Moonfruit Comparison and Review

Pros:

• Low monthly cost
• Offers month-to-month plans in addition to annual plans
• Highly customizable website builder
• The ability to accept online payments is included with this plan
• Includes online shop for selling up to 20 products

Cons:

• No free trial available to test the service
• Poor/minimal guidance for website creation
• Can't edit HTML of the website template
• Phone support not available

Conclusion:

Moonfruit offers beautiful templates with a lot of direction to get you acquainted with their software quickly and easily, but their lack of phone or live chat support means that you cannot receive help with their service in real time. Moonfruit’s software is also highly flexible, and editing content blocks is simple. Moonfruit is a great website builder that we would highly recommend, if their customer support options were better.

Ease of Use

Moonfruit’s Lite website builder received 4 out of 5 stars for Ease of Use.  Moonfruit offers excellent guidance on how to use the website builder via helpful features such as helper text bubbles. Moonfruit does not provide a setup wizard, which some users find helpful. However, Moonfruit makes customizing your site very simple by providing direct editing and drag-and-drop features.  Adding a content block is as easy as selecting the type of block you want and then resizing it for placement on your page. Adding photographs is just as easy as adding content blocks, and Moonfruit provides an image library with over 60 images you can use to customize your site, in addition to letting you upload your own photos.

Moonfruit provides 90 predesigned templates from which you can select and customize. You cannot edit your site using HTML, which is a feature that many other builders provide. Moonfruit’s builder is rather flexible and easy to manipulate, but we found it somewhat difficult to add and delete pages when compared with other site builders. They also allow you to insert your site title, description, and keywords, and provide a metatag editor for the purpose of optimizing your sites for search engines. Many types of content may be added to your site such as contact forms and Flash modules.

Customer Support

Moonfruit received 3 out of 5 stars for Customer Support. We found their customer support to be below-average quality due to their lack of phone and live chat support options. Moonfruit does provide email support, but email response is not as speedy as phone or live chat support would be. Moonfruit also provides FAQs and user forms for answering questions and making inquiries, as well as helpful tutorials and a searchable knowledgebase.

Account Features

Moonfruit does not provide you with any email accounts related to your domain (i.e. yourname@yourdomain.com) with their Moonfruit Lite service, but if you purchase a domain name through Moonfruit you will get five email accounts with your account. If five email accounts are not enough, you can easily set up a business account through Gmail or YahooMail. Moonfruit provides a voucher for 20 British pounds worth of Google AdWords  in order to kick start your online advertising.  This averages out to $32.00 USD. Moonfruit does not provide Privacy Protection from the WHOIS database, which is a publicly searchable database that stores information about the registrants of domain names.  

Pricing

Moonfruit’s Lite package costs $4.50 per month with the purchase of the annual payment term, but you must pay for an entire year’s worth of service up front, which totals to $54.00. Month-to-month pricing is also available for $6.00 per month. Moonfruit Lite does not include a domain registration, but Moonfruit can register a domain for you for $14.99 per year. You can also have a domain registered with another service pointed to Moonfruit’s servers. Moonfruit no longer offers a 14-day free when you purchase the Moonfruit Lite package but instead allows you a 30-day money back guarantee. However, you are provided with the option of signing up for a free account, which means you can host your site on a subdomain of www.moonfruit.com (e.g. yourdomain.moonfruit.com). The free account option offered by Moonfruit provides you with limited hosting space, bandwidth, customer support, and page allotment, but it may be a good starter option that lets you test the service before upgrading to a paid version.  

Upgrades

Moonfruit offers additional plans ranging from $9.00 to $26.25 per month (with an annual contract) that provide you with increased storage, bandwidth, and e-commerce tools if you need more storage space or functionality. Also, every plan above Moonfruit Lite offers at least one free domain registration with your monthly hosting fee.