Wix vs Squarespace: Which Is Better?

We tested both Wix and Squarespace, and can confidently say that Squarespace beats Wix, albeit by a small margin. Squarespace might not be as much of a do-it-all website builder as Wix, but it’s much easier to use, and allows users to create attractive websites without much technical knowledge.

Squarespace also offers better value for money than Wix, giving users access to an online store and unlimited storage for much less than Wix, landing it a spot as the best ecommerce platform for small businesses.

Wix isn’t without its merits, however, and is a great option for those with more niche website topics, thanks to its incredible range of varied templates.

Wix vs Squarespace: A quick comparison

Here’s a quick side-by-side of Wix and Squarespace:

Pricing and Value for Money: Squarespace Wins

Squarespace costs less overall than Wix and offers better value for money in the long-term.

Here’s a side-by-side look at Wix and Squarespace’s pricing:

As you can see, pricing is relatively similar for both platforms, however all of Wix’s plans are more expensive than Squarespace’s, and it has a very steep price jump between its two most expensive plans.

If we look at features between plans, here again we can see that Squarespace offers slightly better value for money. For example, you can start selling products for just $23 per month on Squarespace’s Business plan, but you need to pay $29 per month for Wix’s Core plan to do the same.

On the $23 per month Squarespace Business plan, you can also sell unlimited products and enjoy unlimited storage space. By contrast, Wix only has unlimited storage on its $159 per month Business Elite plan, and only allows a maximum of 50,000 products, which is, admittedly, still a very large number.

However, Wix does have the upper hand over Squarespace in one area, since it offers a free plan, while Squarespace only offers a free trial.

Even though Wix’s free plan isn’t something we’d recommend to businesses in the long-term, it does mean it offers a free option suited to casual passion projects or hobbies that Squarespace doesn’t. After all, if you’re just creating a website for fun, or for a temporary project, it’s best for it to be free.

What about transaction fees?

Wix and Squarespace both offer their own payment processing services – Wix Payments and Squarespace payments. Both platforms offer starting processing fees of 2.9% + 30¢, however, Squarespace’s fees go down to 2.5% + 30¢ on its most expensive plan.

When it comes to additional transaction fees, Wix charges 0% on all of its plans, whereas Squarespace charges an additional 3% on its $23 per month Business plan, which can really eat into your profits. To avoid that, you need to upgrade to Squarespace’s $28 per month Commerce Basic plan, which is still $1 cheaper than Wix’s entry-level ecommerce plan – the $29 per month Core plan.

Because of these two factors, Squarespace wins out over Wix even when it comes to transaction and processing fees.

Design Features: Wix Wins

Wix is the better provider when it comes to design features, largely because it offers a much wider range of prebuilt templates compared to Squarespace, and because its designs are more customizable.

Because so much goes into designing a website, we’re going to break this comparison down into separate sections, focusing on different design aspects.

Templates

Wix has the most template designs of any website builder we’ve tested. With more than 900 templates to choose from, you’re likely to find more than one that fits your website’s topic, no matter how niche it is.

Squarespace, on the other hand, only has a little over 150 prebuilt templates, but they still cover a lot of popular topics, such as online stores, services, reservations and bookings, portfolios, and blogs. You’ll also be hard pressed to find a Squarespace template that isn’t absolutely stunning, whereas Wix’s can sometimes be hit or miss.

That’s why, for businesses or individuals that put an emphasis on style, Squarespace is a better choice than Wix.

Customization

Wix is more customizable than Squarespace because its drag-and-drop editor allows you to drop elements, such as text boxes or images, anywhere you want on a page. Squarespace also has a drag-and-drop editor, however, you’re slightly restricted by a grid system that limits where elements can be dropped.

More customization is generally a good thing when it comes to website building because it helps users create a truly unique website. However, if aesthetics are your priority, Squarespace might be a better choice than Wix, since its restrictive grid layout helps keep everything neat and tidy, especially if you’re new to making a website.

AI assistance

AI is quickly becoming a key component of website builders. Wix hopped on the trend much earlier than Squarespace, which means that it currently has better AI tools, since it’s had more time to test and develop them.

Both platforms have an AI website builder, and while neither is perfect, when testing them, we found that Wix’s AI builder produces a greater variation of templates than Squarespace’s when given the same prompt. This is important, because it means you’re less likely to get a generic website with Wix AI.

Both website builders also have AI writing tools but, again, Wix’s is slightly better, because along with writing new copy, you can instruct the AI writer to edit existing copy based on tone and length. Squarespace’s AI writer can only write new copy and can’t be used to edit.

Ease of Use: Squarespace Wins

Squarespace has quite the edge over Wix when it comes to ease of use. During testing, we found it much easier to complete tasks on Squarespace compared to Wix, and found it easier to navigate Squarespace.

In this category, Wix might be a victim of its own success. It offers a lot of different features and tools for customizing a website, which can be overwhelming when you first start using the platform. One of our testing participants noted that there were “more steps than seem necessary in most of the design options”, with the general impression of Wix being that its designers had focused more on packing it full of features than on improving user experience.

The experience was much more positive with Squarespace. We appreciated the clear signposting, the intuitive layout of the platform, and the smoothness of adding elements to a page using the grid layout in the editor.

Over the past few years, Squarespace and Wix have done a 180 when it comes to ease of use. Two years ago, we were recommending Squarespace to tech-inclined users and Wix to total beginners, but it’s now the reverse.

Marketing: It’s a Tie

Wix and Squarespace are quite evenly matched when it comes to marketing. Both have built-in email and social media marketing functions, a studio where you can design emails and social posts, and attractive prebuilt templates.

Email marketing

Both Wix and Squarespace have a library of pre-built email marketing campaign templates. Similarly to website templates, Wix has a larger selection than Squarespace, however Squarespace’s designs are a little more attractive than Wix’s.

Both providers also let you create your own designs from scratch, but Squarespace has a handy function that lets you automatically match an email template to your website’s color scheme and adds your brand’s logo. Wix also lets you add a logo to email campaigns, although you have to add it yourself using the editor.

Both providers have their own logo maker studio, allowing you to create a unique design straight from your website’s backend. However, Wix now offers an AI logo maker, while with Squarespace you still have to build on from scratch.

On the topic of AI, both providers also now have an AI writer that can help you craft promotional copy for your email campaigns. The AI writers for email campaigns are pretty evenly matched. Both can write new copy based on a prompt or edit existing copy, and neither produces the most inspired content. We recommend you edit anything produced by an AI writer to make it original.

Social media marketing

Both Wix and Squarespace integrate with a wide range of popular social media apps, including Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter. They also both allow you to schedule social posts and track engagement from their respective platforms.

However, Wix opts for convenience by including its social media marketing in the same place as its email marketing tools, while Squarespace prioritizes incredible design features by including social media marketing tools in a separate free app called Unfold.

Unfold was purchased by Squarespace in 2019 and has some truly stunning templates for static social media campaigns, as well as video templates.

Overall, Squarespace’s Unfold app is a far superior platform to Wix’s social media creator tool, presenting more options for customizing and designing unique content, especially when it comes to video. Wix also has a video editor tool, thanks to its partnership with Vimeo, but the results are much less sophisticated than the ones you get with Unfold.

SEO Support: Wix Wins

SEO support is as important as marketing, since it helps get your site seen more often in search results. Wix has a slightly better set of tools than Squarespace when it comes to SEO support, although it’s not a stark difference.

Both website builders come with core SEO tools, such as automatic 301 redirects, automatic site map creation, optimization for mobile, and SSL certificates. All of these mean your website will abide by SEO best practices without you having to do too much about it.

Where Wix edges out Squarespace in SEO is the recent addition of its AI meta tag writer. You can now use AI to help you write optimized meta titles and meta descriptions for your website’s pages. With Squarespace, you still have to rely on your own know-how to write meta tags.

If you have a multilingual website, it’s also slightly easier to optimize it for different regions using Wix than it is using Squarespace. Wix has built-in multilingual SEO optimization, automatically adding hreflang and x-default tags to multilingual pages, features which help Google target their language and region.

You can do this with Squarespace too, but you need to use a third-party app called Weglot Translate, since Squarespace doesn’t have this feature built in.

Ecommerce: Wix Wins

Both Wix and Squarespace have essential sales and ecommerce features, however, Wix offers slightly more than Squarespace.

For example, Wix offers built-in filters you can insert into pages to make it easy for customers to find the products they’re looking for, and you can create custom filters based on your products. If you want to do this on Squarespace, you’ll need to use a plugin. Wix also supports more promotion types than Squarespace, allowing you to offer a buy-one-get-one-free discount at the checkout page, which isn’t yet possible on Squarespace.

Finally, Wix offers better security measures than Squarespace, thanks to its partnership with fraud prevention specialist Forter. Squarespace Payments – Squarespace’s payment processing service – doesn’t have the same measures in place, so you’ll need to use a third-party payment processor, such as Square or Stripe, for robust fraud protection.

Squarespace isn’t without merit, however. There are a few key features it beats Wix at.

One is AR and VR integrations. Squarespace allows you to insert 3D, AR, and VR visualizations of your products into your website, thanks to its integration with Swift XR. Wix doesn’t yet have the same integration, and it can be very handy for boosting customer certainty in a product’s suitability, for example, sunglasses or furniture.

Squarespace is also a better tool for selling across multiple channels since it offers integrations with more sales channels than Wix. Both platforms integrate with Amazon, eBay, and Wish, but Squarespace also connects to Etsy, Walmart, Google Shopping, and Reverb.

How We Compared Wix and Squarespace