What each website builder lets you take away

What each one hands back on the way out

Wix hands back your uploaded images and videos, and your data as spreadsheets. It does not hand back the site. Squarespace hands back one .xml file built for importing into WordPress, carrying your pages, your text and your pictures, with the design left behind. GoDaddy hands back a spreadsheet of shop products, if you are on the plan that has a shop, and documents no way at all to take the pages. Grafter hands back the project itself: the source files, as a zip, or pushed into a GitHub repository or a Vercel account that belongs to you.

The shape of that answer repeats across the category. What travels is words, pictures and rows of data. What does not travel is everything that turned them into a website — the layout, the styling, the menu, the forms, and anything that took a booking or a payment. The exception is a builder that was writing ordinary source files the whole time, because then there is no conversion step for things to fall out of.

Webflow is the interesting middle case and the reason the table has a column for it. It genuinely exports static HTML, CSS and JavaScript — a real answer to this question, and a better one than anything else on the list bar a repository. Two things qualify it. The export is a paid-plan feature, absent from the free tier in Webflow's own pricing table, so the exit cannot be tested before paying. And what comes out is the shell rather than the site: collection lists export their empty state, forms stop submitting, and site search stops working. You take away the design and leave behind the content that filled it, which is close to the exact opposite of what Squarespace hands you.

Every competitor line in the table below carries the date it was last read off that vendor's own help pages, and nothing is repeated from a comparison article. The dates are there because this is the corner of a builder's documentation that changes without an announcement: an undated comparison goes quietly wrong rather than loudly, and a reader has no way to tell a fact from a fossil. What changed and when is at the foot of this page.

Note. One of the two open questions on this page is now settled and one is worse than it looked. Squarespace's form blocks, which appeared on neither its exports list nor its does-not-export list, do have a route out: each block's submissions download as a .csv, one submission to a row — though a file somebody attached through the form is not in it, only a link to it. Wix's media question is still unanswered, and the documentation now contradicts itself: one Wix page scopes its AVIF conversion to what is served on your live site, another says an image is converted when you upload it and that this cannot be turned off, and a third — about a different product — says a gallery visitor downloads the original. Nothing states which of those describes your own download from the Media Manager. It would take an account and a file comparison to settle, so it stays out of the table.

What goes missing, which is the useful half

A feature grid tells you what a builder has. The exit tells you what you have. Read the exclusion list rather than the inclusion list, because the exclusion list is the one that becomes your job on a Tuesday.

On Wix the question does not arise in that shape, because there is no site export to have exclusions from. Its help centre page on exporting or embedding a Wix site elsewhere says the site has to be hosted and operated on Wix's servers, and that the architecture does not support external hosting because it runs on Wix's own technology — checked 14 August 2026. That is a clear answer, published by Wix, and a clear answer is worth more than a vague one. What you can take is your uploaded images and videos from the media manager — not all at once, and the free stock media is not yours to take — plus your CMS collections and your product list as .csv.

Squarespace publishes both lists, which makes it the honest example here rather than the villain. Its export page names what comes across — layout pages, text blocks, image blocks, one blog page with its posts — and then names what does not, and the second list is the longer one. Products, mailing lists and form submissions have separate .csv exports of their own. Those are useful and they are not the site: a spreadsheet of leads is a record of what happened, not a working form, and the storage connections behind it are settings inside the platform that no export carries out.

Here is what the .xml leaves behind, taken from Squarespace's own export page rather than from anybody's review of it, checked 14 August 2026.

• Style settings and custom CSS. The design is not in the file, so the import arrives as text in whatever theme happens to be waiting for it.
• Dropdowns, and anything in a page-specific header, footer or sidebar. The menu is something you rebuild by hand.
• Whole page types: album, cover, index, info, calendar, portfolio and store pages.
• Every blog after the first. One blog page exports, so a site with three means choosing one and retyping the others.
• Drafts, audio blocks, video blocks and product blocks.
• Images in bulk. Squarespace's own page says images come out of the asset library one at a time, and that uploaded videos do not come out at all.

Note. Neither platform is doing anything underhand. This is what a hosted platform is, and both of them wrote it down. The mistake is finding out on the afternoon a client asks for the files, when the answer costs a fortnight you never quoted for.

The only specification that matters in year three

What a builder hands back when you leave is the only specification that matters in year three, and most of them hand back almost nothing.

In month one every builder looks much the same. You describe or you drag, a site appears, the client is pleased. The things people compare — editor style, template quality, how many blocks there are — all get settled inside a fortnight and none of them is permanent. The exit is the one decision you cannot revisit, because by the time it matters you have three client sites, a relationship that is ending, and no way to move any of it without retyping.

One claim on this page is checkable in a repository rather than asserted in a headline. Download the whole project as a zip, or push it to your own GitHub or Vercel account. Export to GitHub or Vercel sits on the free tier, not behind a paid plan, so the exit can be tested before any money changes hands or any client goes near it. The free tier grants 3,000 credits a month, a full site generated and browser preview.

Every plan carries the same two lines underneath it: the code is yours to download, and no lock-in, cancel any time. Read that as a smaller promise than it sounds. It does not mean moving a site is painless. It means the files exist, they are ordinary, and they are already in a format the rest of the industry can open.

Note. Test the claim rather than believe it. Build something on a free tier, export it, and open what comes out before deciding anything. That takes twenty minutes and it works on any builder, this one included.

What comes out of Grafter, and what it is

A build turn writes React source — components and a stylesheet — and nothing else. The export adds the shell around them, so what you download is a project rather than the inside of one: a package.json, a vite.config.js, an index.html, a .gitignore, a README and the source under src. Unzip it, run npm install, run npm run dev, and it is running on your own machine. Run npm run build instead and you get a dist folder of static files you can host anywhere.

There are three ways out and they land in different places. The zip goes to your downloads folder. The GitHub push creates a repository in the account whose token you paste, private unless you say otherwise. The Vercel deploy goes to your own Vercel account, from your own token, and that token is used for the one call and then discarded rather than stored against the project.

That last detail is the one that matters at handover. A deployment sitting in your client's own Vercel account is not something anyone can take away from them later. It does not depend on a Grafter subscription and it is not on a Grafter address.

• React and Vite. The ordinary way of building this kind of site, not a house format that only one company can read.
• No proprietary file types, no theme system to learn, no database to migrate.
• The scaffold is generated at export rather than kept in the project, so it never shows up in the file tree and never gets rewritten by a later build turn.
• The README says the site was built with Grafter. It is a line in a text file and you can delete it like any other line.
• What is not in the download: the conversation that built it, your domain, and the ability to keep changing the site by describing the change.

Note. Cancelling leaves you with a normal React project and the normal ways of editing one. That is the honest description of what you own — not a site that maintains itself, but files that nobody can withdraw.

Who should ignore all of this

If you will never move the site and the client will never ask for the code, exportability is a feature you are paying attention to for no reason. Go and pick on price, and this page has nothing for you.

That is most people and it is not a failing. One site for your own business, which you mean to keep for a decade, on a platform large enough to still be there in a decade — the exit is a hypothetical and the monthly bill is not. Same for a club, a village hall, a one-off event page. Pay the least, get it up, stop thinking about it.

It matters when the site is not yours. A freelancer or a studio is holding somebody else's asset, and the day that relationship ends — badly, or perfectly amicably because they have hired someone in-house — the question stops being theoretical. Grafter prices that reader directly: Studio is $299 a month and Agency starts at $399, both written for people who build sites for other people. Paid plans start at $20 a month, or $16 a month paid yearly, which is the tier for one business rather than a book of them.

The second group is anyone whose site is the business rather than a brochure for it. If the pages are where the money arrives, being able to take them elsewhere stops being a preference and starts being a condition.

Testing the exit before you commit

All of these are minutes of work, and every one of them is cheaper before you sign up than after.

• Build a throwaway site on whatever free tier exists and export it before paying anything. Open the file. Count what is missing rather than what is there.
• Read the vendor's own export page, not a comparison article. Find the list of what is not included, because that list is what becomes your job.
• Register the domain in your own name, or the client's, and away from the builder. It is the one asset that moves cleanly, and the one people most often let somebody else hold.
• Check where messages land and make sure a copy reaches an inbox you control. A form that only fills a dashboard is data you are renting.
• Keep the original photographs somewhere that is not the platform. What you download back is whatever the platform kept, at whatever size it kept it.
• Ask, in writing, what the export produces, and file the answer with the client's contract. Two minutes now settles an argument you would otherwise have in three years.

Note. If you build for other people, put the answer in your proposal. Naming what the client receives if they ever leave you is the cheapest trust available, and it costs nothing at all when the answer is a repository.

What has changed on this page

A comparison of export policy is only worth reading if somebody is still reading the policies. Every row above carries the date it was last checked, and every change to this page is listed below with the date it was made, so you can see for yourself whether this is maintained or abandoned.

The commitment is a re-check of every row each quarter, and a line here whether anything moved or not. A row whose date is more than three months old should be treated as unchecked rather than unchanged — including by us.

Note. Two corrections worth naming rather than burying, because both were in the previous version of this page. Wix's media download was described as returning your file in its original format; Wix's own documentation does not support that and the claim has gone. And Webflow's code export is widely written up as a feature of the product — it is a feature of a paid Workspace plan, and the free tier shows a dash against it in Webflow's own pricing table.

Common questions

Every builder says no lock-in. Why would I believe this one?

Do not believe it, test it. Export to GitHub or Vercel is on the free tier rather than behind a paid plan, so you can build something, download it and read it before any money changes hands. That is the only evidence worth having. And the claim to be sceptical about is rarely this one — it is the marketing around hosted platforms, because what Wix and Squarespace publish themselves is far more modest than what gets said about them second-hand.

What format do I actually get?

A standard Vite and React project: package.json, vite.config.js, index.html and the source under src. You can take it as a zip, as a push into your own GitHub repository, or as a deploy into your own Vercel account. It is not a bundle in a private format and it does not need Grafter to open.

Does the exported code still work after I cancel?

Yes. A zip on your machine and a repository in your own account are not attached to a subscription, and a deployment in your own Vercel account belongs to that account. What cancelling costs you is the ability to keep changing the site by describing the change. The files stay exactly as they were the day you took them.

Can I move an existing site in?

Not as an import. There is no tool that reads a Wix or Squarespace site and rebuilds it. What you do instead is describe the business, let the pages get written, then paste your own wording across wherever you prefer what you already had. Your words and your photographs are the part you own on any platform and the part worth carrying. Keep the old site up while you do it.

Is the code any good, or is it a wall of generated markup?

Judge that yourself rather than take an answer from the company selling it. It is React components and a stylesheet, in the shape somebody writing them by hand would use. The free tier exists partly so you can read the files before deciding, and if you have a developer, have them look at one before you put a client on it. Any builder that makes that test difficult has told you something.

Do I need a developer to run it after I download it?

To keep it as it is, no. The deploy path puts the site into a Vercel account without anyone touching a terminal. To change it after downloading, yes — somebody has to be comfortable running npm install and editing a React component. That is the honest trade, and the alternative is not needing a developer and not being able to leave.