Duda vs Semplice

Duda is a website building platform designed for agencies, SaaS companies and hosting providers that create and manage websites at scale. The company was founded in 2009 and has offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv. Rather than serving individual site owners, Duda focuses on the teams building sites for many clients, with white labeling, client permissions and a central dashboard for hundreds of sites.

The drag-and-drop editor works with templates, reusable sections and widgets, while dynamic pages generate many pages from a single collection, useful for locations, listings or services. Sites are built for fast loading and good Core Web Vitals, and built-in features cover multilingual sites, membership areas, basic e-commerce and AI assistance for content. APIs let SaaS platforms embed Duda as their own website builder. Plans start with a single-site Basic tier and scale through Team and Agency, with white label and client management on higher plans and custom pricing for platforms.

Duda fits agencies building local business, franchise and multi-location sites, and software vendors who want to offer websites to their customers. It gives less design freedom than Webflow, per-site costs add up, and its e-commerce is basic compared with Shopify. Webflow suits design-led studios, WordPress offers maximum flexibility and plugin choice, and Wix suits individuals building a single site.

Semplice is a portfolio system for designers that runs on WordPress, created by designer Tobias van Schneider and his team. It replaces the usual WordPress theme with a visual editor tailored to case studies, so designers can build layouts that look like custom-coded portfolio sites without writing code, while still owning their site and hosting.

The editor works on a flexible grid with columns, full-bleed images, video, galleries, typography controls and scroll animations, and it ships with case study templates, project grids, a blog and options for password-protected pages. Because it is built on WordPress, sites can use plugins, any hosting provider and standard SEO tools. Semplice is sold as a one-time license rather than a hosted subscription: Single and Studio licenses cover one domain, and a Business license covers up to ten domains for client work. Hosting, domain and WordPress maintenance are separate costs.

Semplice fits product and brand designers, small studios, illustrators and photographers who want a distinctive portfolio and are comfortable with WordPress. You are responsible for updates, backups and security, and the editor has a learning curve before layouts feel natural. Framer and Webflow offer hosted, highly designed sites without WordPress maintenance, Squarespace and Format are simpler portfolio options, and Cargo is popular with artists who want an experimental look. For non-portfolio sites such as stores or large blogs, a general CMS is the better choice.