQ