When comparing Layers vs Wix, the Slant community recommends Wix for most people. In the question“What is the best website builder for a portfolio site?” Wix is ranked 5th while Layers is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose Wix is:
Wix has an add-on store, called the App Market, that includes community developed bits of functionality (such as comments, calendars and integrations with third-party services) that you can add to your site. The store includes both free and paid add-ons.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Open source
Layers is an open source website builder. The source code is freely available on GitHub.
Pro Ability to add custom CSS
While designing a whole website without coding is possible with layers, for more advanced users who want to inject custom CSS to their website, it's possible to do so through a plugin called DevKit.
Pro Functionality can be extended with community plug-ins
Wix has an add-on store, called the App Market, that includes community developed bits of functionality (such as comments, calendars and integrations with third-party services) that you can add to your site. The store includes both free and paid add-ons.
Pro Straightforward drag & drop interface
There's a selection of elements you can choose from in the sidebar that you can drag and drop into the page and edit. There are common elements such as text, images and buttons as well as less common elements such as blog or online store. All elements can be adjusted to some extent to fit your needs. For example, you can change things like the font, weight and style of text and even crop, adjust colors and apply filters to images.
Pro Personalized templates
Wix comes with various kinds of templates based on the users genre and needs, ranging from personal, blog, club, portfolio to commercial.
Pro Wix Code lets you add custom code and backends to your WYSIWYG site when needed
This means you can add custom interactions and API's to your site when needed, but do most of the editing in a GUI. This helps you avoid the need to redo an entire site if you need custom interactions. Also dead easy to connect a database and have dynamic components based on CMS updates.
Pro Great support
Cons
Con Requires WordPress
Requires WordPress which is heavy and too bloated for many simple sites.
Con Not a lot of great pre-made themes available
One of the areas that Layers falls behind is the number of good themes that can be found and installed from the marketplace.
Con Generated html is very bad
A lot of duplicated css, a lot of absolute positioning.
Con Hard to migrate away
There isn't an option to self-host the site, but neither should there be a need to.