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Pinegrow Review 2024 – Can It Compete with the Big Players?

Miri Colman Miri Colman Website Development Expert

Buyer Beware – Pinegrow isn’t very user friendly. If you’re like me and don’t have a degree in coding, you’ll probably have a tough time. You’ll also need to download the software onto your computer in order to start building your site.

Overview

💯Free PlanNo
📄Number of Templates10+
🔌Apps/IntegrationsNo
🛒E-commerce ToolsNo
Shared Reseller Dedicated Cloud WordPress

Pinegrow Isn’t for Beginners (or the Easily Intimidated)

Pinegrow is a desktop web builder with a drag and drop editor – and a serious amount of coding functionality. The Pinegrow dashboard and help center is only available in English. It’s pretty easy to figure out how to add and edit a page, but anything past that will land you in a coding black hole if you’re not a developer. For more intuitive options, you should check out our top recommended website builders.

Features and Ease of Use

Pinegrow offers you the tools to get your site online as fast as you can code. Some of the key features include:

Dashboard: The dashboard is cluttered and overwhelming to say the least. They call it a smart WYSIWYG tool, but “what I got” was a whole load of confusion. The interface doesn’t offer any kind of suggestion for where to start or what order to proceed in, which really throws you in at the deep end.

Pinegrow dashboard
The Pinegrow dashboard is busy and overwhelming – where do I even begin?

Pages: Pinegrow offers a selection of pages that you can add to your site to get started. Most of them are fairly limited in design and are only there to give your new site its basic structure. When you open them, these structural templates only give you some text and a mostly barebones HTML document, which can be quite daunting.

Pinegrow page templates
Pinegrow’s bare HTML pages can be more than a little intimidating for non-developers

Element Collection: There is a huge page library containing buttons, UI elements, tables, code blocks, and more, in order to enrich your site. Once you have selected the block you need, you can drag it into the editing area and move it into position with fairly little effort.

Sense of Humor: I’m never one to miss an opportunity to praise vendors who have a sense of humor, so kudos to Pinegrow for mixing up the lorem ipsum placeholder text with all the great meats, and putting a smile on my face… MEATBALL!

Pinegrow panel title
Pinegrow might not be a user-friendly product, but at least it has humor!

Pricing and Support

There is a free trial available, but you have to enter an email address to sign up before you’ll get a Trial Key to open the software on your computer.

After that, Pinegrow offers three different payment options:

  1. A one-time payment that will allow you to use the software forever and comes with one year of free updates
  2. A monthly subscription
  3. An annual subscription

Both the monthly and annual subscriptions come with free updates for as long as you renew.

In terms of support, I was actually impressed by the number of help articles, videos, and tutorials available. What the Pinegrow builder lacks in user experience and intuition, it makes up for with tooltips. On top of that, there is a really responsive email support team in case you have specific questions. They got back to me in under four hours and were happy to answer any follow-up questions after that.

Pinegrow customer support response
Pinegrow’s customer support team gave me a quick and useful answer

Comparison

How does Pinegrow match up to the competition?

WixCompareOur Score4.9Compare
SquarespaceCompareOur Score4.8Compare
PinegrowCompareOur Score4.0Compare
SimpleSiteCompareOur Score2.5Compare

Pinegrow REVIEW: BOTTOM LINE

The Pinegrow builder is not recommended for those who are unfamiliar with coding or have never built a website before. It has a steep and time-consuming learning curve, so if you’re looking to quickly launch your website, this might not be the best option for you.

Pros: 
  • Freedom and flexibility (but only for people who know how to code)
  • Affordable monthly plan
  • Huge library of help tutorials and articles
  • Great sense of humor 

Cons:
  • Dashboard is incredibly difficult to navigate
  • Pinegrow doesn’t offer hosting or custom domains (even with its paid plans), so you’ll have to go elsewhere for hosting even if you build your site there

You might want to consider Pinegrow if you’d like having the freedom to edit your site’s code. However, it wasn’t user friendly enough to make our short list. For more intuitive options, check out the ten best website builders in 2024.
Miri Colman Miri Colman
Miri is an experienced content writer with a passion for technology. She is originally from London but loves to travel the world. She loves chocolate and reality TV. She does not drink tea or coffee, much to the horror of her nation.
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More complete than older Dreamweaver with grate preview and making real competition to cloud web builders

Website builders are expensive long run. Pinegrow instead is a PC application software editor tool that runs on your computer. You purchase ones and you do not need to pay monthly clouds subscriptions. This allowed you to make a one time purchase and build with it your websites. A similar editor like older Adobe Dreamweaver but with better real-time browser preview. The user interface is intuitive and very flexible. Comfortable drag and dock system similar to the popular Unity game engine.

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Alan Mattano, USA
August 11, 2018
5
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