Adobe Dreamweaver Alternatives

This may seem controversial, but the reality is there are no direct Adobe Dreamweaver alternatives. Adobe Dreamweaver stands above the pack regarding enterprise-level website building and associated features. It is the best in class and the gold standard. However, not everybody needs the rich suite of business-grade tools DW provides.

If your web building demands are more basic or you want something more affordable, there are options available:

• Visual Studio Code: Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is a major open-source software editor providing an excellent coding platform. It is an extremely powerful tool that allows you to write JavaScript, Node.js, and TypeScript. In addition, nice features like IntelliSense and autocomplete make VS Code an easy-to-use platform. However, it is much more complete developer software than a web designer.
• BlueGriffon: Another open-source web editor, BlueGriffon, is a popular tool developed by Gecko. Yes, that’s the same engine that powers Mozilla’s Firefox web browser. It is much easier to use than Dreamweaver, and while it is not as well-featured, it boasts plenty of interesting tools. Multiple themes, top-notch tab organization, and more.

If you have come this far into our review, you are probably asking if you should buy Dreamweaver. Do many factors decide whether you should or not, such as how much power you need from your web editor? If you are already using Adobe’s ecosystem, such as Illustrator or Photoshop, then DW becomes a powerful companion.

Still, if you are approaching website design with no coding ability, Dreamweaver is too much technology for you. Sure, it has a visual editor, but some alternatives do a much better job of simplifying website design.

Among them is WordPress, the world’s largest CSS. On WordPress, you can easily pick themes and modify them from easy-to-use menus. WordPress does require some technical experience, but it is a low-code alternative to DreamWeaver.

No-code Dreamweaver Alternatives

What about the no-code folks out there? Well, you need to turn to a website-building software such as Weebly or Wix (there are dozens of other providers too). These lean completely into the MYSIWYG aspect of website design with complete visual editing tools. But, again, you won’t be doing any coding, and this is very much web editing made easy.

The caveat is you will not get the level of control, management, and individuality your coded website built on Dreamweaver can achieve. You will always sacrifice some uniqueness when using a service like Wix or Weebly. Yes, thousands of themes are available, and you can customize formatting, but the site will never be truly your design.

Again, that may be fine for many businesses, especially those lacking coding ability. In these circumstances, tools like Wix and Weebly are excellent. They are also generally more affordable than Dreamweaver because they come bundled with web hosting services.

Free Dreamweaver alternatives

What about free options? Most visual editing website building services are available for free alongside their paid options. You will need plenty of feature compromises to use these free versions. Perhaps the biggest drawback is the lack of a unique URL address. Your site will be saddled with a URL like “mysite.weebly.com.”

For a completely free option, Microsoft’s Expression Web is interesting. You may remember this as a once – relatively expensive – application, but it is now available for free. That’s because Microsoft replaced the app with Visual Studio. Either way, Expression Web is clean and extremely easy to use and allows full code editing capabilities.

The downside? Unfortunately, Expression Web was discontinued in 2011 and has not received new features. However, Microsoft does still issue security updates for the program. It remains a low-cost and effective code editing tool despite its age.

In summary, Adobe Dreamweaver alternatives are diverse, but none is 100% similar to this great software.