If you’re new to Wix and trying to figure out the difference between “Wix Studio,” “Wix AI Website Builder,” and the regular “Wix Editor,” you’re not alone. A lot of people land on this page after googling older names like Wix ADI or Editor X and then get confused when Wix’s own website doesn’t use those names anymore.
Here’s the short version: Wix hasn’t just added features over the years, it has renamed and rebuilt some of its tools completely. What used to be called Wix ADI is now the Wix AI Website Builder. What used to be called Editor X is now Wix Studio. If you’ve been building a mental map of Wix based on an older article, a YouTube video, or a friend’s advice, some of what you “know” is probably out of date.
I’ve spent years working with all three editing options on my own projects and client sites — you can see the full breakdown in my Wix review and I know how overwhelming it feels the first time you open your Wix dashboard and see three different (and confusingly similar-sounding) ways to build a website. This guide breaks each one down in plain language. No design or coding background required, so you can pick the right starting point and avoid rebuilding your site from scratch later.
In short: if you want the fastest, easiest way to get a site live and don’t need deep customization, start with the Wix AI Website Builder. If you want more creative control without touching code, use the Classic Wix Editor. If you’re a professional, an agency, or you need a highly custom, large-scale website, Wix Studio is the tool built for that job.
Wix Editors Comparison Table
1. Wix’s Three Website Editors: Old Names, New Names, and What They Actually Are
Wix currently offers three separate ways to build a website, and each one comes from a different point in Wix’s history. Knowing where each tool came from actually makes it a lot easier to understand what it’s good at today.
Wix AI Website Builder (formerly Wix ADI)
The Wix AI Website Builder started life in 2016 under a very different name: Wix ADI, short for “Artificial Design Intelligence.” Back then, it worked by asking you a short series of multiple-choice questions about your business and style, then assembling a website based on your answers.
Wix ADI was officially retired on November 10, 2024. Any old ADI sites were automatically moved over to the Classic Wix Editor so their owners could keep editing them. In its place, Wix launched a much more capable tool that kept the name Wix AI Website Builder — but works completely differently under the hood.
Instead of clicking through preset questions, you simply describe the website you want in plain language, the same way you’d explain it to a person. This newer version runs on what Wix calls Wix Harmony, its AI editing experience launched in January 2026, powered by an AI agent named Aria. You type a prompt, Aria builds a starting site around it, and you can keep chatting with Aria to make changes — or switch to manual drag-and-drop editing whenever you want more precise control.
So if you’ve read older reviews calling Wix ADI “limited” or “just a starting point,” know that the tool has moved on quite a bit since then — even though a lot of that older advice is still floating around online under the ADI name.
Classic Wix Editor
The Classic Wix Editor is the tool most people picture when they think “Wix.” It’s been around the longest, and it’s built around one simple idea: drag elements — text boxes, images, buttons — anywhere you want on the page, no coding involved.
You start by picking a ready-made template from Wix’s library (there are hundreds, sorted by industry), or you can start from a blank page if you’d rather build everything yourself. Either way, once you’re inside the editor, you’re free to move things around, change colors and fonts, and rearrange sections until the page looks the way you want.
This is the editor Wix keeps supporting and improving for everyday users — small business owners, bloggers, freelancers — and, importantly, Wix hasn’t announced any plans to phase it out or force people onto something else. If a simple, visual, no-code website builder is what you’re after, this is usually the safest and most familiar starting point.
One exception worth flagging: if your main goal is a polished, portfolio-only site rather than a general business site, it’s worth comparing Wix to a niche portfolio platform like Adobe Portfolio — this comparison walks through the differences.
Wix Studio (formerly Editor X)
Wix Studio’s story starts with Editor X, a more advanced Wix editor launched in 2020 for professional designers who found the Classic Editor too limiting. Editor X introduced things like flexible grids and more precise responsive design controls — the kind of features web professionals expect from a serious design tool.
In 2023, Wix rebranded and rebuilt this advanced editor as Wix Studio, folding in everything Editor X could do and adding a lot more on top: real-time team collaboration, custom code support, and a full design system built for agencies managing multiple client sites. The migration from Editor X to Wix Studio rolled out gradually and was fully completed by January 2025 — every remaining Editor X site now runs on Wix Studio, and Editor X no longer exists as a separate product.
So if you’re searching for “Editor X” today expecting a separate tool, Wix Studio is simply what it’s called now — with a broader feature set than Editor X ever had.
This is the option built for people who already understand website structure — designers, developers, and agencies delivering client work — and are comfortable with a steeper learning curve in exchange for full control.
2. Which Wix Editor Is Right for You?
Choosing between these three tools mostly comes down to three questions: how much time you want to spend, how much control you actually need, and whether you’re comfortable with a bit of a learning curve.
If you want a website live today, with as little effort as possible, the Wix AI Website Builder is the easiest starting point. Describe your business to Aria, let it generate a working site, swap in your own text and photos, and you’re most of the way there. It’s a good fit for personal pages, small local businesses, or anyone who just needs an online presence without the fuss.
If you want more say in how your site looks without learning any code, the Classic Wix Editor is the sweet spot. You still start from a template, but you can move, resize and restyle almost anything by hand. This is the option I usually recommend to freelancers, small business owners, and bloggers who have a specific look in mind and are willing to spend an afternoon (or a few) getting it right.
If you’re building websites for other people, or your project needs pixel-perfect layouts, complex responsive behavior, or custom code, Wix Studio is worth the steeper learning curve. It’s overkill for a simple personal site, but it’s the right tool if you’re working professionally or planning something ambitious.
3. How Much Design Freedom Do You Really Get?
“Design flexibility” is just a way of asking: once your site exists, how much can you actually change? The answer is quite different across all three editors.
Layouts and Templates
With the Wix AI Website Builder, you can rearrange the sections Aria creates, swap out content, and adjust colors and fonts — but you’re working within the structure the AI already set up. If you want to build a layout completely from scratch, this isn’t the tool for that.
The Classic Wix Editor gives you noticeably more room to move. Beyond rearranging sections, you get real design controls over spacing, styling and page structure though building something highly unconventional still has its limits.
With Wix Studio, there are effectively no limits. You can build layouts from a blank canvas using flexible grid systems, without relying on a template at all, which is exactly why professionals reach for it on complex projects.
Breakpoints and Responsive Design, Explained Simply
A “breakpoint” is just the screen size where a website’s layout changes to fit the device — for example, switching from a three-column layout on a desktop screen to a single column on a phone. Every website needs to handle this well, since most visitors arrive on mobile.
The Wix AI Website Builder handles this entirely on its own — you don’t control it directly, you just check the result on different devices and ask Aria to adjust anything that looks off.
The Classic Editor automatically creates a mobile version of your site, which you can then tweak separately. The catch: edits you make on desktop and mobile don’t sync with each other, so you’ll often end up adjusting both versions by hand.
Wix Studio is the only one of the three that lets you set your own custom breakpoints and control exactly how elements behave at each screen size — desktop, tablet, mobile, or anything in between.
Drag-and-Drop: Not the Same in All Three
All three editors technically use “drag-and-drop” — clicking and dragging elements into place, but it works differently in each one.
In the Wix AI Website Builder, you can move or hide individual elements, but most of the layout logic is still handled by the AI.
The Classic Editor gives you true freeform drag-and-drop: you can place things almost anywhere on the page. The downside is that it’s easy to accidentally misalign elements if you’re not paying attention — worth double-checking as you go.
Wix Studio uses a more structured version of drag-and-drop, based on the same layout logic (flexbox and grid) that professional web developers use. It takes longer to learn, but it gives you far more predictable results on complex pages.
4. Wix AI Website Builder in 2026: Meet Aria
Since the Wix AI Website Builder has changed the most out of the three editors, it’s worth walking through how it actually works today.
You start by describing your website in a sentence or two — your business, the style you’re after, what pages you need. Aria, the built-in AI agent, generates a working site around that description: pages, layout, sample text and images already in place.
From there, you have two ways to keep going:
- Keep talking to Aria in plain language — “make the header darker,” “add a booking page,” “write better copy for the About section” — and watch the changes appear.
- Switch to manual editing and adjust things by hand: swap photos, rewrite text, move sections, tweak colors and fonts yourself.
You can go back and forth between the two as often as you like, which is a real improvement over the old Wix ADI, where your only real option after the initial setup was manual, section-by-section editing with no ongoing AI help.
That said, this option still isn’t meant for complex, highly customized projects. You won’t get the layout freedom of the Classic Editor or Wix Studio here — what you get instead is speed. For a personal site, a small business page, or a first version of a site you plan to refine later, that trade-off usually makes sense.
5. Speed, Performance and SEO
How a website looks matters, but so does how fast it loads and how easily search engines can understand it. Here’s how the three editors compare.
Load Times
Sites built with the Wix AI Website Builder tend to load quickly, mostly because the AI avoids overly complex layouts by design. You’re trading some design freedom for lighter, faster pages.
The Classic Editor gives you more design freedom, which can come at a small performance cost — the more elements and effects you add by hand, the heavier the page can get. For a typical small site, this usually isn’t noticeable.
Wix Studio is built on newer infrastructure and generally delivers the best performance of the three, even for visually complex sites — as long as you build it thoughtfully.
Code Cleanliness
You’ll never see or touch the underlying code in the Wix AI Website Builder or the Classic Editor — that’s part of the point, since neither requires any coding knowledge. Behind the scenes, the Classic Editor’s code tends to be a bit messier, simply because freeform drag-and-drop makes it easy to place things inconsistently. Wix Studio produces cleaner, more structured code, and it’s the only one of the three that lets developers add custom code directly.
SEO Capabilities
All three editors let you set the basics — page titles, meta descriptions, image alt text, custom URLs. The Wix AI Website Builder handles most of this automatically and offers AI-generated suggestions for meta tags, which is convenient but leaves less room for fine-tuning if you’re targeting specific keywords. The Classic Editor gives you manual control over the same settings, plus optional AI suggestions when you want them. Wix Studio goes furthest, with full control over structured data (schema markup) and technical SEO settings — features that matter more on larger, competitive sites.
6. Learning Curve: How Long Before You Feel Comfortable?
Learning Curve for Each Editor
The Wix AI Website Builder asks the least of you — you don’t need any design or coding experience, since you’re mostly describing what you want and letting Aria handle the details.
The Classic Editor takes a bit longer to feel natural, especially if you want to explore everything it offers — spacing, alignment, section settings. Most people get comfortable with it after a few hours of hands-on use.
Wix Studio has the steepest learning curve by far. You’ll need to get familiar with concepts like containers, breakpoints and layout hierarchies — similar to what you’d encounter on professional design tools like Webflow. It rewards the time you put in, but it isn’t the place to start if you’ve never built a website before.
Support and Getting Started
Wix offers help across all three tools, just at different depths. The AI Website Builder guides you step by step as you go, so it’s hard to get lost. The Classic Editor comes with a large knowledge base, in-editor tips, and standard customer support. Wix Studio has its own dedicated learning center, with in-depth tutorials and documentation aimed at professionals.
Time to Launch
If speed is your priority, the Wix AI Website Builder wins easily — you can have a working site online within minutes of writing your first prompt, though replacing the placeholder content with your own text and photos will realistically take a bit longer.
With the Classic Editor, plan for a couple of hours to get a decent site live, and potentially a few days if you want to fine-tune every detail yourself.
Wix Studio isn’t built for speed — it’s built for precision. Expect to spend real time planning your layout and testing responsiveness before launch, especially on a larger site.
7. Can You Switch Between Editors Later?
This is one of the most common questions people ask before they commit to an editor, and the honest answer is: not directly.
Once you build a site in one of these three editors, it stays tied to that editor. A site built with the Wix AI Website Builder can’t be converted into a Classic Editor or Wix Studio project. A Classic Editor site can’t be opened in Wix Studio, and vice versa. If you outgrow your current editor, your only option is to rebuild the site from scratch in the new one.
This is exactly why it’s worth spending a little time upfront thinking about where your project might be headed — not just where it is today. If there’s a real chance you’ll need more control down the line (say, you’re starting simple now but expect to hire a designer or scale up later), it may be worth starting with a more flexible editor from day one, even if it takes a bit longer to learn.
Read also: How to Hire Someone to Build a Website8. Which Wix Editor Should You Pick?
Here’s the practical breakdown I give people who ask me this exact question.
Choose the Wix AI Website Builder if…
- You want a website online as fast as possible, with minimal effort
- You have no design or coding background at all
- You’re building a personal site, a simple portfolio, a landing page, or a small business site with basic needs
- You’re comfortable letting AI make most of the layout and content decisions
- You don’t need deep customization
Choose the Classic Wix Editor if…
- You want creative control without touching any code
- You’re willing to spend some time customizing a template by hand
- You need a small-to-medium website with real design flexibility
- You don’t need advanced responsive controls or custom breakpoints
Choose Wix Studio if…
- You’re a designer, developer, freelancer, or agency working on client projects
- You need pixel-perfect control and full responsive design across devices
- You’re comfortable with (or ready to learn) a steeper learning curve in exchange for real flexibility
- You may need custom code or team collaboration features
There’s no universally “best” editor — only the one that fits where your project is today, and realistically, where it’s headed. Take a few minutes to think that through before you start building; it’s a lot easier than rebuilding your whole site later.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Wix ADI still available?
No. Wix ADI was retired on November 10, 2024. Any websites built with it were automatically moved to the Classic Wix Editor, where they can still be edited. If you’re looking for Wix’s AI-powered website builder today, that’s the Wix AI Website Builder, powered by Aria.
What happened to Editor X?
Editor X was rebranded as Wix Studio starting in 2023, and the migration of all remaining Editor X sites was fully completed by January 2025. Editor X no longer exists as a separate product — Wix Studio is its direct successor, with a considerably larger feature set.
Is Wix Harmony the same thing as the Wix AI Website Builder?
Essentially, yes. Wix Harmony is the name of the underlying AI-powered editing experience — built around the Aria AI agent, that today’s Wix AI Website Builder runs on. In everyday use, you’ll simply see it referred to as the “AI Website Builder” when you start a new site.
Will Wix force me to move off the Classic Editor?
Not based on anything Wix has announced. The Classic Editor continues to be maintained and supported, and there’s no publicized plan to phase it out or push existing users onto Wix Studio or the AI Website Builder.
Can I upgrade my Classic Editor site into Wix Studio?
No — there’s no direct upgrade path. If you decide you need Wix Studio’s tools later on, you’ll need to rebuild your site there from scratch.