How to Create a Portfolio Website (2026): 12 Platforms and What You Actually Own - DEUTSCH

Zerply spent sixteen years hosting portfolios for film and animation crews. Auf 28 September 2026 beim 16:00 koordinierte Weltzeit, it stops working. The closing notice asks people to request their export by 21 September, because staff are processing those by hand. It also asks them to choose where their old profile URL should point afterwards: LinkedIn, IMDb, Framerate or Vimeo. read.cv ended the same way: angekündigt 17 Januar 2025, deleted 16 Kann 2025, and the domain now answers old links with a bare HTTP 402. Your work is not the fragile part of a portfolio website. The address is.

Schnelle Antwort: Already paying for Lightroom or Photoshop? Adobe Portfolio comes with it at no extra charge, which makes the USD 11.99/month Lightroom (1TB) plan the cheapest real portfolio here. Photographers who need proofing and print sales should start with Pixpa Basic at USD 5.40/month, Verlängerung bei USD 7.20. Anyone who wants the site to outlive the platform should run WordPress on their own hosting, or GitHub Pages for free if Git holds no fear. Avoid Format Basic: 70 images total is not a portfolio.

Zuletzt überprüft: September 2026. Prices read from each platform’s own pricing page or page data on 12 September 2026.

How This Guide Was Researched

Two questions decided everything below, and neither one is “which builder is easiest”.

The first question: what does the platform do to your images? A portfolio is photographs and screenshots. So every platform here was checked against its own help documentation for upload size caps, pixel ceilings, automatic re-compression, and the format it actually serves to visitors. That produced the comparison in the next section, and it disqualified nothing, because the limits only matter relative to what you shoot.

The second question: what happens when you stop paying? Export capability was read from each vendor’s own documentation, not from review summaries. Where a vendor states plainly that no export exists, that sentence is quoted, because it is more honest than anything a comparison page will tell you.

Prices were read on 12 September 2026. Several of these sites inject prices with JavaScript and hand a blank page to simpler tools. So the Squarespace, Wix, Webflow, Format and Pixpa figures came from rendered pages, or from the structured pricing data inside the pages themselves. Where an advertised price is an introductory rate, the renewal is calculated and shown next to it. Two platforms publish enough detail to calculate that multiplier exactly, and both turned out to renew higher than their headline suggests.

What was excluded: any platform we could not confirm was still trading in September 2026, and any plan requiring more than a four-year prepayment. What was not done: no speed testing, no synthetic load tests, and no hands-on build. Where performance is discussed, the thresholds come from Google’s published definitions, not from our own measurements. Pixieset, SmugMug and Zenfolio were considered and left out, because they are client-delivery businesses that include a website rather than portfolio platforms as such.

What a Portfolio Site Has to Do in 2026

Start with the work, not the platform. The most common failure in a portfolio is not an ugly template. It’s twenty projects of uneven quality, where the weakest one sets the client’s expectation.

Three to six projects is the range most working reviewers and hiring guides converge on. Fewer than three reads as thin. More than six and nobody reaches the end. Each one needs the brief, your role, what you actually did, and the outcome. “Rolle” matters more than people think: on team projects, a reviewer who cannot tell which parts were yours will assume the least flattering answer.

Then the unglamorous pages. An about page with a real photograph of you. A contact method that is not only a form, because forms silently fail and people don’t chase them. A logo and a short tagline. You can produce both in an afternoon with one of the free logo makers we tested, and several now export SVG without charging. One or two short client quotes help as well, with a real name and company attached, because an anonymous testimonial reads as invented.

Two things that earn their place in 2026. Password-protected pages, if any of your best work sits under NDA, because the alternative is leaving it out entirely. And a plain-text list of what you do, in the words a client would use. That is what both search engines and AI answer engines read when deciding whether you match a query.

The Image Limits Nobody Checks Before Signing Up

Here is the part every general builder comparison skips, and it decides more portfolios than template quality does.

Upload caps vary by a factor of 25 across these platforms. Format accepts 100 MB per image and takes RAW files from Sony, Canon, Leica and Hasselblad. Webflow caps images at 4 MB, the tightest here by a wide margin, which a single uncompressed TIFF will exceed before you have finished the first project. Squarespace sitzt bei 20 MB with a 120-megapixel ceiling. Wix erlaubt 50 MB, Adobe Portfolio 50 MB, Cargo 25 MB, Karte 16 MB.

Every one of these platforms resizes your work, and only some admit it. Squarespace generates up to seven widths from 100px to 2500px and serves WebP automatically. Wix converts uploads to AVIF and states that AVIF runs about 50% kleiner als WebP. Framer converts to AVIF at quality 80 with a WebP fallback, and never upscales. Pixpa is the most aggressive here, and the most transparent about it. Everything is scaled into a 2560 x 3840 bounding box. Changing the quality setting reapplies retroactively to images you uploaded months ago.

Webflow is the outlier, and the difference is worth understanding before you commit. Its AVIF and WebP conversion is manual, batched, and destructive: the documentation says the original asset files will be replaced. Framer does the same job on upload, automatisch, für weniger Geld. Two platforms sold to the same designers, opposite answers.

Five platforms never state what format they serve at all: Adobe Portfolio, Format, Pixpa, Cargo and Carrd. Four of those document that they process your images without saying into what. For a photography portfolio, that silence is the finding.

Why does any of this matter commercially? Google’s thresholds are public and unchanged. Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 Sekunden, Interaction to Next Paint at 200 ms oder weniger, Cumulative Layout Shift at 0.1 oder darunter. Each is measured at the 75th percentile of real page loads. AVIF now reaches about 95% of browsers and WebP about 97%, so a platform serving neither is leaving weight on the page for no reason. One practical rule from Chrome’s own October 2025 Orientierungshilfe: never put loading=”faul” on your hero or first gallery image, because the browser then discovers your biggest image last.

Self-hosted WordPress has a second ceiling that catches photographers out. Seit Version 5.3, core downsizes anything over 2560px on the long edge and serves a file marked “-skaliert”, keeping your original in place. On top of that sits your host’s PHP upload limit. SiteGround fixes shared plans at 256 MB and won’t let you raise it. Kinsta sets 128 MB, Bluehost 50 MB. Also ein 100 MB TIFF that sails past Format’s cap dies on Bluehost before it lands.

Adobe Portfolio – Best if you already pay Adobe

You may already own a portfolio site and not know it. Adobe Portfolio is bundled with the Creative Cloud photography plans. Adobe’s own comparison page lists it against both tiers, with the line “Build your own website and share your best work.” The cheaper qualifying plan is Lightroom (1TB) beim 11,99 USD/Monat. Fotografie (1TB), which adds Photoshop, is USD 19.99/month. Both are annual plans billed monthly.

Run the comparison and it is uncomfortable for the specialists. Format charges USD 17/month at renewal for the portfolio alone, no photo editor attached. If you already subscribe to Lightroom, your marginal cost for a portfolio site is zero, and that is a number no other platform here can match.

What you get is narrow but sound. Up to five separate websites per account, each with its own domain and password. Images up to 50 MB, with Adobe generating multiple renditions and serving at most 3840px wide. Per-page passwords are pitched by Adobe for exactly the case that matters here: sharing different work with different clients or recruiters.

Die Grenzen sind real. There is no store, no cart and no print sales documented anywhere. There is no proofing workflow. The lightbox is a site-wide toggle that ships switched off, and the layout options stop at responsive photo grids. Adobe also publishes no storage figure for the site itself, so treat the 1 TB in the plan name as Lightroom cloud storage, which is what it is.

Vorteile

• Zero marginal cost if you already subscribe
• Five separate sites, each with its own domain
• Per-page passwords aimed at client and recruiter sharing
• 50 MB uploads, comfortably above Webflow and Carrd

Nachteile

• No ecommerce or print sales of any kind
• No export, no self-hosting, no code access
• Lightbox off by default, few layout choices

Preisgestaltung: included with Lightroom (1TB) at USD 11.99/month or Photography (1TB) für 19,99 USD/Monat. No standalone subscription exists. The domain is bought separately from a registrar; connecting it is free and SSL is automatic.

Beste für: photographers and designers already inside the Adobe subscription. Überspringen Sie, wenn: you want to sell anything.

Urteil: If Lightroom is already on your card, build here first and spend the saved money on the domain. If you need to sell prints, this is the wrong tool and Pixpa does that job from USD 5.40/month. If you want to leave one day with your files, go to WordPress instead, because Portfolio offers no exit at all.

Platz – Best design quality per dollar

Start with the exit, because it is worse than its reputation. Squarespace exports a single WordPress XML file. Its own support documentation lists what does not come with you: portfolio pages, album pages, cover pages, index pages, Produktblöcke, Audio-, Video, Entwürfe, page-specific headers and footers, style settings and custom CSS. Lesen Sie diese Liste noch einmal. Portfolio pages are the exact page type a portfolio is built from.

What you buy is the best template quality here, and unusually generous media handling. There is no published cap on total image storage, unlimited bandwidth on every tier, and automatic WebP delivery. Caps are per container instead: 250 images per gallery section, 60 projects per portfolio page.

Grundläufe USD 19/month billed annually, Das ist USD 228 ein Jahr, or twelve times what Carrd charges for a one-page site. Core is USD 29, Zuzüglich USD 49, Erweiterter USD 99. Die monatliche Abrechnung kostet USD 25, 39, 65 und 139. Video is metered in minutes and Basic gets only 30 von ihnen.

Two dated facts a buyer needs. Squarespace raised annual prices by up to 26% in early July 2026, moving Core from USD 23 in USD 29 pro Monat. It published no announcement, and existing subscribers meet the new rate at their next renewal. Separat, Stand Februar 2026 the old Personal, Business and Commerce plans closed to new signups. Any guide still quoting a “Persönlicher Plan” price is describing something you can’t buy.

The proofing gap matters for photographers. Squarespace has password-protected pages, one shared password per page, sessions expiring after four hours. It has no client proofing, no favouriting, no download tracking. Photographers routinely bolt on a second subscription such as Pixieset to cover that, which changes the real monthly cost.

Vorteile

• Strongest templates here with no design work required
• No published image storage cap, Unbeschränkte Bandbreite
• Automatic WebP on every plan
• Password-protected pages on all tiers

Nachteile

• Export excludes portfolio pages and all styling
• No proofing, so photographers pay twice
• Lightbox works on grid layouts only, not slideshows

Preisgestaltung: Basic USD 19/month annually (228 USD/Jahr), Kern-USD 29, Zuzüglich USD 49, Erweiterter USD 99. Flat list pricing rather than a promo, though the list itself rose in July 2026. Kostenlose benutzerdefinierte Domain für das erste Jahr bei Jahresplänen. 14-Tagesprobe, and refunds are 14 days on annual plans only.

Beste für: service businesses and designers who want it to look expensive without hiring anyone. Überspringen Sie, wenn: you might move later.

Urteil: Buy Squarespace when design quality closes the sale and you expect to stay for years. If you are a photographer who needs proofing and prints, Pixpa does both natively for a fraction of the cost. If the possibility of leaving matters at all, WordPress is the only answer on this page that keeps your layout.

Format – Best proofing, worst entry tier

Seventy images. That is the total Format Basic allows you to publish, across the whole site, für USD 120 ein Jahr. Pixpa Basic allows 200 für USD 64.80 in the first year. The comparison is not close, and the 70-image ceiling is the single most important number Format publishes.

Look past Basic and the platform is the strongest photographer workflow here. Uploads run to 100 MB per image, the highest cap in this guide, with RAW support for Sony ARW, Canon CR2 and CR3, Leica DNG and Hasselblad 3FR. Client galleries handle favouriting, email-gated viewing and download limits you set by longest edge. Pro raises the image ceiling to 1,500 und fügt hinzu 100 GB Speicher; Pro Plus is unlimited images with 1 TB.

Now the pricing trap, which Format’s own page shows if you look at the struck-through numbers. Pro advertises USD 12/month billed annually against a regular rate of USD 17. Pro Plus advertises USD 15 gegenüber USD 26. Those are introductory rates covering the first year only, applied with codes at checkout, damit Pro renews at 1.42x and Pro Plus at 1.73x. Format’s page states the codes must be redeemed by 30 September 2026 beim 11:59 p.m. PST, which gives this a deadline rather than a permanent discount.

The store is commission-free and self-fulfilled, was in beide Richtungen schneidet: you keep the full price and you also pack the boxes. Digital downloads are capped at 100 MB and one file per product. Basic cannot sell at all and gets no custom domain in year one.

Vorteile

• 100 MB uploads with genuine RAW support
• Proofing, favouriting and download controls built in
• Commission-free store on Pro and above
• 14-day trial with no card required

Nachteile

• Basic begrenzt auf 70 images total
• Advertised annual rates expire after year one
• Text and hosted video cannot be exported

Preisgestaltung: Basic USD 10/month annually (120 USD/Jahr, the only tier whose price does not move). Pro USD 12 first year then USD 17 (USD 204/year). Pro Plus USD 15 dann USD 26 (USD 312/year). Die monatliche Abrechnung erfolgt in USD 14, 24 und 36. Format’s terms of service state that no refunds are provided on cancellation, which contradicts help-desk material describing a 30-day window, so treat the stricter document as binding.

Beste für: working photographers who deliver client galleries and want one subscription. Überspringen Sie, wenn: US Dollar 204 a year is above your budget.

Urteil: Take Format Pro if proofing and delivery are part of how you get paid, and budget the USD 17 renewal rather than the USD 12 Überschrift. If you want the same workflow cheaper, Pixpa includes proofing on every tier and costs less at renewal. If you only display work and never send galleries, you are overpaying here and Adobe Portfolio does the display job for nothing extra.

Pixpa – Best value for photographers

Where Format gates proofing and selling behind a USD 204 Erneuerung, Pixpa puts client galleries, favouriting and a commission-free store on all four tiers, einschließlich der billigsten. That is the whole argument for it, und es hält.

It is also the one platform here that publishes its own discount mechanics clearly enough to calculate the real price. Pixpa’s pricing page spells it out. Yearly and 2-yearly plans “include a 25% intro discount on the first billing period and renew automatically at standard pricing thereafter”. Yearly then sits at 20% off the monthly rate. Basic bills monthly at USD 9. Twenty percent off is USD 7.20. Der beworbene USD 5.40 is that figure minus the intro discount. Damit Basic renews at USD 7.20, a 1.33x step up, and the same arithmetic applies to every tier.

Image handling is the most tightly specified in this guide. Everything is resized into a 2560 x 3840 pixel box. Four quality levels are available, and changing the setting reapplies to images already uploaded. Storage of 3 GB on Basic sounds small until you read what it meters: originals in client and ecommerce galleries only, not the web versions on your site. Basic is separately capped at 200 Bilder; higher tiers are unlimited.

Pixpa is also the only platform here that names a print lab, WHCC, alongside self-fulfilment and custom vendor routes. Gallery control runs deeper than anywhere else: mehr als 20 Layouts, plus lightbox settings for maximum resolution, zoom behaviour on desktop and mobile, and slideshow timing.

The exit is the flat no. Pixpa’s help centre states that its websites “can only be hosted on our servers” und “cannot be downloaded or hosted elsewhere”. You can retrieve your uploaded images and your order data. The site itself stays.

Vorteile

• Proofing and 0% commission selling on jede Stufe
• Named print lab integration, not just merch drop-shipping
• 15-day trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee
• Deepest gallery and lightbox controls here

Nachteile

• Advertised yearly price is an intro rate, renewing 1.33x higher
• No export of any kind, stated plainly in their own docs
• Basic begrenzt auf 200 images and no custom domain

Preisgestaltung: Basic USD 5.40/month first year then USD 7.20, Creator USD 9 dann USD 12, Professioneller USD 12 dann USD 16, Erweiterter USD 15 dann USD 20, all billed yearly. Monthly rates are USD 9, 15, 20 und 25. Free custom domain for year one on every plan except Basic.

Beste für: photographers who sell prints and send client galleries on a tight budget. Überspringen Sie, wenn: you want the option to migrate.

Urteil: Pixpa is the best-value photography platform here, and Creator at USD 12 renewal is the tier most working photographers should buy. If you shoot large files and need RAW uploads above 50 MB, Format’s 100 MB ceiling beats it. If you ever intend to move the site elsewhere, neither of them will help you, and self-hosted WordPress is the only route that does.

Wix – Best free plan to test with

Two gigabytes. That is what Wix Light gives you for USD 17/month, and for a portfolio it is the number that ends the conversation. Core at USD 29 springt zu 50 GB, Geschäft in USD 39 zu 100 GB, Business Elite at USD 159 bis unbegrenzt. Squarespace publishes no image storage cap at all and costs USD 19 beim Eintritt, which makes Light poor value for image-heavy work.

Wix earns its place on two other counts. The permanent free plan, 500 MB and a Wix subdomain, is the most usable way to test a builder properly before paying. And the image pipeline is quietly excellent. Uploads convert to AVIF automatically, which Wix states is roughly 50% kleiner als WebP. Du erhältst 50 MB per image and no published pixel ceiling.

The Pro Gallery is a real gallery system with a lightbox through Expand Mode and built-in image protection, which matters more here than in a general builder comparison. One caveat on password protection. Wix warns that protecting a page also stops search engines crawling and indexing it. NDA work stays private, and that page contributes nothing to search.

The exit is the hardest on this page. Wix offers no code export in any form. Text, images and blog posts can be saved manually. Design, layout and functionality can’t leave.

Vorteile

• Automatic AVIF conversion on upload
• 50 MB per image, generous for a mainstream builder
• Permanent free plan for genuine testing
• Unlimited bandwidth on every paid plan

Nachteile

• Light gives only 2 GB Speicher
• No export of any kind, the strictest lock-in here
• Password-protecting a page also deindexes it

Preisgestaltung: Light USD 17/month, Kern-USD 29, Business-USD 39, Business Elite USD 159, Alles wird jährlich in Rechnung gestellt. Flat list pricing, keine Promo. Free domain for one year on every paid plan. 14-Rückerstattungsfrist von einem Tag.

Beste für: people who want to try three designs this weekend without paying. Überspringen Sie, wenn: your portfolio is photography-heavy and you planned to buy Light.

Urteil: Use the free plan to find out whether you like building at all. Then buy Core at USD 29 rather than Light, da 2 GB won’t hold a photography portfolio. If design quality is what you are buying, Squarespace does it better for USD 19. If you want the AVIF pipeline without Wix’s lock-in, Framer converts images the same way and costs USD 10.

Webflow – Best code export, worst upload cap

Four megabytes per image. For a platform aimed at professional designers, that is a startling number, und es ist 25 times tighter than Format’s 100 MB. Anyone uploading photography at print resolution will hit it immediately.

What Webflow sells instead is an exit, and it is the only real one among the hosted builders. Code export is a Workspace feature, not a site feature, which changes the arithmetic most write-ups get wrong. Workspace Core costs USD 19/month billed yearly and lists code export among its features. If you export and host the files somewhere else, dieser USD 19 is all you pay. If you want Webflow hosting and export rights together, it is Premium at USD 25 plus Core at USD 19, so USD 44/month. Export also drops CMS content, so a project collection does not survive the trip.

Site plans start free on a webflow.io subdomain with 2 static pages. Basic is USD 15/month billed yearly with a custom domain, 300 static pages and no CMS at all. A blog or a project collection needs Premium at USD 25.

One dated change to know: Webflow merged its CMS and Business site plans into a single Premium plan, angekündigt 13 Kann 2026. Existing sites move at their next renewal from 29 Juni 2026, and legacy accounts from 16 November 2026. CMS allowances rose sharply in the process. Bandwidth for sites coming from the old Business plan fell from 100 GB nach 50 GB, which is the part the announcement is quietest about.

Image variants are generated only above 3200px, and they skip rich-text images, background images and anything imported by CSV or API. The AVIF and WebP conversion tool is manual and replaces your originals.

Vorteile

• Real code export with no attribution required
• Export costs USD 19/month alone if you self-host
• Lightbox element ships built in
• Unique password per page on Site plans

Nachteile

• 4 MB image cap, tightest in this guide
• Export drops all CMS content
• Basic has no CMS, so a blog costs USD 25

Preisgestaltung: Site plans Starter free, Basic USD 15/month, Premium USD 25/month, jährlich abgerechnet. Workspace Core USD 19/month yearly for export. Flat list pricing with no promo step-up. Annual plans are billed upfront and are not generally refundable, with a 14-day statutory right in the EU, EEA, UK and Turkey.

Beste für: designers who want to own the HTML and can work with a class-based editor. Überspringen Sie, wenn: you upload full-resolution photographs.

Urteil: Buy Webflow when leaving with your markup is worth USD 19/month, and plan to compress every image before it goes near the asset panel. If you want the same design freedom without the second bill, Framer is USD 10 and converts images for you, though it never lets you leave. If photography at full resolution is the point, Format’s 100 MB ceiling makes this the wrong platform entirely.

Framer – Best canvas, ships no gallery

For a tool sold to designers building portfolios, the omission is remarkable: Framer ships no gallery, no slideshow and no lightbox. None of its nine help categories documents one. You either build the grid yourself on the canvas or install a component from the marketplace.

What it does ship is the best image pipeline here. Framer converts most JPEG, PNG, WebP and GIF uploads to AVIF at quality 80, serves WebP where AVIF is unsupported, and never upscales. Variants run 512, 1024, 2048 and up to 4096px. Webflow makes you do that work by hand, and charges USD 5 more a month for the privilege.

Basic is USD 10/month billed annually and includes a custom domain and 2 CMS collections, which is enough for a project list plus a blog. Pro ist USD 30, USD skalieren 100 on annual billing only. The free tier publishes to a Framer subdomain and cannot connect a custom domain.

Then the wall. Framer’s help centre states that it “does not offer HTML export for self-hosting”, because pre-rendering, image optimisation, font subsetting and server-side rendering run on Framer’s infrastructure. There is no tier that unlocks it. Third-party scrapers sell you a static copy, not your source.

Video deserves one warning. Framer accepts native uploads but states it does not alter or optimise the file in any way and serves it as-is. Upload a 4K showreel and a phone on mobile data downloads a 4K showreel (your visitor’s data plan pays for your production values).

Vorteile

• Automatic AVIF at Qualität 80 with WebP fallback
• US Dollar 10 entry undercuts Webflow Basic by a third
• Genuine design canvas, closer to Figma than a block builder
• Custom domain from the cheapest paid tier

Nachteile

• No export at any price, stated by Framer
• No gallery or lightbox component ships with it
• Uploaded video is served completely unoptimised

Preisgestaltung: Kostenlos, Basic USD 10/month, Pro USD 30/month, Scale USD 100/month annual only. Flat published rates with no promo step-up; subscribers from before October 2025 keep their old rates until they switch. Framer cut its lineup from five plans to three paid tiers on 9 Oktober 2025, removing the Mini plan and dropping Basic from USD 15 in USD 10.

Beste für: designers who want motion and scroll effects without writing code. Überspringen Sie, wenn: you want a ready-made gallery out of the box.

Urteil: Choose Framer when the canvas and the animation are the product, and accept that the site can never move. If you want that same modern output but need to own the files, pay Webflow’s USD 19 Workspace and export. If you simply want a grid of images working tonight, Squarespace gives you six gallery layouts and Framer gives you none.

Karte – Best one-page site under USD 20

Worth knowing before you buy the cheap tier: the custom domain is not on it. Carrd Pro Lite at USD 9/year keeps you on a carrd.co subdomain. The domain arrives at Pro Standard, 19 USD/Jahr, which is the tier that matters and still the cheapest real portfolio address in this guide. Squarespace Basic costs USD 228 a year for the same custom-domain privilege, twelve times more.

Carrd builds one page. For a designer with three projects, a photographer with a single series, or anyone who needs a credible address by Friday, one page is often the honest format. Uploads run to 16 MB for images and 64 MB for video on Pro tiers, which is more headroom than Webflow allows.

Two limits to price in. There is no CMS, so a project collection means adding sections by hand and a blog means embedding someone else’s. And password protection covers the whole site only, with no per-page option, and it requires Pro Plus at USD 49/year. If you need to show one NDA project privately while the rest stays public, Carrd can’t do it at any price.

Carrd publishes no export documentation either way, so treat the site as hosted-only. Bei USD 19 ein Jahr, that is a smaller bet than anywhere else here.

Vorteile

• 19 USD/Jahr with a custom domain and no branding
• 16 MB images and 64 MB video on Pro
• Free tier publishes 3 sites for real testing
• Prices unchanged since 2021

Nachteile

• Eine Seite, no CMS, kein Blog
• Site-wide password only, and it needs the US Dollar 49 Tier
• Der USD 9 tier still leaves you on a carrd.co URL

Preisgestaltung: Pro Lite USD 9/year (3 Websites, keine benutzerdefinierte Domäne), Pro Standard USD 19/year (10 Websites, benutzerdefinierte Domäne), Pro Plus USD 49/year (25 Websites, site password). Nur jährliche Abrechnung, Wohnungserneuerung, 7-day Pro trial with no card. All sales final, with refunds only where legally required.

Beste für: a sharp single-page portfolio or a link hub that costs less than lunch. Überspringen Sie, wenn: you need per-page privacy for client work.

Urteil: Buy Pro Standard at USD 19 if one page tells your story, and ignore Pro Lite, which exists to catch people who did not read the domain row. If you need several project pages and a blog, Framer at USD 120/year is the next step up. If you need to hide individual client work behind a password, Adobe Portfolio does per-page passwords and Carrd does not.

Cargo – Best flat price for unlimited sites

Cargo runs two live products at once, and mixing them up will waste your afternoon. Cargo 3 is the current builder at cargo.site. Cargo 2 is the older system, still fully operational, and Cargo’s documentation states plainly that Cargo 2 sites will not be discontinued. There is also no migration path: you cannot edit, import or move a Cargo 2 site into Cargo 3. Moving means rebuilding it by hand.

The pricing is the simplest here and one of the best deals. One tier, USD 14/month billed yearly oder USD 19 monatlich, covering unlimited public sites on cargo.site subdomains with one free custom domain connection. Extra domains are USD 2/month. Squarespace charges USD 19/month for a single site, and Adobe Portfolio caps you at five. Cargo sets no cap at all. Students can get it free through participating universities.

The layout engine is built for art and design work rather than marketing pages. Five layouts ship: Gitter, Columnized, Justify, Freeform and Slideshow. Justify arranges images in rows of uniform height, as if they were words in a paragraph, and Freeform lets you drag images anywhere on the page. Clicking an image enters Zoom mode. Images upload to 25 MB, and video up to 250 MB through the File Library.

Commerce is a paid add-on at USD 5.50/month billed yearly, through Stripe and PayPal, and Cargo takes no per-transaction fee. What Cargo 3 documents nowhere is what it does to your images: no compression, Größenänderung, metadata or delivery-format statement exists. There is also no refund policy and no documented export, and Cargo tells you backups are your responsibility.

Vorteile

• Unlimited public sites on ein USD 14 Abonnement
• Layouts built for images rather than landing pages
• Commerce add-on with no per-transaction fee
• Free for students at participating universities

Nachteile

• No refund policy at all
• Image processing entirely undocumented in Cargo 3
• Cargo 2 users face a manueller Umbau to upgrade

Preisgestaltung: USD 14/month billed yearly or USD 19 monatlich, one tier. Commerce add-on USD 5.50/month yearly or USD 9 monatlich. Extra custom domains USD 2/month yearly. Flat rate with no promotional step-up.

Beste für: artists and designers running several sites, or anyone who wants Freeform layout. Überspringen Sie, wenn: you need a documented answer on image handling.

Urteil: Take Cargo if you maintain more than one site, weil USD 14 covering all of them beats every per-site price here. If you run exactly one portfolio and want proofing with it, Pixpa costs less and does more. If you are still on Cargo 2, understand before you start that upgrading means building the whole thing again.

GitHub-Seiten – Best free option, if you can use Git

Kostenlos, mit einer benutzerdefinierten Domain, with automatic HTTPS, and with no branded subdomain forced on you. No other platform in this guide matches that combination at any price. Karte, the cheapest paid option here, still wants USD 19 a year before it will point your own domain at anything.

The price isn’t the obstacle. The skills are. There is no visual editor. Content changes are Git commits. You need a static site generator, Jekyll being built in, plus a domain from a registrar and enough DNS confidence to point it at GitHub. For a developer this is an hour’s work and a portfolio that outlives every company on this page. For a photographer it is a wall.

Published limits are generous for a text-and-screenshot portfolio: 1 GB maximum published site size, a soft bandwidth limit of 100 GB per month, und 10 builds per hour. Those same numbers make it a poor home for a large photography archive.

The exit is the inverse of Framer’s. Your site is a Git repository you already own. Cloning it or moving it to another host takes one command, because the files were never anywhere else.

Vorteile

• Free custom domain hosting with automatic HTTPS
• No branding, keine Werbung, no subdomain requirement
• The site is your repository, so migration is trivial
• Runs any generator through Actions

Nachteile

• No visual editing whatsoever
• 1 GB site cap and 100 GB monatliche Bandbreite
• Serving from a private repository needs a paid plan

Preisgestaltung: US Dollar 0, permanent, on GitHub Free with a public repository. The domain is bought separately. Serving Pages from a private repository requires GitHub Pro, Team or Enterprise.

Beste für: Entwickler, and designers comfortable in a terminal. Überspringen Sie, wenn: you want to drag a photograph onto a page.

Urteil: If you write code, build here and spend the saved USD 228 a year on the domain and better glass. If you want ownership without the terminal, self-hosted WordPress is the same principle with an admin panel. Wenn die Worte “statischer Site-Generator” mean nothing to you, take Carrd at USD 19 und mach weiter mit deinem Tag.

WordPress (Self-Hosted) – Best long-term ownership

WordPress 7.1 “Mary Lou”, veröffentlicht am 19 August 2026, moved image compression, resizing and thumbnail generation into the browser. It also added native support for AVIF, HEIC and HDR gain maps. That matters more for portfolios than any other dated change here. It sidesteps the PHP memory limits and upload timeouts that made large photo uploads fail on cheap shared hosting.

The trade is the familiar one. You own the files, the database and the design, and you can move all three to another host in an afternoon. In exchange you handle updates, backups and security yourself, or pay someone to.

Hosting is where the numbers diverge sharply. Hostinger’s Premium plan advertises USD 2.99/month, which requires a 48-month prepayment of USD 143.52, und verlängert sich bei USD 10.99. That is a 3.68x step up. Bluehost runs USD 3.99 Eintrag gegen USD 9.99 renewal on a 36-month term, a 2.5x step. Pressable charges USD 20.83/month billed annually and states that the price you see is the price you pay at renewal, which makes its multiplier 1.0x. Over eight years, Hostinger’s route costs USD 143.52 dann USD 527.52. Worth knowing before the four-year term ends.

Two technical details specific to image work. Core downsizes anything over 2560px on the long edge by default. WordPress is also the only platform here that documents its metadata handling precisely. On resize it strips everything except colour profiles, IPTC copyright, EXIF orientation and XMP rights. On hosts using the GD library rather than Imagick, nothing survives at all. If your copyright metadata matters, that is worth checking with your host.

Vorteile

• You own the files and can move hosts freely
• Browser-side image processing since August 2026
• Documented metadata handling, einzigartig hier
• No cap on how many images you publish

Nachteile

• Cheap entry pricing renews at up to 3.68x
• Aktualisierung, backups and security are your job
• Host PHP limits still cap single uploads

Preisgestaltung: Hostinger Premium USD 2.99/month on a 48-month term (US Dollar 143.52 im Voraus), USD erneuern 10.99, mit 20 GB und 3 Websites. Bluehost Starter USD 3.99 USD erneuern 9.99 auf 36 Monate, 10 GB, 10 Websites. Pressable Signature USD 20.83/month billed annually, Wohnung bei Erneuerung, 20 GB und 1 Seite? ˅. Compare the field with our Hosting-Finder-Tool.

Beste für: anyone whose portfolio is a business asset they expect to keep for a decade. Überspringen Sie, wenn: you will not maintain it.

Urteil: Run self-hosted WordPress when the portfolio feeds your income and you intend to keep the address for years, and budget the renewal rather than the teaser. If you want that ownership without the maintenance, Pressable’s flat USD 250/year removes the renewal shock. If you never want to see an update notice, Squarespace is the honest alternative and you should accept the export limits that come with it.

WordPress.com – Best managed middle ground

Same software, someone else’s problem. WordPress.com runs the platform for you. Schon seit 2 April 2026, every paid plan includes plugins, Global Styles, font uploads and custom CSS. That removes the old reason to jump straight to the expensive tier.

Personal at USD 4/month billed annually, US Dollar 48 ein Jahr, buys a custom domain for the first year, 6 GB of storage and the ability to upload a theme. Compare that with the self-hosted route: Hostinger’s four-year prepayment is USD 143.52, roughly three years of Personal, and you maintain the server yourself. Premium at USD 8/month gives 13 GB, Geschäft in USD 25 fügt Inszenierung hinzu, SFTP and database access.

The free plan is not a portfolio option. One gigabyte, keine benutzerdefinierte Domäne, no plugins, no theme upload, ads shown to your visitors, and stats limited to the last seven days.

Zwei ehrliche Vorbehalte. Storage is thin for photography: 6 GB on Personal against Wix Core’s 50 GB at a higher price. And WordPress.com’s own pricing grid reads as though Personal and Premium cannot upload custom themes, while its support documentation and the Personal plan feature page both say they can. The support docs were reviewed more recently, so that is what this guide follows, but you may see the contradiction yourself.

Vorteile

• 48 USD/Jahr with domain, plugins and theme upload
• Instandhaltung, backups and security handled
• Standard WordPress export, so migration is real
• Plugins on every paid plan since April 2026

Nachteile

• 6 GB on Personal is thin for photography
• No staging below the USD 300/year tier
• Pricing grid contradicts the support docs on themes

Preisgestaltung: Free USD 0, Personal USD 4/month (48 USD/Jahr), Premium-USD 8 (USD 96/year), Business-USD 25 (300 USD/Jahr), Commerce USD 45. Monthly billing costs roughly 2.2x the annual rate. Free domain year on annual plans.

Beste für: writers and designers who want WordPress without a server. Überspringen Sie, wenn: you need staging or heavy photo storage.

Urteil: Take Personal at USD 48/year if you want a real CMS and a domain with nothing to maintain, which is the best-value managed option in this guide. If you shoot a lot and need storage, Pixpa Creator costs less and meters storage more generously. If you want SFTP and staging, self-hosted WordPress gives you both for less than the USD 300 Geschäftsebene.

What the Domain Really Costs

The address is the only part of a portfolio you can genuinely own, and it is the part people spend least time on. Three things are worth knowing before you buy.

Zuerst, creative TLDs are priced as traps. At Porkbun in September 2026, .photography costs USD 5.66 for the first year and US Dollar 29.35 zu erneuern, a 5.19x jump. A .design is USD 10.81 dann USD 46.86, which is 4.33x. A .studio runs USD 11.84 dann USD 32.44. Gegen diese, a .com at USD 11.08 verlängert sich bei USD 11.08 and a .me at USD 17.27 hält flach. Run it over five years and the gap is stark: .photography costs USD 123.06, while .com costs USD 55.40. The cheap first year on a creative extension is the most expensive decision on this page.

Zweite, .portfolio does not exist. It is not in the IANA root zone, which does contain .design, .Studio, .photography and .me. Anything advertising a “portfolio domain” is selling you something else.

Dritte, a change that affects everyone. Verisign is raising the wholesale .com registry fee from USD 10.26 in USD 10.97 pro Jahr, Wirksam 1 November 2026. Announced in April 2026, it is the first rise since September 2024. Registrars selling at cost will pass it through. Cloudflare states that its domains are “sold at cost, for the exact price offered by registries”, and Porkbun prices close behind. If you are registering anyway, doing it before November saves you a year at the old rate. Unser Leitfaden zu günstige Domainregistrierung covers the registrar comparison in full.

How to Choose Your Portfolio Platform

Vergessen Sie Funktionslisten. Four situations cover almost everyone who reads this.

Budget: zero extra. You already pay Adobe. Use Adobe Portfolio. It is included with the Lightroom (1TB) plan at USD 11.99/month that you are already buying, it allows five separate sites, and it handles 50 MB uploads. Skip Format, whose Basic tier costs USD 120/year and caps you at 70 Bilder. Skip Squarespace at USD 228/year unless template quality is what closes your sales.

Arbeitsbelastung: client galleries. You shoot clients and deliver proofs. Buy Pixpa Creator, USD 9/month in year one and USD 12 nach dem. Proofing, favouriting and a commission-free store are on every tier, and WHCC is wired in for prints. Skip Squarespace here despite the better templates. It has no proofing at all, so you end up paying for a second subscription such as Pixieset to cover the gap. Choose Format Pro only if you upload files above 50 MB, seit es 100 MB ceiling is twice Pixpa’s. Budget the USD 17 Erneuerung, nicht der USD 12 Promo.

Publikum: hiring managers. Three to six projects, no more. Carrd Pro Standard at USD 19/year is enough, and a sharp one-page site beats a sprawling one. If any of that work is under NDA, Carrd can’t help you. Its password is site-wide and sits on the USD 49 Tier, so use Adobe Portfolio’s per-page passwords instead. Developers in this situation should use GitHub Pages, pay nothing, and point a USD 11 .com at it.

Situation: a ten-year asset. This portfolio is your business. Self-hosted WordPress. Pressable at USD 250/year if you want the price to stay still, or Hostinger at USD 143.52 for four years if you accept the USD 10.99 renewal afterwards. This is the only route where a platform decision in 2026 does not become a rebuild in 2031. If the maintenance will not happen, WordPress.com Personal at USD 48/year keeps the same export path without the server. For the wider builder-versus-WordPress question, unser comparison of WordPress and website builders goes deeper than there is room for here.

One legal note, since it worries freelancers unnecessarily. The European Accessibility Act has applied since 28 Juni 2025. It reaches portfolio sites only through its e-commerce limb, which covers services provided “with a view to concluding a consumer contract”. A portfolio that shows work and invites an email does not conclude contracts online. Even a site that does sell is exempt as a microenterprise. The test is fewer than 10 Angestellte, with turnover or balance sheet total at or under EUR 2 Million. Most freelancers are outside this twice over. Build accessibly because it is good work, not because someone told you it was mandatory.

Häufig gestellte Fragen

Is Adobe Portfolio really free if I already pay for Lightroom?

Ja, with no separate website bill. Adobe’s plan comparison lists Portfolio on two plans: Lichtraum (1TB) at USD 11.99/month and Photography (1TB) für 19,99 USD/Monat. There is no standalone Portfolio subscription to buy. You get up to five websites, each with its own domain and password. You still buy the domain itself from a registrar, and if your subscription lapses the site goes with it.

Is Format or Pixpa better for a photography portfolio?

Pixpa for most photographers, Format for large files. Pixpa includes client galleries, proofing and a 0% commission store on every tier including Basic at USD 5.40/month, Verlängerung bei USD 7.20. Format gates proofing and selling behind Pro, which renews at USD 17/month, and its Basic tier allows only 70 images in total. Format wins on one specific point: 100 MB uploads with RAW support against Pixpa’s 50 MB and a 2560 x 3840 Größe ändern.

How many projects should a portfolio website include?

Three to six, and the weakest one sets your price. Reviewers rarely reach a seventh project, and each additional weak piece drags the average down rather than demonstrating range. Show the brief, your specific role, and the outcome for each. On team projects, say exactly which parts were yours, because a reader who cannot tell will assume the least impressive answer.

Can I password-protect client work on a portfolio website?

Most platforms do it per page, but two popular ones don’t. Adobe Portfolio, Platz, Wix, Webflow and Cargo all support per-page passwords, and Adobe pitches the feature for sharing different work with different clients. Carrd protects the whole site only, and that needs Pro Plus at USD 49/year. Framer documents no native per-page option either, and points you to marketplace components instead. One warning specific to Wix: it states that password-protecting a page also stops search engines indexing it.

Do I need a .design or .photography domain?

Nein, and the renewal maths argues against it. At Porkbun, .photography costs USD 5.66 im ersten Jahr und USD 29.35 jedes Jahr danach, a 5.19x increase, while .design runs USD 10.81 dann USD 46.86. A .com at USD 11.08 renews at the same USD 11.08. Note also that .portfolio is not a real extension; it does not appear in the IANA root zone.

Will large images slow my portfolio down?

Only if your platform makes you handle it, and several do it for you. Squarespace serves WebP automatically, while Wix and Framer convert uploads to AVIF, which covers roughly 95% von Browsern. Webflow leaves conversion to you as a manual batch job that replaces your originals, and self-hosted WordPress needs a plugin or a filter. Google’s threshold is Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds at the 75th percentile, and the quickest win is never putting loading=”faul” on your first gallery image.

Endgültiges Urteil

Adobe Portfolio is the best-value portfolio site in 2026 for anyone already paying Adobe. The marginal cost is zero, and five sites is more than most people need. It cannot sell prints and it cannot export, so treat it as a shop window rather than a business system.

Pixpa wins for working photographers. Proofing, favouriting and commission-free selling sit on every tier, including Basic, and no competitor here does that. Budget the real number: USD 7.20/month on Basic and USD 12 on Creator, once the introductory year ends.

Karte at USD 19/year remains the best cheap address on the internet, provided one page is genuinely enough and no client work needs hiding. GitHub-Seiten beats it at zero for anyone who can use Git, und Cargo at USD 14/month is the pick for artists running several sites at once.

For ownership, self-hosted WordPress is still the only answer that survives a platform’s bad quarter. Der August 2026 release finally fixed the large-upload problem that made it painful for photographers. If maintenance is not realistic, WordPress.com Personal at USD 48/year keeps the same export path.

Two to think twice about. Webflow sells the only real code export here, and caps images at 4 MB, which is an odd combination for a designer’s tool. Framer has the best image pipeline and ships no gallery at all, and its own documentation confirms there is no way to take your site anywhere else.

Fazit: pick the platform for what happens in year three, not week one. Zerply switches off on 28 September 2026. The people who had put a domain they controlled in front of their work will lose a host, not an audience. Still weighing the wider options? Our no-code builder guide tests all twelve on what you can take with you. The cheapest website builders covers the budget end in more detail. Building a store rather than a portfolio? WordPress-E-Commerce-Hosting is the guide to read next.