Wix vs Squarespace

Regardless of your business type or brand, having a professional online presence is vital nowadays. Your website must be informative, appealing to customers, easy to manage, and visible to search engines. That’s why it’s important to choose a quality website builder that will enable you to set up the site easily and customize the details profoundly.

Wix and Squarespace are two leading names in the industry. Both companies are solid choices, yet they differ to some extent. Find all the nuts and bolts of both platforms, see what perks each has, and see which is the right one for your site or online store. So, let’s dive in and find out, which is better – Wix or Squarespace.

Wix vs Squarespace: Quick Summary

Wix and Squarespace are powerful SaaS website builders aimed at those users who need to create a website yet don’t have coding skills. Wix caters to beginners and enables users to create a site and customize almost all details without coding knowledge. Aside from being quite powerful, it offers a free starter plan to let users get familiar with the platform before subscribing to an annual plan.

Wix is an utmost versatile site-building solution. It offers two completely different editors; a quick, AI-powered ADI for users who don’t have a precise vision of how their site should look and an extensive, highly customizable Classic Editor for those who want to control every phase of their website setup process.

With over 800 lovely templates segmented into categories by industries and thousands of in-house and third-party integrations, Wix becomes the website builder that lets you do everything with your site.

As for Squarespace, this platform provides its users with the straightest path to creating a beautiful and fully-fledged small business site. It features fewer tools and templates than Wix does, and yet, whatever is offered, is of premium quality.

Wix vs Squarespace: Price

The cost of a website builder is one of the first things one pays attention to when choosing. Wix and Squarespace both offer great value for money. However, although Wix also has a lifetime free plan, while Squarespace only provides a 14-day free trial period, Squarespace definitely is a better choice in terms of value for money.

It proposes its services in four plans: Personal, priced at $16/mo, Business, priced at $23/mo, Commerce Basic at $27/mo; and Commerce Advance, which comes at $49/mo. Even the cheapest plan comes well-packed with features to build a mobile responsive, effective website. It offers a free custom domain, SSL encryption, access to multiple extensions, unmetered bandwidth, two contributors, and half an hour of video time.

In comparison, Wix introduces eight pricing plans, categorized into Website Plans, Business and eCommerce Plans, and Enterprise Plans. The latter doesn’t have a fixed price and is completely tailored to the user’s requirements. Other plans range from $11/mo for the Unlimited plan (currently, it comes with a 50% discount) to $29/mo for the Business VIP.

Wix Combo plan is priced at $16, just like Squarespace’s introductory Personal plan. To compare the functionality of both platforms, the Wix plan includes a custom, free domain for one year, 2GB storage space, and a free SSL certificate. As you can see, Squarespace offers better functionality at the same price.

The pricing of both Wix and Squarespace reflects the equivalent monthly cost of annual plans. Accordingly, whether you choose the annual subscription of Squarespace or the Wix introductory plan, you will have to pay $192 upfront for the whole year. Per-month plans are also available, yet they are priced higher.

Wix vs Squarespace: Creating a Website

To create a website with Wix, sign up and choose a pricing plan (you can start with a free plan, too, yet it will always carry the Wix ads banner. You can use either the Wix ADI or the Wix Classic Editor to set up a website. The first is based on AI and creates a site based on your answers during the brief survey. The Classic Editor, meanwhile, gives you complete power over what you are doing with the site.

So, choose the editor which best fits your needs.

As for building a website with Squarespace, here, you have only one editor to work with. Start by choosing a template, then set up pages. Use the broad possibilities of Squarespace via fonts and colors, animations, buttons, and image blocks, to design and brand your website. Squarespace also offers SEO tools, so make use of them. And once all the key settings are configured, and the necessary information is added, your site will be ready to go live.

Wix vs Squarespace: Interface

Squarespace features a simple business setup interface, which is easy to learn and handle. Whatever you need to do with your eCommerce site, including selling online, offering gift cards, selling digital services, and managing shipping, is done through the main interface.

The left-hand of the interface is where the basic sections are located, including Commerce, Marketing, Scheduling, Profiles, and Settings. You can always switch between desktop and mobile previews to see your site’s appearance.

The dashboard shows your sites and allows creating a new one. All configurations with your subscriptions are carried out from the dashboard, too.

Wix is a way more elaborate website-building platform. And yet, the interface doesn’t seem to be out of this universe. Everything is neatly organized in the left-hand menu – a classic scenario. Your main actions with the business site settings, such as payment methods, updating the staff details, getting found on Google, etc., are introduced right in the middle. And the top menu offers help and the possibility to hire a professional or explore the app market, inspiring websites, etc.

Wix vs Squarespace: Templates

Wix and Squarespace website building solutions both offer loads of templates to choose from. And yet, the selection of Wix is broader. It introduces hundreds of themes covering all possible industries, from photography to blogs, from non-profit to conferences & meetings.

Most of the templates are attractive, but they can’t compete with Squarespace’s in quality. Not all of the suggested templates are fully responsive. If you choose any of such and want to make it mobile-friendly, you must make some tweaks yourself.

Wix also suggests editing minor things on the chosen template, such as fonts, color, multimedia, etc. For more profound alterations, however, you may have to rebuild the entire site.

Meanwhile, with Squarespace templates, users aren’t provided with such a huge spectrum of choices. Moreover, the elements are not as easy to move around as with Wix. Instead, the approximately 100 Squarespace templates are premium quality and professional. They are all carefully tailored to various industries and bear the stunning Squarespace signature. All templates are available in the free plan, too.

Squarespace templates are all fully mobile responsive and look equally impressive regardless of the screen size of devices your site visitors use to access your site. The website builder also allows switching templates without losing the already submitted content. In fact, this is a significant advantage over other site-building solutions, including Wix. These features and the moderate array of templates with that wow factor every user wants ensure Squarespace an edge over Wix’s in the aesthetics department.

Wix vs Squarespace: Website Design

Squarespace tries to make everything as minimalist and smooth as physically possible, while Wix offers a variety of options and customization.

Squarespace has a rather simple editor, which makes website customization less hectic than with Wix. After choosing a template, Squarespace provides the user with a brief tutorial on how the editor works. In fact, Squarespace editor doesn’t work on the drag-and-drop formula like Wix. Instead, everything falls in a straightforward grid, and the editing system is constructed from sections that go one after another. Every section, in its turn, is composed of blocks.

When designing a site, you choose from a few premade sections that fit with the template in overall style, colors, and fonts. Such a unique structure eliminates any possibility of building an unstructured site. All results turn out good-looking on all types of devices.

On the other hand, Wix offers extremely easy template customization. With only a few clicks, you can replace almost anything on your site, from images to logos and text. Since Wix offers two editors, ADI and Classic, every user can build the perfect website as quickly as necessary. ADI tool automatically builds a design based on how the user answers the brief questionnaire. On the one side, this editor is great for beginners, yet, on the other hand, it doesn’t allow much editing.

The classic Wix Editor is a pixel-perfect editor that gives the user full control over the website’s customization. You pick up a template and edit it to your heart’s content.

Perhaps the biggest downside of Wix website customization is that templates can’t be switched without having to submit the whole information again.

Wix vs Squarespace: SEO

The success of a site is directly dependent on the traffic the site receives. Your website builder must have solid SEO tools to rank higher in the search engines’ result pages. In this regard, both Squarespace and Wix are rather expedient. Both companies have plenty of useful SEO tools, from metadata to high-ranking keywords.

Being catered to beginners, Wix offers a comprehensive SEO guide, Wix SEO Wiz, to let its novice users get. By entering crucial data, such as the purpose of your site, keywords relevant to your industry, etc., the system will automatically adjust your SEO functionality.

Other in-built SEO features involve:

• Rapid page load time.
• Default meta tags.
• XML sitemap.
• Instant Google indexing.
• Customizable meta titles.
• Automated mobile optimization.

In the meantime, Squarespace ensures every site’s most prominent SEO techniques by implementing different strategies to provide the site with higher search results. Squarespace will generate a proper sitemap automatically, clean HTML markup, create a lightweight version of webpages for faster load speed, clean URLs so they become indexable, provide automatic image tagging, and Google search keywords analytics.

Squarespace has a thorough guide to assist beginners with their SEO strategy. Although it isn’t the same step-by-step personalized wizard that Wix offers, it’s still a big help for beginners.

Wix vs Squarespace: Publishing a Website

Both Wix and Squarespace offer free plans allowing users to test the platform’s major features without yet having the opportunity to launch the created site.

So, your Squarespace site will be private if you use the two-week trial period. However, to let someone see your site for constructive feedback, Squarespace suggests setting up a site password as a key to your unpublished site.

So, choose a plan once your site is ready and you have made sure Squarespace meets your standards. Opting for an annual subscription will save much on the cost. Squarespace is an all-inclusive website builder, so you won’t have to worry about hosting and site maintenance. Therefore, launch the site after confirming the submitted things and integrating marketing and eCommerce tools if necessary.

Publishing a site with Wix is not much different. Here, too, no hosting should be brought separately. It’s possible to publish a site whenever you wish, right from the top toolbar of the Editor. After the website is released, you can still apply changes and publish again to make them go live.

Before you release the site, I’d recommend previewing it to see how your site looks from a visitor’s point of view. If it looks great, click Publish at the top right of the Editor and then hit View Site for Wix to take you to your live site. Wix also allows sharing the site URL or domain name on social media.

Wix vs Squarespace: Online Store

Wix and Squarespace have impressive eCommerce functionality. And yet, the smaller app store of Squarespace and some restrictions of payment gateways and multilingual support force it to lose this round to Wix. With the latter, it is straightforward to set up a robust online store since it features a broad array of in-built tools and an impressive library of apps. Furthermore, both companies offer point-of-sale integration.

With either Squarespace or Wix (with Squarespace, you need the paid Trunk extension, though), users can use key third-party sales channels and sell on Instagram, eBay, Facebook, and Amazon.

Wix eCommerce offers unlimited bandwidth, no commission fees regardless of the chosen plan, no Wix adverts, Google Analytics to track the site performance, up to 50GB of storage (great for small sites, but it will limit the growth), and an unlimited number of products, etc. The range of sales tools is extensive, and even the cheap eCommerce plans offer great value for the money. While Squarespace users have to take a few steps to back up their content manually, Wix has taken the pressure off by backing up all sites’ content automatically.

Squarespace, in its turn, offers such tools as gift card creation, 0% transaction fees for higher priced plan users (otherwise, it’s 3%), customer accounts, as many products selling as you wish, abandoned cart recovery, email marketing, enhanced, unlimited bandwidth and storage which is amazing regardless of your site size, etc. Generally, the initial option is primarily structured for product merchandising and selling limited products. Therefore, although the app store is smaller than Wix’s, the in-built eCommerce functionality is carefully curated.

Also, Squarespace allows sales of services in all its plans, while Wix offers the same functionality only in eCommerce packages.

If you aim to sell worldwide, know that both companies offer multilingual capabilities. But still, Wix has the edge over Squarespace. Its multilingual tool with 100 languages support is free, while Squarespace generates extra fees and works with only around 20 languages.

Also, Wix supports a more extensive array of payment gateways used to process credit card transactions. There are more than payment processors with Wix plus its native Wix Payments, while Squarespace is limited only to two options – PayPal and Stripe – definitely not inspiring!

Wix vs Squarespace: Blog

Blogging is vital for generating traffic. With either Wix or Squarespace, you can succeed in this. Surely, none of them is as powerful a blogging platform as WordPress, but they offer pretty good blogging functionality overall. Both companies ease the tasks of website authors by providing RSS feeds, allowing them to use categories and tags, scheduling posts, and supporting multiple authors.

Squarespace’s amazing blogging tools are all incorporated into the WYSIWYG editor. It offers some premium quality blog templates (especially for graphics design and photography blogs), multiple author contributions, category support, social sharing, etc.

Wix also features a number of appropriate blogging templates with beautiful layouts. Its array of amazing features, meanwhile, includes galleries, feeds, email campaigns, autosave, etc. Adding the robust Wix Blog app to the site is also possible to elevate it to even greater heights.

Anyway, what I didn’t like about Squarespace’s blogging functionality is that it doesn’t support autosave or history revision. The whole post must be written anew if your PC crashes or the electricity shuts down unexpectedly while you’re still writing. Particularly this tiny run-out pulls Squarespace back a step from Wix in terms of blogging functionality.

Wix vs Squarespace: Technical Support

Regarding customer support, you can contact Squarespace via email, live chat, Facebook Messenger, or Twitter. There’s no phone support, which makes the tech assistance more limited compared to Wix. The latter welcomes its users to get in touch with them by phone, email, live chat, or Twitter. Wix’s 24/7 support is available as long as it’s in English, Spanish, Portuguese, or French.

On top of that, Squarespace sticks to a customer support policy, according to which every email is replied within an hour. On the other hand, Wix offers way better on-page help. It’s built into the site editing page, so you don’t have to exit it when you get stuck with anything.

Anyway, both platforms encourage searching for a solution to a problem in their help centers before getting in touch with the support teams.

Wix vs Squarespace: The Winner

Overall, there seems to be no obvious winner in the Wix vs Squarespace shootout. Both are solid choices for creating a website, and which of them to choose depends on what you need. For instance, if you are a beginner with no experience or coding knowledge yet need a thoroughly customizable site with premium SEO, Wix is your pick. But if you want to build a fabulous-looking site and sell services online on a limited budget, Squarespace could be a more robust choice.

However, although both companies share plenty of common features, a few additional elements are enough to make a difference. And based on this theory, Wix becomes the winner, albeit by a small margin.