Yola vs Carbonmade: Comprehensive comparison guide for 2024

Final verdict

Yola and Carbonmade cater to different user needs, with Yola being more versatile for small businesses and individuals, while Carbonmade excels in portfolio creation for creatives.

• 
  Yola (Overall Grade: 6.5/10)
  
  is a user-friendly website builder designed for individuals and small businesses. It offers a drag-and-drop interface, responsive templates, and a variety of features such as SEO tools and ecommerce capabilities. Yola stands out for its comprehensive learning resources, flexible product testing options, and robust security measures. It also provides a range of plugins and integrations, making it a versatile choice for users looking to create and manage a professional online presence.
• 
  Carbonmade (Overall Grade: 4.4/10)
  
  is tailored for creatives who want to showcase their work online without coding skills. It offers fully customizable layouts, unlimited image and video uploads, and features like gallery slideshows and SEO optimization. Carbonmade excels in ease of use and design functionalities, making it ideal for photographers, illustrators, and designers. However, it lacks ecommerce capabilities, plugins, and extensive marketing features, which may limit its appeal for users looking for a more comprehensive website solution.

Best for ecommerce

Verdict

: Yola is a basic yet functional option for small businesses looking to sell online, whereas Carbonmade is not suitable for ecommerce due to its lack of features.

• 
  Yola
  
  : Yola provides a basic ecommerce solution through its integration with Ecwid, allowing users to sell up to 1000 products without transaction fees. It supports multiple currencies and payment services, making it a viable option for small businesses. Yola’s ecommerce features include shipping and tax configurations, product catalog management, guest checkout, analytics, and promotions. However, its templates and customization options may not be as advanced as other leading website builders.
• 
  Carbonmade
  
  : Carbonmade does not offer any ecommerce features, making it unsuitable for users looking to sell products online. It is designed specifically for creatives who want to showcase their work online without the need for coding skills. While it excels in providing customizable layouts for portfolios, it lacks the necessary tools and functionalities for ecommerce.

Best for informational & business websites

Verdict

: Yola is the better choice for creating informational and business websites, offering a more comprehensive set of features and higher ease of use for a broader audience. Carbonmade, while excellent for creatives, lacks some of the functionalities needed for more general business use.

• 
  Yola
  
  : Yola scores 7.4 in this category, making it a strong contender for informational and business websites. It provides a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface, a variety of responsive templates, and essential features like SEO tools and e-commerce capabilities. Yola’s comprehensive approach ensures that users can create professional-looking websites without advanced technical skills, making it ideal for small businesses and individuals.
• 
  Carbonmade
  
  : Carbonmade, with a score of 5.9, is tailored more towards creatives looking to showcase their work. It offers customizable layouts and features designed for portfolio creation, making it perfect for photographers, illustrators, and designers. However, its lack of plugins, integrations, and some business-oriented features makes it less suitable for general informational and business websites compared to Yola. When comparing Yola vs Carbonmade, Yola’s broader feature set and ease of use make it the better choice for most business needs.

Detailed comparison

🏆

Winner: Carbonmade.

If you’re a creative professional looking for a platform that offers extensive customization and a focus on portfolio presentation, Carbonmade is the preferred choice.

Yola offers a diverse range of templates and designs, catering to various types of websites, from personal blogs to professional business sites. Users can choose from a wide selection of themes, each customizable to fit their specific needs and preferences. With hundreds of templates available, Yola ensures that there is something for everyone, regardless of their niche or industry. This variety, coupled with the platform’s user-friendly design tools, makes it easy for users to create a unique and visually appealing website without needing advanced technical skills.

Yola Themes

Compared to Yola, Carbonmade does not have templates, the platform creates a personalized portfolio website based on the inputs of the users. Carbonmade offers a specialized platform for creatives to build personalized, professional portfolios with a wide range of features tailored to showcase their work effectively. The website builder supports responsive designs optimized for all devices, allows unlimited uploads of images and videos, including 4K content, and provides various premade blocks and layouts for customization without the need for external templates or platforms. Additionally, Carbonmade includes advanced features like gallery slideshows, gradient backgrounds, SEO optimization, and analytics to help users present their work in a dynamic and engaging way.

Carbonmade Themes

🏆 Winner: Carbonmade

. Scoring 8.3, Carbonmade excels in ease of use, particularly for creatives looking to showcase their work. Its drag-and-drop interface and customizable layouts make it simple for users to create professional portfolios without coding skills. Yola, with a score of 8.0, also offers a user-friendly experience with its drag-and-drop interface and responsive templates, making it a solid choice for small businesses and individuals new to website creation. However, Carbonmade’s specialized focus on portfolio creation gives it a slight edge in this category.

Learning Resources

🏆 Winner: Yola

. Both platforms provide comprehensive learning resources, but Yola’s extensive tutorials, guides, and video tutorials are designed to support users of all skill levels. The inclusion of interactive elements and direct customer support further enhances the learning experience, making it easier for users to find help and answers to their questions.

Yola provides a basic yet functional ecommerce solution through its integration with Ecwid, allowing users to sell up to 1000 products without transaction fees. It supports multiple currencies and payment services, making it a viable option for small businesses. Carbonmade, on the other hand, does not offer any ecommerce features, making it unsuitable for users looking to sell products online.

Yola ecommerce features:

• Shipping and Tax configurations
• Product Catalog Management
• Ability to checkout as guest
• Analytics and reporting
• Promotions features

Carbonmade ecommerce features:

Carbonmade does not provide any ecommerce features.

Ecommerce themes & templates

Yola offers a range of templates for building websites, including those suitable for ecommerce. However, the variety and design quality may not match those provided by other leading website builders. The templates are customizable, especially for users on higher-tier plans (Silver or Gold), which allow for deeper customization, including CSS editing. Carbonmade does not offer any templates for ecommerce as it lacks ecommerce capabilities.

Product page customization

Yola’s ecommerce platform offers a variety of customization options for product pages, including the ability to manage product options and combinations. This feature is useful for selling items that come in different sizes, colors, or models, allowing customers to select their preferences directly from the product page. Carbonmade does not have ecommerce capabilities, thus it’s not possible to have product pages.

Payment processing

Yola supports various payment gateways for online store transactions, such as PayPal, Sage Payments, and American Express. While Yola doesn’t directly charge commission fees for transactions, the chosen payment gateway might impose its own fees. Carbonmade does not have payment processing capabilities.

In summary, Yola offers a basic ecommerce solution suitable for small businesses, while Carbonmade lacks any ecommerce functionalities, making it unsuitable for users looking to sell products online.

🏆

Winner: Carbonmade

. Carbonmade, with a score of 7.6, offers a range of features designed for creatives to build personalized, professional online portfolios without requiring coding knowledge. Its editor provides responsive design across devices, 4K video support, unlimited image and video uploads, and premade blocks for customization. The platform also includes unique features such as private portfolios, a before/after block, gallery slideshows, and a talent pool to connect with other creatives and potential clients.

Yola’s editor, scoring 6.7, is designed for ease of use, allowing users to create professional-looking websites without needing coding knowledge. It offers a drag-and-drop interface, enabling users to easily add, customize, and position elements like text, images, and buttons on their web pages. The editor also provides access to a wide range of templates and customization options, including color schemes, fonts, and page layouts, to help users achieve their desired website look and feel. Additionally, Yola supports responsive design, ensuring websites look great on both desktop and mobile devices.

Mobile editor/app

🏆

Winner: Yola

. When it comes to mobile editing capabilities, neither Yola nor Carbonmade offers a dedicated mobile editor app. However, Yola allows users to make some small changes using a mobile browser, providing a minimal level of flexibility for on-the-go adjustments. This feature, although limited, gives Yola a slight advantage over Carbonmade, which does not support mobile editing at all.

In summary, while both platforms lack robust mobile editing solutions, Yola’s ability to make minor changes via a mobile browser makes it the better option for users needing some level of mobile accessibility.

Overall Result

:

Yola wins

. Yola scores 7.5, slightly higher than Carbonmade’s 7.2, due to its more flexible testing options. Yola offers a free version and a 30-day money-back guarantee, allowing users to test premium features within this refundable period. Carbonmade, while providing a trial version with access to all features, lacks a free version and a money-back guarantee, which may limit its appeal for some users.

Yola offers a range of plans with additional online store add-ons, while Carbonmade provides straightforward portfolio-focused plans, both with annual discounts.

🏆

Winner: Yola

Yola offers managed cloud hosting with a 99.9% uptime guarantee and transparent data center locations, making it a reliable choice for small businesses and individuals. Carbonmade, while providing unlimited storage, lacks disclosed uptime statistics and data center locations, which may be a concern for users needing assured reliability.

🏆 Winner: Yola

Both Yola and Carbonmade offer tools for building websites, but Yola has a more comprehensive approach to speed optimization, giving it an edge over Carbonmade.

Yola is a user-friendly website builder designed to help individuals and small businesses create professional-looking websites without the need for advanced technical skills. It offers a drag-and-drop interface, making it easy for users to add and customize elements on their web pages. Yola provides a variety of templates that are responsive and customizable to ensure that websites look great on any device. Additionally, it includes features such as SEO tools, e-commerce capabilities, and the option to publish a site with a custom domain, making it a comprehensive solution for creating and managing an online presence. Yola employs several strategies for speed optimization, including the use of a CDN, caching, code minification, server response time improvements, and image optimization. These strategies help ensure that websites built with Yola load quickly and perform well.

Carbonmade, on the other hand, is a website builder designed specifically for creatives who want to showcase their work online without the need for coding skills. It offers fully customizable layouts that are perfect for a wide range of professionals such as photographers, illustrators, motion designers, graphic designers, and copywriters. Carbonmade provides an easy and fast way to create and manage online portfolios, featuring pre-designed templates along with various features and tools. However, Carbonmade does not provide specific information on its speed optimization features or Core Web Vitals improvements, which may impact the overall performance of websites built on the platform. As a result, Yola’s more comprehensive approach to speed optimization gives it an advantage in this comparison.

🏆 Winner: Yola.

Yola scores 6.3, offering a range of plugins and integrations that enhance its base functionalities. With over 70 free apps and widgets available through Elfsight, Yola provides options for social media integration, e-commerce tools, marketing enhancements, and utility widgets. This makes it a flexible choice for users looking to customize their websites.

Carbonmade, on the other hand, does not support any plugins or integrations, scoring 0 in this category. While it excels in simplicity and ease of use for creating online portfolios, it lacks the extensibility that Yola offers.

Yola Applications

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Overall Winner: Yola

. Yola excels with a broader range of marketing tools, making it a more versatile choice for businesses looking to enhance their online presence. Carbonmade, while excellent for showcasing creative portfolios, lacks many essential marketing features.

🏆 Winner: Yola

. Comparing Yola vs Carbonmade, Yola takes the lead in this category with a customer support score of 6.3. Yola offers 24/7 email support, with priority responses for Bronze, Silver, and Gold customers. Additionally, Yola provides a call-you-back service for personalized assistance and supports inquiries via social media channels, ensuring users have multiple avenues to seek help.

Carbonmade, on the other hand, has a customer support score of 5.8 and primarily relies on a ticket-based system for addressing user inquiries. While Carbonmade does not offer live customer support, it generally provides quick responses within a few hours. However, the lack of immediate support options may be a drawback for users needing urgent assistance.

🏆

Winner: Yola

. Yola excels in security with a comprehensive approach that includes SSL encryption, DDoS mitigation, firewalls, regular software updates, and data backup and recovery. These measures ensure that users’ websites are well-protected against various threats, fostering trust and reliability.

Carbonmade, while excellent for creating and managing online portfolios, does not emphasize security to the same extent. Its primary focus is on providing an easy-to-use platform for creatives, which may leave some security aspects less robust compared to Yola.

🏆 Winner: None

. Both Yola and Carbonmade do not offer any AI capabilities. Yola focuses on providing a user-friendly interface for individuals and small businesses to create professional websites, while Carbonmade is tailored for creatives looking to showcase their work online. However, neither platform includes AI-driven tools or features.

🏆 Winner: Yola

. Managing your online team with Yola and Carbonmade involves different approaches to website editing access.

• Yola supports multi-user editing capabilities, allowing different levels of access and control based on the plan chosen. The primary account holder, often referred to as the Owner or Administrator, possesses comprehensive control over the website, including the ability to edit content, manage settings, and extend invitations to collaborators for website modification. Collaborators or Editors, invited by the account holder, can edit the website to varying degrees, which might range from content editing to page management, depending on the permissions granted by Yola’s platform. The number of users permitted to edit a website and the scope of their roles and permissions may vary, typically increasing with higher-tier subscription plans.
• Carbonmade allows only one user to manage and edit a website, which can be limiting for teams or collaborative projects.

Yola User Management Score:

7.3

Carbonmade User Management Score:

2.8

Additional Features

User Feedback

Yola seems to have received mostly positive reviews. Users appreciate its professional templates, ease of use, affordability, and customer service. They find it ideal for website creation, especially for those without specialized knowledge. However, some users express dissatisfaction with aspects such as data security, customization limitations, and lack of certain features like chat support. Overall, Yola appears to solve the problem of easy website creation and maintenance for businesses and individuals, offering a range of templates and tools at a reasonable price point.

Users appreciate Carbonmade for its ease of use, modern design templates, and no-code platform, which simplifies creating professional portfolios. However, some express a desire for a freemium plan and note limitations in customization and mobile site loading times. The platform is highly recommended for creatives, particularly illustrators and graphic designers, for its variety of design options and efficient customer service. Despite concerns over pricing, the overall sentiment is positive, with users finding value in Carbonmade’s ability to showcase their work effectively and streamline portfolio management.

FAQ