This review is for the SiteJet Builder for cPanel / Plesk that comes with some hosting packages. While I mostly work with WordPress for clients, I like to try out alternatives now and then to see how they compare. For this review, I built a small, 3-page website using SiteJet on one of my hosting plans at Fullhost.
TLDR: Great for small, brochure business sites. Nice user-interface. It might be easy to out-grow the features provided with SiteJet. Cheaper than Squarespace and Wix. Some things didn’t work as expected.
Demo Site: Furever Friends Kitten Rescue Template: Green Change

Pros:
- Great user-interface design: Most features were available within the one screen without having to navigate back to a dashboard like in WordPress. I like the dark mode option.
- Template designs are nice and modern without being overly minimalistic. They are practical for small businesses.
- Page-builder offers many blocks, content, and layout options without requiring an upgrade to a premium version. It offers several types of image sliders. (Compared to Elementor, which does not offer an image slider in their free version. I’ve also found their pro slider to be disappointing. However, lately I’ve found the Smart Slider plugin to meet the needs of clients)
- Integrates multiple icon libraries.
- Integrated Google Fonts and Pexels free stock images makes building websites fast
- Themes are highly flexible – You’re not limited by the layout or colours provided in the theme.
- Files are self-hosted on your own web hosting plan
- I like how the mobile / responsive viewport options are based on real device sizes.
- Code editor included. It allows editing the original source code. In some ways this is good because it reduces the amount of CSS loaded on the page. (Compare to WordPress child themes, where you might sometimes end up writing additional CSS to override parent theme styles.)
- Includes basic contact form.
- Automatically minimizes HTML code on publishing.
- Includes SEO meta tag fields.
- They have a help desk which appears to be active.
- I’m going to acknowledge that I only spent a few hours on this, and there probably are some other good features that I didn’t get a chance to mention.

Cons:
- When publishing the site to your server, the website is taken offline for a few minutes and shows a 404 error.
- Aside from text, image, and video content, the features are very limited compared to WordPress.
- No extensions or plugins available.
- Fewer learning and troubleshooting resources available online compared to WordPress.
- No options for styling the sticky menu / header differently as it scrolls down the page. This could be overcome with the code editor, but it would be important to have an option to change the logo file. This might be an issue specific to the theme that I’ve chosen.
- I tried to build something with their “Collections” which is similar to WordPress Custom Post Types & Custom Fields, but it didn’t work as expected. I created the collection data first, but when adding a Collection layout to the page it wouldn’t connect to my collection. I feel like the Single Page Layout option for the collection fields makes users go through extra steps to assign data to the content fields. Some elements offered the option to link to the data and others did not. (I confess that I did not spend much time on this. I was hoping that it would be as intuitive as the rest of the platform had been so far. Maybe I will give it another try later.)
- Code editor allows editing original source code. This could be a problem for some clients if this is deleted by accident or edited incorrectly. The code editor is relatively hidden in the editor so I don’t think this is a big issue, but I would be hesitant to give clients access to this. However, there is a backup created whenever logging in which is good.
- There were a few things that didn’t seem to be working, like changing the height of a container on mobile devices.
Price Comparison (Basic Hosting or Subscription Fees)
CMS | Hosting or Subscription Cost (based on monthly pricing) |
---|---|
SiteJet | $11 CAD / Month with Fullhost Elastic Web Hosting |
WordPress.org | $11 CAD / Month with Fullhost Elastic Web Hosting (Managed WordPress Hosting is also available) Createscape Design Studio offers an optional WordPress maintenance package for plugin and WP core updates. The price is based on the number / type of plugins installed and the complexity of the site. |
Wix | $16 – $149 CAD / month |
Squarespace | $30 – $90 CAD / month |
Will I use this for client sites?
If a client is looking for a simple brochure website that doesn’t require a lot of features, and is confident that their needs won’t change in the near future, I might offer this as an option, especially for clients on a small budget.
For most clients I would be concerned that they would quickly outgrow SiteJet and we would have to re-build the site in WordPress to accommodate new feature requests.
Conclusion:
I think SiteJet builder might be good competition for Wix and Squarespace, but it can’t beat the features that are available with WordPress. I read this article by SiteJet comparing it to WP, and I found that they are really heavy on criticism of WordPress, and light on detail of the features available with their own CMS. Many of the WordPress challenges that they mention can be overcome very easily, and it really isn’t that difficult to install a WordPress plugin like Elementor which offers most of the features available with SiteJet.
Thanks for reading! If you’d like an assessment on which CMS is right for your website project, please get in touch.