Straight to the point
We’re a development studio, and it would be to our advantage to say “builders are evil, order from us”. But that isn’t true. Tilda is a great tool for its tasks, and we ourselves sometimes recommend it to clients. The question isn’t “which is better” but “which is better for your task and your stage”.
When Tilda is the right choice
- Testing a hypothesis. A landing page in 2–3 days and ₽500–1000 a month, to test demand before investing in a product.
- A business-card and portfolio site. Nice templates, no-code, publishing the same day.
- Promo pages for campaigns — quickly assembled, ran the ads, deleted.
- A micro-business with no budget — a photographer, a tutor, a coffee shop. A neat Tilda beats a “custom site” from a student for 30 thousand.
Where Tilda runs out of road
- A catalog and store. The built-in store handles a small range, but with hundreds of products with filters, warehouse stock and 1C integration, the workarounds begin.
- Personal accounts, calculators, bookings — any functionality more complex than a form hits the platform’s limits.
- Speed. Tilda pages are heavy: a lot of universal code. PageSpeed rarely pleases, and that affects both SEO and conversion.
- Serious SEO. The basics (title, description, clean URLs) exist on Tilda. But when you need thousands of pages for semantics, auto-generation, complex internal linking — the builder becomes a cage.
- You don’t own the site. Stopped paying the subscription — the site switches off. You can’t migrate it “as is”: code export is limited, and in a migration the site is essentially rebuilt from scratch.
An honest comparison
| Criterion | Tilda | Custom development |
|---|---|---|
| Launch | 2–7 days | from 3–4 weeks |
| Launch budget | ₽0–100k (with a designer) | from ₽150–300k |
| Monthly | subscription ₽500–1000 | hosting ₽500–5000 + support |
| Unique functionality | almost none | any |
| Speed and Web Vitals | average | depends on the team, potentially excellent |
| Scaling | hits a ceiling | grows with the business |
| Ownership | rental | your code and data |
A common-sense criterion for choosing
Ask yourself two questions:
- Is the site a shop window or a tool? If the task is “show that we exist and collect requests” — a builder will do. If the site has to calculate, sell from stock, integrate with CRM and 1C — you need development.
- What will happen in two years? If the plan is to grow, add services, build up SEO traffic, then migrating off a builder later will cost more than the price difference now.
A sensible strategy we recommend ourselves: start on Tilda → tested demand → with the money earned you build a full site, and keep the Tilda landing pages for ad campaigns.
Takeaway
Tilda is about speed and a cheap start, custom development is about control, functionality and growth. The mistake isn’t choosing “the wrong one” but clinging to a tool the business has outgrown. Not sure which stage you’re at — ask us, we’ll say honestly, even if the answer is “a builder is enough for you for now”.
