Thanks to AI, building a website has never been easier. But how easy is it?
Vibe coding tools like Lovable and Anthopic’s Claude Code can take a high-level prompt and build a website with little to no human intervention.
Established players like Wix allow individuals to create websites without any coding knowledge, but require human users to decide on design elements and layout.
Wix is embracing AI and vibecoding to keep pace with upstart rivals like Lovable. Last June, the company announced it had acquired vibe coding startup Base44 for $80 million. In January, it announced the launch of Wix Harmony, an AI website builder that combines humans and artificial intelligence.
This comes as the industry warns of a “SaaSpocalypse” in which AI threatens the business models of companies like Workday, Salesforce, and Asana. Partly as a result of these concerns, Wicks’ stock price has fallen about 23% since the beginning of the year.
Yaara Asaf, head of product at Wix, told Business Insider that Wix Harmony “is available to anyone who wants to create a web presence. No website building experience or technical or design background is required.”
Nad Chishtie, head of design at Lovable, told Business Insider that Lovable “allows 99% of people with no technical skills to bring their ideas to life just by talking to AI.”
We put Wix Harmony to the test to see if Wix’s 20 years of website building expertise stacks up against Lovable, a startup founded in 2023.
adorable
Lovable generated a nearly perfect website from the first prompt. Aditi Varade
I had previously used Lovable to create a virtual newsroom photo coach, so I already knew it would be an easy process.
I threw out the first prompt, asking the platform to generate a clean, no-frills website with my headshot and bio on the homepage and five sections: Breaking News, Careers, Technology & AI, Cultural Trends, and Retail. There I can post articles of my choice.
He got right to the point and gave me almost exactly what I needed. The homepage features only a simple headshot, the title “Jane Doe: Journalist, Reporter, Writer,” and a placeholder bio. The website is divided into five sections, and each section has three article cards containing dummy articles.
This is where I ran into my first problem. How do I edit text? I was hoping for a Canva-like interface where I could double-click a text box and enter content, but Lovable doesn’t work that way.
When you ask the chatbot what to do, it will tell you to edit the code or paste all your edits into the chat, and it will make the changes for you.
Since I don’t have any coding expertise, I typed out a huge 700-word prompt telling me all the headlines, subheadings, and article links to the 15 articles I wanted to feature in my portfolio. The request was processed seamlessly.
Then I noticed that the article card didn’t have a thumbnail. I asked if it was possible to get a thumbnail at the correct size from a Business Insider article. No problem.
Lovable was able to input my input into the article card seamlessly. Aditi Varade
All I had to do was put my LinkedIn profile on my homepage, request a photo of me from my author page, and update my contact information.
When we processed the last tweak, the daily free credits were gone. It was a lot of work, but I created a website in about 20 minutes and ended up with a digital portfolio that is very easy to use.
Needless to say, I was impressed.
wicks harmony
I wasn’t too impressed with Wix’s vibe-coded website design. Aditi Varade
We had high expectations for Wix Harmony. The first website I built was a digital photo repository on Wix a long time ago when I was in my high school photography club.
But when I entered the same prompt into Wix Harmony and saw the website it created on the first try, I sighed.
All elements appear to have been extracted from a basic PowerPoint template, with no consideration given to text alignment.
An image of a quill pen was automatically generated as the website logo, and while there’s nothing wrong with that, it felt a little on the nose. The face photo was an AI-generated image of a South Asian woman.
But the worst part is that Wix didn’t create 5 different sections depending on my story type. Instead, I grouped all my story cards together on the home page and hallucinated two unnecessary sections: “Blog” and “Portfolio Page.”
When I prompted it to fix the mistake, it gave me a list of five steps to fix the problem myself. “Follow these steps to rebuild your website and position your content appropriately.”
“Can’t you?” I asked Wicks. I was then presented with other options, including contacting Wix Support.
As a last-ditch effort, I asked Wix to regenerate the site, thinking it might be easier to start over than trying to resolve all the issues myself. This was helpful. The redesign was much better.
The five sections were separated correctly and the text was aligned. However, unlike Lovable, I was unable to correctly enter information from the 15 stories I entered into the story cards. A placeholder story has been added in its place.
For example, I never wrote a novel titled “The Rise of the Fractional Leader.”
Wix’s design was a bit flashy. Aditi Varade
What I like about Wix is that you can do things that Lovable can’t do. Instead of having your edits reflected in the chat, you can edit the text in the preview. This feature felt much more intuitive than Lovable.
Perhaps you would have gotten better results if you had worked with Wix’s existing design templates instead of having Wix generate your website from scratch. It certainly needed a lot more humanity than “Lovebubble.”
final thoughts
For impulsive people like me who thrive on random brainwaves but don’t have the patience to improve a website, Lovable might be a better option because it lets you draft a simple idea and watch it come to life in no time.
Lovable’s Chishtie said traditional website builders “seem to offer a lot of choice, but they constrain people’s vision.”
“They tend to direct users to templates and ask them to use ready-made blocks to create their sites,” he said. “This also means that customization comes with a high learning gradient, as more precise changes actually require more technical knowledge.”
On the other hand, I felt Wix was for people who were more into the technology, who cared about how each element looked and wanted more control over the flow of their website. It wasn’t pure vibe coding. It was AI-assisted website building, with users firmly at the wheel.
Wix’s Asaf told Business Insider that Wix Harmony allows users to seamlessly switch between AI editing and manual editing.
“This makes Vibe Coding not just a way to quickly build a website, but a complete professional-level method for creating real, living business websites,” she said.
He added that all actions taken by the AI tool are fully reversible and easily adjustable, giving users “full control over the outcome every step of the way.”
Overall, this experience gave me some insight into the horror behind SaaSpocalypse.
If Wix’s AI capabilities can’t keep up with those of other companies like Lovable and Claude, it risks losing users like me who don’t care much about design and just want a website that can be used in minutes.