HostGator vs Zoho Sites: Comprehensive comparison guide for 2024

Final verdict

HostGator and Zoho Sites both offer unique strengths, catering to different user needs and preferences.

• 
  HostGator (Overall Grade: 6.2/10)
  
  is a versatile website builder known for its user-friendly drag-and-drop interface and extensive template library. It excels in providing a wide range of customizable templates and is particularly suitable for beginners and small businesses. However, its ecommerce capabilities are limited compared to Zoho Sites, and its customer support has received mixed reviews. HostGator is ideal for users seeking an easy-to-use platform with a variety of design options and basic ecommerce features.
• 
  Zoho Sites (Overall Grade: 7.6/10)
  
  stands out with its comprehensive set of features, including seamless integration with other Zoho applications, robust security measures, and advanced AI capabilities. It offers a more affordable pricing structure and better ecommerce functionality through Zoho Commerce. Zoho Sites is perfect for users looking for a cost-effective, scalable solution with strong marketing features and extensive customization options.

Best for ecommerce

Verdict

: Zoho Sites edges out HostGator in ecommerce capabilities, offering more comprehensive features through its integration with Zoho Commerce.

• 
  HostGator
  
  : HostGator’s website builder includes essential ecommerce features like secure online payments, product management, and inventory tracking. However, it is limited by the number of products on lower plans, making it less suitable for larger stores. HostGator is ideal for small to medium-sized businesses looking for a straightforward ecommerce solution.
• 
  Zoho Sites
  
  : While Zoho Sites lacks built-in ecommerce features, it integrates seamlessly with Zoho Commerce, providing a robust platform for online store management. This integration offers extensive product and inventory management, order processing, and marketing tools, making Zoho Sites a better choice for businesses looking for scalability and flexibility in their ecommerce operations.

Best for informational & business websites

Verdict

: When it comes to creating informational and business websites, Zoho Sites edges out HostGator with a score of 7.9 compared to HostGator’s 7.4. Zoho Sites offers a more comprehensive set of features tailored for business needs, making it a slightly better choice for this category.

• 
  HostGator
  
  : HostGator is a robust website builder known for its user-friendly drag-and-drop interface and a wide variety of customizable templates. It is particularly suitable for users with no technical background who want to create professional-looking websites quickly. HostGator also provides extensive web hosting services, domain registration, and 24/7 customer support, making it a solid choice for small businesses and individuals looking to establish an online presence.
• 
  Zoho Sites
  
  : Zoho Sites excels in providing a user-friendly platform with a collection of customizable templates and a visual editor that requires no coding skills. It is designed to cater to various purposes, including business, blogging, and art. Zoho Sites also offers responsive templates, ensuring that websites look great on any device. With its higher score and a focus on business functionalities, Zoho Sites is a strong contender for those looking to create informational and business websites.

Detailed comparison

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Winner: HostGator.

If you’re looking for a platform that offers a vast variety of design templates and significant customization flexibility, HostGator is the preferred choice.

HostGator website builder provides a substantial variety of design templates, catering to different user needs and preferences. It offers over 200 different mobile-friendly themes. Additionally, there’s a separate collection of 4,500 templates available for free download to users hosting their sites on HostGator servers, which are not interchangeable with the site builder’s own templates. This vast collection ensures that users have a wide range of design options to choose from, whether they seek simplicity for a professional presence or more intricate designs for complex websites.

Compared to HostGator, Zoho Sites offers a diverse collection of over 150 templates, thoughtfully categorized into industries like Restaurants, Architecture, Health, and more. Each template provides a pre-designed layout with responsive design for various screen sizes. Customization options include visual elements such as colors, fonts, and images, as well as the ability to modify layouts and content using the visual editor. For advanced users on the Advanced Plan, there’s the option to leverage HTML and CSS for deeper customization.

Zoho Sites Themes

🏆 Winner: HostGator

. Scoring 8.0, HostGator is highly praised for its user-friendly interface and simple drag-and-drop functionality, making it a great choice for beginners and small businesses. Zoho Sites, with a score of 7.0, offers a clean interface and logical workflows but may present challenges for users requiring advanced features and seamless data integration.

Learning Resources

🏆 Winner: Zoho Sites

. Both platforms offer solid learning resources, but Zoho Sites provides a wider range of high-quality resources, including a detailed beginner’s guide, comprehensive user guides, video tutorials, blogs, FAQs, community forums, and webinars.

When it comes to ecommerce, Zoho Sites has a slight edge over HostGator with a score of 7.4 compared to HostGator’s 6.3.

HostGator’s website builder includes ecommerce features, allowing users to create an online store where they can sell products and services directly from their website. The ecommerce functionality includes features such as product management, inventory tracking, secure payment gateways, and options for shipping and tax calculations. However, on lower Express Start and Express Site plans there’s a significant limit on the number of products: 3 and 10 respectively, and unlimited number of products on higher Express Store plan.

On the other hand, while Zoho Sites serves as a website builder for general purposes, it lacks built-in ecommerce features. However, it seamlessly integrates with Zoho Commerce, a dedicated platform designed for online store management. This allows users to create a website with Zoho Sites and easily incorporate ecommerce functionality through Zoho Commerce, providing clarity, flexibility, and scalability for businesses of various sizes.

HostGator ecommerce features:

• Secure Online Payments
• Unlimited Products
• Product Search & Filtering
• Wishlists & Gift Cards
• Multi-Channel Inventory Management
• Shipping Labels

Zoho Sites ecommerce features:

• Product and Inventory management
• Order management
• Payment Processing
• Marketing and Promotions
• SEO and Analytics
• Security

Ecommerce themes & templates

HostGator’s website builder caters to eCommerce needs by offering a broad selection of free templates, all designed with mobile responsiveness in mind. These templates are equipped with essential eCommerce features such as product catalogs and payment processing options. The platform is user-friendly, enabling users to effortlessly create professional-looking online stores tailored to their specific requirements, all without the need for any coding knowledge.

Zoho Sites offers a range of eCommerce website templates and themes designed to cater to various industries and business needs. These templates are customizable, allowing businesses to tailor their online stores to their brand and product offerings. Zoho Commerce, in particular, provides beautiful and highly customizable eCommerce store themes, aiming to enhance the online shopping experience.

Product page customization

HostGator Website Builder offers basic features for customizing product pages, enabling users to add products with details such as name, price, description, and images. It supports product variants and categorization to enhance customer navigation. Advanced settings include inventory management, discount options, and the ability to set products as shippable or downloadable.

Zoho offers extensive product page customization options, allowing users to tailor the display of their products. This includes features like image galleries, sliders, and video integration, enabling businesses to present their products in a visually appealing manner. Additionally, Zoho facilitates the configuration of product variants like size and color options, as well as efficient inventory management directly from the product pages.

Payment processing

When it comes to payment processing, HostGator Website Builder integrates with PayPal as a payment gateway for processing transactions. This is particularly highlighted in their offerings, suggesting that PayPal is a primary option for e-commerce activities within the platform. The platform charges a 3% transaction fee on Express Store and Express Site plans, no transaction fees are charged on higher Express Store plan.

Zoho Sites, in conjunction with Zoho Commerce, offers robust payment processing capabilities and supports integration with multiple payment gateways like PayPal, Stripe, and Square, facilitating secure online transactions. While direct POS system integration and commission management might require leveraging additional Zoho tools or custom solutions, the Zoho ecosystem provides a comprehensive suite for businesses to manage both online and in-store sales efficiently. This integration ensures flexibility and security for businesses aiming to provide a seamless shopping experience across multiple channels.

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Winner: Zoho Sites

. Zoho Sites, with a score of 7.5, offers a user-friendly website builder that enables both businesses and individuals to create professional, responsive websites without coding skills, through its drag-and-drop interface. It offers customizable templates, SEO tools, social media integration, and ecommerce features, along with connectivity to other Zoho applications for enhanced functionality.

HostGator’s website builder, scoring 7.3, offers a user-friendly drag-and-drop editor, enabling users to easily create and customize their websites without needing any coding knowledge. It provides a wide range of templates that are fully customizable, allowing for the personalization of layouts, colors, and fonts to match the user’s brand identity.

Mobile editor/app

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Winner: Zoho Sites

. Both HostGator and Zoho Sites do not have a dedicated mobile editor app. However, they allow for some level of editing through the mobile browser. HostGator allows for some small changes using the mobile browser, while Zoho Sites lets you edit the visual aspects of the mobile version of your website, such as font size, color, background, and shadow, but you cannot change the content through the mobile interface.

Given the scores, Zoho Sites (5.5) provides a slightly better mobile editing experience than HostGator (4.0). Therefore, Zoho Sites is the winner in this category.

Overall Result

:

Zoho Sites Wins

. Zoho Sites scores 8.8, significantly higher than HostGator’s 2.6. Zoho Sites offers a free version and a 15-day free trial during which all features of each plan can be tested. They also provide a 30-day full refund for monthly subscriptions and a 45-day full refund for annual subscriptions. HostGator, on the other hand, does not offer a free or trial version, but allows testing of all features within a 30-day refundable period. However, their money-back guarantee comes with several exceptions.

Zoho Sites offers a more affordable pricing structure compared to HostGator, with a higher price score of 8.6 against HostGator’s 6.2.

Winner: Tie

. Both HostGator and Zoho Sites offer reliable hosting services with a 99.9% uptime guarantee. HostGator provides a variety of hosting types, including shared, managed WordPress, VPS, and dedicated hosting. Zoho Sites, on the other hand, offers managed hosting with a focus on speed and scalability. While HostGator has data centers in the US, India, and China, Zoho Sites has a more extensive global presence with data centers in Canada, the US, India, Australia, China, and Japan.

🏆 Winner: Zoho Sites

Both HostGator and Zoho Sites prioritize website performance and page speed, but Zoho Sites takes the lead with its regular testing, optimized code and libraries, and cache balancing.

Zoho Sites has a strong focus on website performance and page speed, regularly testing and implementing updates to ensure optimal performance. They use optimized code and libraries, and balance cache to maintain fast load times. Zoho Sites websites typically load in below 2-5 seconds on average, and have an average PageSpeed score of 70-80/100. They also focus on improving Core Web Vitals by implementing various performance optimization techniques.

HostGator, on the other hand, uses browser caching and CDN to optimize website speed. However, both load times and PageSpeed scores can vary widely, depending on the optimization, website complexity, and the chosen hosting plan. HostGator provides guidance on understanding and improving Core Web Vitals (CWV) for websites, with an emphasis on LCP, FID, and CLS improvements.

🏆 Winner: It’s a tie.

Both HostGator and Zoho Sites score 7.3 in plugins and integrations. HostGator offers a wide range of apps, catering to diverse needs such as advertising, website analytics, integrating social media, managing appointments, and conducting email marketing. On the other hand, Zoho Sites extends its website features through integrations with Zoho’s suite of applications and third-party services, rather than traditional plugins. This approach allows for a versatile and customized website building experience.

Zoho Sites Applications

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Overall Winner: Zoho Sites

. Zoho Sites has a slightly higher score for marketing features, indicating a more comprehensive set of tools for SEO, email marketing, blogging, social media integration, analytics and reporting, and ads and promotions. However, HostGator also offers a robust set of marketing tools, especially for users on higher plans.

🏆 Winner: Zoho Sites

. In the HostGator vs Zoho Sites comparison, Zoho Sites takes the lead with a higher customer support score of 8.3 compared to HostGator’s 7.3. Zoho Sites offers 24/7 support through live chat, email, and phone, ensuring users can get help whenever they need it. Additionally, Zoho Sites provides a comprehensive knowledge base and community forum, which are valuable resources for troubleshooting and learning.

HostGator also offers 24/7 customer support through email, phone, and live chat, catering to a global audience. While HostGator’s support is reliable and accessible, it falls short in comparison to Zoho Sites, particularly in terms of enterprise support, where Zoho Sites excels with dedicated assistance and resources for larger businesses.

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Winner: Zoho Sites

. Zoho Sites takes the lead in security with a score of 8.1, compared to HostGator’s 7.4. Zoho Sites provides secure private data storage and protection through advanced encryption and access controls. The platform uses SSL encryption to protect data transmission and offers two-factor authentication for added security. Regular software updates are also part of Zoho Sites’ commitment to security, addressing any potential vulnerabilities.

HostGator, on the other hand, also emphasizes data protection with features such as SiteLock for malware scanning and a commitment to GDPR compliance. HostGator secures its servers against various threats, including DDoS attacks, through extensive custom firewall rules and mod security rule sets. However, website owners are responsible for aspects such as password security, updating applications, and ensuring their site is malware-free.

🏆 Winner: Zoho Sites

. Zoho Sites, with a score of 7.5, leverages AI for content generation and ecommerce features. Zoho’s AI assistant, Zia, provides sales predictions, workflow automation, and customer service enhancements.

HostGator, with a score of 2.6, has announced the launch of their new website builder, which incorporates AI technologies. However, its AI capabilities are relatively basic and it does not have AI ecommerce features or AI content generation features.

🏆 Winner: Zoho Sites

. Zoho Sites offers a more comprehensive user management system compared to HostGator.

• HostGator mentions the possibility to have multiple users for its hosting solutions, however, there’s no mention whether the mentioned users have the permission to edit the websites built with their website builder.
• The number of users who can edit a Zoho Sites website and their access levels depend on the chosen plan. The Free Plan allows only the owner to edit, while paid plans like Pro, Business, and Enterprise offer access for up to 10, 25, and 50 users respectively. Zoho Sites provides four access levels: Admin, with full editing rights and user management; Contributor, who can edit content and create pages but not manage collaborators; and Author, limited to editing text content without access to settings or user management.

Unfortunately, neither HostGator nor Zoho Sites provided a detailed user roles table.

Additional Features

User Feedback

HostGator’s website builder receives mixed reviews from users, highlighting both its strengths and areas for improvement. Users appreciate the platform for its ease of use, making it accessible even for novices to build professional-looking websites, and for its range of web services that facilitate website creation and management, including domain registration and SSL certificates. However, concerns are raised regarding its customer support, which is often described as slow or unresponsive, potentially impacting users requiring timely assistance. Additionally, some users find the pricing structure to be high, particularly for small-scale developers or those needing only basic services.

Zoho Sites receives mixed reviews, with users praising its user-friendly interface, extensive template library, and seamless integration with other Zoho products, which simplifies website development and management for small businesses. However, some users express dissatisfaction with its limited design flexibility and the inability to create custom features. Overall, Zoho Sites addresses the need for cost-effective website solutions, particularly for those without coding knowledge, offering a one-stop-shop for building and managing websites with varying degrees of customization and integration with other business tools.

FAQ