They hand you a canvas. We hand you a finished, compliant site.
Wix and Squarespace can spin up a site with AI now. Neither ships it accessible, ad-free, and built for how a fire department, city, or church actually works. Mainfolk does, on day one, starting at $0.
Free plan, free forever · No credit card required · Compliant on day one
Six reasons teams switch to Mainfolk.
Wix and Squarespace are good tools if you want to spend a weekend building and then maintaining a site. Mainfolk is for when you’d rather it be done, done right, and done for less.
Compliant on day one. Provably.
Neither Wix nor Squarespace guarantees WCAG 2.1 AA output; the liability stays with you. Every Mainfolk site is built to the standard by construction and ships its own accessibility statement. For anyone under ADA Title II, this is the buying criterion, not a feature.
Built for who you are.
Wix is general-purpose, tuned for no one. Mainfolk ships deep presets for fire, police, city, church, and local business: right pages, right tone, right structure from the first draft. A fire chief gets burn-ban banners and apparatus pages, not a blank canvas.
And it costs less.
A genuinely good free site with a real address and no ads, where Squarespace has no free plan and Wix puts ads on theirs. Civic is $149/month all-in: under bid thresholds, approved on a consent agenda, no RFP.
Both have AI builders now. Only one hands you a finished site.
Wix and Squarespace generate sites with AI too, so we will not pretend that alone is the difference. What differs is what comes out: theirs starts you at a canvas to finish and audit yourself. Ours arrives written, structured, accessible, and ready to publish. You edit, not build.
Faster, and actually found.
Edge-served pages load instantly and every site ships llms.txt and JSON-LD, structured for Google and AI assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity. Wix sites are heavy.
A small company, on purpose.
Wix and Squarespace are platforms at enormous scale, serving millions of sites. That scale is exactly why support is a help center and a queue: at those numbers it cannot be anything else. Mainfolk is made in Gurnee, Illinois by a small business that builds for small businesses, and the people who write the software are the people who answer your email. It is the one thing on this page a bigger company cannot simply add.
Feature by feature.
The honest comparison — where Mainfolk wins, and why.
| Feature | Mainfolk | Wix | Squarespace |
|---|---|---|---|
| Real free plan | Yes — real address, no ads | Free plan, but Wix ads + subdomain | No free plan (14-day trial) |
| Starting price | $0 free · $15/mo with your own domain | Starts around $17/mo (billed annually) | Starts around $16/mo (billed annually) |
| Built for fire/police/city/church | Deep presets | Generic templates | Generic templates |
| Accessibility (WCAG 2.1 AA / ADA) | By construction, every site, day one | Not guaranteed; you are liable | Not guaranteed; you are liable |
| Full site export | Free, anytime | Limited | Limited |
| Civic plan (gov features, all-in) | $149/mo | Not offered | Not offered |
| Page speed | Edge-served worldwide, instant | Heavier | Moderate |
| Found by AI assistants (llms.txt, JSON-LD) | Yes, per site | Partial | Partial |
| Visitor analytics | Included on Pro, private | Add-on / limited | Basic |
| Support | A person who built it | Ticket queue | Ticket queue |
| Made in | USA (Champlin Enterprises) | — | — |
Competitor prices and plans as of 2026 and may change — check their sites for current details. Comparison reflects standard published plans.
Accessibility isn’t a setting you switch on. It’s how the site is built.
Wix and Squarespace hand you a canvas and leave WCAG conformance to you: your alt text, your heading order, your form labels, your contrast. If any of it falls short, the liability is yours, not theirs. The usual patch is a third-party accessibility overlay, a line of JavaScript that promises instant compliance and delivers none.1
Every Mainfolk site is built to WCAG 2.1 AA from the source up: semantic HTML, keyboard navigation, labeled forms, checked contrast. That holds on the free plan and every plan above it, and every site ships its own accessibility-statement page. Nothing to bolt on, nothing to configure, nothing to get sued over. See how we build it in, or read our own statement and latest audit.
For state and local governments this is the requirement, not a bonus. Under the DOJ’s ADA Title II rule, entities serving 50,000 or more must conform by April 26, 2027; smaller entities and special districts by April 26, 2028.2 Most Wix, Squarespace, and WordPress sites do not pass today. Mainfolk sites do, on day one.
1. Overlays do not produce compliance; they attract lawsuits. In April 2025 the FTC finalized an order requiring overlay vendor accessiBe to pay $1 million over claims that its widget could make any website WCAG-compliant (FTC, April 2025). In the first half of 2025, 456 U.S. web-accessibility lawsuits, about one in four of all filings, targeted sites that had an overlay widget installed (UsableNet midyear report). Screen readers read your actual code, not the widget layered on top.
2. Dates per the DOJ’s April 2026 interim final rule extending the original deadlines by one year. The underlying ADA obligation to provide accessible services applies regardless of the rule’s deadline, and private businesses under Title III have no deadline at all: they can be sued today.
Price-shopping for a department?
Mainfolk Civic is $149/month ($1,490/year) — WCAG built in, an emergency alert banner, unlimited staff editors, and we migrate your old site for you. Compare that to a general Wix or Squarespace plan you still have to build and audit for accessibility yourself, or a legacy government-web vendor billing thousands a year.
Stop building. Start running.
They sell you a website. We ship you one that is compliant, ad-free, and yours. The Free plan is free forever; upgrade only when you’re ready.