Jimdo Dolphin vs. Jimdo Creator – Which Is Best for You in 2024

That’s why it’s more than a little frustrating that Jimdo is not at all clear on the difference between Creator and Dolphin. To make things worse, Jimdo Dolphin and Jimdo Creator no longer exist, at least not by those names. However, when you create your website with Jimdo, you’ll be asked whether you want to “Create a beautiful website—no coding required” (what used to be called Dolphin) or use “The editor for coding experts” (Creator).

These two options are functionally different builders, and the ideal one for you will depend on your goals and experience.

You won’t find any clarifying material on Jimdo’s website, and even its customer support is frustratingly vague. Lucky for you, I went ahead and tested both builders thoroughly to provide you with a useful comparison. Hopefully, this analysis will help you decide which one (if either) is the right website builder for you.

Templates

You’ll Get a Better Starting Point With the AI Builder

When you get started with Jimdo’s AI builder, which used to be Jimdo Dolphin, you’ll have to answer a small questionnaire about your website’s details. These details include if you’re creating a website for a group of people or just yourself, what you’re planning to use the website for, and the general “topic” of your website (sports, food, music, etc…). You’ll also have to make a couple of minimal decisions about fonts and color schemes.

Once you’re done with the questionnaire, Jimdo will generate two options for you to start with: a bright template and a dark one. That means that you don’t really get templates in the traditional sense, as Jimdo’s AI just decides the starting point of your website.

Jimdo’s “editor for coding experts,” formerly Jimdo Creator, does offer a template selection, or at least that’s what it looks like at first glance.

Even if Jimdo’s manual editor offered templates in the traditional sense, I’d be a little annoyed at how hard it is to choose one. You see, when you first create your website, you’ll get the option to choose from 17 different templates named after different cities (which isn’t really that notable, but I thought it was a cute detail). The template selection page might seem woefully outdated, and that’s because it is. For some reason, the template selection page belongs to several previous versions of Jimdo.

If you choose to change your template after creating your website, you’ll see the modern template selection with 40 different options. Even then, I’d still hesitate to call the available options templates, since they have no distinctive elements, colors, or typography. When you change your template on Jimdo’s manual editor, all you’re doing is changing your site’s layout.

In the end, though Jimdo’s AI editor might seem limited in the template department, at least it creates unique options. If that wasn’t enough, it also gives you the option to change your layout at will, so the AI builder takes this round with ease.

Features and Ease of Use

Jimdo’s AI Builder Is Way More Intuitive, but It Offers Fewer Tools

I should probably establish this early on, since it will keep coming up: Jimdo’s manual builder feels quite outdated across the board. Its template selection page hasn’t been updated in a while, the formatting options are exactly what you’d expect from an early 2000s blog, and the widget menu isn’t that easy to use, clunky, it’s hard to find, and for a lack of a better word, ugly.

Once you’ve selected your template with Jimdo’s manual builder, you can no longer make any changes to the layout of your homepage. You can still select from a handful of pre-made layouts when you create a new page, but besides that, you don’t get that much control over your page’s structure.

The manual editor is point-and-click, which means that you can add new Elements in specific sections of your page. Once you’ve added a widget, you get limited choices for customization.

Jimdo’s AI builder, on the other hand, offers a much more intuitive design process, including a modernized, nice-to-look-at user interface (UI). Its editor is a lot simpler though. It has a block editing approach, in which you to add pre-made content blocks to your page, and then customize them by choosing from a limited selection of Block designs.

Jimdo’s AI builder might offer less features on paper, but that doesn’t mean it lacks anything essential. It’s also a lot more pleasant to use and navigate, so I’ll go ahead and give this win to the Jimdo AI builder.

Apps and Addons

The AI Builder (Formerly Dolphin) Offers True Integrations

Jimdo’s AI builder has a special block section dedicated to “Smart Apps.” It includes a well-rounded selection of 25 blocks for integrating with various third-party apps. Though 25 is not a lot, Jimdo does a good job of covering its most important bases with integrations for social media (Twitch, TikTok, Instagram), productivity tools (Google Drive, Canva), and some business platforms (Airbnb, Dribbble, Typeform).

Jimdo’s manual editor allows more integrations on paper, but they’re a lot more troublesome to implement. For example, if I want to add an Instagram post to a Jimdo AI builder site, all I have to do is add an Instagram block. The Jimdo manual creator, on the other hand, opens an HTML segment, requests that I copy-paste a certain code, and then only lets me make changes to what’s displayed through a third-party powr.io account.

That’s because Jimdo’s manual editor offers a single integration with powr.io, a third-party service that offers custom HTML widgets. Powr.io isn’t unique to Jimdo, and in fact, you can use it with any website builder. Powr isn’t perfect, and you have to pay for it if you want to make the most of what it has to offer. So even though Powr technically opens more doors, I still think that Jimdo’s AI builder wins this round.

That said, I wasn’t particularly impressed by the integration selection of either builder, so if you’re looking for a website builder that will allow you to connect to thousands of third-party apps with ease, I’d recommend Wix instead1.

E-Commerce

Jimdo’s AI Builder Is Better Equipped To Handle E-commerce

E-commerce can get quite confusing when you’re using the manual editor. There is no separate dashboard or product manager at first, and you don’t even get an option for a “store” layout when creating a new page. Instead, you can add the “store item” widget on any page, which lets you edit a product’s price, description, and some additional information.

Counterintuitively, once you’ve added a store item somewhere on your site, you can then access the Store dashboard on the left-side menu. Once you’re there, you can actually start managing your orders, inventory, and modifying your store’s details like the checkout page, payment options, and more.

Though you technically have all the ingredients you need to make an e-commerce site, the complicated, unintuitive process makes it so I really wouldn’t recommend Jimdo’s manual builder for e-commerce.

Jimdo’s AI builder has a more modern approach. It has a dedicated “store” section you can access from your user dashboard, and easy-to-navigate subsections for managing products, orders, payments, and more.

Once you’ve added and published products on your dashboard, a “Store” page automatically appears on your site, which you can then edit just like you would any other page.

Blogging & Marketing

Some Features Are Exclusive to either Builder

Jimdo’s AI builder doesn’t offer any blogging tools, so if you’re planning to start a blog, you’ll have to go with the manual builder. The manual builder has a simple what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editor which allows you to create new blog post entries the same way you would create a page. You also get a barebones dashboard that lets you modify categories, tags, and general settings.

On your website, your blog will automatically appear as a new page, and you’ll be able to choose between 4 different layouts for how it’ll be displayed.

On the other hand, if you need marketing functionalities, you can only get them with Jimdo’s AI builder. Once again, the options here aren’t extremely varied, but you do get the chance to create custom business listings, link your Meta (Facebook) Business Account, and connect with Google Ads. You can also create your own logo using Jimdo’s basic logo creator.

If either marketing or blogging functionalities are important to you, I’d honestly recommend steering clear of Jimdo altogether. Instead, try a builder that excels with both, like Squarespace1. It has robust marketing and blogging tools that are already built-in to every plan.

Pricing

More Options and a Better Deal with Jimdo’s AI Builder

Both Jimdo builders have completely free plans that you can use to publish as many sites as you want, so long as you don’t mind a Jimdo subdomain. If you want a little more than what the free versions offer, however, Jimdo’s AI builder offers a wider variety of pricing plans, with better value overall.

Here’s What You Get for Free

With either builder, the free plans give you access to all the basic design features, about 500MB of storage, and 2GB of bandwidth. With both builders’ free plans, you will also have to endure a Jimdo subdomain and Jimdo advertising on your website.

Here’s What You Get if You Pay

Jimdo’s manual editor offers two plans, JimdoPro and JimdoBusiness. Pro lets you connect your own domain, removes Jimdo’s branding, and gives you access to blogging features. Business does all of that and also introduces e-commerce and SEO tools.

The AI builder on the other hand, has a total of seven paid plans divided between the “website” and “Online Store” categories. The entry-level plan removes the Jimdo branding from your site and lets you connect your own domain. The other plans give you access to SEO tools, analytics, marketing features, and premium support. And of course, the “Online Store” plans give you access to e-commerce features.

Not only is Jimdo’s AI builder a tad more affordable when its plans are compared to similar manual builder plans, the AI builder gives you a lot more options to pay only for what you need.
Here’s a quick comparison of two similar plans from each builder.

Jimdo’s AI Builder Is the Way Forward

When I started researching for my comparison of Jimdo Dolphin and Jimdo Creator, I was expecting to find two unique approaches to website building from a company that was once one of the biggest names in the industry.

It’s not just that the names don’t exist anymore. Jimdo Creator, which is now called the “editor for coding experts,” isn’t really an alternative for experts as much as it is a very-outdated version of Jimdo that allows you to put in some HTML snippets. Everything from its user interface to its features seem stuck in what passed as modern a decade ago.

On the other hand, the Jimdo AI builder is a very respectable website builder that uses AI-powered features and a clean user interface to prioritize ease of use. The result is intuitive, well thought-out, and ideal for beginners or those who don’t have a lot of time to manage their site.

The AI builder still has its own flaws, which is why personally, I’d recommend going with a builder like Wix1. It’s both easy to use and offers a lot of design freedom. But that doesn’t mean that Jimdo’s AI builder won’t be the right choice for some.

You can see how the two Jimdos stack up against each other below.

FAQ

What’s the difference between Jimdo Dolphin and Jimdo Creator?

Jimdo Dolphin and Jimdo Creator no longer exist per-se. Instead, on the Jimdo page you can find the “AI builder,” formerly Jimdo Dolphin, and “Builder for coding experts,” formerly Jimdo Creator. The AI builder offers intuitive, but barebones website building, while the ‘coding experts’ option offers a completely manual but sometimes hard-to-navigate editor.

If you want to learn more about how these two builder match up against one another, I recommend you check out the article above.

Does Jimdo Dolphin still exist?

Not with that name, no. However, what used to be Jimdo Dolphin is now the Jimdo AI builder, which allows you to create simple websites with ease. You’ll be asked to input some information about your business/site, and Jimdo’s AI will generate unique options for you.

Should I use Jimdo Dolphin or Jimdo Creator for my site?

Overall, I recommend Jimdo Dolphin, or what used to be Jimdo Dolphin and is now described as Jimdo’s code-free AI builder. It offers greater ease of use, more updated features, and an overall better user experience. The AI builder is also more affordable overall, and has more pricing options to choose from.

Can I build an e-commerce site with Jimdo?

You can, though I wouldn’t recommend it. Both Jimdo’s manual and AI builders offer e-commerce capabilities, but there are other website builders out there that offer better, more complete, and easier-to-use e-commerce features. If you want to learn more, I recommend you check out our list of the top ten website builders in 2024.