Wix and Squarespace dominate the all-in-one site builder space, and though the two appear nearly identical, they’re not without their differences. So we compared Wix vs Squarespace head-to-head to help you decide which is best for you—if either. In short, Wix is easier to use and provides far more design freedom. In contrast, Squarespace’s award-winning templates and limited design flexibility can help beginners avoid over-customizing a site, ensuring a DIY website doesn’t look homemade.
- Wix: More user-friendly with extensive design freedom and better for selling services
- Squarespace: More affordable with unlimited storage and better for selling products
Does either sound quite right for you? The good news is that there are plenty of others to choose from, so find the perfect solution for your unique business needs by checking out the best overall website builders.
Wix vs Squarespace Key Differences at a Glance
Expert Score
4.6 out of 5 stars
4.1 out of 5 stars
Starting Price
$12 per month
$14 per month
Ecommerce Plans
Sell online for $18 per month
Sell online for $23 per month
Ease of Use
Beginner-intermediate
Beginner
Design
110 prebuilt templates
800+ prebuilt templates
Built-in Appointment Booking System
No
(available as an add-on for an extra $15 per month)
✓
Sell Gift Cards
✓
(with the Business Plan, $18 per month)
No
Accept Recurring Payments (e.g., Subscriptions)
✓
(with the Commerce Plan, $40 per month)
✓
(with the Business Unlimited Plan, $27 per month)
Membership Site
✓
(via Member Areas for an additional $10 per month)
✓
Visit Squarespace
Visit Wix
How We Evaluated Squarespace vs Wix
At first glance, Squarespace and Wix seem nearly identical, and the two are very nuanced in pricing and features. If you haven’t used either site builder before, it can be tough to decide which is suitable for you. So we tested them and compared the providers head-on—across several evaluation criteria—to help you determine the best site builder for you.
Click the tabs below for more information on each evaluation criterion:
BREAKDOWN
- PRICE – 25%
- GENERAL FEATURES – 25%
- NICHE FEATURES – 10%
- EASE OF USE & DESIGN – 25%
- SUPPORT – 5%
- EXPERT OPINION – 10%
*Percentages of the overall score
Let’s take a closer look at Wix vs Squarespace:
Best for Price: Squarespace
Pricing starts at $14 per month but quickly increases, depending on if you’re selling online and what features you need.
It’s cheaper and a better value, with plans starting at $12 per month with unlimited storage and bandwidth.
Squarespace is slightly more affordable for low- and mid-priced plans, but the builder offers a better value. You get unlimited storage and bandwidth for just $12 per month, whereas, with Wix, professional-use plans start at $14 per month and give you just 20GB of storage space.
Pricing gets tricky if you’re looking to accept payment online or for additional features. For example, you can accept online payments with Squarespace for just $18 per month, compared to Wix at $23 per month. However, once you’re looking for more advanced selling features, such as abandoned cart recovery and recurring payments, Squarespace gets way more expensive than Wix.
If you’re looking for the cheapest option, you must look beyond Wix and Squarespace. The most affordable site builder for professional use is Bluehost, with plans as low as $2.95 per month, and the cheapest option for building an online store is Weebly at just $6 per month. For more info, check out the most affordable website builders.
Winner: Squarespace wins here for offering more value for the cost (plus, it’s a bit more transparent about its pricing and plans), but it was a close race (Wix’s pricing is comparable).
Most User-friendly: Wix
More intuitive site editor, making it easier for beginners
Templates are far more built out, requiring fewer customizations
Ease of use can be a subjective topic. However, if you’re new to website design and site builders, you will likely find Wix more user-friendly than Squarespace. Both make editing text and images easy, but they do so in different ways. With Squarespace, you’ll click on buttons and use menus to make changes. With Wix, you’ll rely on drag-and-drop and pop-up menus to design.
- Wix: You get a lot of design freedom with the ability to drag and drop an element anywhere on any page.
- Squarespace: Content blocks keep your page structure to the template, which ensures your design looks professional, no matter what you add or remove.
Building a Site With Wix
Like most website builders, Wix starts you off with a template of your choice (unless you opt for artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted site build). Editing text and images through the Wix editor is as simple as double-clicking what you want to change. Then you can upload your own image (or use stock images that Wix provides), add your own text, and make the site uniquely yours.
If you need more sections, just click on the plus sign on the left menu and choose the element you want. Most features offer different layouts, which you can select in the menu or after you’ve added it to the page. To add an element, you just drag and drop it where you’d like. It’s an easy-to-use editor, but having the freedom to put an element anywhere on a page, it’s possible to clutter your page easily if you don’t have design experience.
Get a walk-through on how to create a website with Wix.
Building a Site With Squarespace
Designing a website with Squarespace starts with choosing a template. Once you find one you like, you can fill in some specific details about your business and then get started editing. You can usually click on what you want to edit, but only for some elements. For example, you can’t simply click on it to edit if you wish to change what’s on your navigation menu (usually at the top of a website). You’ll click on the header, and a pop-up brings up editing options, including the site title, logo, elements, and colours.
Squarespace could be more intuitive to use compared to Wix. You can’t change a font while you’re typing on a page. You have to save your template changes, go to Design > Site Styles > Fonts, and choose a font pack you prefer. If you want to customize the fonts for your site, you can do that by selecting the text style. For the most part, Squarespace tries to keep your design balanced (hence font packs), so no matter how you change your design, it will always look professional.
Learn more about how to build a website using Squarespace.
Winner: Wix wins here because the editor is intuitive to use, making it easy for anyone to design a website.
Best for Design & Templates: Squarespace
800+ templates to choose from, but many are old and dated-looking
110 award-winning template designs to choose from
The most significant differences in design between Wix and Squarespace are that Squarespace’s designs are cleaner, more modern, and objectively designed better. You can easily change templates with Squarespace and not lose your content. If you change your mind about your template choice with Wix, you lose all your work and have to start over. Squarespace offers fewer templates with more than 200 options (if you include templates from the older editor), and Wix provides more than 800.
Wix Template Examples
Wix’s designs are hit or miss—some rival the quality of Squarespace’s templates, while others seem outdated.
Squarespace Template Examples
Squarespace’s designs are consistent in quality—even the older designs—providing white space, thoughtful font packs, and balance.
Winner: Squarespace is the clear winner based on the quality of templates alone (it helps you quickly switch templates and not lose your content too).
Best for Selling Online: Tied
Best For
Selling services
Selling products
Starting Price to Sell Online
$23 per month
$18 per month
Things to Know
- Far cheaper to sell subscriptions
- Appointment booking system available with all plans
- Cannot sell gift cards
- Cheaper for more advanced selling tools and features
- More dropshipping integrations
- More built-in marketing tools to help you sell across channels
- Cheaper for introductory selling tools and features
Selling online is easy with either Wix or Squarespace, but what you’re selling and how you’re selling is where the two differ. In short, Wix is better for selling services online, given its built-in appointment booking system, which is available with all plans. Squarespace is better for selling products online as its plan enables cheaper online payment processing. With unlimited storage, you have all the space you need to build your product library.
Digging deeper, you’ll find that pricing varies greatly depending on the features and capabilities you need. For example, if you’re looking to sell on social channels, such as Facebook and Instagram, Wix is a better value at $23 per month, whereas to get this feature on Squarespace, you’ll need to spend $26 per month. Then consider features, such as abandoned cart recovery—with Wix, it’s included in the $23 per month plan, but with Squarespace, you’ll need its highest-tier plan at $40 per month.
One area of eCommerce that both Wix and Squarespace lack is their dropshipping integrations. So, if you’re looking to set up a dropshipping business and want the ease of use of a site builder, opt instead for Shopify.
Winner: It’s a toss-up. Wix offers better plans for selling services and more feature-packed mid-level plans, whereas Squarespace is cheaper for its entry-level plans. Still, pricing quickly increases well above Wix for advanced eCommerce features.
Best for Service-based Businesses: Wix
Wix offers lots of built-in tools that service providers need
110 award-winning template designs to choose from
What do an events website, a salon website, and a site for a medical office have in common? You need specific tools so your clients or customers can book appointments, buy tickets, sign up for classes, and get in touch with you. Wix and Squarespace do a great job of catering to service-based businesses, but they do so a little differently.
Wix offers a handful of features and apps to accept recurring payments, display events on a calendar, email clients, and allow customers to order food online or make reservations at a restaurant. These tools are native or proprietary to Wix, so it’s a great all-in-one option. However, not all of them work as intended, or the developers still need a bit more tweaking.
Squarespace can do all the same as Wix. Still, a feature or tool is often available because of a third-party app, such as OpenTable for reservations and ChowNow for online ordering. The good news is that these third-party apps are usually full-featured and have fewer issues than Wix’s native apps. Not all apps are free with Wix or Squarespace, so expect your monthly cost to increase with these extra features.
Accept Recurring Payments
✓
✓
Booking System
✓
✓
Calendar Sync
✓
✓
Email Marketing Tools
✓
✓
Live Chat
✓
✓
Maps
✓
✓
Online Ordering
✓
✓
Reservation System
✓
✓
Building a website for the food service industry? Check out the best site builders for restaurants.
Winner: Wix because it offers more built-in features with lower-priced plans. However, what’s even better than Wix for those in the service industry looking to accept online appointments and bookings is GoDaddy, which is also cheaper, with plans starting as low as $6.99 per month.
Best Support: Tied
Wix offers a callback phone support service
Squarespace offers live chat help on its website
For the most part, Wix and Squarespace offer similar customer support in that both have forums for customers, tutorials, step-by-step guides, robust knowledge bases, and videos. Where the two differ is when you need to speak to an actual person for help. Wix offers a callback service, so you can get phone support. It’s available from 5 a.m. to 5 p.m. Pacific Time on weekdays. Squarespace offers live chat support, so you can get in touch through its website. Hours for live chat are from 4 a.m. to 8 p.m. Eastern Time on weekdays.
Winner: Tied. Wix offers phone support, whereas Squarespace provides live chat support. Quality of support is excellent from both, so this one comes down to preference: phone or live chat.
Best Alternatives to Wix & Squarespace
Wix and Squarespace are excellent site builders that make it easy to create a professional website or online store. However, you may want something that offers more creative freedom or a niche site builder for something more specific.
Consider these alternatives to Wix and Squarespace:
- Shopify: If you want the best eCommerce builder, look into this builder explicitly made for online stores.
- WordPress: For the most creative freedom, you’ll want to choose a content management system (CMS) like WordPress.
- Weebly: Budget-conscious business owners may consider Weebly, which starts at just $6 per month.
There’s a lot of competition in the site-building world, which means you have a lot of choices. A great place to continue your research would be with our guide on the best website builders.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Is Wix good for SEO?
Wix, Squarespace, and other website builders have a terrible reputation when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO) because they may add more code to pages than needed. However, site builders have improved SEO recently, such as by letting you change URL slugs—it’s always better to have a keyword as a page name rather than a string of random numbers and letters. Learn more about all SEO features Wix offers and see how it stacks up among the best website builders for SEO.
Which website builder is best for photographers?
Photographers typically have extensive galleries to share on their websites, so they will want to find a site builder that offers unlimited storage. Great design is also essential, so a builder with striking templates would benefit a photographer. Squarespace is an obvious contender, but other options might surprise you. Find out more about the best website builders for photographers.
Is WordPress better than Wix?
WordPress is an open-source CMS that is free to use but requires some technical know-how. It allows for a lot of design freedom, and thousands of apps can be used to add functionality. Wix is more of an all-in-one site builder that’s easy for beginners to use at the expense of creative freedom. Which is better? It comes down to preference, so read the head-to-head comparison on Wix vs WordPress and find out which is best for you.
Bottom Line
Which is better: Wix or Squarespace? That depends on what you’re looking to do with your small business website. If you’re still on the fence, try Squarespace. It’s more affordable, and though it requires a bit more of a learning curve, you get the peace of mind that it will look like a professional built it. It’s free to start with Squarespace, and even once you upgrade to a premium plan, you get a 14-day free trial.