Wix Ascend Pricing And Costs Analyzed In 2023

Is it possible to combine a no-code website builder with a CRM, a tool that helps you collect payments, and improve your SEO and email marketing at the same time?

Wix says it’s possible!

The Wix Ascend is a set of tools that do just that and more. Ascend by Wix is available for all Wix users for an additional fee or for free with limited capabilities and options.

In this article, you’ll learn exactly what Wix Ascend is, how it may help you in selling your products or services through Wix, how much it costs, and in which scenarios is it worth considering.

Let’s get to it.

What Is Wix Ascend?

Wix Ascend is a set of tools that help to further improve your Wix website, available for an additional fee on top of your regular Wix cost and subscription.

Ascend by Wix combines customer management with customer service tools, such as a support live chat, invoices, quotes, email marketing and SEO tools, marketing integrations, and more.

Taking into account all that Wix Ascend can do, we can’t help, but realize that it very much resembles a CRM. Many of which we have already discussed, analyzed, and compared to each other on our blog, e.g.,  Studio vs HoneyBook, Tave vs HoneyBook, or Plutio vs Suitedash.

Wix Ascend Plans

Ascend by Wix pricing comes down to four plans in total, out of which, the first one is free to use.

	Free	Basic	Professional	Unlimited
Price	0$	$10/month	$24/month	$49/month
Additional Collaborators	✔️	✔️	✔️	✔️
Scheduled Chat Hours	✔️	✔️	✔️	✔️
Real-time Customer Details	✔️	✔️	✔️	✔️
Customizable Wix Forms	5 (limited)	10	20	unlimited
Automations	2	7 up to 2 follow-up actions per automation	20 up to 10 follow-up actions per automation	unlimited up to 10 follow-up actions per automation
Social Post Campaigns	3 per month	5 per month	20 per month	unlimited
Promotional Videos	4	5	10	15
Gmail and Facebook Messenger Integration	✔️	✔️	✔️	✔️
Tasks and reminders	✔️	✔️	✔️	✔️
Assign tasks and contacts to other contributors	❌	❌	✔️	✔️
Collect payments via chat and forms	❌	✔️	✔️	✔️
Remove Ascend branding	❌	✔️	✔️	✔️
File Downloads	❌	✔️	✔️	✔️

How Much Does Wix Ascend Cost?

Wix Ascend costs either nothing or $10, $24, $49 respectively for each Ascend by Wix paid plan.

So the yearly cost of adding Ascend on top of your regular Wix account subscription is:

Basic: $120

Professional: $288

Unlimited: $588

What You Get: Wix Ascend Features

Ascend by Wix offers many different features.

So it may feel like a complicated maze that’s very easy to get lost in, especially for new users or those of us who haven’t had much experience with CRMs or similar tools yet.

And that’s why after testing Ascend by Wix possibilities, we’ve decided to group its features into 4 main categories that will help us move around the platform a bit better and evaluate its true worth.

So, without further ado, here is an overview of what you can expect from Wix Ascend!

Selling Services and Products

If you decide to use Ascend by Wix on your Wix site, you can take advantage of the possibility to create and sell services, as well as physical and digital products.

The catch here is that only Wix premium plan users can actually collect payments through Wix. The free version of Wix Ascend lets you only create the services or products you’d wish to sell.

When it comes to the whole process of adding a new product or service, it’s all pretty simple. Everything seems to be in one place, descriptions, images, adding prices, adding a subscription option, coupons, and more.

Ascend by Wix tops it all off with a few unique features, such as the possibility to sell gift cards for your products and services, a loyalty program your clients can join, or their back-in-store requests.

When it comes to collecting payments, paid plans’ users can connect their PayPal, Stripe, or use the manual payments option to accept payments in cash, check, or any other form of payment.

You can also create quotes and invoices if you wish to offer more custom-made services or products.

But the things that came as a bit unintuitive in this category were the quotes, invoices, and tax settings, whereas the creation of services and products was quite simple, even though a bit extensive.

And if you take your time with the tool, you’ll find that any item you add anywhere in the software is automatically remembered by it. Meaning that you can then choose it from a dropdown list the next time you create, for example, a quote.

CRM

Coming straight to the next category of features offered by Wix Ascend, CRM.

Unfortunately, this category leaves a spacious room for improvement by Wix creators to fill and you’ll have to bear with us, because we’re going to nag a little bit here and there.

To the point.

Wix CRM can be divided into Contacts, Communication, Tasks & Reminders, Workflows & Automations, and Forms.

The Contacts tab is pretty simple, basically letting you add clients and teammates and collect their details. You can then use that information to send the created Wix invoices and quotes to your clients. You can also assign other team members to clients.

Communication with clients is mainly performed through either a live chat that you can connect via available integrations or by sending your clients emails.

Tasks & Reminders are pretty much just as simple. All you can do is add new tasks, set a due date, and connect the created tasks with clients. You can then view all your tasks and filter them by either to-do or completed ones.

Workflows on the other hand are a bit more complicated, but that doesn’t really do Wix Ascend any favors. We didn’t necessarily understand the purpose of Ascend’s workflows at first glance.

So, Wix workflows work based on Trello-like cards with different stages of the project. You can add a Card, add an Automation, or Send Email Campaign in each one. And here’s the thing that was the most unintuitive, adding a Card means you’re adding a Contact. Which in itself is pretty pointless.

But, it turns out that you can actually click on the specific cards you add and clicking on them reveals a lot. Namely, workflows, tasks, contact info, attachments, subscriptions, badges, labels, or notes. Meaning that you can track many details about your clients and leads throughout the different stages of the project. The tab that pops up is also customizable. But getting there was no fun.

Automations, on the other hand, can either be connected with workflows or serve as a standalone feature. The automations are pretty extensive and there’s great potential in this particular functionality. For example, you can set automatic chat messages to clients based on the triggers you specify. Unfortunately, the automations in Wix Ascend for now are pretty unintuitive.

And last but not least, we want to mention the creation of Forms in Ascend by Wix. The form creators are pretty cool, but users on the free Ascend plan can just window-shop some of the functionalities, such as adding a file upload, file download, or a signature field to their forms. There’s also a limitation on the forms you can create (even on two of the paid plans) and the number of fields you can add to each form.

But if you’re not that demanding, you’ll get a nice, simple form creator with different templates you can use.

The whole CRM category is for now a bit too simple or in more advanced features, unintuitive.

Marketing & SEO

Now, after the sorrows and shortcomings of the CRM offered by Wix Ascend, we’re diving into, in our opinion, its best category of features, Marketing & SEO.

We won’t go into every little feature, because this category is quite big. But, we have to mention a few things that really caught our attention in a good way.

The first one is the Wix email marketing feature. Ascend by Wix lets you easily create professional-looking email marketing campaigns, customize them to your liking, work on many nice templates, and send those emails to your contacts. The only con would be the fact that email scheduling is reserved for paid users only.

But the outcome is pretty cool and the whole process was very much intuitive for a change.

Next up, we have the social media marketing and Wix video maker features. This time, what won us over were the templates. So. Many. Templates.

And it’s so easy to customize them to your specific needs and then share those creations directly on social media or simply download them and post wherever you want.

Ascend by Wix definitely knows how to make the creative work easier!

Integrations

Another worth-noting thing about Wix Ascend is the amount of integrations it comes with.

From marketing and SEO integrations, such as Google Search Console, Google Analytics, through the Wix ads integrations, including Google Ads, Facebook Ads, financial integrations, like QuickBooks, Xero, or Open Payout, to different booking applications and live chats.

There’s a potential to make Wix Ascend your business hub if you take a look at just how much Wix app market offers.

Wix Ascend Pros and Cons

Having moved around Wix Ascend, we can now craft a pros to cons ratio for anyone interested in this particular software.

Pros

• If you already have a website built with Wix, it can give you even more possibilities
• Marketing features are pretty neat
• There are a lot of great templates to use
• You can also download the Wix mobile app (Wix Owner app) for easy access to your site and tools

Cons

• Steep learning curve
• Too many features to get a grip of
• A bit unintuitive
• Only available on Wix sites and for Wix users
• CRM features not that great just yet
• No client portal
• It’s difficult to find relevant information about Wix Ascend pricing
• Because the tool has this many features, it’s sometimes a bit slow

Are There Better Options?

The question of whether there are better options than Wix Ascend out there is actually quite difficult to answer. At the very least, the answer won’t be binary.

Because it very much depends on your preferences and needs.

If you’re after the marketing features and you already have a Wix subscription, using Wix Ascend is not a bad idea at all. You can even take advantage of the free Wix plan, so as not to spurge on the additional features.

Alternative options that also combine marketing and CRM features usually come as pretty pricey, e.g., HubSpot that for the most basic kit costs around 45 EUR paid monthly or 27, 59 EUR when committing to an annual subscription. This tool also offers a limited free plan, but you might as well keep it simple and just use Wix Ascend to get basically the same features without the chaos of switching to yet another software.

Zendo

But if you’re more after a tool that makes it easy to sell your services, issue quotes and invoices, and contact your clients at the same time, you’ll find many more affordable options out there.

One such tool we want to mention particularly because of how well it combines useful features with affordable prices is Zendo.

Zendo is a fairly new tool on the market that’s been built around a simple to use chat that combines both client and team communication. It can easily serve as your main spot for selling services online and crafting them to be custom, productized or subscription-based.

On top of easily creating your services, you can also list them on a customizable Service Catalog to let your clients self-serve in ordering, and then deliver the services through Zendo as well. 

Moreover, you can work on customizable order forms with file uploads, collect payments, issue quotes and invoices, and update your clients’ orders with automatic and manual statuses sent via the chat!

Not to mention its modern look that’ll make sure your clients see you as an absolute professional.

And the best part is that your clients can also use Zendo to log in to your workspace, access any files shared with them, and get in touch with you and your team!

This tool also comes with some unique features, such as the Impersonation feature that lets you impersonate your clients or other team members. Whether that’s to check how the client portal looks from the client’s perspective or substitute an agent on leave to keep the customer’s journey smooth and consistent.

Zendo Pricing

Zendo is not a feature creep, it’s built for users who crave an easy to use tool. And its pricing definitely reflects that, because you have three straightforward plans:

Free Starter: all the essential functionality to sell your services and communicate with your customers online. The Starter plan is dedicated for smaller teams of up to two agents that wish to take advantage of a modern client portal solution for free. This plan won’t cost you a penny.

Growth: the Growth plan comes with even more possibilities on top of the basic functionality. It will give you more automation options, unlimited access to subscriptions, and the possibility to whitelabel your client portal for the ultimate professionality. The Growth plan costs $19 per month, per agent when choosing annual billing or $23 per month, per agent if you decide to pay on a monthly basis.

Enterprise: in case you’d wish to build something unique and have custom features, take advantage of the Enterprise plan that offers just that for a custom price based on your needs.

Wix Ascend Pricing And Costs In 2023: Final Verdict

Wix Ascend overall positively surprised us. We especially like its marketing-related features, such as the email campaign or the video creator.

But we are not really fond of its poor CRM possibilities and the limitations it puts on the free plan users. Moreover, this set of tools is only available to use for Wix users on Wix sites.

To conclude this analysis, we have to say that if you’re on the lookout for a good online marketing tools kit and you already have a Wix website, you should definitely try Wix Ascend, especially the free plan.

But if you long for something much more intuitive that doesn’t force you to work on a Wix website, and that focuses more on client communication and selling services online, then we’d suggest going for Zendo.

You can create and sell different type of services, collect payments, issue quotes and invoices, get in touch with clients, and offer your clients the possibility to log in and access their messages, requests, and files in one place, all and more.

If that sounds promising, try Zendo for free to see how it fits your business!

Keep from $120 up to $588 in your pocket switching from Wix Ascend to Zendo and get a free, lifetime access to a modern client portal that makes it easy to sell your services.

And if you want to jump in head first, go for the paid plan to gain even more, including subscriptions, the possibility to connect your own domain, remove Zendo branding, and gain even more automations to further ease your work life.

Whatever you choose, we hope it’ll make your work-life balance much more, well, balanced!