The three questions
What people who run a website really want to know comes down to three questions: what does it cost, do I have to understand it, and do I know where I stand? Most systems answer two. Wix answers the second and the third well — and the first is where it starts to pinch.
| Wix | loam | |
|---|---|---|
| What does it cost? | A monthly plan, plus apps from the App Market for what the plan does not do — and the bill grows with what you need, on a site you cannot take elsewhere. | On loam you pay for the design once, up front — made by hand, so not the cheapest start. After that: one licence per site for updates, and the subscription of your own agent. No theme or plugin licences, no bill because an update got stuck. |
| Do I have to understand it? | Little to understand: Wix takes care of hosting and security for you. That is its strength. | Nothing to understand: you say what you want, your agent knows how your site works, and you see the whole site as it would be before you say yes. |
| Do I know where I stand? | Predictable, as long as you stay within what Wix offers; at its limits you meet a higher plan, another app — or a rebuild, because the site only runs on Wix. | You know where you stand: no plugin can hold an update back, the engine follows the PHP versions PHP itself supports, security fixes are free for five years per line — and without a licence your site simply keeps running. |
Built around the agent, not added to it
Wix has an agent connection now: the Wix MCP, built into Claude, which can call Wix's business APIs — the store, bookings, contacts — and create and publish sites. That is an agent added to a platform built around its editor. Behind it, the editor, the App Market and Wix's servers stay as they were.
loam was built the other way round. The agent is the front door, and there is no editor behind it. Everything your site is goes through that one door — the words, the design, the images and the guide that says how your site speaks — and every change is a draft first, checked against the whole site before it goes live.
Your own site, not a place on a platform
A Wix site lives on Wix: it can only be hosted and run on Wix's own servers, and your agent reaches it through your Wix account. A loam site is its own: its own connection, with its own address and keys for your agent — no central service holding the accounts of many sites. It runs on any server that runs PHP, and leaving is copying a folder.
You are the maker
On Wix, what the platform does not do comes from the App Market — apps that live as long as their makers keep them up, at the prices they set. A licence that runs out, a maker who stops, a price that goes up — and a part of your site that stops with it. On loam there is no store to depend on. What an app would do lives in your own design, made for your site, under your own control — nothing that stops when someone else stops.
Freedom in what you make
Wix gives you a visual editor and an AI that generates a site to start from — within what the editor can place. On loam the design is plain templates and a stylesheet, made by hand for your site alone — and your agent works within it, in your style.
What moves with you
- Your content. Pages, posts and images move over — your agent reads the live Wix site and stages every page as a draft, so you see the whole new site before anything changes.
- Your addresses. Each old address is kept on its new page and forwards to it by itself — search engines follow, and so do your old links.
- Your words. Titles and descriptions come along, and are a good moment to read again.
What stays behind: the editor, the apps — what they did lands in your design, or turns out not to be needed — and the Wix template. The design is made again, by hand: part of the route, and the moment your site gets a form of its own.