Home Website Comparisons Wix vs Squarespace: Which One Is Best In 2023?

Wix vs Squarespace: Which One Is Best In 2023?

by Matt Turner
Published: Last Updated on
Wix vs Squarespace 2023: 10 Crucial Differences To Know

Wix vs Squarespace, which one is better for easy website building? These are the two of the most popular website builders that make it easy for creators to build a website.

Both of these website builders have garnered massive attention, mainly because of one fact:

They are easy-to-use, feature-rich powerful drag-and-drop website platforms. 

On the surface, Wix and Squarespace share a lot of similarities. However, they have some major differences between them that could make or break the deal for you. 

So, it becomes challenging for a lot of creators and business owners to choose which is the best website platform in terms of features, services, and value for their business. 

So where do we get started? Which is better, Wix or Squarespace?

We have tried and tested both website builders for not just ourselves, but our clients as well. And we have observed some stark differences between the two website platforms, and how they impact your business goals, especially marketing efforts and user experience. 

This is why we decided to come up with the most comprehensive Wix vs Squarespace help guide. You can read our complete Wix review, where we put the platform to test.

In this article, we will be evaluating both Wix or Squarespace in terms of how easy they are to use, their design, flexibility, SEO capabilities, and other features, as well as their pricing. 

Who is this guide for?

This Wix vs Squarespace review guide is specially focused on online creators, entrepreneurs, artists, and SaaS business owners who are either just starting out or want an easy yet powerful website builder for their business. 

Let’s begin. 

Wix vs Squarespace: Overview

Wix and Squarespace have much in common: both website builders are beginner-friendly and absolutely easy to use. 

So you don’t have to be a tech wizard to create and launch your website when it comes to these two platforms. The process of creating a website is pretty simple and straightforward – which means you can literally build a website within minutes. 

Wix is an all-in-one website platform that comes with a wide range of advanced features and design customization tools. 

Along with features for website creation, Wix also takes care of your marketing needs and provides ample third-party integrations – which is a huge benefit that will show results in the long haul for your business. 

On the other hand, Squarespace is equally modern and provides many features you might need to run your online business or simply create a website. 

Initially launched as a blogging-centric website platform, Squarespace has emerged to become a decent eCommerce platform that lets you create an ecosystem within the platform itself. 

With that in mind, let’s dive into the two platforms’ feature comparisons, pricing, and other factors that you MUST know to select the right website builder for your brand.

Wix vs Squarespace: Ease of Use

Wix and Squarespace have a similar drag-and-drop approach, however, Wix is more beginner-friendly and easy to use. It has an extremely visual user experience which means you can click the element you want to add or change on your website and that’s it. 

You get almost complete control over your website design with easy selection among text, images, videos, headers, fonts, galleries, buttons, and a lot more. Wix also offers a Site History feature where you can recover your previous versions of the website.

In addition, Wix also offers a simple way to get started: Wix ADI which uses artificial intelligence to build websites automatically. All you need to do is answer a number of questions and then the ADI presents a website quickly. While this is a great feature that you may consider (if you’re in a rush), it is definitely less flexible and satisfying when it comes to personalization.

Now, Squarespace is fairly easy to use, but it comes with a learning curve. You might need to play around with the editor a bit more than Wix to get the hang of things and understand how to get your desired design quickly. Do read our complete Squarespace tutorial guide to know more.

Squarespace’s editor has predefined regions on the page which allows you to add design and content almost in any region but limits the alignment of these regions. Contrary to Wix, Squarespace doesn’t provide a version history of your previous edits, so you might want to copy-paste your editing manually to save your progress.

If this sounds confusing, or even overwhelming at this point in time, you can refer to Squarespace help a.k.a Knowledge Base which covers most of the essential topics you will need help with to create a website. 

Ease of Use Verdict 

Being able to drag and drop elements to build your website feels much more simple in Wix. Also, Squarespace comes with a steep learning curve and offers little flexibility when compared to Wix. 

Wix vs Squarespace: Design & Flexibility

Now that we’ve established how the two website platforms get you started, let’s do a head-to-head comparison of their templates and the flexibility they offer. 

Pro Tip: Ideally, you’d want to use a clean, modern, mobile-friendly, customizable design for your website. More importantly, it should not just be appealing to you as a creator but also to your audience as the end-user. 

This is often one of the most overlooked factors by creators while building a website – how easy it is to navigate the website as an end-user? Keep this in mind and only then select a template that best fits your and your customers’ needs. 

Coming to Wix templates, the platform offers over 500 pre-designed templates, divided into 17 categories as varied as food blogging, photography, portfolio, restaurants, etc. The Wix template editor gives you the ability to drag and drop elements or replace any particular section on the web page wherever you want.

Each element can be customized up to a great extent. For instance, you can easily adjust the colors and sizing of the buttons and headings on your website. You also get access to a large design collection which includes decorative shapes, interactive sections (welcome, subscribe, contact buttons), videos, music, contact forms, blog, bookings, events, etc.  

An interesting feature of Wix is that it provides a separate mobile editor where you can customize your website specifically for your mobile users. However, if you want to keep the same design for both – desktop and mobile versions, you might have to put in a little more effort. 

For instance, the template editor has dotted lines that show the areas you shouldn’t drag your elements into, or else you might have to re-organize your website for your mobile users. This makes it easier to figure out what elements should be placed where to ensure that they completely fit your mobile version as well. 

However, you can’t change a template in Wix once you have made your site live. Sure, you can still edit and make changes in your website layout, but otherwise, it doesn’t give a lot of flexibility here. 

With Squarespace, you get around 100 templates and they are all responsive for mobile devices. These are organized by different industry types, which helps creators choose the best template option for their website and jump right in. 

Unlike Wix, Squarespace allows you to change your templates and switch to a new one whenever you want – an important factor you should consider. 

As far as the template editor is concerned, Squarespace also offers a lot of designs, and customizations, including animations, buttons, image blocks, blog pages, product items, icons, checkout pages, etc. 

With Squarespace, you can’t just “Drag and drop” elements on your template. But it gives you the ability to drag elements in certain rows and columns of a webpage. Overall, this makes the template editor well-structured and more defined for someone who wants to build a website.

As mentioned earlier, Squarespace definitely has a learning curve to it, but once you get the hang of it, you’re pretty much in for a comfortable website editing and management experience. 

Design & Flexibility Verdict

While Wix templates might get your website up and running under a few minutes with its easy drag and drop editor, Squarespace definitely wins over with its customizable and well-structured template editor. 

Wix vs Squarespace: Useful Features

Every website builder must have some core features that are essential to creating and running a successful website. This includes interactive buttons, contact forms, galleries, maps, video, audio players, etc. Advanced features like in-depth data analytics, tracking, smart targeting, and others are platform-specific that you may or may not need to achieve your business goals. 

Before you dive in to read about the various features, make sure you first understand what are the features you are looking for. If you are a music artist, having embed options for your audio might be your top priority, whereas you might not need an advanced tool like an email service provider at the moment. 

Now, both Wix and Squarespace have the core features of a website builder. Plus, the platforms go beyond what you might get with other website builders. For instance, both Wix and Squarespace have specially designed eCommerce stores (we’ll get into that later in the article), email marketing tools, and online booking features.

While Wix and Squarespace offer similar features, it’s when you go one step further that the differences become more visible. 

Let’s get into the details now. 

App Store

Wix has its own dedicated App market, with over 200 apps in total (both free and paid). So you don’t have to depend on a lot of third-party integrations and can easily choose the features that you want in your website.

Meanwhile, Squarespace doesn’t have a dedicated app store. All of its features are in-built into the editor for creators. So you can either choose the feature you want to use from your editing screen or you can use its third-party tools for advanced capabilities (Read more). 

While you can create a membership site using Wix’s Members app, Squarespace requires integration with Memberstack to let you host your membership site on the platform. 

Similarly, if you want to integrate a live chat feature on your website, Wix offers its Wix Live Chat app. However, Squarespace needs integration with third-party platforms like Tawk. 

Blogging Tools 

Both Wix and Squarespace come with decent blogging tools and features including pre-designed templates, content customization, analytics, etc. 

If the primary purpose of your website is blogging, we’d suggest you consider Squarespace. This is because it supports a long list of features including custom permissions, schedule posts, contributors, categorization, tagging, featured posts, etc. 

The platform also goes a step beyond with strong customer support for teams, so if you have collaborators with different roles (content writer, editor, moderator) and have multiple authors on a single blog post, you can do that easily with Squarespace. 

Another interesting thing with Squarespace is that it allows you to import your blog from Tumblr, WordPress, and other platforms to the website builder without any special coding skills or knowledge.

Wix doesn’t give you that sort of flexibility and you can’t import your site content or blog posts. However, it lets you import products to your store in a dot CSV file.

Otherwise, Wix supports all the essential features you’d need for blogging. In addition, it offers you the ability to enable Facebook and user comments options to boost your engagement rate.   

Both platforms are pretty much the same in terms of blogging features. However, if you want more flexibility and customization options, you should consider Squarespace. 

Podcast Features

An interesting feature that a lot of online creators and business owners look for these days is Podcast features. 

Wix offers a free Podcast Player, so your visitors can listen to your podcasts right away on your website. It also offers specialized podcast features, like detailed analytics, monetization options, etc., making it easier to set up your podcast website on Wix.

However, Wix doesn’t let you syndicate podcasts. Syndicating is a very important feature for podcast websites as it lets you submit your podcast to various platforms like Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, etc. 

On the other hand, Squarespace allows you to syndicate your podcasts and host episodes right on your podcast website. In addition to this, it offers some really cool features like the ability to connect multiple podcasts to the same website, monetize your podcast, and detailed tracking reports.

Squarespace really outperforms Wix when it comes to storage and bandwidth as well. 

(Note: Squarespace offers unlimited bandwidth and storage options on all plans.)

Features Verdict

Both platforms come with their fair share of essential features, but if you’re looking for advanced features, we’d recommend you consider Wix. One of the major reasons for this verdict is because of Wix’s dedicated App Store that gives so much flexibility and options to website owners. It literally becomes an all-in-one website builder that offers everything under one platform, which is pretty amazing.

Wix vs Squarespace: SEO Capabilities

Whether you want to start an online business or build your blog, you’d definitely want to create and grow your audience. And to do that, you need to have strong SEO in place. 

So, when you choose a website builder to create your website, it’s important to look for good SEO capabilities.

Talking about Wix vs Squarespace, both platforms come with good SEO support and share similar features. However, there are some differences that set them apart and can impact your website’s overall SEO.

Let’s talk about Wix first. The platform provides a number of tools to help you rank higher on search engines. It offers all the basic SEO functionalities like the ability to add meta tags which can be automatically generated by Wix, page descriptions, sitemaps, etc.   

In addition, Wix takes it further with SEO features like the ability to adjust tags and URLs for large sections of your website. You can also create SEO-friendly page redirects that ensure that your rankings don’t suffer in case you change the website’s structure. 

Moreover, there are many third-party integrations available to boost your SEO such as Crazy Egg. 

Our favorite SEO feature in Wix is its dedicated AI-driven tool called Wix SEO Wiz. Similar to Wix ADI, SEO Wiz also asks the creator a few important questions and then starts working on the SEO of the entire website based on the answers.

Wix also allows you to integrate third-party apps/extensions from its App Market like callback order buttons, email distribution, social networking tools, etc., to improve your website’s SEO.

Squarespace takes a pretty basic approach when it comes to SEO. So, if you’re looking for advanced SEO capabilities, you will need to put in extra time and effort to reach the same level as Wix. 

You get a bunch of essential features including SEO-friendly redirects, clean URLs, Google Sitemaps, and the ability to customize how each page is previewed on social media (Wix does that too). However, you’ll have to add tags and page descriptions manually. 

Squarespace offers an SEO Checklist in its help center, so if you are just getting started with SEO, this might be of great help to you. 

While Squarespace covers all the basic SEO features you might need to push your website’s rankings higher in search engines, it isn’t as feature-rich and advanced as compared to Wix. 

SEO Verdict 

If you’re looking for a complete SEO package that takes care of all your SEO needs in terms of customization, better design, visibility options, support, we’d recommend you consider Wix. However, if you want basic, beginner-friendly SEO features, you might want to look at Squarespace. 

Wix vs Squarespace: Marketing Tools and Features

Wix and Squarespace offer all the basic marketing tools you’d need to grow your website. This includes built-in analytics, logo maker, social sharing buttons, social posting, Facebook Ads, Google Ads,  email marketing, MailChimp integration, etc. 

At first, you might think that both platforms are just the same but it’s only when you look deeper into each of these features and how each platform functions, that you notice the real difference between the two website builders. 

Since email marketing is one of the most important marketing tools, let’s begin there. 

Wix has a dedicated tool called Wix Email Marketing which allows you to run email campaigns on your website or blog.

Wix offers pre-designed templates that are highly intuitive and visually engaging. You get complete control over your email template, so you can literally customize the entire theme- right from the fonts, text, color, and widgets, to everything else. 

In addition, you can easily integrate your existing audience into your mailing list. Once you create and send emails to your customers, you can go back and track your stats (open rate, clicks, views) through the platform. This allows you to understand your email campaigns’ engagement and identify what your customers are more likely to connect with.

With the free version of Wix Email Marketing, you can send up to three email campaigns with 5,000 emails overall campaigns. The limit is automatically reset on a monthly basis. So unless you want to create and send more email campaigns, you don’t need to upgrade to a paid version of the tool. 

This is definitely a steal for creators who are on a budget or are just starting out with their website or online business. 

However, if you want to access its advanced features, you need to upgrade to Wix Ascend, an all-in-one marketing solution that automates your marketing efforts.  

So, with Ascend Automation tool, you’ll be able to set up automation for your email campaigns. This way, you don’t have to worry about manually sending out “Welcome emails” when someone signs up for your newsletter, or even notifying your existing email list. Also, it’s a big-time saver! 

Meanwhile, Squarespace offers impressive email campaigns that help you build and grow your email list. Combine this with integrations across social media platforms like Facebook, and you can streamline your email marketing strategy. 

Similar to Wix, Squarespace, too, has a platform dedicated to Email marketing i.e. Squarespace Email Campaigns.

You can do pretty much everything like select a pre-designed template, create email campaigns, import content from your website to email drafts, send automated emails to your subscribers, manage your marketing campaigns, and track analytics. 

However, Squarespace doesn’t offer a free version like Wix for its email marketing tool. You can get a trial period that allows you to send up to three email campaigns with 50,000 emails per campaign.

Once you have exhausted your campaign limit, you’ll need to upgrade to Squarespace Email Campaign’s paid plans. The pricing ranges from $5/month to $48/month – which is quite affordable. 

If you want more advanced marketing tools, you can integrate your Squarespace website with MailChimp. 

Marketing Tools Verdict

Wix comes with excellent marketing features you might need to run a full-fledged online business. Apart from offering all the essential tools for marketing, Wix offers some exceptional features like a dedicated email marketing solution, specific apps like Wix Ascend for automation, etc. Squarespace isn’t as powerful when it comes to marketing tools and doesn’t give this sort of flexibility. 

Ecommerce: Wix Store or Squarespace Shop?

Wix and Squarespace have built their eCommerce features aggressively over the past few years. While these aren’t the first options that you might think of when it comes to eCommerce, let us show you our review of their eCommerce shops.

Both platforms offer the essential features you need to create and run an online store including inventory management, product variations, discounts, taxes, etc. 

They also come with a bunch of advanced features like digital products, connect to print-on-demand services, custom email receipts, a point-of-sale system, automated cart recovery, recurring payment products, and others. 

Now, Wix eCommerce works great for small to medium-sized businesses. It offers 500+ professionally designed templates that are fully customizable and easy to navigate.

Along with this, Wix also offers dropshipping with Modalyst to expand your online store’s product offering and source from thousands of products with a modalyst platform. You can set your own pricing and shipping rules, and simply get started. 

With Wix eCommerce, you also get the ability to manage your store from a single platform and sell across multiple channels – including Instagram and Facebook. This makes it much easier for you to cross-sell your products online and improve your sales. 

On the other hand, Squarespace does a great job when it comes to being a powerful eCommerce solution with advanced features you’d want for your online business.

For example, Squarespace lets you add sophisticated forms to products so that you can ask for additional information when a customer checks out. 

You can customize these forms up to a great extent, which is amazing for a lot of business owners who want to add that personal touch to their brand. While Wix also allows you to add form fields to your products, you can only add text fields. 

Moreover, Squarespace also allows you to offer gift cards, low stock, and back-in-stock notifications – all of which are not available with Wix. 

E-commerce Shop Verdict 

Both platforms have advanced features and tools that come handy if you want to set up your ecommerce shop. It really depends on the features you need from the platform. If you are a small to middle sized business, or looking for an affordable solution, you should check out Wix ecommerce as it starts at just $23/month. However, if you want advanced tools and a more mature ecommerce platform, you can consider Squarespace.

Wix vs Squarespace: Customer Support

Many people underestimate the power of good customer support and how it really impacts their business. Just imagine that if you’ve put in all your time, effort, and resources into building your website, and have a decently growing audience, you wouldn’t want to get stuck at a point and not get any valuable help whatsoever. 

A good customer support team is your savior, in all cases, whether you’re building a website, opening an eCommerce store, or running your digital business. 

With that in mind, let’s explore the customer support options given by Wix and Squarespace. 

Wix has a dedicated Support Center and provides support through email, calls (available from 6 am to 5 pm PST), social media, and forums. Currently, there’s no live chatbot feature with Wix.

An interesting feature that Wix offers is its on-page help. So, let’s suppose if you get stuck or don’t know what something is, you can simply click on the little question mark on your screen. 

Basically, you don’t even have to leave the website editor to get a solution – it’s literally right there within your editor. 

Meanwhile, you can also get help from their articles and resource center.

Squarespace help comes as a Knowledge Center which consists of all the topics you’d need help with on the platform. In addition, it offers a forum, a 24/7 email response team, and a live chat function (from 3 am to 8 pm EST, Monday to Friday). However, there’s no on-call support with Squarespace. 

It also lacks the in-editor support that Wix offers, but it provides a Squarespace help center which consists of webinars, videos, workshops, and a great community forum to get solutions. 

Support Verdict 

Both Wix and Squarespace help their customer offering decent customer support with their dedicated teams, one-on-one interactions, and rich resource guides to help you out. Overall, Wix offers better customer support and help. Squarespace has decent support features as well, but Wix’s in-editor help, phone support, and help center resources makes it a better option than Squarespace. 

Wix vs Squarespace: Pricing

Now that you have an idea of what each of the platforms offers in terms of features, tools, integrations, etc, let’s take a look at their pricing. 

Wix has four pricing plans. The lowest tier is the Combo plan priced at $13/month offering you to connect a domain, enable SSL encryption, and remove Wix adverts from your website. While this is better than the Free package, it’s not ideal for creators who are serious about their business and want to tap into the advanced features that Wix offers. 

The next pricing plan is their Unlimited plan which costs $17/month. This plan is more suited for freelancers and individual creators who are looking for better features like unlimited bandwidth, video storage, email campaigns, premium support, site booster, etc.

Wix’s most popular plan is the Pro plan priced at $22/month with features like increased storage, Professional Logo Maker, and much more. It’s well-suited for small teams and creators who want to build or grow their brand’s online presence.

The highest tier i.e their VIP plan which costs $39/month gets you all the advanced features available in their Pro package, along with premium support. This is ideal for entrepreneurs and organizations that want to run a full-fledged online business and get priority support as well. 

Now, Squarespace offers four pricing plans. Its lowest tier is the Personal plan costing $12/month with features like free custom domain, unlimited bandwidth, and storage, SSL encryption, SEO capabilities, etc. This is ideal for freelancers and individual business owners looking for an affordable solution.

It’s the most popular plan i.e the Business plan costs $18/month with advanced features like extensions, marketing features, eCommerce tools, and much more. If you want to start an online business or already have one, this plan might come in handy for you. 

The next two pricing tiers i.e Basic Commerce ($26/month) and Advanced Commerce ($40/month) are specially designed for professionals looking to build their online eCommerce shops. 

Pricing Verdict

After analyzing various pricing plans and the features they offer, we have come to the conclusion that a Combo offer by Wix is all you need to get started with your website. It’s only when you exceed their storage or bandwidth should you upgrade to a higher pricing plan. Or else, if you’re an advanced creator, you can definitely opt for their Pro plan that comes with excellent features and tools to grow your website.

Wix vs Squarespace: Conclusion

Is there a clear winner in Wix vs Squarespace? 

While both website platforms look pretty similar at first glance, they are poles apart when you dive deep into their features and capabilities. 

Wix allows you to customize your entire website and gives you complete control over the site’s design. Moreover, it offers advanced features like the ADI tool, podcast player, email marketing solutions, enhanced SEO capabilities, and many others to help you grow your website. 

So, if you’re looking for an easy-to-use yet powerful website builder, we’d recommend you pick Wix to build your website. 

When it comes to Squarespace, the platform is amazing for dedicated bloggers who want to try out a new website builder for easy management. While there’s a learning curve with Squarespace, once you get the hang of it, you’re pretty much going to like its features and capabilities.  

(Note: Squarespace isn’t as advanced or powerful as WordPress)

Ultimately, it depends on your goals, the features you need, and your budget to pick the right website builder for your business. 

We hope you liked our Wix vs Squarespace review and can now select the one that best suits your needs. If you have any feedback or a question, please drop a comment below. 

PS: We’re coming up with a bunch of exciting content designed specifically for online creators, freelancers, entrepreneurs, and SaaS business owners.

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