B12.io Review 2024 – Should You Give This Site Builder a Try?

B12.io at a Glance

Should You Use B12.io?

B12.io is an artificial intelligence (AI) supported website builder that enables you to create a functional and professional-looking website in just 60 seconds (or so it claims). The combination of AI with a real-life team of designers can be a fantastic proposition if you’re looking to make an impact on the web.

Besides its creative integration of AI features, B12.io also includes plenty of powerful tools to help you manage your business website, like intuitive options for scheduling, invoicing, and marketing.

The pricing on paid plans can get rather steep, and its customization settings do suffer from some over-reliance on AI.

All in all, B12.io isn’t for everyone, but for some businesses, especially those that earn money from clients, it’s an outstanding website builder. The question is, is it the right builder for you? Read on to find out.

B12.io Has a Unique Approach to Templates

Most website builders let you choose from a list of pre-made templates when you’re creating a new site. B12.io has a different approach. It uses AI to generate about 10 different theme options based on your responses to its startup questionnaire. Each option comes with its own font, color, and structure pairing, which you can change anytime.

The theme options have names that are supposed to represent the feel of your website, like bold, minimal, and modern. The classic option used a white background, a formal serif font, and a clean layout that made my generated website feel appropriate for a classy, old-school business, while the bold option used huge impact letters on brightly colored backgrounds.

I wasn’t wowed by the AI-generated themes but I encountered a limited selection of good-quality templates, which would make a good starting point for any business website.

Design and Customization

B12.io uses a section editor. Instead of adding singular elements at will as you would with a classic drag-and-drop editor, you can only add or remove purpose-specific sections. Common sections include things like call-to-action (CTA) buttons, image galleries, or client testimonials.

True to fashion, B12.io uses AI to generate all of your section options and lets you re-generate sections at any time. You can let AI do as much or as little of the heavy lifting as you want. However, while you are free to edit individual elements like images, text, colors, animations, and so on, the only way to change a section’s structure is with the AI generation tools. This means you can’t manually edit the positioning or even delete elements within a section.

Though you can’t edit a section’s layout, you do get an impressive level of customization over the appearance of individual elements. If you’re completely unconvinced, you can re-generate a section anytime. If you like the section but don’t love the copy, you can just let B12.io’s AI rewrite the section content. If you’d rather write everything yourself, the old-fashioned way, you can do that too.

Most site editors don’t offer this combination of granularity and auto-generated content. Usually, if a builder lets you make major changes quickly, you don’t get that much control over the fine details, and if a builder offers complete control over every element, making major layout changes can be tedious.

Powerful Tools for Website Design and Management

To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t expecting B12.io to have quite as many useful tools as it does. There are a lot of “AI-assisted” website builders out there that offer text generation and call themselves “the future of website design” even without basic outreach and editing tools.

Luckily, even with all the AI stuff aside, B12.io offers a solid toolbox for building professional websites. You get enough versatility to create almost anything you’d want, from a simple blog to a professional portfolio, or even a small e-commerce site.

But first, let’s take another look at “all the AI stuff.”

High Quality and Versatile AI-Generated Copywriting

I previously mentioned how you can leverage B12.io’s AI features to re-generate the entire structure and content of a section. You do this with the touch of a button. It’s just a matter of clicking on the gear icon and pressing “regenerate layout.” However, B12.io offers a lot more control over its generated text.

For starters, it’s worth mentioning that the text editor is pretty solid on its own. It’s an intuitive what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editor, but it offers even more formatting options than some cloud-based word processors. This ensures that you can display copy on your website exactly as you want it.

However, the text generator really steals the show. By clicking on the stars icon inside of the text editor, you can re-generate any text on your website with options for use case and tone. After playing a bit with the editor, the most surprising thing is that it works.

I tried several use-case and tone combinations and compared them to what ChatGPT could generate. B12.io’s content consistently delivered copy on par with ChatGPT,  if not better, and required a lot less prompting. B12.io’s text generator actually uses ChatGPT, but thanks to B12.io’s tweaks, producing quality results requires less of a learning curve than the standard ChatGPT.

I also appreciate that B12.io doesn’t even bother trying to add a “humorous” tone to its options, since I’ve never seen a text generator deliver something that’s actually funny. So, you might have to add in your jokes yourself, but for everything else, B12.io delivers high-quality and accurate copy.

Dedicated SEO Tools

Though it is quite versatile, B12.io is quite clear about its focus on professional, business websites. A big part of a successful business site is getting found on search engines, and to that end, B12.io offers high-quality SEO tools.

To enhance your SEO efforts, you can take advantage of AI and a team of SEO experts. Even on the free plan, you can call and talk to an SEO expert. With higher-paid plans, you get access to SEO monitoring and advice from B12.io’s team to ensure your site is search engine-friendly.

B12.io’s SEO experts will also get your website listed on local directories on popular platforms, such as Facebook, Google, and Yelp. This makes it much easier for potential customers to find your business.

E-Commerce and App Integrations

The closest that B12.io gets to offering native e-commerce support is giving you a dedicated section for displaying product prices and descriptions. Users can’t purchase products on your site without a third-party integration, but you can send and accept invoices.

Also, you can accept invoice payments via PayPal, Stripe, and Square, in addition to common credit cards.

Though the lack of dedicated e-commerce features is a drawback, B12.io integrates with 26 different services, including Shopify, Ecwid, and Donately. And aside from e-commerce, you can also integrate an RSS feed for podcasts, custom YouTube playlists, and even a custom Medium blog for the four of us who still use Medium.

In total, you get 26 third-party apps for your site, which is far from the most extensive app selection on the planet. But if you have something different in mind, you can also embed custom HTML codes to display third-party widgets.

Blogging Capabilities

B12.io has a blog feed feature, which you can access in the Pages tab, in the Add Content section. You can customize your blog feed by modifying existing post templates or creating brand-new content. You can also update individual posts if you want to include any specific CTAs or just maintain your branding across all posts.

As you might have guessed, you can also let B12.io write entire blog posts for you. Also, if you’re on the Advanced plan, you’ll get a monthly blog post written and SEO-optimized just for you.

Extremely User-Friendly Design Suite

Even if it’s the first time you’ve approached a website builder, B12.io is beginner-friendly enough that you can start customizing your website in a matter of minutes.

Getting started with B12.io is super simple – you’ll get asked for your email address and your business name. After that, you’ll get asked to describe the overall tone of your business and what effect you wish to achieve, which I think is pretty useful in helping you shape your brand.

Once that’s done, you’ll get dropped into a user panel with a dedicated website dashboard from which you’ll be able to change your website’s design to your heart’s content.

That said, the Website dashboard isn’t the only dedicated dashboard that B12.io offers, and the others can be just as helpful for managing your website and business.

Let’s take a quick look at some other user-friendly features offered by B12.io.

Ease Invoice Creation for Your Professional Services

Creating invoices for your services can be a pain, doubly so if you have to use different apps to manage different aspects of your business online. That’s why B12.io offers a dedicated dashboard for creating and tracking invoices.

To create a new invoice, all you have to do is go to the Payments and Invoices tab, click on Create Invoice, and add the relevant information. B12.io also lets you save custom invoice templates, which means that you don’t have to worry about manually formatting every invoice you make.

Keep in mind that the invoice and payments feature is only available in the US at the moment, so international businesses will have to do without this handy application.

An Intuitive Scheduling Dashboard

You can also access the Scheduling dashboard directly from your user panel. There, you can create and check appointments, and set availability rules. You can label appointments by type, so you can take one look at your calendar and know not only when you’re busy, but why you’re busy.

If you add a bookings section to your website, your calendar will get updated automatically when clients sign up for appointments.

A Dedicated Dashboard for All Your Custom Form Needs

Regardless of the kind of business you run, you will need to take custom information from potential customers at one time or another. B12.io lets you create and add forms anywhere on your site, and you can review all the information you gathered directly from the Intake Forms dashboard on your website.

Since I tested out B12.io using the free plan, I didn’t get access to the priority support channels offered on the premium plans. Still, in my experience, support was mostly friendly and efficient, but a little salesy.

To test the available support channels, I started by sending a live chat message asking about integrating RSS feeds into my website. B12.io’s live chat is available during business hours Monday to Friday, US Eastern time. Since I mixed up my time zones, I didn’t get an answer through live chat, instead, I got a detailed email response the following day.

The email response was comprehensive and friendly, but it also included a very obvious effort on the support team’s side to get me to upgrade to one of the paid plans.

When one of my colleagues tested B12.io’s support a while ago, she also found it to be useful and efficient. I can only imagine it gets even better with the premium plans. Overall, I had a very pleasant experience with support, even if I’m not a fan of upsells.

Pricey, but You Get What You Pay For

I’ll say this right off the bat, and I hope it won’t sound too harsh: B12.io’s paid plans are only worth it if your website generates revenue. At $42.00 per month, the “entry-level” plan Basic costs around the same as other website builders’ priciest plans. (And that’s with the yearly billing discount.)

Besides removing B12.io’s ads from your site and allowing you to connect a custom domain, Basic gives you access to third-party integrations and on-site conversion tools.

The next plan, Professional ($169.00 per month) gives you access to email marketing and contact conversion tools, as well as the option to hire copywriting services at an hourly rate of $75.

Finally, with Advanced (which comes up at a whopping $339.00 per month) you get help for being listed in directories, monthly content creation by B12.io’s experts, and priority customer support.

I am a little impressed by all the features offered on the Professional and Advanced plans, but B12.io’s only real claim to those prices is the integration of a team of human professionals who can help you with your site. Most of the other features can be found in cheaper plans by other website builders.

However, the Basic package still has plenty of strong marketing and client management features, so its cost is probably the most reasonable for most small businesses. I’d just make sure that B12.io is capable of giving your business those extra dollars back in revenue before making any long-term commitment.