Duda review: Pros and cons in 2024

Best for marketing agencies

Duda

Blueprint Rating

Monthly fee

$25

Free domain

No

Drag and drop builder

Yes

Pros

• Strong focus on SEO.
• Specialized marketing tools.
• Fast, high-performance sites.

Cons

• No free domain.
• Advanced features paywalled.
• Basic plan doesn’t include client management/billing.

Duda is a dedicated website builder that has established itself as a premier platform for agencies trying to grow their client base or better serve their existing customers while not taking itself too seriously. The company’s name is based on The Dude from The Big Lebowski, which the founders say exemplifies their brand because “he rolls with the punches and is always there to help his peers.” 

It’s not just great for small businesses, however — Duda earns top marks in large part because of how easy it is to use while also offering a deep suite of tools and additional options for more advanced users.

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Duda overview

Duda is a web design platform with a focus on serving small businesses and also provides website-building tools and services suitable for everyone from individual freelance professionals all the way up to large corporations. 

Duda leans into its agency and small business focus by providing tools aimed at optimizing client management, billing, as well as discovery, primarily through its SEO tools, many of which are AI-assisted. The company also places a heavy emphasis on sites that load and perform well to make the browsing experience for customers and clientele as seamless and frictionless as possible. 

Duda pros and cons

Pros

While many platforms require users to do their own SEO research and rely on third-party tools to optimize their sites for crawling and ranking, Duda does a lot of the legwork for you. 

From auto-generated sitemaps and SSL to full meta control and structured data markup, Duda takes care of some of the most technical backend optimizations so users can focus on content, presentation and integration with their business. Duda makes focusing on that front-end content approachable with its drag and drop tools and easy-at templates.

Hand-in-hand with their focus on SEO best practices, Duda also strives to deliver speedy sites both to satisfy Google’s requirements for ranking and to make the user experience of browsing a page as pleasant and frustration-free as possible.

Cons

Despite Duda’s focus on the small business/agency scale, many of its features aren’t available with their least expensive plan, Basic. You have to upgrade to at least the second of their four pricing tiers to access tools like client management and client billing. 

To get access to some of the more advanced features, like the ability to build multiple websites with one account or access dynamic page functionality, you’ll need to upgrade to at least the third-tier Agency plan. 

Duda also doesn’t offer custom domains to its customers unless they upgrade all the way up to the fourth and most expensive tier, the White Label plan, for $199 per month. 

Duda pricing and value

	MONTHLY FEE	EMAIL SUPPORT	CLIENT MANAGEMENT TOOLS	DYNAMIC PAGES	CUSTOM DOMAIN
Basic	$25	Yes	No	No	No
Team	$39	Yes	Yes	Limited	No
Agency	$69	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
White label	$199	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

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Duda is on the more expensive side for website builders, many of which provide some level of free access to their editors. The basic tier is fairly feature-light given that it costs $25 a month – especially since it doesn’t come with a custom domain. However, like all of Duda’s plans, it does come with unlimited bandwidth and storage, which is relatively rare at the lowest subscription level amongst many of Duda’s competitors. 

The higher subscription tiers generally do a better job of justifying their price points. Beginning at the second tier, the Team plan, you get access to Duda’s client management and client billing tools, access for additional team members and to Duda’s website experts and the ability to make use of custom assets across multiple sites. 

Duda really shines at the Agency tier, which unlocks:

• The ability to create up to four websites.
• Full access to the dynamic pages and internal collections feature.
• The ability to export a complete site, including images, files, HTML and CSS all as a single zip file.

At $69 a month, it’s aligned with the high-end subscription plans of some competitor website builder platforms, but its feature set is similarly comparable.

One thing to note is that Duda also offers custom plans tailored for large businesses that need to manage a big portfolio of sites simultaneously, though customers need to contact Duda directly for pricing and further details. 

Website editor features

Duda’s website editor is built around a number of user-friendly design decisions and tools. It starts with templates, which allow users to select a framework for their site based on intent. There are a huge number of templates and site designs available, ranging from shoe stores and insurance companies to church community sites and charity organizations.

Once you’ve selected a template, you can then customize, arrange and edit elements with a drag-and-drop editor. Duda also allows you to edit every element of a page by device to help ensure your site will display properly on mobile devices as well as desktop browsers. You can copy and paste any elements that you want to reuse between pages or even between separate sites if you’re using Duda to build a full web portfolio. 

At the Agency subscription tier and above, you also get full access to Duda’s dynamic pages feature. This allows you to build a template for multiple pages that share the same overall format and then insert content into each on a page-by-page basis without having to redesign the entire page from the ground up each time. 

Additionally, Duda offers AI assistance when building your page. AI can suggest titles and generate text for your pages or iterate on suggestions it has already made, and you can then edit that content to suit your voice, brand or style. 

It can also translate material on the fly, correct spelling and grammar mistakes and even automatically add context to your content based on information about your business that you’ve provided.

Blogging features

The flexibility of the main website editor extends to Duda’s blogging features. Blogs don’t need to be limited to basic text entries – you can include any content that you’d build into another page of your blog, from images to widgets and tables. 

You can also schedule posts ahead of time to automatically post to your site on a given date or at a specific hour, which is great for embargoed content or for planning content releases around vacations or downtime. 

Duda will also automatically generate RSS and ATOM feeds for your blog, making it easy for your readers to subscribe to your feed and get updates when you post. There’s also a built-in search function so specific content can be easily accessed, and the blog can be surfaced site-wide, so users can jump to it from any other page on your site.

E-commerce features

Duda features built-in support for fully functional e-commerce websites. E-commerce sites can also take advantage of Duda’s AI assistant, which can generate product descriptions and SEO metadata directly, saving you time and the frustration of doing some of the boring grunt work of designing an e-commerce storefront. 

Duda integrates with a number of established payment gateways, like PayPal, Stripe and Klarna, to make processing transactions simple and ensure end-to-end security. The company also offers templates custom-made to serve e-commerce stores, as well as site themes and custom widgets tailored for e-commerce applications. 

There are also APIs for tracking and managing your inventory, as well as syncing between physical points of sale and your online storefront.

Marketing features

Duda places a great deal of emphasis on marketing and upselling to potential clients and customers. At the White Label plan level, the company provides a number of tailored marketing materials for pitching and presenting, like sales decks and flyers. Duda also offers guides on how to effectively upsell clients or how to market for specific circumstances, like during the holiday season.

Duda also offers direct integration with many third-party companies and apps to boost its customer’s marketing power. These range from services like MailChimp for email marketing campaigns and Yelp to display customer ratings directly on your pages to SiteSearch 360 to add powerful, sitewide search functionality or Locu for food industry sites that want to display their menus.  

Duda vs. top competitors

	LOWEST PAID PLAN	HIGHEST PAID PLAN	FREE PLAN	UNLIMITED STORAGE	E-COMMERCE SUPPORT	DRAG-AND-DROP EDITOR
Duda	$25	$199	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Strikingly	$12	$59	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
WordPress.com	$9	$70	Yes	No	Yes	Available through plugins
Clickfunnels	$147	$497	No	Yes	Yes	Yes

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Though Duda is in the upper echelons of website builders in terms of price, its feature sets compare favorably, particularly at the higher subscription tiers. 

Duda vs. Strikingly

Strikingly is a website builder designed to appeal to novices, with easy-to-use tools geared toward creating quick, simple websites. Though the focus is on simplicity, it does pack a number of additional features, including e-commerce functionality and tools designed to keep visitors engaged (and get them to return), like newsletters and membership forms. 

Strikingly also offers a free plan with a reasonable, though limited, set of features – another gambit to appeal to first-time website designers or casual users. As such, Strikingly may be a better fit for those new to creating websites or individuals looking to create low-stakes personal sites, while Duda is the superior option for small businesses or users who require more complex features.

Duda vs. WordPress.com

WordPress.com is one of the best platforms for designing blogs and, like Duda, features a drag-and-drop editing interface. WordPress allows you to select (or build) blocks that you can then apply anywhere on your site and a number of ways to monetize your site, from direct e-commerce sales functionality to ad revenue. It does, however, impose a fairly restrictive 50 GB cap on storage, even at the highest subscription tier.

If your intent is solely blogging, or if a blog is going to be a core feature of your site, WordPress.com may be the better option. For business and e-commerce applications, and especially for small businesses and agencies who require client management features and advanced marketing tools, Duda is the better choice.

Duda vs. Clickfunnels

Clickfunnels is a platform clearly designed for enterprises, which is evident beginning with its pricing structure (Clickfunnels’ lowest-priced plan is $147 a month). The main conceit of Clickfunnels’ platform is the construction of sales funnels to channel website visitors from a landing page all the way through to a final purchase, and most of Clickfunnels’ features and tools are structured to support that journey. 

While Duda does offer enterprise support, particularly at the White Glove and custom plan levels, Clickfunnels’ exclusive focus on serving enterprise clients makes it a better choice for large businesses. However, for everyone else, Duda is likely the better (and more affordable) choice.

Featured website builder offers

Wix

Learn More

Via Wix’s website

Monthly fee

$17

Free domain

For one year

Drag-and-drop builder

Yes

Web.com

Learn More

Via Web.com’s website

Monthly fee

$19.99

Free domain

Only when paying annually

Drag-and-drop builder

Yes

Squarespace

Learn More

Via Squarespace’s website

Monthly fee

$23

Free domain

For one year

Drag-and-drop builder

Yes

Frequently asked questions (FAQs)