Wix vs Squarespace: Comparing the Top Website Builders

Get a quick summary of the two website builders from the table below. We’ll go into more detail about key areas, such as pricing, ease of use, and support, in the dedicated sections.

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Wix	Squarespace
Overall Rating 4.8	Overall Rating 4.6
Starting from $17 $15.30 with code ‘TAKE10’	Starting from $16 $14.40 with code “WBE10”
Free plan or free trial Free plan	Free plan or free trial 14-day free trial
Number of templates 900+	Number of templates 150+

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Want to get the best deal for your money? Squarespace is better value for money than Wix. Squarespace’s pricing ranges from $16 to $52 per month (billed annually), divided between four premium plans:

• Personal – $16 per month
• Business – $23 per month
• Commerce Basic – $28 per month
• Commerce Advanced – $52 per month

For 10% off your Squarespace plan, use our exclusive code “WBE10” at checkout.

Squarespace’s Personal plan is a great place to start for anyone looking to build a simple website, without the need for ecommerce tools or advanced functionality, like promotional pop-ups or subscriptions. You’ll need to opt for at least the $23 per month Business plan if you’re looking to sell online.

And, as you can see, there’s a steady increase between Squarespace’s plans, meaning you won’t face a huge jump in price if you choose to upgrade.

However, be aware that Squarespace’s pricing has risen recently, with the Commerce Basic and Commerce Advance plans both having a slight price increase in April 2024. Each plan’s key ecommerce features have also remained the same. If you intend to use Squarespace for your online store, this means that you will be paying slightly more.

Wix’s pricing ranges from $17 to $159 per month (billed annually). You can also choose between four premium plans:

• Light – $17 per month
• Core – $29 per month
• Business – $36 per month
• Business Elite – $159 per month

Get 10% off your Wix plan with the code “TAKE10” at checkout.

To accept payments and sell products, you’ll need Wix’s Core plan – an option that’s slightly more expensive than Squarespace’s cheapest ecommerce plan. And, unlike Squarespace, Wix’s plans increase dramatically once you reach the higher tiers.

Wix has a free plan that you can stay on for as long as you’d like, but it comes with ads and limited features, such as 500MB of storage and a Wix domain name, such as www.accountname.wixsite.com/siteaddress. We recommend upgrading as soon as possible to remove ads and unlock additional features to help your site grow – not only will this make your site appear professional but you’ll have better tools, such as a full marketing suite, to manage and promote your business.

In comparison, Squarespace has a 14-day free trial to test out the builder. Despite not having a free plan, the trial still gives you plenty of time to see if Squarespace is a good fit for your website. You only need an email address to sign up, too – there’s no need to enter payment details.

The Winner

Squarespace is better value for money

Despite Wix and Squarespace starting at similar price points, Squarespace’s plans are more affordable long-term. Its most expensive plan, Commerce Advanced, costs $52 per month (billed annually), whereas Wix’s most expensive plan, Business Elite, is triple the price.

The onboarding process is the first experience you’ll have with your chosen website builder and it can really set the tone. We carried out hands-on testing for both Wix and Squarespace to see what it’s like for users when signing up.

Our Experience With Wix

With Wix, you have two paths to set up your website. Wix’s recommended route, the AI chatbot, is a recent addition to the website builder. It engages you in conversation and asks a few questions to create a custom site based on your responses.

During our tests, we were impressed by how personalized the questions became following our answers. For example, we set out to create a website for a bookstore, and Wix’s AI chatbot asked: “Do you have any additional goals for your website, like gathering newsletter subscribers or promoting book events?”.

Of course, the AI tool isn’t without error – we named our bookshop “Bookmark”, and the chatbot focused heavily on that word when building the site profile, resulting in “bookmarking needs” as a goal.

If you want a more direct approach, Wix’s stripped-back onboarding process (without AI) takes under 60 seconds to complete. Wix asked us three questions:

• What kind of website are you creating?
• What would you like to call your website?
• What would you like to add to your website?

The final question comes with a variety of suggestions and recommendations based on your needs. For example, a blog section or events page for our bookstore website. Once we answered the basic questions, Wix directed us to choose a template or let Wix’s AI builder create a custom site for us – like the AI chatbot, but based solely on our answers to the three previous questions.

We’d recommend using the AI chatbot to get started since it sets you up with a personalized website in a minute or so. Using the chatbot, as opposed to Wix’s general AI website builder, gives the user more control over the outcome.

Our Experience With Squarespace

When testing Squarespace, we were presented with two set-up options: choose a template or build with Squarespace Blueprint, a guided web design solution.

To compare with Wix’s AI chatbot, we tried Squarespace Blueprint to help build our bookstore. It first asked us for the website’s name – a standard starting point when building with AI. We could then choose from a list of sections and layouts to add to the homepage, such as the “Products section” or “Social section”.

While this makes it easy to pull a website together quickly, you get a greater variety of sections and elements if you choose to edit a pre-designed Squarespace template in the editor, instead of using Squarespace Blueprint.

To complete the custom build, Squarespace Blueprint finally asked us to add pages from a preset list, before choosing colors and font type. A five-step process in all, but it takes a little longer than Wix’s AI chatbot since you have to browse and select the design options yourself.

The Winner

Wix has the best onboarding process

We could set up a website with Wix in less than a minute thanks to its various set-up options. The AI chatbot creates a personalized site for you based on your responses during the onboarding conversation. But, if you’d rather not use AI, you can dive into Wix’s editor and dashboard following a quick 3-step process.

Building a unique and eye-catching online presence often comes down to the website’s design. Despite Squarespace being a design powerhouse, Wix offers a wider range of templates.

With over 800 Wix templates available, the catalog covers a broad spectrum of industries and business needs, from “Real Estate” to “Vlog”. These templates are especially brilliant for portfolio websites, since you can find a stylish design that accurately reflects your artistic pursuits and display your work with flair.

In comparison, there are around 150+ Squarespace templates to choose between. Now, these are all high-quality and professionally designed as well, but they can’t match the sheer scale of Wix’s template library. To give you context, Wix has 17 templates for non-profit organizations, whereas Squarespace only offers eight.

Unfortunately, you can’t swap your template once live with either Wix or Squarespace (if you’re using Squarespace’s most recent 7.1 editor). This means that any intense design updates can be time-consuming since you need to tweak everything from scratch.

The Winner

Wix offers a better template variety

Wix has over 800 template options to choose from, covering a broad range of industries, such as “Photography” and “Blog”. In comparison, Squarespace’s 150+ template library is more limited.

From our testing, Squarespace is the easiest website builder to use. It creates a user-friendly experience, offering stylish designs, intuitive features, and structured editing support when building a site.

We used Squarespace’s drag-and-drop editor to design our test website – the grid overlay, which adds some guided structure, felt helpful instead of restrictive. While we couldn’t drop a section or element anywhere we liked, the grid lines kept the site looking clean.

With Squarespace, it was just a matter of changing the actual content rather than the sections, so that made things easier.

Lucy Carney Content Manager

Because of this, we recommend Squarespace for beginners since it’ll be a challenge to create a bad-looking site with the editor. That being said, we also feel that more experienced builders would also enjoy Squarespace thanks to its sleek UX and library of design elements.

Wix also uses a drag-and-drop editor but Wix gives users total creative freedom. You can drop items anywhere on the screen, without any grid-style structure. However, this can quickly result in messy or cluttered pages!

With the advanced control, Wix can be daunting for some beginners due to the sheer number of editing tools available – you’ll lose a lot of time exploring the editor and deciding what to include. If you’re confident with designing a website, you’ll likely favor the creative independence granted by Wix, but Squarespace is the easier option for anyone less tech-savvy.

It would take me a long time to get my Wix site to a point where I’m happy to publish it, especially for a business. You want it to look sleek and professional.

Sam Jagger Senior Writer

The Winner

Squarespace is the easiest website builder to use

Squarespace’s intuitive interface and structured drag-and-drop editor make building a website easy. We could simply place and rearrange elements to our liking, and the grid overlay helped us keep sections aligned with one another.

If you’re looking for an ecommerce website builder to build an online store, then Wix is the stronger choice. You’ll gain access to powerful sales features with its ecommerce plans, such as:

• A robust backend for managing your store and inventory – sell a variety of physical and digital products
• Seamless integration between in-store and online sales thanks to Wix’s POS products
• Advanced shipping options, including free shipping and local delivery – customize your settings to suit your business needs
• Unlimited storage space on the Business Elite plan – you’re restricted on cheaper Wix plans which offer between 2GB and 100GB of storage
• Multichannel selling to help your business target customers across social media and marketplaces, such as Amazon and Facebook

And this is just scratching the surface of Wix’s sales features – you can read more about Wix Ecommerce in our dedicated review.

Squarespace is also a capable website builder for selling online, especially if you’re looking to offer services, such as appointments or classes. Squarespace’s Acuity Scheduling tool is a great built-in feature, letting you create appointments and set availability from a dedicated dashboard.

However, you’ll need to pay extra to use the scheduling platform in addition to your regular Squarespace plan – Acuity Scheduling plans start from $16 per month (billed annually).

With Squarespace, you get unlimited storage from its cheapest plan – something only available on Wix’s most expensive plan. Plus, you can sell unlimited products across all plans which is capped at 50,000 products on Wix plans.

That said, Wix remains the better ecommerce website builder of the two, providing room for growth and a suite of built-in sales features, as well as access to a large app market of third-party integrations. However, we still wouldn’t recommend either Wix or Squarespace for a large online store since both builders lack the ecommerce capabilities and power of Shopify, our top-rated ecommerce website builder.

The Winner

Wix provides great sales features and scalability

Thinking about selling online? Wix provides high-quality ecommerce plans that offer room to grow your business, and its sales features, such as abandoned cart recovery and shipping options, help you serve your customers effectively.

A key factor for any website is marketing – you must promote your website to your target audience. To do this, you need the right website features at your fingertips, and Wix has the best tools for promoting a website.

Marketing & SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Wix and Squarespace are evenly matched when it comes to email marketing – both offer built-in tools as well as third-party integrations, such as Mailchimp. This means website owners can easily grow subscribers, send out newsletters or website updates, and organize automations such as welcome emails.

When it comes to SEO, Wix comes out on top. Both website builders include standard free SEO tools, such as mobile optimization and 301 redirects, but Wix goes the extra mile. When testing Wix’s SEO, we were impressed by the personalized SEO checklist it created for our website – this is especially useful for beginners.

Wix also helps you generate and analyze keywords with its Semrush integration, ensuring your content is optimized fully. And, at the end of 2023, Wix rolled out the AI Meta Tag Creator – this deploys AI to support your SEO efforts by automatically generating optimized title tags and meta descriptions for you.

For additional support, you can also tap into Wix’s vast SEO Learning Hub to broaden your SEO knowledge. We found that the video library is a great resource to strengthen those foundational SEO skills.

Blogging

Like email marketing, Wix and Squarespace remain fairly level when it comes to blogging. Both have dedicated blog sections to make it easy for you to add content to your website. You can set up blog-specific SEO, schedule posts, search blog content, create categories, and even set up comments or ways to share posts across socials.

However, Squarespace is a little let down by its lack of blog-specific analytics and archive functionality – both are features offered by Wix. Additionally, Wix lets you monetize your blog content with online ads or premium content, whereas Squarespace doesn’t provide this opportunity. That’s why Wix beats Squarespace in our list of the best blogging platforms.

Internationalization

Thinking about expanding your audience globally? Want to reach new markets? Wix offers far superior internationalization tools than Squarespace. For example, Wix supports 180 languages if you’re looking to adapt your site for other regions, whereas Squarespace only supports 11.

Wix will automatically translate content for your website visitors, but it’s a trickier process with Squarespace. If you’re using Squarespace 7.1, you can use the Weglot integration to build a multilingual site (with limited language options). If you’re using the older 7.0 editor, then you’ll need to manually translate your site.

Wix also recently announced a partnership with Global-e which will help Wix merchants sell products around the world thanks to improved ecommerce features, such as localized checkouts and multiple currencies.

The Winner

Wix’s marketing tools will help boost your site’s visibility

Both Wix and Squarespace provide valuable website features, but Wix’s suite of tools are more impressive. Whether you want to monetize your blog or expand your store into international markets, Wix’s built-in features and accessible apps have you covered.

Everyone needs a helping hand now and again, and Wix has the best help and support out of all the website builders we’ve tested. You can find expert guidance and resources from these channels:

• 24/7 phone support
• Social media
• Live chat, available Monday to Friday between 2AM and 6PM EST
• Support within the editor, such as video guides and a tour of the editor’s features, if you need help designing your website
• Knowledge center full of guides and tutorials
• SEO Learning Hub for specialized support to help optimize your content
• Community forum so you can hear from real Wix users

Apart from phone support and the dedicated SEO resource, these are all available with Squarespace, too. Like Wix, Squarespace performs well in this research area, providing users with 24/7 live chat and email support.

Despite slight differences in contact methods, where Wix and Squarespace really differ is in their response times. When testing the live chat functionality, Wix’s AI live chat gave us a response in under 10 seconds, whereas Squarespace’s human live chat response took over eight minutes. So, if you’re after immediate support, Wix is the clear winner.

The Winner

Wix offers 24/7 support to website owners

We found Wix’s contact options, such as 24/7 phone support and live chat, to be more responsive. Plus, Wix provides a lot of expert guidance in the form of its SEO Learning Hub and video guides within the editor.

When comparing two of the top website builders, like Wix and Squarespace, we carry out regular testing to guarantee that our recommendations and judgments are accurate and up to date.

Our research process focuses on six key areas, made up of 398 sub-categories, that we know are important to website owners:

• Website Features
• Design Functionality
• User Experience
• Help and Support
• Value for Money
• Customer Score

Following over 200 hours of data analysis and hands-on testing, both Wix and Squarespace have been awarded a star rating out of five for each core category. When combined, this creates their overall rating – and, as a result, we can fairly compare the two website builders.

It’s a close race between our two top-rated website builders, but Wix just takes the lead. Wix is the best website builder overall, offering strong features to support selling, promoting your site, and optimizing your pages.

We recommend Wix for small businesses and entrepreneurs looking to promote their brand or start selling online. That said, Wix is a great option for a variety of needs and industries due to its broad range of templates and features.

Squarespace is a close second, providing a beginner-friendly editing experience and plans that are great value for money. Because of this, Squarespace is better suited for creatives who need a portfolio or a visually-heavy website. And, if you’re looking for an easy or budget-friendly builder to get to grips with, you can’t beat Squarespace.

For more information on Wix and Squarespace, see how they compare with other leading website builders in our full list of the best website builders.

Or, you could take a deeper look at both platforms in their dedicated reviews where we discuss pricing, features, and more:

• Wix Review
• Squarespace Review