Strikingly

There are three plans available: Free, Limited and Pro.

Free Plan
The first tier is the Free plan. This plan comes with 5 GB monthly bandwidth. It also gets you a yoursite.strikingly.com address, and shows a Powered by Strikingly badge at the bottom of your website. On this plan, you can try out Strikingly's Simple Store eCommerce tool with 1 product.

Limited Plan
The next-up plan is the Limited plan. You get up to 50 GB monthly bandwidth and a free custom domain name and email account. You also get full use of the Strikingly website builder. This plan also raises the eCommerce product maximum to 5. Unfortunately, this plan does not remove the Powered by Strikingly badge from the footer of your website.

Month-to-month: $12/month
1-yr billing term: $8/month
2-yr billing term: $7/month

Pro Plan
The Pro Plan builds upon the Limited plan but comes with a lot more features. Monthly bandwidth is unlimited. This plan also gives you access to the mobile action buttons, HTML editor, advanced image editing tools, password protection, as well as full access to the Strikingly App store for more widgets and apps. This plan also increase the number of product you can sell to 20 and removes the Powered by Strikingly branding from your website.

Month-to-month: $20/month
1-yr billing term: $16/month
2-yr billing term: $14/month

There is a way to get the Pro Plan for free. Strikingly offers up to 12 months of the Pro plan for free if you send them referrals.

Strikingly offers 11 beautiful templates that you can use to edit and build your website. All of these templates are responsive – they will be automatically resized for mobile devices.

You will find that all of Strikingly's templates, with the exception of those available on the Pro Plan, are one-page designs. This makes them simple to build. Your website is broken into sections instead of pages.

And because Strikingly websites are all one-page deep, it is a plus for mobile – visitors don't have to jump through pages on your website for your information, they simply need to scroll down your website to the sections they want to see. The one-page design lends well to one-handed operation, making truly the website builder for the mobile age.

Unfortunately, there is a serious lack of meaningful customization options for themes. You can change the website's color, font styles and background; but you can't change the font color and sizes, and element border colors. Also, once you have chosen a template, all you site customizations are limited by that template. While you can switch templates any time, all site customizations are limited to what the template already has to offer. For example, you can only pick from the template's available color variations (unless you upgrade to the Pro plan). There is also no dragging and dropping new elements into wherever you want. You build your website by adding sections and each template has its own set of sections – you are limited to only those available sections blocks.

Most website builders are not designed to create one-page websites. For example, Wix allow you to build a one-page website but because its editor is designed for multi-page websites, it can become confusing. But because Strikingly exclusively builds one-page websites, they have the best editor for doing just that.

Your one-page website is made up of sections – you build your website by adding sections. Sections are essentially large content block that break the page. Strinkingly's interface make building sections simple and intuitive.

You won't find page elements on the Editor panel as you would on most other site builders. Instead, it lets you switch and add sections. Unlike other website builders, Strikingly does not use the drag-and-drop interface. You can't position page elements anywhere you like – each template has set areas for images and text, etc. – you can only add elements as dictated by the theme.

While this approach can seem restrictive, it does make the process of building a website a lot more straightforward and it does eliminate any user design errors. For example, you can add and edit text and media within page sections, but you won't be able to move them around as they are locked in the section. As a result, some of the sections can end up feeling a bit cookie cutter, but at least you won't have to worry about misaligned elements. Each section is defined by the allowed element types and their exact designs.

There are ways to change the layout of your sections. Some sections offer a "Change Layout" button, which gives you a few different layout options. For example, you can swap photos and text from left to right or vice versa.

Additional site customization options are found in the Styles and Settings menus. From the Styles menu, you can change a template's background colors as well as font styles. Unfortunately, you can't change the font color and sizes, nor the element border colors. The Settings button offers site-wide options such a site title, domain name, descriptions for SEO, mobile actions (only for Pro accounts), navigation, custom code (only for Pro accounts) and language. There are six language choices: English, French, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese, both Simplified and Traditional.

Another feature you will find on the editor is the question-mark button. After tapping on the button, a text box will pop up into which you can type the nature of your problem or question. It will then display relevant knowledgebase info or lets you send an email to the Strikingly support team.

Because the simplicity of editor interface and the concept of the website builder, Strikingly doesn't come with a very rich feature set.

Standard features include Simple Store, Simple Blog, Strikingly App store, Social feed, gallery, contact form and basic website analytics. Pro accounts also get the image slider, mobile action buttons, password protection, collaboration, custom header and footer code, and A/B testing.

To start a blog, simply add the Blog section to your web page and it will link to individual post pages. When creating a new blog post, you can add a variety of inline media including images, videos, call-to-action buttons and quotes. The blog manager features a simple interface that lets you customize how your posts will appear on your web page. Strikingly's Simple Blog also comes with social sharing and SEO functionalities. But to enable comments, you must register your website with Disque.com.

Just like the Simple Blog, the Simple Store is a section that you can add to your web page. Simple enable the section, add our products and set up your payment method (PayPal or Stripe). You can sell one product under the Free plan, up to 5 products under the Limited plan and up to 20 products under the Pro plan.

There is a contact form you can drop into your website but it doesn't allow you to add new fields — you can simply choose from Name, Email, Phone and Message. Submissions are sent to your email address, but once you've delete those emails, they are gone for good – Strikingly does not save form submissions in a database for you.

The Strikingly App store is where you will find all kinds of third-party apps and integrations. Many popular third-party apps can be found in the app store, such as Google Maps, Soundcloud, ECwid, PayPal, WuFoo, MailChimp and so on. Some apps are free for all accounts, while some are just for Pro users.

Strikingly also offers a one-click site creation. This spectacular feature lets you build a personal website by simply connecting to LinkedIn. Strikingly will import all of your information from your LinkedIn profile and populates the default template for you. You can then use their simple editor to modify any of the elements.

After you've uploaded your images to your Strikingly editor, they will be stored in your Uploaded Images library. This way, you won't need to re-upload your images every time you want to re-use them on your website.

Like Squarespace, Strikingly has implemented the reputable Aviary editor right into their site editor. You can easily resize, crop, add image effects, adjust brightness, adjust contrast and more right from your Strikingly editor.

There are a couple of ways to showcase your images on your Strikingly website: grid gallery or slider.

Strikingly's template designs are very photo-heavy. Great photography leads to beautiful templates. Unfortunately, not all users have their own relevant or beautiful images. If you are running low on stunning images, note that Strikingly offers a library of high quality stock photographs that you can use for your website background, as well as stock icons for your section contents.

You may want to add a video background instead to give your website a little more flair. Strikingly lets you embed a video from YouTube or Vimeo. If you are running low in high quality videos, Strikingly even offers a stock video library where you can choose from.

If you need eCommerce functionality, Strikingly has the Simple Store that lets you set up a simple web store on your website. You can manage up to 20 products depending on the pricing plan you're on. You can add product variations, payment gateways, shipping options and even pre-order from customers. If you are a Pro plan user, you can also create coupon codes. Unfortunately, the coupon code editor is very basic and you can only set % discounts. There is not tax options and digital products are not supported. Also, while you can preview the email notifications your customers receive, you can't customize them as you can with site builders such as Jimdo. Luckily, unlike Squarespace, Strikingly doesn't charge any transaction fees – you only have to pay the PayPal or Stripe processing fees.

Strikingly has an iOS app that allows you to edit and manage your website directly on the iPad. It also lets you upload images to your website directly from your iPad's photo library.

Strikingly throws in a free domain name as well as email address as part of the Limited and Pro plans. Just like Jimdo, Wix and Weebly, custom domain names are not supported on the Free plan – you will need to upgrade to a paid plan in order to use your own domain name.

Once you have purchased your domain from Strikingly, you can then set up your custom domain email address, ie. [email protected]. Note that this custom domain email address is simply a forwarding address – Strikingly does not offer any actual email hosting services. It allows you create a domain email address and then link it to an email address that you already have, ie. Gmail.

For example, it allows people to send email to [email protected] and you will receive it at your Gmail account. And because it's simply a forwarding address, you won't be able to send email from [email protected].

Each domain name purchased from Strikingly gets 3 forwarding email addresses. If you need more than 3, you can order them at $10 for 10.

If you want to send and receive emails from your custom domain email address, you will need to set it up on Google Apps.

You will find the purple the question-mark button displayed prominently on the lower right of the editor. A quick tap on the button and a text box will pop up into which you can type the nature of your problem or question. It will then display relevant knowledgebase info.

Strikingly has an extensive help and FAQ library, covering everything from mobile features to eCommerce, website design and building questions as well as technical assistance.

You can also find updates on new features and on the Strikingly blog. There is also a fun and innovative Idea Forum where other users can collaborate and share ideas and design tricks.

Strikingly does not offer any phone or live chat support. Strikingly promotes a "do it yourself" approach – their editor is very user-friendly and if you need help, there is the Knowledgebase, blog and community forum. And if you need more assistance, they have an email and ticket-based support system where you can turn to for help.

Strikingly is the website builder for the mobile age. While there are many other website builders out there that offers responsive design templates, none of them are specialized in one-page websites. Strikingly's service and editor is simple and easy to use. While the simplicity might not be to everyone's taste, especially those with more demanding needs, but to those who are not looking for advanced features for a one-page or mobile-friendly website, Strikingly is definitely a solid choice.

Strikingly has a Free plan that lets you test drive and to get an idea of what their mobile website builder service is all about before diving in.

Simple in concept and design, Strikingly's websites typically have clear, simple information sections and large photos, which is ideal for mobile screens.

Unfortunately, Strikingly does lack the robust web tools and flexibility in site customizations that other website builders offer. However, because it is a website builder for one-page websites, we can't say it competes directly with Wix, Website.com or any other website builders. Strikingly is just different.