Who Wins Between GoDaddy vs Squarespace in 2026: See Which Is Best

Want a quick roundup of both platforms? The table below features key differences you should know about:

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BEST IN TEST (2025)
Squarespace	GoDaddy
Overall Rating 4.5	Overall Rating 4.1
Today's best price $16 $14.40 with code “WBE10”	Today's best price $10.99
Free plan or free trial 14-day free trial	Free plan or free trial Free plan
What We Like Intuitive and easy-to-use editor Excellent booking tools to offer services online Stylish design options helping sites shine	What We Like Build a website in less than a minute Excellent marketing suite for promoting your business Affordable plans for websites and online stores
What We Dislike No centralized SEO dashboard Smart grid in editor can limit you creatively No autosave feature when designing	What We Dislike Limited and uninspiring design options Features are too simple for complex businesses No app market to add extra functionality with
Number of templates 190+	Number of templates 200+
Apps 40+	Apps No app store
AI website builder	AI website builder
Recommended for Creatives, portfolios and service-based businesses	Recommended for Tech novices and side hustlers
Start Free Trial	Try GoDaddy

GoDaddy and Squarespace have their own strengths that cater to different user needs, so it’s important to pick the option that best aligns with yours. Here’s who I recommend each option for:

GoDaddy’s website builder is the cheapest. Its paid plans start from as little as $10.99 per month (billed annually), and it has a free plan too (unlike Squarespace), so you can test the waters before dipping into any recurring payments

GoDaddy’s Pricing Plans

Below is a summary of GoDaddy’s key plans:

Squarespace’s pricing is more expensive than GoDaddy’s, with its plans ranging from $16 to $99 per month (billed annually). 

However, these plans come with more advanced, professional features, such as comprehensive SEO tools, advanced metrics and an app market to help you add additional functionality to your website.

• For 10% off your Squarespace plan, don’t forget to use the promo code WBE10 at checkout.
• You can also test Squarespace first with its 14-day free trial.

Squarespace’s Pricing Plans

I’ve outlined Squarespace’s plans below:

Squarespace is the best option if you want to design a website that’ll turn heads. When testing out the platform, I could choose from over 180 professionally designed templates, or use its AI website builder (Squarespace Blueprint) to generate a design tailored to my specific needs.

Creative businesses will particularly enjoy Squarespace’s customization options, since you can use its design tools to tweak your template and make it better reflect your brand personality. For example, I could easily drag and drop new content on a page, create different color palettes, and browse through an array of Google and Typekit fonts.

In comparison, GoDaddy’s designs don’t feel as polished. Though it also has an AI website builder that’s quick and beginner-friendly to use, the finished results can look outdated or slightly generic at times. If you’d like, you can choose from around 200 templates too, which are suitable for most one-page business websites.

So, for the most sophisticated designs and varied customization options, Squarespace is the clear winner here.

In our 2025 round of testing, Squarespace has maintained its title as the easiest website builder to use. There’s little room for error in the editor because it comes with a handy grid overlay that keeps your different design elements in alignment. When moving photos, videos and contact forms around my webpage, the overlay kept everything in place.

Squarespace’s editor is also superb for adjusting websites in mobile view, since it let me edit my mobile formatting independently from my desktop layout. This wasn’t the case with GoDaddy. While I could look at my website in mobile view, I couldn’t reformat the design myself and make sure that it was as responsive as possible on smartphones.

It’s worth noting that both Squarespace and GoDaddy are easy to use, so you shouldn’t have too much difficulty creating your website with either option. This view is supported by our in-house testing, with participants finding it easy to complete different tasks on each builder, be it tracking down a specific tool or publishing their finished website.

Though both Squarespace and GoDaddy offer useful features, like analytics tracking and marketing tools, Squarespace has the upper hand due to the depth and breadth of its tools. That said, let’s take a look at some of the different features in more detail.

App Store

The biggest difference between GoDaddy and Squarespace is that only Squarespace has an app market. With this useful feature, you can enhance your website with around 40 third-party apps covering ecommerce, marketing, social media, SEO and even chatbots.

Here are a few examples of Squarespace plugins that you might find useful:

• Weglot Translate: Used to translate websites into multiple languages
• Easyship: Users can save up to 91% on shipping costs in over 550 courier services
• Mailchimp: Helps you drive traffic to your webpage through personalized email marketing tools
• TinyIMG: An extension speeding up your site through image optimization
• Impact.com: Used to build affiliate marketing programs and track progress
• Printify: A useful way for creative businesses to make, sell and ship their products globally

The downside of these extensions is that they typically aren’t free to use, but many do provide free plans, trial periods, and monthly and per-use fees that can accommodate a variety of budgets. Some of these plans are worth looking into if there are certain tasks you want to streamline.

Booking Tools

Squarespace’s Acuity Scheduling tool lets you create, book and manage appointments on your website, which is ideal if you’re a service-based business or a creative that wants to secure more bookings. From my dashboard, I could set up different appointment types, highlight my availability during the week and accept payments from clients.

I was also able to:

• Sync my account with external calendars, like Google Calendar
• Ask for payments before or after appointments
• Create invoices
• Set up video conferencing through Zoom and join.me
• Send automated appointment reminders
• Access analytical tools

If you need a more affordable option, GoDaddy’s built-in appointments tool is free to use. However, I found its features limiting, since I could only add one appointment section to my entire website and couldn’t send automated appointment reminders to clients either.

However, GoDaddy now lets you create coupons for appointments, which is a clever way to treat your customers and inspire them to re-engage with your business.

Security

To protect your website and customer data, Squarespace and GoDaddy do come with important security features, such as:

• In-built SSL certificates to make sure your website runs on HTTPS (that will keep sensitive information like credit card details secure)
• 2-step verification to make it more difficult for hackers to steal your information
• PCI compliance so both platforms store credit card information in a secure environment
• Customer log-in areas that create a secure zone for any website members

Squarespace will get your website seen by as many eyes as possible, since our 2025 research confirmed that it has better blogging, SEO and email marketing tools than GoDaddy. That said, I was impressed by GoDaddy’s social media tools – in particular, its social media planner and calendar. I’ll compare these tools in more depth below.

Email Marketing

When I created a Squarespace email campaign, I had over 100 sophisticated templates to choose from. After I picked an appealing design, I could then use Squarespace’s straightforward editing tool to make it my own and, even better, transfer across design elements from my pre-existing website.

Additionally, I could schedule my emails for a later date and preview what they look like on mobile and desktop devices for optimal formatting.

GoDaddy has a free email marketing tool too, which enabled me to create and customize emails with its built-in design tools. While you shouldn’t expect Squarespace levels of customization, I liked how I could change my campaign’s theme, fonts and images with ease.

Social Media Integration

Both Squarespace and GoDaddy let you integrate your website with your social media accounts. You can link to your profiles on your website, create new social posts and track your performance from your dashboard.

Out of the two, GoDaddy stands out with its social media calendar. I could use the tool to view different content ideas for the month ahead, either based on seasonal dates (e.g. “National Friendship Day”) or different ways to promote my business (e.g. a product feature).

If there was an idea that I particularly liked, I could get GoDaddy’s AI to quickly generate the post for me.

Blogging

Squarespace’s blogging tools are impressive and come with more features than GoDaddy. These include:

• Enabling comments on your blog posts
• Letting your audiences search for specific posts on your website
• Adding profiles for each writer

This doesn’t mean that GoDaddy isn’t suitable for blogging at all. You can still monetize your posts for some extra cash, or add social buttons so that your audience can share your written content with others. But, if your blog is going to play an important role on your website, Squarespace is still a better option.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

In our testing, Squarespace scored full marks for its integrated SEO features. It covered essential SEO practices, like schema markup and keyword research support. To increase my website’s visibility, I was able to:

• Write meta descriptions and meta titles for each page
• Add alternative text to my images
• Create URL redirects to prevent broken links

GoDaddy does cover basic SEO that’ll help your website show up in search engines, but there are limitations. For one, you can’t add schema markup to your pages, download an SEO specific app and use canonical tags.

Squarespace and GoDaddy do have help options if you get stuck, but Squarespace provides the best support – primarily due to its Help Center. When looking for guidance on specific topics, like how to add alt text to my website or create a blog, I could easily find resources (e.g. guides and tutorials) that answered these questions.

GoDaddy’s Help Center was less comprehensive, since its resources didn’t go into as much depth or breadth.

If you need more direct help on your website, these are the key contact methods Squarespace and GoDaddy have available: 

💡 For more information, Writer Annie Angus tested Squarespace’s customer support options herself.

No website builder is one size fits all. Whether you pick GoDaddy or Squarespace as your desired platform, you’ll need to take certain factors into account before making your choice, which I’ve explored below:

Will I be able to create a professional design for my business?

• Strong choice of templates
• Easy-to-use editor
• Customization
• Images and video integration
• Avoid outdated designs that don’t suit modern audiences

Will it help me grow my website over time?

• Social media integration
• SEO tools
• Email campaign set up
• Blogging
• Avoid limited marketing tools that won’t help you scale over time

Will it fit into my budget?

• Variety of price plans
• A good number of features per plan
• Affordable website add-ons
• Number of free features
• Avoid paying extra if you’re mainly receiving features you won’t use

To judge GoDaddy and Squarespace fairly, this comparison is guided by our 2025 round of in-house website builder research, which spanned over 300 hours of data analysis and hands-on testing.

We assessed each website builder according to six key criteria that are most important to business owners:

1. Website features: 30%
2. Design features: 25%
3. Pricing: 15%
4. User experience: 15%
5. Help and support: 10%
6. Reputation: 5%

I’ve also sat down with Squarespace and GoDaddy myself, so have firsthand experience with their key features, strengths and weaknesses.

After comparing both website builders, I can confidently say that Squarespace is the best option. It’s ideal for businesses with a creative edge, since its eye-catching templates and customization options will help you design a website expressing your unique brand identity.

Its powerful scheduling tool, Acuity Scheduling, also means that it’s ideal for service-based businesses who want to build their clientele online.

That’s not to say that GoDaddy won’t be a good fit for your business. If you want to set up in record time, or save some cash with cheaper plans, it’s still a worthwhile option.

💡 Still need more information? Read through our in-depth Squarespace review or GoDaddy review.