If you’re looking for a two-in-one platform for building websites and providing managed hosting, then Jimdo should be one of your top considerations. This German company, founded by two high school friends, offers both paid and free plans that enable users to build and manage a site with minimal coding or hosting experience.
In our Jimdo review, we take a close look at the platform’s features, its pricing model, and its support and security frameworks. Before providing our final thoughts on the platform, we compare it to its competitors and ask whether Jimdo can be considered one of the best web hosting platforms.
Jimdo: Plans and pricing
Jimdo offers two independent website building and hosting products: Jimdo Dolphin and Jimdo Creator. For each product, several plans are available.
Four plans are available: Play, Start, Grow, and Unlimited.
The Play plan is the company’s free option. It enables you to design a simple, five-page website using a jimdosite.com domain with third-party ads. It’s not suitable for businesses but provides a good opportunity to try out the platform before committing to a paid plan.
Several features are common across each of the paid plans, such as SEO optimization tools, administrator analytics, HTTPS security, and an ad-free experience.
The Start plan costs $9 per month and includes a free domain, 10GB of bandwidth, and up to 10 pages.
The Grow plan costs $15 per month and includes email forwarding for five addresses, 20GB of bandwidth, and up to 50 pages.
If you’re serious about your website, we recommend the Unlimited plan. Although it costs $39 per month, it comes with unlimited bandwidth, an unlimited number of pages, personal design support, and priority customer support.
Jimdo Creator provides five plans: Free, Pro, Business, SEO Plus, and Platinum. Respectively, they cost $0, $10, $20, $30, and $40 per month.
This flexible pricing model enables amateur coders to choose a plan that is ideal for their individual needs. The main differences between the plans are the amounts of storage and bandwidth provided, and whether SEO tools are included.
Features
Having the right amount of storage space is crucial for a website. This is especially true if you plan on storing videos and other interactive content on yours. Fortunately, the company’s storage offerings are comparable to most competitors.
The Jimdo Dolphin Unlimited, Grow, and Start plans respectively provide unlimited, 15GB, and 5GB of storage space.
For Jimdo Creator, unlimited storage is provided to Platinum, SEO Plus, and Business subscribers. Pro subscribers get 5GB storage.
Interface and in use
The choice you make between Jimdo Dolphin and Jimdo Creator will significantly affect how you interact with the platform. As we’ve previously explained, Jimdo Dolphin is a drag-and-drop design studio requiring zero coding skills, whereas Jimdo Creator is more advanced, requires some coding skills, and enables superior customizability.
This flexibility means Jimdo is suitable for most users, whether they have minimal design and coding skills or are prepared to customize their site with personalized code.
Support
The level of support customers receive is mostly dependent on the subscription they purchase. Start and Grow plan customers can expect to receive a reply from the Jimdo support team via email within 48 hours of submitting a request.
However, if you’re an Unlimited plan customer, you are entitled to priority customer support. This means the company guarantees a response in less than one hour, no matter the time of day or night. Although we were unable to confirm whether they achieve this lofty goal, it is still superior to many competitors’ offerings.
Beyond email correspondence, there are a number of support articles and how-to guides. Although the existing content is useful and better written than that of many competitors, advice on a greater range of topics would be welcomed. The lack of explanatory images is also disappointing.
Security
All Jimdo plans, even the free options, come with HTTPS encryption. This is the industry standard for secure web browsing and will prove to your customers that your website is safe and secure.
Regarding your own security and privacy, we’re also impressed. Because Jimdo is headquartered in the European Union, they are fully compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation, one of the most comprehensive frameworks for protecting customers’ data. What this means in practice is that your data (and that of your customers) is stored securely by Jimdo. The company’s privacy policy is unambiguous and makes clear how and when data is collected and used.
Our only criticism is that we were unable to find out exactly where Jimdo’s data centers are located.
The competition
If you’re looking for a similarly priced European-based website builder, consider Voog. Like Jimdo, it provides HTTPS encryption at no extra cost, but also includes unlimited bandwidth in all its paid plans.
However, if you prefer a website builder with a global reputation and a significant customer base, you might want to consider providers such as Squarespace or Wix. These companies provide highly affordable plans and highly scalable content management services. If you want a no-hassle hosting solution, we’d advise choosing one of these providers.
Final verdict
Jimdo is a reliable and easy to use website builder and managed-hosting platform. We appreciate that customers can choose between the drag-and-drop Dolphin studio or the more advanced Creator studio.
Although there’s little to fault Jimdo on, it is ultimately a small player in the website builder market, and therefore can’t capitalize on the benefits accruing from economies of scale. In this regard, competitors such as Squarespace or Wix might have the edge.