TheGarnet.net

2026/02/14 - I have decided to transition away from using Mobirise. I will be going full wiki on all my sites with the insanely great dokuwiki software that I have used for years.

Why am I giving up on Mobirise web editor?

This is because of several issues:

I am tired of paying their $200+ a year subscription fee. They no longer offer a pay once and own it price.

I am tired of many aspects of how mobirise works.

I have a lot of domains that I was managing with their software, and although I believe they said I could still edit my prior sites after their software expires. But right now it is instead not correctly opening all my old sites. Many broken images and such when opening them for editing.

So in essence, when I need to make some quick emergency updates, they are holding me hostage waiting for a payment of an annual random.

I cant just continue using the old software without getting further updates.

The other big issue is them peppering my sites with links back to their own site. I can understand this for a free software, but when I am paying, I dont expect to find involuntary links on my site back to their site.

They promise this feature to not link to themselves if you pay, but they fail to keep the promise.

Example: I just discovered a very embarassing issue. On my site https://www.laughingchaplain.com, the icon at the upper left of all pages should be a “Home” icon, and take users back to the home page. It doesn't. It is hijacked to go to mobirise website.

Every time any element in their designs needs a link, they put their own URL. It is not always obvious where all these links are just looking at their designs, because they dont always have standard link outlines. Graphic images might be links when you dont realize it. And every one of them has a hidden link to their own website if you dont spot that.

What could they do instead?

They could simply make all those things link to “/” if the user has paid, but they dont. I have asked for this feature for years.

Which brings me to the next reason.

In the past I have seen persistent issues with editing links in my site using their UI where when I save the edit, the new link doesn't actually get saved. Yes, every edit to a website should be manually checked, but having to constantly make sure their software actually accepted the edit, unacceptible.

Every time you publish a mobirise project, the output directory includes a project.mobirise file which is supposed to completely represent your site. It is often around 4MB in size. There is no way to diff two different project,mobirise files to quickly see what has changed.

Wiki's maintain an ongoing recent changes so you can follow the history of the site.

And dokuwiki stores every webpage in a separate file so you can easily check in changes to a .git repository and have a nice development history for your site if you desire.

I use mac and windows computers. While I like that the Mobirise editor can run on different platforms, to edit a website on a different computer, I have to re-import that large project file.

So I have to be sure I am importing the correct one. It is impossible for me to easily look at two machines and quickly determine which one has the latest version of my site, unless I consistently manually edit a version number onto at least one of my pages.

And since the project files dont have any easily inspectible version number, and they are large binary blobs for git to deal with, they really bloat your repository.

A wiki can be edited from any and all of the devices I own.

Editing text in a block based UI is cumbersome. With wiki, just move around the wiki text and edit as many things as you want before looking at a preview.

Grok writes superior text. But its hard to deal with multiple individual cut and pastes from Grok into the various blocks.

With a wiki, just have grok generate dokuwiki formatted output for the page.

Here are some of the things I might cover further, but maybe these limitations have been fixed. These things were true in the build of about a year ago.

* AI generated sites were only one long run on page, it couldnt generate multiple AI generated pages in the same site. * Also their AI was meh in what it generated * it was easy to type too much in the prompt.

There might be more reasons, but I am exhausted just recounting all these issues.

Because this is a wiki, I can easily come back and add more reasons later.