Wix just started a new marketing campaign aimed at Wordpress. It started with them sending headphones to popular Wordpress users (saying that they were “from WP”), with a QR code that links to a very badly received commercial.
I knew the two companies were in direct competition, but I didn’t realize how heated it got. Matt Mullenweg (one of the creators of Wordpress) just wrote an article titled Wix and Their Dirty Tricks saying:
Wix, the website builder company you may remember from stealing WordPress code and lying about it, has now decided the best way to gain relevance is attacking the open source WordPress community in a bizarre set of ads. They can’t even come up with original concepts for attack ads, and have tried to rip-off of Apple’s Mac vs PC ads, but tastelessly personify the WordPress community as an absent, drunken father in a therapy session. 🤔
The first article linked in that quote talks about some open letters that Matt and the CEO of Wix, Avishai Abrahami, sent each other back in 2016. Matt said Wix used some of the open source Wordpress code without publishing all of the resulting code like you’re supposed to. He also mentioned that Wix used to be called Wixpress??? I had no idea.
Avishai’s response to Matt (also 2016) didn’t really address his points and just came off condescending and weak.
Anyway, Matt goes on to talk about Wix not allowing users to export any of their pages or files. Once you start using their editor, your shit is stuck there. He clearly sounds a lot happier with Squarespace’s decisions:
I have to believe that users will care about that in the long run, and maybe that’s why Squarespace just passed up Wix in market share. They natively support exporting into WordPress' format and don’t have to resort to dirty tricks to be successful. I expect Squarespace’s upcoming IPO will be a great one.
I work with either Wix, Wordpress, or Squarespace for clients (but I’m not using any of them for this website). I’ve edited some Wix sites in the past, but I never noticed that was no export feature. I did notice that less people chose it over the others tho.
And after everything I read about it today, I’m definitely a lot less likely to recommend it to people myself.