For most artists, Squarespace is the best website builder — its templates still make art look the most expensive. Format and Portfoliobox are the strongest portfolio-first picks, ArtCloud wins if you're selling with inventory to manage, and Weebly or Hostinger's AI builder cover the budget end. The caveat this whole category shares: every one of them is a template. If your practice needs something real — commission requests priced by size, a print calculator that knows your edition rules — the last section covers the one path that isn't a template.
Artists get the worst version of the website-builder decision, because the site has two jobs that fight each other: gallery walls want to disappear behind the work, and working artists need machinery — commissions, print rules, collector follow-up — that most portfolio templates treat as an afterthought, even though the photographer-lineage tools solved proofing years ago. Every builder below picks a side. Knowing which side you need picked is most of the decision.
What should an artist look for?
Image handling first — full-bleed display, sane compression, and galleries that don't crop your work into squares. A store that fits how you actually sell: originals, prints, commissions, or all three have different needs. Commission workflow, if that's your income — at minimum a real inquiry form, ideally pricing logic. A domain and no builder badge, because "made with X" in your footer reads as amateur to the galleries and clients you're courting. Pricing checked September 2026.
At a glance
| Builder | Free plan | Entry price | Best at |
|---|---|---|---|
| Squarespace | Trial only | ~$16/mo | Making art look expensive |
| Wix | Yes, with ads | ~$17/mo | Design freedom |
| Format | Trial | ~$12/mo | Portfolio-first workflow |
| Portfoliobox | Yes, limited | ~$8/mo | Clean portfolios, fair price |
| ArtCloud | — | ~$25/mo | Selling + inventory |
| SmugMug | Trial | ~$13/mo | Photographers, print sales |
| Pixpa | Trial | ~$8/mo | Portfolio + store + proofing |
| Weebly | Yes | ~$10/mo | Budget simplicity |
| Hostinger AI | — | ~$3/mo | Cheapest respectable start |
| Canva | Yes | ~$13/mo | One-page portfolios |
| Greta | Yes — 5 credits/day | $20/mo ($5 welcome) | Custom functionality templates can't do |
The best, quickly
Squarespace — still the taste king. Galleries hang your work in generous whitespace and the commerce is competent. It charges for that taste and doesn't apologize.
Wix — more freedom, more decisions. Great when you have a specific vision; dangerous when you have four hundred choices and a deadline.
Format & Portfoliobox — built for portfolios first: client galleries, proofing, watermarking. Format is the more polished; Portfoliobox the better value.
ArtCloud — the pick when selling is the point: inventory, editions, price history, gallery-world features. Overkill for a pure portfolio.
SmugMug & Pixpa — photographer-lineage tools that fine artists quietly love: bulletproof image handling and print fulfillment (SmugMug), or portfolio-store-proofing in one affordable tool (Pixpa).
Weebly & Hostinger AI — the budget tier. Weebly is simple and stays out of the way; Hostinger's "AI builder" assembles a template fast for the price of a coffee. Both fine for a first site you'll outgrow.
Canva — you already know the editor. A beautiful one-pager in an afternoon; not a working artist's system.
Got an idea? Build it now!
Just start with a simple prompt. No coding required: Greta.sh turns your idea into a working app in minutes.
Are these customizable, or just templates?
Direct answer: in the workflow they sell you, templates — including the ones marketed as "AI," which generate a template faster rather than building anything custom. You choose a layout and fill fixed fields; the store sells the way the platform decided stores sell, and the contact form asks what it was built to ask.
One exception worth naming rather than glossing: Wix ships a real developer layer. Velo runs JavaScript, has its own database collections and backend code, so a commission form with pricing logic genuinely can be built there — as an application you maintain inside Wix's editor and runtime, on a Wix plan. Squarespace allows code injection on its higher tiers, which is narrower. So the question isn't whether it can be customised; it's where you want that application to live.
For a portfolio with occasional sales, that's genuinely enough. Buy the Squarespace subscription and go make work.
When your practice needs more than a template
The working-artist problems no template ships: a commission form with real pricing logic — size, medium, framing, deposit math — instead of "email me for pricing." A print calculator tied to your actual paper and edition rules. A waitlist that opens by collection drop, with the queue and the notification handled for you.
Client proofing is deliberately not on that list. Pixpa ships it on every client-gallery plan — favourites, labels, star ratings, side-by-side comparison, per-image comments and an email when the client is done — and Format offers proofing too. If approving images before you ship is the job, buy one of those rather than building it.
Those are applications, and describing one to Greta builds it: "collectors browse finished work; commission requests pick size and medium and get a quoted range with a deposit link; my dashboard tracks each commission from deposit to shipped." Database, payments, your domain, no badge. It can sit alongside a portfolio you already love — the Squarespace stays, the commission system lives on your subdomain — or replace the whole stack. The free plan (5 credits a day) builds the first version; Starter is $20/month, $5 with the current welcome offer.
The pattern matches what we found across wedding builders and every template category: the templates are good at the gallery. They were never going to be your back office.
FAQ
What's the best free website builder for artists? Portfoliobox's free tier for a real portfolio; Wix free if you can live with ads; Canva for a one-pager. Genuinely free and professional is a short list — most artists end up at $8–17/month.
Should artists use Squarespace or Wix? Squarespace if you want it to look right by default; Wix if you have a specific layout in mind and the patience to build it. Taste by default versus freedom with effort.
How do artists handle commissions on their website? Most templates stop at a contact form, and most artists quote by email forever after. A commission system with pricing logic and deposits is custom functionality — the one part of an artist's site worth building rather than templating, because it's where the money actually moves.
Do I need to know how to code to get a custom art website? No. Describing the workflow in plain English to an AI app builder covers it now — the build is generated, including database and payments. The skill that matters is knowing your own commission process well enough to describe it precisely.
