What agencies should weigh differently than a solo business owner picking a builder for themselves.
An agency evaluating AI website builders is solving a different problem than a business owner building their own site. The tool needs to work well across many different client sites, support handoff or ongoing management, and not box the agency into a look that's hard to differentiate between clients.
A few criteria that matter more for agency use than for a single business:
Design flexibility and white-labeling. If every client site starts to look similar because the AI leans on a narrow set of templates, that's a real problem for an agency's differentiation. Framer AI scores highest in our testing on design flexibility and visual distinctiveness, which matters more here than for a single small business.
Multi-site management. Handling several client accounts efficiently — ideally from one dashboard — saves real operational time compared to managing each site as a fully separate account.
Client handoff. Consider whether the platform makes it easy to eventually transfer ownership or access to the client, or whether the agency is expected to manage the site indefinitely.
Custom code / advanced control, when needed. Some client projects need custom interactions or integrations beyond what AI generation alone produces. Tools with an underlying code layer (Framer's component system, or WordPress under 10Web) give agencies an escape hatch that pure no-code generators don't.
For most client work, our ranking puts Framer AI and Wix ahead of the more small-business-focused tools (XAIWebsites, Durable) specifically because of their customization depth — see the full scores in our AI website builder ranking. That said, for high-volume, templated client sites (e.g., many similar local-business clients), XAIWebsites' speed and low-maintenance defaults can still be the more efficient choice operationally, even if the design ceiling is lower.
The right answer really depends on whether the agency's value proposition is speed/volume or design differentiation — those pull toward different tools.