Free Website vs. Jottful: Which Done-For-You Website Is Actually Better for Your Small Business?

Jottful and Hoot Free Website both pitch a similar idea to small business owners: skip the DIY builder, let someone else build your site, and pay an affordable monthly rate instead of a big agency invoice.

Because the pitch sounds so similar, it's worth looking closely at what each one actually includes for the price.

Both companies are also targeting a similar customer: a small business owner, often a solo operator or a team of a handful of people, who has no in-house marketer and no time to become a part-time web developer. Where they diverge is in the balance between price, design flexibility, and what's bundled in beyond the site itself — which is exactly what this comparison walks through.

How Jottful's Pricing Works

Jottful builds you a website using their in-house “Magical Editor” tool. According to Jottful's own pricing page, there's a $99 one-time setup fee if you sign up within 48 hours of viewing your free sample site, then ongoing co-maintenance and hosting starting at $65 per month, with higher tiers running up toward $169 per month depending on the plan and add-ons you choose. Jottful is explicit that it's built for “the smallest of small businesses,” with the owner expected to handle most day-to-day editing themselves through the Magical Editor.

How Hoot Free Website's Pricing Works

Hoot Free Website skips the setup fee entirely: $0 for the design and build of up to 5 pages, and $15 per month for managed hosting once your site is live. There's no 48-hour window to catch a lower price, and no tiered plan structure to navigate — one flat rate covers hosting, with larger update requests handled as needed.

Design and Customization

Jottful's Magical Editor is built around simplicity: you click on text or images directly on the live site to change them, using a small set of template layouts as the foundation. That's genuinely easy for a non-technical owner to use, but it also means the design is working within fairly fixed template constraints. Hoot Free Website takes the opposite approach on the build side — a design team creates your site from scratch around your brand colors, fonts, and voice, with stock photography and content organization included, so you're not fitting your business into someone else's template shape.

What's Included Beyond the Website

Jottful includes security, outage monitoring, updates, and backups as part of its co-maintenance plans, and describes its sites as “SEO-ready.” Based on Jottful's own public materials, it does not advertise a built-in CRM or marketing suite — small businesses that want lead tracking, email campaigns, or pipeline management would need a separate third-party tool on top of a Jottful plan. Hoot Free Website includes the HootBiz CRM directly: leads, pipeline, appointments, email campaigns, invoicing, and review requests, alongside Google SEO essentials (on-page SEO, sitemaps, analytics) set up from day one.

A Quick Example

Consider a solo bookkeeper choosing between the two. On Jottful, she pays $99 up front (assuming she signs within the 48-hour window) and roughly $65/month from there — about $879 in year one. She edits the site herself through the Magical Editor whenever her services or rates change, and if she wants to track client leads, she adds a separate CRM tool on top. On Hoot Free Website, she pays $0 up front and $15/month — $180 in year one — with a design team handling the initial build around her brand, HootBiz managing her leads and follow-ups from day one, and support handling larger updates as they come up. Same underlying goal, a meaningfully different cost and workload over the first year.

Side-by-Side Comparison

Which Should You Choose?

If you want the absolute simplest possible self-editing tool and don't mind working within a template, Jottful's Magical Editor is built for exactly that kind of hands-on simplicity. If you'd rather have a design team build a site matched to your brand at no setup cost, with a CRM and SEO groundwork included in a flat $15/month rate, Hoot Free Website is built around that instead. Compare both against your actual monthly budget over a full year — the gap between $15/month and $65–$169/month adds up quickly.

Frequently Asked Questions