Contentive vs Wix Studio and Duda
Wix Studio and Duda are built for agencies too. Where a Wix Studio alternative differs: content and design are separate, and the client never sees a canvas.
Most website builders are made for someone building their own site. Wix Studio and Duda are different: they were built for agencies, by companies that understood agencies are a market of their own. If you're comparing us to them, you're comparing three products aimed at the same reader, and that makes the differences easier to see.
What they do well
Duda has been agency-first for years. Its white-label dashboard is a core selling point: your brand on the dashboard and the editor, your domain in the address bar, the client never seeing Duda's name. Its client management is mature, with granular permissions over what each client can enable or touch, and an API for managing clients and sites at scale.
Wix Studio brings the whole Wix stack to agencies: team workspaces, a large app market, built-in business tools and code tools for custom work. If a client needs a booking system, a shop, a members area and a blog by Friday, the odds that Wix Studio has an app for each are high.
Both are capable, both are well supported, and both have more years in the agency market than we do.
The real difference: the editing model
The thing that separates us isn't features. It's what the client is looking at when they edit.
Wix Studio and Duda both hand the client a visual editor in a restricted mode. The agency decides what to lock, and the client edits on the page, inside the design. It's a fence around a canvas, and a well-built fence works for a long time. But every new section is a new set of controls to lock, and the client is still standing in a design tool.
In Contentive, the client's editor is generated from a content model. A page is an ordered list of sections you defined, and each section is a set of fields. There's no canvas behind the form, so there's nothing to lock. We go into why that matters in content control, not design control.
White-label: they win, clearly
Agencies ask about this first, so here it is straight. Duda's white-label is a headline feature on its agency plans. Ours is Enterprise only, on custom pricing. On our Agency plan, your client signs into a Studio that says Contentive. If a branded client portal is the thing your clients pay for, that decides it, and Duda is the better fit.
Roles and what a client can do
We ship five built-in roles. Owner runs the account. Developer changes structure and reads content. Editor writes and publishes. Author drafts but can't publish. Viewer reads. Custom roles are built from a fixed list of capabilities, defined once for your whole agency, and can be scoped per content type: a client's marketing lead might publish news posts but only draft pages. Structure and content are separate capabilities, so you can give someone full control of the words without any access to the model. Clients are invited to their own workspace only and never see your other clients. CMS user roles and permissions has the practical mapping we'd use.
A client Editor can add, remove and reorder sections, fill in every field, publish and restore an old version. They can't create a new kind of section, change the theme or touch the model.
Portability
Content on Wix Studio and Duda lives in their platforms. That's normal and it's fine while you stay. Contentive's content sits behind a GraphQL API with a typed SDK, so it can feed something else later. Themes are files in your own git, pulled and pushed with our command-line tool, so your design work is yours.
Breadth: theirs is far larger
Their app markets are large. Ours is a small set of apps we build and maintain ourselves: forms, analytics, SEO, members, bookings, site search, multilingual, reviews and a handful of others. That's deliberate, because each one is something we keep working rather than something a third party might abandon, but it's narrower. If a client needs something unusual, Wix Studio is likelier to have it ready. We have no shop or checkout at all.
Agency economics
On our Agency plan, £39 a month covers three live sites, then £10.99 a month for each further live site, with unlimited workspaces and unlimited seats. Sites still in staging cost nothing. Check Wix Studio's and Duda's current pricing pages directly, as both change and both depend on plan and volume.
The client's first month
Here's how the difference plays out. In week one, the client adds a new service. In a restricted visual editor, they duplicate an existing block, edit the text, and the new block sits in a slightly different spot because the original was nudged during the build. In week three, they paste copy from a document and the formatting comes with it. In week four, they ask why the page looks different on their phone.
None of that is the platform's fault, and a careful build avoids most of it. But each one is a call to you. In Contentive, the new service is a new entry in a form: name, summary, price, image. The theme decides where it goes and how it looks, and a phone shows the same design it always did.
Hosting and going live
All three of us host the sites we serve, so that's not the difference. What's different is the route to live. Every Contentive site has a staging address beside the live one, with a bar on every page saying it's the staging preview. Publishing lands there first, and someone promotes it to production deliberately. Rolling back a theme creates a staging version from an earlier deployment, which you then promote. Clients who want to approve changes before the public sees them get a private, expiring preview link rather than a screenshot.
Agents
Contentive has an MCP server, so an AI agent you already use can build the content model, pages, forms and theme of a site, and an agent can be given a content-only connection with no publish, deploy or structure tools at all. Wix and Duda have both added AI features of their own for generating sites, sections and copy, and both now run official MCP servers that let an outside AI assistant work with an account and its sites. If an agent-driven build is part of how you want to work, compare the approaches on a real project rather than on a feature list.
Where we're worse, in one list
No white-label below Enterprise.
A much smaller app catalogue, and no commerce.
No visual editing for the client. Some clients want it, and they won't get it here.
Someone has to write the theme, in Liquid.
When to pick which
If a white-labelled dashboard and an app for everything matter most, choose Duda or Wix Studio. They're good at exactly that. If what costs you money is clients changing things they shouldn't, and you'd rather sell a fixed, reusable build than a canvas with a fence round it, that's what we're for. Productised builds is where that model pays off.