Once upon a time, you couldn’t build a site unless you could code. But the dark ages have passed and website builders like Wix and Squarespace have stepped into the spotlight. Today, both are among the most popular platforms for making a website, whether you're looking to sell stuff online or showcase your talent. So, which one is right for you?
Here we dive into a detailed comparison of Wix and Squarespace to help you decide which is a better fit for you.
Intro to Wix and Squarespace
Both Wix and Squarespace emerged onto the scene in the 2000s, establishing themselves as pioneering website builders distinguished by their unique brand identities and offerings.
Wix
Now trusted by over 6.3 million subscribers (or a total of 263 million registered users when you include free users on Wix) across 190 countries, Wix is primarily known for its user-friendly platform and versatile business solutions. “We’re constantly developing and releasing new features to simplify the website building process so our users can focus on running their businesses,” writes Wix’s Co-founder and CEO Avishai Abrahami about Wix’s culture of innovation.
Create a website with Wix today.
Squarespace
Squarespace, on the other hand, is often praised for its elegant design templates and features that are tailored to creative professionals and artists. True to its mission (“We believe design is the ultimate competitive advantage. We build products that help entrepreneurs stand out and succeed.”), the company puts design front and center. As of the end of 2023, Squarespace had a total of 4.6 million unique subscriptions.
Wix vs. Squarespace: key features
Drag-and-drop capabilities
When it comes to drag-and-drop, Wix arguably sets the gold standard. It has been prioritizing its DIY web builder from the get-go, launching with an intuitive drag-and-drop site solution back in 2006, when code-only platforms were the norm. Today, Wix offers two website editors: the original editor, built for SMBs and independent creators looking for a unified business solution—and Wix Studio, designed specifically for agencies and enterprises looking to create exceptional design experiences for their clients.
Wix Studio represents the height of Wix's offerings. With intricate design features and detailed CSS control, Wix Studio gives you the freedom to create captivating and highly distinctive websites.
Squarespace, on the other hand, broke into the market in 2004 with a block-editing engine catered towards individuals with little-to-no design experience. The Classic Editor, (which is still accessible today) allowed users to drag elements across a gridded canvas; upon Squarespace’s Fluid Engine release in 2022, more flexible drag-and-drop capabilities were added to the platform.
Fluid Engine still allows you to move elements on the page within a controlled grid area, but lets you work within a bigger canvas and has fewer constraints than the Classic Editor.
Bottom line: While Wix and Squarespace both excel with their intuitive website builders, Wix offers more customization by putting fewer limitations on how page elements can be placed or structured. For those seeking more design flexibility and responsiveness, Wix Studio emerges as the ideal solution.
Explore Wix Studio to elevate your web design, or read more about Wix vs. Studio.
Web design (and AI)
Wix has been a trailblazer in the realm of artificial intelligence (AI) for website building since 2016 when it introduced its artificial design intelligence (ADI)—a powerful tool that could suggest a website layout based on a few simple questions. Today, the influence of AI runs deep within Wix; from site creation to business management, AI features are seamlessly integrated throughout the platform.
With its newly minted AI website builder, you can quite literally chat back and forth with AI to design an entire website from scratch. Once your site has been created, you can continue chatting with AI to tweak the theme, layout and other design elements. Further tweaks can then be made in the Editor itself, where you can use built-in AI tools to generate images, content and video trailers (among other things).
Squarespace has its own Blueprint AI website builder, which allows you to handpick the pages, colors and other elements of your site one by one. The elements are all then pieced together a bit like a puzzle to form your website. Instead of the conversational approach that Wix takes, Squarespace’s Blueprint AI tool walks you through a series of pre-set questions and steps. When it comes to AI features, Squarespace's products revolve around text generators for content creation.
Bottom line: Wix has built-in AI tools for text and image generation, marketing, analytics and much more, enabling you to create a functional website in minutes and run your businesses more efficiently. Squarespace's AI website generator is more like putting a puzzle together as opposed to top-to-bottom website creation, and its AI tools are primarily focused on text generation.
Templates
Both Wix and Squarespace offer impressive template libraries to kickstart your website design journey. Wix has website templates that cover a wide range of industries and styles. Once you’ve chosen a template, you can customize it however you see fit in the Editor. Squarespace offers fewer templates with 160+ in their bank compared to Wix’s 900+, but curates its templates to ensure a high level of quality.
Bottom line: While Wix offers far more templates than Squarespace; the ones that Squarespace offers are carefully curated.
Security and reliability
Security and site reliability are paramount when it comes to web hosting. Hackers and error messages should be the least of your concerns when you’re managing a business online.
Wix prioritizes these aspects, offering advanced protection measures and boasting an impressive uptime rate of 99.9%. Squarespace also places a strong emphasis on security, with a 99.9% uptime rate, built-in SSL encryption and reliable website infrastructure.
Learn more about website security on Wix.
Bottom line: Both Wix and Squarespace ensure a high degree of security, so you can put your focus where it’s needed—your business.
Blog
Both Wix and Squarespace have sound blogging capabilities, so you can create and manage engaging content in the same place as your website.
Wix includes blog templates alongside AI tools to help you design a stylish blog. Enjoy various tools to manage and drive traffic to your blog, including AI-powered tools for SEO, email marketing, analytics and more. But it's the community capabilities that give Wix blogs an edge. Readers can sign up as members, create profiles, like and comment on posts and follow each other's activity. You can also play with the contributor permissions so multiple authors can manage your articles without compromising security, plus make use of categories and tags.
You can additionally monetize your content through subscriptions, members area, online courses or eCommerce offerings—which can all be managed via Wix. Squarespace provides flexible layout options and design customization tools for building a blog. Its monetization capabilities include membership areas and, like Wix, Squarespace offers essential features like AI writing assistance, content scheduling, contributor permissions, SEO optimization, social integrations, email marketing and analytics.
The main limitation with Squarespace’s blogging capabilities is that it doesn’t have an autosave or revision history feature, so if your computer crashes mid-sentence, the rest is history.
Bottom line: If you’re a blogger, both Wix and Squarespace offer fantastic blogging capabilities, but Wix’s added features (like its autosave function) mean it comes out a smidge on top.
Start a blog with Wix.
Ecommerce
Wix offers a robust backend system for managing your online store. It connects your ecommerce website to any in-person sales through Wix's POS solutions, creating a cohesive experience for your business. Wix further allows you to sell a whopping 50,000 physical and digital products, with advanced features like abandoned cart recovery, free shipping configuration, local delivery options and inventory management.
Wix also supports a number of multichannel selling options, so you can easily list your products across major sales channels like Amazon, eBay and Facebook. You can even take advantage of built-in dropshipping features to expand your product catalog without holding any physical inventory.
While Squarespace is no slouch for eCommerce, providing unlimited storage and product uploads across most plans, it has fewer sales features and multichannel integrations than Wix. For instance, tools like appointment scheduling require paid add-ons, and Wix lets its users sell offline and accept payment upon delivery, a feature not yet offered by Squarespace.
Concerning online payments, Wix supports more payment processors and methods. Wix Payments lets you accept payments from major credit/debit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, BNPL, iDeal and Pay Now by Klarna. Alternatively, you can choose from 80+ other third-party payment processors worldwide. By contrast, Squarespace Payments supports major credit/debit cards, Apple Pay and Afterpay. Or, you can connect your account to several third-party processors: Stripe, PayPal or Square.
Bottom line: Both platforms allow you to create a professional online storefront. However, if scalability and omnichannel selling are top priorities, Wix provides a more expansive eCommerce solution. Its built-in features, third-party integrations and payment options make it better equipped to support ambitious eCommerce businesses.
Create an online store with Wix today.
Marketing
Wix and Squarespace both offer a suite of marketing and SEO tools to optimize your website for search engines and attract more visitors. However, their strengths in these areas differ.
When it comes to email marketing tools, both platforms offer built-in features and third-party integrations like Mailchimp. Easily grow subscriber lists, send newsletters and set up automated emails.
Wix offers an additional advantage with its AI email generator. While Squarespace offers an AI tool to help craft email content, it doesn't match the full capabilities of Wix's email generator. Wix takes it a step further crafting full-fledged emails based on your business type, brand voice and campaign objectives. Its email generator not only creates the written copy, but also produces a complete email layout specifically designed for your campaign objectives. The tool incorporates relevant images to complement the email content, allowing you to quickly produce polished and engaging campaigns.
For social media marketing, Squarespace allows you to connect your social accounts to your site and publish posts directly from your site, plus offers social selling for Facebook and Instagram. However, Wix takes it one step further by offering unified publishing and scheduling across Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter) and more. It also offers native integrations to embed feeds, run ads from your dashboard, create campaigns with AI and even sell products via social channels like Facebook Shops.
Bottom line: Wix’s marketing tools outnumber that of Squarespace’s, but both have helpful integrations and self-service features. The “best” solution will depend on the types of channels you plan to engage on, and the types of automation you desire.
SEO
When it comes to SEO, Wix takes the crown. While both website builders include standard free SEO features like mobile optimization, 301 redirects and an SEO checklist, Wix takes it a step further. It directly integrates with Semrush so you can research and analyze keywords for optimized content within your Wix dashboard. Its new AI meta tag creator leverages AI to automatically generate optimized title tags and meta descriptions too.
Diving deeper into some of the SEO-specific features:
Meta titles and descriptions: With both Wix and Squarespace you can customize the meta to specific pages, while Wix also allows you to use AI to create optimized content for you.
URL structures: Both let you get creative with custom URLs for pages.
Heading tags: With Wix, you can utilize heading tags from H1 to H6 on standard pages, and H1 and H2 on blog posts. Squarespace, on the other hand, limits heading tag usage to H1 through H4 across all pages.
Image alt text: Both Wix and Squarespace let you set alternative text for images, a crucial accessibility and SEO feature.
SSL encryption: Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption, which is essential for protecting user data and improving SEO rankings, is available on all plans for both platforms.
Sitemaps: Both website builders automatically update your sitemap whenever you make changes to your site and allow you to download it if you want.
Google Search Console integration: Both Wix and Squarespace enable you to connect your website to Google Search Console for monitoring and managing search performance.
Bottom line: When it comes to having native SEO functionality, Wix provides a more advanced toolset compared to Squarespace's solid but slightly more basic capabilities.
Customer support
Responsive customer support is crucial when building and maintaining a website and while both Wix and Squarespace offer great support options there are a few key differences. Here’s how they stack up against each other.
Wix customer support offers:
Callback support (24/7 for English speakers)
Live chat (EN live chat available Monday through Friday, 2 a.m. to 6 p.m. ET; also available in other languages)
Ticket submission
Help center (FAQ and forum)
Knowledge base articles with video tutorials
Squarespace customer support offers:
Email (24/7)
Live chat (available Monday through Friday, 4:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. ET; hours may differ for Australia and New Zealand)
X (24/7)
Facebook Messenger (24/7)
Help center (FAQ, knowledge base articles, videos, webinars, forum)
Bottom line: Both platforms have thorough support systems in place, but Wix's 24/7 callback phone line and support for additional languages give it an edge.
Pricing
In terms of pricing, Wix and Squarespace offer tiered plans to cater to a range of budgets and needs. Wix's pricing plans are structured to provide flexibility and scalability. It has options for individuals, businesses, eCommerce and agencies. Squarespace offers a similar range of plans with additional features tailored to creative professionals and online merchants.
Wix’s annual pricing plans:
Free plan ($0): Limited features and ads.
Light ($17/month): Basic plan for simple sites.
Core ($29/month): Basic eCommerce features and marketing suite.
Business $36/month): Geared towards growing your brand.
Business Elite ($159/month): Unlocks unlimited storage and scaling capabilities.
Enterprise: Custom plan for large corporations.
With each plan, you’ll get a free domain for one year. The amount of storage space increases with each plan along with how advanced the eCommerce and marketing features are. When it comes to payments, you’ll be able to take online payments with the Core plan and above. You can use Wix’s free plan for as long as you like. This is a great way to get familiar with it without spending a dime, but we do recommend upgrading your plan to remove the Wix ad banner. An upgraded plan will also allow you to use your domain and unlock more marketing, eCommerce and analytics features with larger storage space.
You can try any of Wix’s paid plans for 14 days, and if you’re not 100% satisfied, you can get your money back.
Squarespace’s annual pricing plans:
Personal plan ($16/month): Ideal for bloggers and portfolios with basic features.
Business plan ($23/month): Ideal for small businesses. Products and services can be sold but with a 3% transaction fee.
Basic Commerce plan ($28/month): Ideal for small businesses with essential eCommerce features, products and services can be sold with a 0% transaction fee.
Advanced Commerce plan ($52/month): Tailored for larger stores with advanced eCommerce functionalities like shipping and discounts at checkout.
Enterprise: Custom plans for larger businesses.
With each Squarespace plan, you’ll get free domain registration, a mobile-optimized site and the ability to send invoices for free. Regarding eCommerce, you can sell products and services starting with the business plan, though you’ll have to pay a transaction fee unless you upgrade to a Commerce plan. Commerce plans and above come with more merchandising features, subscriptions, advanced shipping and more. Squarespace plans include a 14-day free trial and essential features like support and mobile optimization.
Bottom line: Wix and Squarespace both offer cost-effective plans, though Wix offers a free forever plan. At the end of the day, you get what you pay for and in both cases, the better the plan, the more you get.
So who will it be—Wix or Squarespace?
Deciding between Wix and Squarespace ultimately depends on your specific business and preferences. Overall, Wix emerges as a top contender, with a long list of integrated tools for sales, marketing and customer management that guarantee that your site is ‘business-ready’ from the get-go. Squarespace emerges as a good option for someone looking to design a straightforward and attractive website but isn’t seeking the level of advanced business tools that Wix has to offer.
Editor's note: The information presented in this article is true as of May 8, 2024, unless mentioned otherwise.