GoDaddy vs Volusion: Comprehensive comparison guide for 2024

Final verdict

GoDaddy and Volusion both offer comprehensive website building and hosting solutions, but they cater to different user needs and preferences.

• 
  GoDaddy (Overall Grade: 7.5/10)
  
  is a versatile platform that excels in providing a wide range of services, including domain registration, web hosting, and a user-friendly website builder. It is particularly strong in design functionalities, ease of use, and marketing features. GoDaddy is ideal for users looking for an all-in-one solution with extensive templates and customization options, making it a popular choice for beginners and small businesses.
• 
  Volusion (Overall Grade: 6.6/10)
  
  is tailored for ecommerce, offering robust tools for product management, secure payment processing, and marketing. It stands out in ecommerce-specific features and user management, making it suitable for businesses focused on online sales. However, it has a steeper learning curve and fewer design options compared to GoDaddy. Volusion is best for users who need a dedicated ecommerce platform with strong security and detailed analytics.

Best for ecommerce

Verdict

: GoDaddy and Volusion both offer solid ecommerce solutions, but they cater to different needs. GoDaddy is slightly ahead in overall marketing tools, while Volusion excels in product page customization and payment gateways.

• 
  GoDaddy
  
  : GoDaddy provides a user-friendly experience for setting up and managing online stores. It includes integrated payment processing, flexible shipping options, and comprehensive tools for product and order management. However, when comparing GoDaddy vs Volusion, GoDaddy’s themes may lack the niche variety and cutting-edge designs found on dedicated ecommerce platforms.
• 
  Volusion
  
  : Volusion offers a range of features tailored for online stores, including a comprehensive inventory management system and customizable design options. It supports various payment gateways and provides tools for marketing and SEO to help increase online visibility. However, it lacks blogging capabilities, which GoDaddy offers.

Best for informational & business websites

Verdict

: GoDaddy is the better choice for informational business websites due to its extensive template collection, user-friendly interface, and versatile hosting options. Volusion, while strong in ecommerce, may not be as suitable for purely informational sites.

• 
  GoDaddy
  
  : With a score of 7.9, GoDaddy excels in providing a comprehensive platform for creating and managing informational business websites. Its extensive collection of over 1500 templates and advanced customization options make it ideal for users seeking versatile and visually appealing designs. The platform’s user-friendly interface and intuitive website builder are particularly beneficial for beginners, making it easy to create professional-looking websites without coding knowledge.
• 
  Volusion
  
  : Scoring 7.2, Volusion is primarily an ecommerce solution, offering a range of customizable templates and robust features for online stores. While it provides a user-friendly interface and a variety of design templates, its focus on ecommerce functionalities may not be as advantageous for purely informational websites. Volusion’s comprehensive product management system, secure payment processing, and marketing tools are excellent for businesses looking to expand their online presence, but may be overkill for those needing a simple informational site.

Detailed comparison

🏆

Winner: GoDaddy.

GoDaddy’s extensive collection of over 1500 website templates and advanced customization options make it the preferred choice for users seeking versatile and visually appealing website designs.

GoDaddy provides an extensive collection of over 1500 website templates catering to diverse industries and design preferences. These templates cover business, ecommerce, creative, personal, and non-profit sectors, offering various styles such as modern, classic, bold, minimalist, and content-focused.

GoDaddy Themes

On the other hand, Volusion, as a website builder, offers a variety of design templates tailored to meet the diverse needs of online stores and businesses. The platform provides users with over 30 professionally designed, responsive templates. These templates are crafted to cater to a wide range of industries, ensuring that businesses of all types can find a design that aligns with their brand identity and goals.

Volusion Themes

🏆 Winner: GoDaddy

. With a score of 8.2, GoDaddy’s user-friendly platform and intuitive website builder make it a popular choice among beginners. Volusion, scoring 6.9, offers a user-friendly interface but may require a steeper learning curve for more advanced functionalities.

Learning Resources

🏆 Winner: Volusion

. Both platforms offer a range of learning resources, but Volusion’s comprehensive suite of detailed guides, video tutorials, and a dedicated support center make it a standout choice for users looking to maximize their website’s potential.

GoDaddy and Volusion both offer robust ecommerce solutions, but they cater to different needs and preferences. GoDaddy’s ecommerce features provide a user-friendly experience for setting up and managing online stores, with integrated payment processing, flexible shipping options, and comprehensive tools for product and order management. On the other hand, Volusion is an eCommerce platform that offers a variety of features tailored for online stores, including a comprehensive inventory management system, a range of payment gateways, and customizable design options.

GoDaddy ecommerce features:

• Payment processing
• Shipping options
• SEO tools
• Email marketing features
• Social media integrations
• Detailed reports

Volusion ecommerce features:

• Ecommerce Product listings
• Payment Gateways
• Multiple Currencies support
• Shipping options
• SEO tools
• Social Media Integration

Ecommerce themes & templates

GoDaddy offers around 70-80 ecommerce themes, covering diverse industries and styles. While generally mobile-friendly with basic customization options, these themes may lack the niche variety and cutting-edge designs found on dedicated ecommerce platforms. Volusion, on the other hand, offers 14 free themes and 38 paid themes, each costing $180. These templates are mobile responsive and customizable, allowing merchants to adjust the look and feel of their store.

Product page customization

GoDaddy’s ecommerce platform offers users basic customization options like editing content, adding images, and adjusting layouts. For advanced customization, coding knowledge is required. Volusion offers a range of ecommerce product page customization options to enhance the shopping experience. Users can modify product descriptions, images, and videos to showcase their items effectively.

Payment processing

GoDaddy Payments provides a versatile solution for online, in-person, and phone payments with a tiered pricing structure. Generally, online transactions have the lowest fees (2.3% + 30¢), while in-person and manually entered transactions have slightly higher rates. Volusion offers a comprehensive eCommerce platform that supports various payment gateways, including PayPal, Stripe, and its own solution, Volusion Payments, tailored for U.S.-based merchants. The platform is distinctive for its low transaction fees, which vary based on the subscription plan.

🏆

Winner: Volusion

. With a score of 7.1, Volusion’s website builder editor is designed for ease of use, catering to both beginners and experienced users. It offers a drag-and-drop interface, allowing users to easily add, remove, or modify elements on their website without needing to code. Users can customize their site’s layout, adjust colors, fonts, and images, and even integrate various functionalities like social media links, shopping carts, and payment gateways. Additionally, Volusion provides a range of templates and themes to kickstart the design process, making it straightforward to create a professional-looking online store or website.

GoDaddy Editor, scoring 6.7, is a user-friendly drag-and-drop tool enabling website creation without coding. It offers pre-designed templates, a mobile-friendly interface, basic SEO tools, and ecommerce integration, making it accessible for beginners, with affordable pricing plans and an all-in-one solution. However, it has some design limitations, basic features compared to dedicated platforms, a learning curve for extensive use, and potentially limited third-party app integrations.

Mobile editor/app

🏆

Winner: GoDaddy

. Both GoDaddy and Volusion do not offer a dedicated mobile app for editing websites. However, they allow users to log into their accounts and access the website builder through a mobile web browser. The experience might be slightly more constrained on a smaller screen, and navigating through the admin dashboard could be difficult.

Despite these limitations, GoDaddy scores higher in the mobile editor category with a score of 5.5, compared to Volusion’s score of 4.5. Therefore, GoDaddy is the winner in this category.

Overall Result

:

GoDaddy wins

. GoDaddy scores 8.1, offering a free version and a 30-day money-back guarantee, allowing users to explore all features of any paid plan and get a full refund if not satisfied. Volusion, scoring 7.6, offers a 14-day free trial for testing premium features but does not provide a money-back guarantee.

GoDaddy and Volusion both offer a range of pricing plans to cater to different needs, but GoDaddy scores slightly higher in terms of pricing.

🏆

Winner: GoDaddy

GoDaddy offers a variety of hosting types, including shared, VPS, dedicated, and WordPress hosting. It also provides a 99.9% uptime guarantee and has data centers in multiple countries. Volusion, on the other hand, offers managed cloud hosting with the same uptime guarantee, but does not disclose information about its data centers. GoDaddy’s transparency and variety of hosting options give it the edge in this comparison.

🏆 Winner: GoDaddy

Both GoDaddy and Volusion prioritize website performance and page speed, with GoDaddy focusing on infrastructure upgrades and Volusion emphasizing various performance optimization techniques. However, GoDaddy has a slight edge when it comes to website speed optimization.

GoDaddy has enhanced its platform through infrastructure upgrades, including improved server infrastructure and data centers, resulting in faster loading times. Additionally, the implementation of effective caching mechanisms, image optimization tools, and automatic minification of code files contribute to a smoother user experience and improved Core Web Vital metrics. The website builder features optimized templates and code structures for efficient rendering, further enhancing overall performance.

Volusion, on the other hand, implements various performance optimization techniques, including CDN, image optimization, code minification, regular monitoring and updates, and SEO optimization. However, both load times and Page speed scores vary widely, depending on the optimization and website complexity.

🏆 Winner: GoDaddy.

With a score of 7.3, GoDaddy offers a more versatile range of integrations, especially for users of its Managed WordPress Hosting and Unmanaged WordPress Hosting services, which provide access to the extensive WordPress plugin repository. Volusion, scoring 6.8, also offers a variety of integrations, but falls short in comparison to the breadth of options available with GoDaddy.

However, it’s worth noting that Volusion’s integrations are more focused on ecommerce, which could be a deciding factor for online store owners.

GoDaddy Applications

Volusion Applications

🏆

Overall Winner: GoDaddy

. GoDaddy edges out Volusion with a slightly higher score, offering a more comprehensive set of marketing tools. While both platforms offer SEO tools, email marketing, social media integration, analytics and reporting, and ads and promotions, GoDaddy also provides blogging capabilities, which Volusion lacks.

🏆 Winner: GoDaddy

. In the GoDaddy vs Volusion comparison, GoDaddy takes the lead with its extensive 24/7 customer support options. GoDaddy offers round-the-clock phone support in multiple languages, live chat, and email assistance with a response time of within 24 hours. Additionally, users can access a 24/7 Community Forum and connect through social media channels, ensuring comprehensive support coverage.

Volusion, on the other hand, provides customer support primarily to merchants on their Business and Prime Plans. Support is available via phone during business hours from Monday to Friday, and 24/7 chat support is accessible through the Merchant Center dashboard. While Volusion offers dedicated client success managers for enterprise-level customers, its support hours are more limited compared to GoDaddy’s around-the-clock availability.

🏆

Winner: Volusion

. Volusion takes the lead in security with a score of 8.7, compared to GoDaddy’s 6.8. Volusion’s comprehensive security measures, including data encryption, two-factor authentication, SSL certificates, PCI DSS compliance, and regular security audits, provide robust protection for both user accounts and ecommerce transactions.

GoDaddy, while offering a range of security features such as SSL certificates, malware scanning, and web application firewalls, falls short in providing comprehensive data protection, especially for compliance with regulations like HIPAA or GDPR. Users seeking extensive data security may need to consider alternative solutions.

🏆 Winner: GoDaddy

. GoDaddy, with a score of 7.5, utilizes AI mainly to enhance the ecommerce experience. Its AI features focus on generating product descriptions, customer service messages, and social media ads. These tools aim to save business owners time and effort, allowing them to focus more on growth.

On the other hand, Volusion does not have any AI capabilities, scoring 0.0 in this category. This lack of AI features may limit the efficiency and automation capabilities of the platform, especially for ecommerce businesses.

🏆 Winner: Volusion

. Both GoDaddy and Volusion offer different user roles and access levels, but Volusion provides more flexibility with customizable roles and permissions tailored for efficient online store operation.

• GoDaddy’s number of users who can edit a website varies based on the hosting plan and website building tool. For Website Builder (GoCentral and Websites + Marketing), the free plan permits one user, while Deluxe and Ultimate plans allow up to five users with full editing permissions. In WordPress Hosting, there’s default support for unlimited users, each with customizable permission levels controlled through the WordPress dashboard.
• Volusion offers customizable user account management with various roles and permissions tailored for efficient online store operation. These roles, including Administrator, Editor/Manager, Customer Service, and Marketing, provide different access levels for tasks like site design, order processing, and analytics. Subscription plans determine the number of staff accounts available: 1 in the Personal Plan, 5 in the Professional Plan, 15 in the Business Plan, and unlimited in the Prime Plan. This range ensures scalability and flexibility to meet the needs of businesses of all sizes, enabling effective management and operation of eCommerce teams across different business scales.

GoDaddy User Roles and Access Levels:

Additional Features

User Feedback

Users generally praise GoDaddy for its affordability, reliability, and user-friendly interface, particularly in domain registration and hosting services. However, concerns include occasional interface changes, perceived slowness in website hosting, and dissatisfaction with pricing increases.

Volusion users appreciate its affordability compared to competitors like Shopify, finding its simplified user interface suitable for non-tech users. However, there are concerns about its limited integrations and frequent technical issues, such as crashes and slow support responses. Some users feel that Volusion lacks the advanced features and customization options offered by competitors, making it less competitive in the market. Despite these drawbacks, Volusion remains a feasible option for small to medium-sized businesses seeking a budget-friendly solution for establishing an online store.

FAQ