A practical AlpacApp alternative when you would rather not assemble the rest yourself

Start with the part AlpacApp genuinely does better than almost anything in its price range. Beyond the built-in blocks you can author your own with the Liquid template engine: an entry file plus a placeholder file, carrying whatever HTML, CSS and JavaScript you want, then reused, shared and imported across projects. That means you can add a feature the product never shipped without leaving the product. Grigora lets you inject custom code into a page, which covers a script or a widget, but there is no authored block format to build and reuse.

Takeaway: If you want a builder you can extend by writing code into it, AlpacApp wins this outright and Grigora does not try to compete.

AlpacApp Premium includes project export as a ZIP containing website files. This can help move a static site to another host, although forms, Notion feeds and external services may still need configuration. Grigora exports content but does not export the site layout as runnable code.

Takeaway: Grigora loses this one cleanly: AlpacApp Premium gives you a folder, and Grigora gives you a rebuild.

AlpacApp's free tier is branded 'Always Free' and it is not a trial. It carries the full editor, the built-in blocks, custom Liquid blocks, an SSL certificate, the Notion integration and basic support, on an alpac.site subdomain. The unusual part is the custom domain: connecting your own .com costs nothing and is not a row on the pricing table at all, where most builders put it behind their cheapest paid plan. The two real costs of staying free are the 'Built with AlpacApp' banner and the fact that Export Project is switched off.

Takeaway: A free domain with free SSL and no published expiry is the most generous thing about AlpacApp, and it is worth taking seriously.

AlpacApp's blog is the Notion integration, not a CMS of its own. The renderer carries a full Notion-to-HTML pipeline with Notion Page, Notion Cards and Notion Card blocks, tables, toggles, bookmarks and link previews all mapped to styled markup, and the styling stays editable on the AlpacApp side. For a team that already drafts in Notion this is a lower-friction loop than any builder's own post editor. The flip side is blunt: there is no post editor, no categories or tags, no scheduling and no author management inside AlpacApp, and if you do not use Notion you do not have a blog.

Takeaway: A genuinely nice writing loop if Notion is already where you work, and no blog at all if it is not.

This is not a thin store, it is the absence of one. There is no cart, no checkout, no product catalogue, no inventory and no order management anywhere in AlpacApp. The application bundle contains no references to Stripe, Paddle, carts, checkouts, payments or commerce, there is no store block in the library and no store row on the pricing page at either tier. The advertised use cases are photographers, landing pages, portfolios, brands and wedding sites, and that is an accurate description of what it can do. Grigora includes the store on every paid plan, Starter included.

Takeaway: A separate hosted checkout or commerce service is an option. Compare its integration work and cost with a native storefront.

AlpacApp's block engine exposes a Mailchimp audience field and a subscribe call, so a signup block can push an address straight into a Mailchimp list. That is the whole of the email feature. There is no list management, no campaign composer, no broadcast or automation sending, no templates and no deliverability tooling in the product, so everything after the address is captured happens in Mailchimp on a separate Mailchimp bill. Grigora holds the list, builds the campaign and runs the automation in the same subscription.

Takeaway: AlpacApp's email feature ends at the moment the address is captured, which is the moment the work starts.

The live template list returned exactly six designs on 11 September 2026: Reykjavik, Marrakesh, New York, Rio de Janeiro, Vienna and Montreal. They are well made and they are named after cities rather than industries, which tells you how they are meant to be used. If none of the six fits, the starting point is heavy customisation or an empty page. Grigora ships website templates and, more to the point, generates a first draft with pages, layout and copy from a sentence describing the business.

Takeaway: Six starting points is a reasonable design decision for a portfolio and a real problem for a business site.

Credit where it is due, because the marketing site undersells this. Published AlpacApp sites are genuine server-rendered static HTML rather than a JavaScript shell, and they come with an automatic sitemap.xml and robots.txt, a per-page meta description, Open Graph and Twitter card tags, a lang attribute and an alt text field labelled for SEO. What is missing is the layer above the defaults: no canonical tag appeared on the template demos checked, there is no schema tooling, no exposed redirect manager, no noindex controls, and the auto sitemap stamps every URL with today's date and changefreq daily, which is a weak crawl signal.

Takeaway: The output is cleaner than the marketing implies, but the crawl signals stop where the defaults stop.

AlpacApp is an independent single-founder product built in Montreal. It began as yawb.io, launched in February 2023 and renamed in April 2023, and the rename is still half finished in public: the blog footer still reads yawb.io, the docs link still points at the old organisation and the images are still served from a yawb bucket. The app itself is still being deployed, with a January 2026 date on the live bundle. The self-serve surface around it is thinner: the Documentation link in the navigation and the footer goes to one GitHub repository rather than a docs site, and the community block library is nine blocks, every one published by AlpacApp itself.

Takeaway: Neither side publishes a response time, but when an AlpacApp build goes wrong the self-serve material is a single repository.