Jimdo Review: A Surprisingly Bad Website Builder
Jimdo is inconsistent, difficult to master, limited, and expensive. It's a product that has been so thoroughly outclassed by its competitors that I'm surprised they're still in business.
Jimdo review summary
Simplicity
Much more difficult than it should be or could be.
Functionality
Very limited in functionality (no app store)
Costs
Significantly more expensive than most competitors.
Our score:
2 / 5
Jimdo pros
Jimdo cons
The advantage of a website builder is that it makes creating a (free) website extremely easy. This is partly true for Jimdo. It probably won't take you more than 5 minutes to have a basic framework for your site up and running.
Where things go wrong is when you're trying to edit your site and add content. Whether you're using Jimdo Dolphin or Jimdo Creator (more on the differences between these two later), building your site feels clumsy and unnecessarily restrictive.
As a result, Jimdo offers the worst of both worlds: it's not easy to use, and you can't do much with it either.
The designs you can choose from (or that are assigned to you) usually don't look very good either.
And, as the final nail in the coffin: Jimdo is more expensive than its competitors. In some cases, significantly more expensive.
In this Jimdo review, I'll cover all of this and more.
I wouldn't recommend Jimdo to anyone. Instead, I suggest you check out Webador (learn more about them in our Webador review) or try Wix for free (see our Wix review).
Jimdo: impossible to make sense of
Jimdo manages to create confusion even before your account is fully set up.
You first have two options for creating your site: a choice for beginners and an option for developers.
Internally, the beginner option is called Jimdo Dolphin and the advanced option is called Jimdo Creator (although you'll rarely encounter these terms on the website).
Both are completely different products with entirely different approaches to website editing and design. Choose one, and you can't switch to the other later. It's therefore extremely important that you make the right choice. Yet strangely enough, Jimdo makes no effort whatsoever to clarify the differences between the two.
I'm guessing most people will choose Jimdo Dolphin. This is understandable, since you apparently need to be a programmer and understand code to use Jimdo Creator.
However, this is not the case. In fact, Jimdo Creator doesn't require any coding at all. It also uses a drag-and-drop site editor, just like Jimdo Dolphin.
As you might imagine, all of this leads to quite a few angry customers:
Creating a website with Jimdo: Jimdo Dolphin or Jimdo Creator
Jimdo Dolphin
According to Jimdo, their Dolphin product is the future of website builders. Typically, when using a website builder, you choose a template and then start assembling pages and writing content yourself. Jimdo Dolphin aims to take this work off your hands through Artificial Intelligence.
You'll be directed to Jimdo Dolphin when you choose Build a beautiful website – without coding during account creation.
You're first bombarded with a series of questions, after which the AI gets to work and churns out a basic website framework. It includes both text and images.
Among the questions you need to answer are:
- Who is your site intended for? (one person or a group of people)
- What is your site intended for? (a project or hobby, a project that you might want to turn into a business, etc.)
- What is your style? (modern, minimalist, etc.)
- And more
You don't need to answer all these questions, but doing so should increase the likelihood of getting a site that matches what you want.
Next, you'll be presented with two choices.
What you get here isn't set in stone: you can still adjust the content and style of your site later.
Afterwards, Jimdo offers you the option to purchase a domain name, and “helps” you with some suggestions. Some of these suggestions are so cringey that they made my skin crawl.
As soon as a service claims with a straight face that something like start24-tech-it-services.nl is a good choice for a domain name because it “inspires trust,” it's probably time to scratch your head in bewilderment. And perhaps ask yourself whether today's AI is actually capable of building a decent website for you.
The answer is no. The site that the AI created for me felt generic. The images didn't look good, the text was hollow, meaningless marketing speak, and the layout wasn't what I was looking for.
The bottom line was that I would still need to work with the site editor to transform the site into something that would actually be useful for me.
The Dolphin Site Editor
Let's first look at the learning curve. The editor isn't very difficult to use, but I wouldn't call it intuitive. Unlike the editors from Wix, Webador, and Webnode, it feels clumsy and poorly thought-out.
The biggest problem, however, is how limited your capabilities are and how unnecessarily restricted you are in terms of layout and design. For example, you can't grab and drag individual elements like text, images, and buttons.
In fact, you can't even add individual elements like buttons or titles to your page. Instead, you can only add complete “layout blocks” to your pages. If you choose a button, for example, you'll also get a title, text, and image along with it.
This is incredibly inconvenient and restrictive in a way I've never seen before with any website builder. It's like going to IKEA and not being able to buy just a desk lamp, but instead only being able to purchase a desk lamp that's permanently soldered to a desk.
I understand the concept behind it. Jimdo wants to make things as simple as possible for users and give beginners every advantage. But this isn't simple. This approach is incredibly frustrating and limiting, making it practically impossible to create the site you actually want.
I can't accept the idea that this is “the future of website building,” as Jimdo would have you believe.
Jimdo Creator
The Jimdo Creator option (for this you select The system for programmers) is more similar to what you're used to with other website builders.
And no, contrary to what Jimdo suggests, this option doesn't require any programming knowledge or coding skills either. It's simply a good ol' code-free website builder, though it does offer you a bit more freedom than Jimdo Dolphin.
(You can add your own HTML and CSS code if you want, but this is absolutely not necessary and not something that's emphasized within the editor.)
When setting up a website with Jimdo Creator, you'll be asked a few questions, including which business industry you're in.
Afterward, you'll be presented with several design options (each with their own color variations), but you can also choose something that has little to do with your selected industry or website type.
None of these designs are particularly attractive. Many of them even look outdated.
The Jimdo Creator is Jimdo's old website builder. I suspect they want to phase it out eventually and focus exclusively on Dolphin. This might also explain why Jimdo claims that Jimdo Creator is for “programmers”: it could be a way to discourage new users from choosing it.
The Creator Site Editor
Just like the Dolphin site editor, the Creator site editor is also disappointing. It simply doesn't feel easy and intuitive. And despite the tool's age, it doesn't feel finished. It's as if it's still in beta mode.
The editor lacks a clear visual hierarchy, forcing you to look two or three times to figure out where to click. You need to save each element individually (highly unusual: auto-save is standard these days) whenever you make changes. Buttons (like “delete” or the drag handle) aren't where you'd expect them to be. If you want to undo a change to an element, you have to press a button labeled “ignore” – which makes no sense whatsoever in this context.
In short, it's a complete mess.
On top of that, choosing a different design for your website could potentially ruin your site's layout.
The Jimdo Creator site editor is easily one of the worst on the market, and I feel sympathy for those running their sites on it (especially since I strongly suspect that Jimdo will eventually abandon the product or discontinue support for it).
Other considerations
The above should paint a clear enough picture of why you should never use Jimdo. However, for the sake of completeness, I'll discuss their customer service and pricing below.
Customer service
Jimdo has a knowledge base and a support ticket system. They don't offer phone support or live chat.
Their knowledge base is fairly well put together. The articles are quite concise but do what they need to do.
Their ticketing system means you can expect to wait a full day for a response. I wasn't impressed with Jimdo's support. It usually boils down to being redirected to their knowledge base, and if you still can't figure it out after that, you'll have to wait another day for an answer. This way, even a simple problem can drag on for days or weeks.
Jimdo's customer service receives the harshest criticism from users (more on this later).
Paid plans
Jimdo is far from cheap. Additionally, their most affordable plans are stripped down to the bare bones and lack crucial features.
These are the 5 plans you can choose from:
- Play (free)
- Start (€9 per month)
- Grow (€15 per month)
- Grow Legal (€20 per month)
- Unlimited (€39 per month)
The most frustrating limitations are in the support and the number of pages allowed.
The Starter plan, which costs €9 per month, has a limit of 10 web pages. If you exceed this limit, you'll need to upgrade to the Grow plan, which is almost twice as expensive (and also has a page limit, this time of 50 pages).
Almost any decent website will quickly exceed 10 pages, so you can pretty much bet that sooner or later you'll need to upgrade to a much more expensive plan. None of the website builders I'm familiar with impose a similar limit.
Additionally, with the Start plan, you'll have to wait 1-2 business days for a customer service response. This wait time is unacceptably long.
Another issue is that you can only pay annually, even though the website displays prices on a monthly basis.
Jimdo reviews: what do their users think?
Overall, users online are dissatisfied with Jimdo.
User reviews typically focus on one of the following issues:
- Technical issues such as customers being unable to complete checkout on Jimdo online stores (see screenshot below)
- Poor customer service
- Automatic renewals and having a collection agency breathing down your neck if you don't pay (!)
- Dramatic price increases over the years
Of course, there are also satisfied customers. Quite a few positive reviews mention how easy they find it to build a website with Jimdo.
However, the overall sentiment is negative.
Conclusion
Before I started this review, I hadn't really heard of Jimdo. But while doing research for this review, I discovered that 30 million websites have been built using the platform. That's an impressive number.
I strongly advise you not to join this group of 30 million. Jimdo – both their Dolphin and their older Creator product – fall short in every aspect. Both tools feel unintuitive and are severely limited in terms of functionality, design, and control.
In addition, Jimdo is extremely expensive, and their plans come with ridiculous restrictions like page limits. This feels like nothing short of pure price gouging.
The good news is that there are countless website builders that are actually good. Examples include Wix and Webador. You can try both for free.
If you're willing to invest a bit more time in creating your site, then I recommend WordPress. That's what I use to build all my own sites. In this WordPress guide, I'll show you exactly what my process is for creating a WordPress site.
