Repaint and Surmado Sites both use AI to get a small business a better website, and that is where the similarity ends. Repaint is an AI website builder: a genuinely capable tool that you operate. Surmado Sites is a managed website service: Surmado builds, migrates, and runs the website for you. The honest way to choose is to decide who should be doing the work, you or the service.
TL;DR
Choose Repaint if you want to build and iterate yourself. It generates multi-page sites from a prompt or an import, lets you edit everything through chat, rolls back versions, and covers unlimited sites in one workspace at a much lower cash price. You remain responsible for design judgment, SEO-safe migration, and upkeep.
Choose Surmado Sites if you want the outcome without the operating. Surmado rebuilds your existing site free (or builds your first one), a human checks it against a 42-point QA list, most rebuilds are ready within 24 hours, and you pay nothing until you approve the preview. After launch, Surmado hosts, monitors, updates, and improves the site, and you request changes in plain English.
| Surmado Sites | Repaint | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Managed website service | AI website builder |
| Who does the work | Surmado | You, with AI help |
| Output | Fully customizable, complete multi-page sites; 100+ pages by request | Multi-page sites with chat-driven editing |
| Turnaround | Most rebuilds within 24 hours, human checked | Minutes to generate, then you iterate |
| Migration | URLs, redirects, metadata, content, and forms preserved; human verified | Import supported; SEO preservation is your responsibility |
| Languages | Up to 15, kept in sync with every edit | Not a managed multilingual workflow |
| Ongoing care | Hosting, monitoring, maintenance, weekly checks included | Self-serve; you maintain the site |
| Pricing | $99/month billed annually (Pro), $199 (Pro+) | Free tier; roughly $20 to $40/month paid |
| Code export | No (content, URL map, redirects, and metadata returned on exit) | No (deliberate product decision) |
Two different jobs
Repaint replaces the website builder. It is aimed at people who want to direct the work: founders, developers, and agencies who have taste, know what they want, and enjoy the loop of asking, inspecting, correcting, and publishing. Its chat editing is consistent, it writes real code under the hood, and one subscription covers unlimited sites in a workspace. As a builder, it is impressive.
Surmado Sites replaces the webmaster. Most small business owners do not want a better tool. They want the website to stop being their problem. Surmado takes the existing site, preserves what customers recognize, rebuilds it on a faster and more secure foundation, and then keeps running it: hosting, security, monitoring, content updates, and search and AI visibility care. Other companies give you tools. Surmado drives outcomes.
Speed, and why Surmado is deliberately not instant
Repaint generates a site in minutes. Surmado usually delivers in about 24 hours. That gap is the product working as intended: after Surmado’s AI rebuilds the site, a human checks it against a 42-point QA process covering broken links, forms, mobile layout, accessibility, and the details automation misses. You see a finished, verified preview, not a first draft to correct.
Migration is where this matters most. Moving a site is riskier than generating one, because a migration has to preserve information architecture, URLs, redirects, metadata, content, assets, forms, and business context. Repaint can import an existing site, but it is upfront that SEO preservation is not automatic; you are expected to review old and new URLs and add redirects where paths change. Surmado treats migration fidelity as the core of the service and verifies it with a human before you ever see the preview.
Customization and scale
A common misreading is that a managed service means less capability. Surmado Sites are fully customizable, complete multi-page websites. Surmado can keep your current brand identity or take the design somewhere new, and any change is a plain-English request away. Full sites with navigation are standard, sites over 100 pages are available by contacting Surmado, and blogs are supported, including automated weekly posts on Pro+.
Repaint has the stronger workflow for hands-on creative exploration. You can feed it style references, screenshots, and PDFs, generate custom interactive components, and edit text directly. If you have strong creative direction and want to execute it yourself, Repaint gives you the tighter loop.
Languages, leads, and everything after launch
After launch is where the two products diverge most.
A Surmado membership includes hosting, a domain if you need one, ongoing maintenance, human support, weekly monitoring, and research that checks how search engines and AI platforms see the business. One additional language is included with every membership, Pro+ includes up to five more, and a whole site can run in up to 15 languages by request, with every edit kept in sync across every language so translations never drift. Pro+ also adds a custom chatbot trained on your site that answers customer questions and captures leads, plus weekly blog posts.
With Repaint, the site is yours to operate. Its native contact forms email you each submission, and anything beyond that comes from embedding outside services. That is workable for a technical owner and a real workload for anyone else.
Lock-in, honestly
Neither product lets you export its production code, so weigh offboarding instead. A cancelled Repaint site stays reachable on a Repaint subdomain with Repaint branding, which is a gentle landing but not portability. Surmado returns your content and images, a full URL map with redirects, your metadata, and a DNS checklist so your next provider can rebuild without losing your search presence. With both products your domain and your content remain yours; with Surmado, the exit package is designed to protect your rankings on the way out.
The bottom line
If your time is cheap, you enjoy iterating, or you manage several sites, Repaint is the better value and the better tool. If an hour of your attention is worth more than the price difference, or you simply never want to think about your website again, Surmado Sites is the stronger choice: the rebuild is free, a human verifies it, most are ready within 24 hours, and it comes with a 7-day money-back guarantee. See pricing for what each membership includes.