Can EverWeb Replace Discontinued Muse?

The recent announcement by Adobe concerning the discontinuation of Muse, its website building software, has come as a surprise to many Muse users. Development of Muse has already stopped with support ending on March 26 2020.

The termination of Muse undoubtedly leaves its users wondering what to do with existing and future website development projects. Muse itself has no direct counterpart, and the products that Adobe offer as replacements, such as Spark, just don’t meet the needs of Muse users. In this light, would EverWeb be a viable alternative? The two products actually have quite a lot in common as well as some differences as we explain below.

Product Facts, Purchasing, Updates and Support

EverWeb and Muse are both 64 bit applications that run on macOS. Muse additionally runs on Microsoft Windows. EverWeb’s a locally installed application so working on your website project may be faster as you’re not at the mercy of your Internet connection to use EverWeb. The other difference is that EverWeb is not a subscription service like Muse is. If you purchase EverWeb, you’ll receive product updates and support for one year. After that time, you can still use the product you purchased if you don’t want to renew your product update and support for another year.

EverWeb is usually updated every couple months, so new and updated features, as well as maintenance and stability enhancements, are never a long time coming.

Basic Features of EverWeb and Muse
EverWeb and Muse are both drag and drop website building products and both include Master Pages, Asset Management features to manage image files, built in hyperlinking including page anchors, light boxes, website preview features, automatically generated navigation menus and more.

Using Fonts
Object manipulation in EverWeb and Muse is easy including quick access to fonts and colors. Muse takes advantage of Adobe’s own font styles whilst EverWeb can take advantage of Google Fonts making nearly 900, free to use, font families available to integrate in to your website.

No Coding Required
One of the major features of EverWeb and Muse is that neither requires any coding skills and EverWeb’s features are usually only one or two mouse clicks away. If you do want to use code in your site that’s also easy to implement at any level in your website.

Widgets and Blogging
Widgets are a common feature to the two products letting you easily add specific features to your webpages. Third party widgets are also available for both products. Muse uses widgets to access WordPress and RSS Feeds as a way to facilitate blogging. EverWeb’s fully featured blogging environment on the other hand is integrated directly in to the product. You can easily import any WordPress posts you may have in to EverWeb’s blogging environment and you also can easily use Disqus or Facebook Comment engines for blog commenting.

Built in Contact Forms
Contact forms are a mainstay of website builders and are features of both Muse and EverWeb. EverWeb’s fully featured Contact Form Advanced widget makes highly customize forms possible with just a few mouse clicks.

Built In SEO
SEO is important for many website developers. SEO is backed in to EverWeb making it easy for novice users to include SEO automatically. EverWeb also creates a site map XML file for your website that can easily be found by Google and other search engines. Checkout the SEO for EverWeb video course for more details of how to effectively use SEO in EverWeb.

Publishing Your Website
EverWeb and Muse allow you to publish your website to either their own hosting service (EverWeb+Hosting and Adobe CC respectively), your own host provider or to a folder on your local hard disk. EverWeb provides exclusive built in features within the product itself for those who have an EverWeb+Hosting account so there’s no need to work with a hosting provider for features such as HTTPS secure websites, 404 Page not found pages, password protected pages and websites and page redirection.

…and There’s So Much More!

There’s a long list of other areas where EverWeb and Muse share common features…

• Hyperlink file downloads e.g. PDF file downloading
• Slideshow and Image Gallery widgets
• Dynamic Page resizing
• Facebook, Google Maps, YouTube, Vimeo, Pinterest features
• Object alignment and distribution
• Mobile and desktop friendly
• Spell Checker and Search & Replace
• Social Media widgets and buttons
• Royalty free Stock Photo library built in
• User customizable UI features
• E-Commerce support using PayPal widget
• Animation Effects
• Fully editable template designs

What’s the Next Step?
There are many ways in which EverWeb and Muse have features in common. There are also many areas in which both products diverge. The only way to find out if EverWeb’s right for you moving forward is to take advantage of the free trial download. The free download is the full EverWeb product but you can’t publish your website to the Internet or locally unless you purchase the product.

If you’re using Muse and have any questions about whether EverWeb is suitable for you moving forwards, please let us know in the Comments Section below.