Pricing (weighted 12%)
IMcreator
Free - IM Creator offers a free option. It is about as tantalizing as the other free website options offered by other website builders. It gives you 50mb of hosting and a site that is a subdomain of IM Creator.
Premium - The premium plan has a few different pricing options. You can choose how often you are billed, and that determines how much you pay. These are the pricing options
If you pay biannually (twice a year, not every two years) then you pay $9.95/month.
If you pay yearly then it is $7.95/month.
If you pay once every two years (also biannually) $6.95/month.
If you pay every three years they will charge you $5.95/month.
All of these prices are for the same plan. The premium plan gives you unlimited hosting and bandwidth, ten custom email addresses, and better support options.
Pro & Whitelable - This is IM Creator’s most expensive option at $250/year. It allows freelancers to rebrand IM Creator as their own product to sell to clients. You also get better support options.
These pricing options are quite odd. If you don't want to be stuck with IM Creator for three years, some of the pricing plans won't really be worth it. If you are committed to IM Creator as a platform then they are a great value.
WordPress
Free - WordPress is free and open source. Anyone can download the software and use or modify it to their heart’s content. To get a site up an running you will have to pay for hosting. WordPress.org has a few suggestions for hosts that play nicely with the WordPress platform.
Even with the hosting fees, WordPress will be the cheaper option. Also, you won't have to
Design (weighted 12%)
IMcreator
IM Creator has a very nicely sparse design environment. The sparseness is partly a symptom of not having much that you can do with IM Creator.
The editor works very well for what it is, and the same can be said of the templates, but these websites are mostly for showcasing something.
Still, it would be nice to see a few more design options. IM Creator is very limited in what kind of sites it can make. The design interface really feels amateurish.
WordPress
WordPress does not have a drag and drop editor, but that doesn’t mean you are out of design options. You can customize your WordPress site in a few different ways.
There are thousands upon thousands of WordPress themes, both free and paid, all over the web. There is sure to be one that meets your needs.
Also, there are a number of WordPress add ons that will fundamentally change how your website works. These can be used to further customize your site. WordPress has many more design options than IM Creator, but it is much harder work to get them up and running.
Frontend Features (weighted 12%)
IMcreator
IM Creator's sites are not mobile optimized. They will require some tweaking to display well on a mobile phone.
You can do most of the basic web design stuff. You can embed video and audio, for instance. ECommerce is not really a focus of IM Creator, so if you want an online store this may not be the one for you.
The websites look pretty good. They don’t really do much, but they look good.
WordPress
Your WordPress site frontend will vary greatly depending on what kind of theme you have. There are many different kinds of WordPress sites. They range from simple blogs to very fully featured websites that cost quite a bit.
WordPress can do pretty much anything you need it to, but keep in mind not all features are free. If you want to implement eCommerce, you will have to purchase the necessary software. WordPress is not an all in one solution.
Backend Featuers (weighted 12%)
IMcreator
The backend is also very stripped down. It looks kind of odd. Most of the backend is dedicated to creating another website. There is a small section where you can edit your account details, but beyond that the interface is a wasteland.
There are no real features to speak of except the website builder. The backend looks pretty amateurish.
WordPress
The WordPress backend will morph to fit your needs. At its most basic it provides a very stable blogging platform that will be more than enough for personal websites.
There are tons of add-ons that make the WordPress backend more fully featured. Third part apps will integrate seamlessly into the dashboard.
Hosting & Security (weighted 12%)
IMcreator
The free plan has hosting only up to 50MB, which is very very little. The paid plans will give you unlimited hosting. You may host to your heart’s content.
IM Creator is much more generous with hosting than WordPress, but this is largely because WordPress is free software.
IM Creator does not have the same widespread popularity as WordPress, so they aren't as vulnerable to attack. That said, constant vigilance must be maintained.
WordPress
You’ll have to purchase your own hosting. WordPress only supplies you the software to make your website. They don’t put it on the web for you as well.
WordPress has been around forever, and because of that hackers and other such undesirables have had ample time to find and exploit its weaknesses. There are a number of WordPress plugins that can help prevent malicious attacks, but out of the box WordPress is vulnerable.
Reports & Statistics (weighted 12%)
IMcreator
You can only get your statistics from third parties like Google Analytics. This is a shame. IM Creator has the ability to provide a statistics page. Unlike WordPress they don't have the excuse of being a non profit.
They do have a way to integrate Google Analytics into their dashboard. You just have to put in your tracking ID and it is all set up. Pretty easy.
WordPress
You can only get statistics from third party integrations, just like IM Creator. This makes more sense, however. WordPress is free software, and they rely on third part integrations to make complete websites.
There are a few different options for analytics in WordPress. As well as plug-ins that track your website traffic, there are also plug-ins that will track where people clicked on your website, as well as ones that track the actions of individual users.
Extensibility (weighted 12%)
IMcreator
IM Creator is not really designed to integrate with a lot of other applications. It is more of a platform for showing off what makes your product special.
That is a nice way of saying that IM Creator does not have any meaningful integrations.
WordPress
There are tens of thousands of third party apps and plug-ins for WordPress. Specifically there are 41,784 different plug-ins available.
With that many integrations it is almost certain that your favorite apps work with WordPress.
Support (weighted 12%)
IMcreator
IM Creator offers support tickets, a FAQ, forums, a downloadable manual, and one hundred and twenty-three how to articles.
They are very proud of the one hundred and twenty-three how tos. And why not? One hundred and twenty-three is an awful lot of how to articles.
IM Creator will have people who are ready to answer your specific questions, so they edge out WordPress in terms of support.
WordPress
Since WordPress is open source, there is no traditional support to speak of. However, there are a bunch of internet resources that should be able to fix any problem you might have.
WordPress is the largest website platform out there and there are a lot of people who probably have the exact same question as you. A few quick searches should help you solve most any problem.
The sheer number of WordPress sites make it so that there is a lot of help out there. There are entire websites dedicated to helping you get your WordPress site up and running.
