Mobirise is a toy compared to BSS, and while the program is technically “free”, they nickel & dime you for anything that would make it useful to a professional developer. For example…
BlockPack for AMP – $99
BlockPack for M4 – $99
Lazy Load (CSS optimization tool) – $39
PWA (progressive web application) Builder – $49
Popup Builder – $49
Form Builder – $59
WOW Slider – $49
PayPal Shopping Cart – $59
Icons – $49
Code Editor – $69
However, if you try to purchase one of these themes or add-ons, you’ll find that you can’t actually do that (at least not at the moment). Instead, after clicking the “Buy Now” button, you are redirected to the portion of the page that offers Mobirise’s all-in-one Website Builder Kit. This kit includes all the themes and feature extensions and goes for $99/year. This kit is listed as being 97% off. Mobirise arrives at this figure by adding up the cost of every single individual theme and extension, which would come to $4638. Obviously, nobody would ever pay anywhere near that much for a DIY website builder’s add-ons. What’s more, the 97% figure is misleading due to the fact that you’ll be paying $99 annually for the themes and add-ons, while the prices of the individual extras (which, again, you cannot currently buy individually) are listed as one-time charges.
Compare that to Bootstrap Studio which is a mere $60, one-time purchase for a fully-featured program that can build the most professional websites one could ask for using the latest Bootstrap technology, plus you get functional forms, free hosting and free updates for life. It gets frequent updates, the developers never charge anything extra, are highly responsive to the users and their ideas, and incorporate many of our suggestions into future versions. I’ve yet to see a better development team than Martin and his crew. The ONLY area BSS is lacking is in documentation, but the Forums are well supported, and most people get their problems solved here with little difficulty. But, BSS is not for people who don’t want to learn CSS, or the basic fundamentals of how websites work. It’s not a program for the pure drag-n-drop crowd.
Plus, Mobirise will endlessly market crap to you, send you emails and hammer you to buy their “latest new features.” The program It is geared towards the novice, “I don’t want to learn a single thing about how to build websites correctly” crowd, which is why they are still around. There is a market for such types, but I don’t think any serious web developer, freelancer or small business would rely on Mobirise to build websites for clients.
As for AMP… it’s days are numbered. Google created and promoted AMP because it benefits Google, not because it benefits website owners or developers. Stripping down a website of features or content to make it load faster is not the future of web design. Every year, bandwidth and throughput continue to increase exponentially. It’s only a matter of time (a few years) before affordable gigabit wireless will available everywhere on Earth thanks to new technologies being developed (like Starlink.) As it is now, most developed nations have full 4G wireless coverage, and virtually all major cities and suburbs have high speed internet from either cable or fiber-optic. It’s only very remote, rural areas that are still stuck on 3G or DSL, and these are already being addressed by Musk’s Starlink.
Every “band-aid” technology that has been invented to save space (storage) and increase speed has eventually ended up going defunct because progress in technology is always towards greater storage and speed, with smaller form-factors that require less power and cost less. Just look at how quickly we went from 3.25 floppies to Zip disks, to CDs, to DVDs, to USB thumb drives, and micro SD cards, and from mechanical hard drives to SSDs. In 5 years, AMP will be pointless and useless.
Eventually Bootstrap will be replaced as well, but then so will the whole process of humans coding websites via keyboards, mice and trackpads. Eventually, we’ll be in “Star Trek holodeck” land, and you’ll just describe what you want in plain language, and it will be created in seconds. In 20 years, the websites we’re building and using today will seem as primitive and antiquated as the monochrome 80 column ASCII graphics of computers from the 1970’s.