Wix vs Squarespace 2019 | 9 Differences You Should Know

Ease of use was one of the most important things our users told us they looked for when choosing a website builder, and we agree completely. After all, there’s no point signing up to a builder if it’s just too complicated to use.

To cover the basics, both Wix and Squarespace are drag-and-drop website builders. This means you simply select the element you want (such as text boxes, images, and maps), and drag it to where you’d like it positioned on your page. Drop it there, and hey presto – that’s just how it will look once your site is published.

Wix is a “pure” drag-and-drop builder, meaning you really can drop whatever you want, wherever you want it. Squarespace isn’t exactly the same – you can’t drag elements around as freely like you can with Wix. This means it takes a little longer to get used to.

In our testing, Wix scored 4.3 out of 5 stars for ease of use, because of its smooth drag-and-drop editor. Squarespace’s section-based design is more challenging, meaning it only scored 3.3 out of 5 stars.

How did we reach these scorings? Well, we got our users to test out Wix and Squarespace and tell us exactly what they thought. We’ve included a few of their quotes, so you don’t just have to take our word for it!

Wix Ease of Use

Beginner-friendly shouldn’t mean boring, but this is something a lot of website builders struggle to grasp. Luckily, Wix has mastered the art of bringing fun, creative tools to beginners and tech pros alike.

Wix’s drag-and-drop editor was a big hit with most of our users:

“The drag and drop feature is excellent, allowing quick and easy redesigns.”

If you don’t fancy dragging and dropping to build your page, you can let Wix do it for you with its Artificial Design Intelligence (Wix ADI).

All you do is enter some information, such as the name and purpose of your website, and pick the colors and themes you like the best. Wix ADI then creates a personalized website for you to edit. It’s as easy as taking an online quiz, and only takes a few minutes.

Squarespace Ease of Use

Squarespace is more technical than Wix, and doesn’t sacrifice any creative freedom or dumb down its impressive features. Because of this, it just takes a little longer to get to grips with than Wix.

As you can see, though, it’s still pretty easy to use if you have the patience, or a little technical confidence:

Squarespace has recently made setting up your site a lot easier, by introducing AI to its setup process. This new feature gives you a helping hand finding a template, meaning you can now get started in minutes.

Simply type in the goal for your website – for example, “create a portfolio.” Squarespace then automatically shows you relevant templates, with the most recommended appearing at the top of the page.

The Squarespace editor remains the same, but this use of AI certainly speeds up the first steps of building your website.

This is what one of our users had to say about using Squarespace:

“I can imagine that once you’ve spent enough time working out what certain elements do, Squarespace would be pretty easy to use. You just need to work out where to click if you want to X, or which function helps with Y.”

It’s well worth spending time learning your way around once you’re inside the editor, as you can create a professional looking site without ever entering a line of code.

You’ve got a great idea for a website, and now you need to dress it up so the world sits up and pays attention. How many templates do you have to choose from? Can you switch to another one later on? Are the designs going to knock your socks off? Let’s find out!

Wix Templates: The Facts

• 510+ templates for you to choose from across different industries
• Very professional looking
• Once you pick a template, you cannot change it without rebuilding your website’s content – so choose carefully!
• All Wix templates are fully mobile responsive, and are supported by a dedicated, advanced mobile editor

Squarespace Templates: The Facts

• Responsive designs (great for mobile phones and tablets)
• Over 60 polished and beautifully designed templates across multiple industries
• You can change templates for your website at any time (no content will be lost)

Design Head to Head: How Do They Compare?

Wix has an impressive range of templates, all of which are attractive and provide a foundation for a professional looking website. They’re all mobile responsive, and come with a mobile editor so you can customize both your desktop and your mobile view.

However, when it comes to templates, Squarespace is the unbeaten champion of stunning and modern design. This is a classic case of quality over quantity; Squarespace may have a smaller range than Wix, but each and every template has been created by professional designers. And, of course, they’re all mobile responsive.

By simply looking at some of these templates, you can tell that the Squarespace team has invested a lot of time and effort into crafting them.

Squarespace’s superiority showed in our research testing – it scored an impressive 4.6 stars out of 5! Flexible, switchable, modern, and well-designed, Squarespace’s templates deserve every star they get. Wix scored 3.5 out of 5, which is still very respectable, and reflects a large number of good-looking themes.

Customization

While both Wix and Squarespace have great looking templates, you’re going to want to make them your own.

Wix makes this really easy with its simple drag-and-drop editor. You can replace text and images, add slideshows, and drop in contact forms a-plenty, all with just a few clicks!

To prove it, we took Wix for a spin:

Squarespace gives you tons of creative freedom over your template. However, a lot of features do come included, so it’s still a good idea to pick one that suits your website as well as looking incredible.

If you want to really customize your site with Squarespace, you can! You’re not just limited to drag-and-drop, “what you see is what you get” editing, and this opens up a whole world of options. With Squarespace’s CSS Editor, for example, you can change fonts, colors and backgrounds to make them totally unique.

Switching Templates

With so much choice, it’s understandable that you might want to change your template later down the line. It’s like those shoes you love in the store, then totally regret when you try them on at home. Ideally, you want the option to swap your template, just like you can with those shoes.

One of the biggest downsides of using Wix is that once you’ve selected your template and use it to publish your website, you can’t switch it. You’ll have to rebuild your content if you want to give your site a different look, which is time consuming and fiddly.

Squarespace, on the other hand, lets you switch your template any time you like. Your existing content is automatically transferred into the new template, although you’ll probably need to tweak it a bit to make sure it still looks its best.

You can even install multiple templates with Squarespace, meaning you can edit and preview your new one before making the switch. This makes rebrands and facelifts much easier for your website as it grows and develops.

It’s exciting enough just making a website. But once you’ve mastered editing your menu and creating multiple pages, you’ll want to go a step further and add some oomph to your site. That’s where features and tools come in.

Customization tools let you add slideshows and galleries, pick from hundreds of fonts, and create custom colors for your page designs. But it doesn’t stop there…

Features can do everything, from giving your site powerful ecommerce tools so you can sell online to customized emails for you to promote your website with. We’ll get into those in a sec.

Both Wix and Squarespace come with tons of built-in features and tools to give your site that extra punch. In fact, Squarespace’s features are some of the best on the market, while Wix has an almost overwhelming number of tools to choose from.

But if you want to go one step further, you can add apps.

Wix has its own dedicated App Market, providing apps made by Wix as well as third party ones. There’s a mix of free and paid apps – over 200 in total! This gives you the freedom to choose the features which work best for your website as it grows.

Squarespace, meanwhile, doesn’t have an app store. All of its features are designed in-house, and already built into the editor for you.This means everything you need to build, grow, and manage your website is right there at your fingertips – you don’t have to go looking for extra functions.

So how did these builders’ features perform in our testing? Wix got 4 stars out of 5, while Squarespace got 3.8 stars. Squarespace’s features are superb, but Wix’s combination of quantity and quality just tipped the balance.

If you want to sell online, you’ll need ecommerce – or sales – tools. Sure, basic ecommerce tools let you accept payments through your website. But for a really professional online store, you’ll need some of what Wix and Squarespace are offering…

Wix has three ecommerce plans, which come with ecommerce tools built-in for you to build your store with. These features include: 0% commission fee, unlimited bandwidth, up to 50GB storage, no Wix adverts, and Google Analytics. You can also integrate Wix apps to expand your store’s capabilities.

Squarespace supports ecommerce on three of its plans. The first one is designed for normal websites which need to sell a few items. The other two are specifically aimed at building online stores.

Both of these ecommerce specific plans come with all the ecommerce tools you need to succeed, already built-in. These features include: 0% transaction fees, unlimited bandwidth and storage, abandoned cart recovery, gift card creation, and customer accounts.

Wix scored 4.3 stars out of 5 overall for its ecommerce functions, while Squarespace came in just behind with 4.2 stars. Though they’re pretty evenly matched, Wix just outperformed Squarespace in our testing.

You can tell that both builders are on fairly even footing by looking at the table below, but there are some key differences. For example, Wix offers 0% transaction fees no matter which ecommerce plan you choose, whereas Squarespace has a 3% transaction fee on its lowest ecommerce plan. 

Compare Wix and Squarespace in the ecommerce features table below:

If you’ve got something to say… say it! These blogging tools will make sure your voice is heard.

While Wix does have built-in blogging tools such as blog posts, feeds, galleries, and email campaigns, if you want the best for your blog, it’s worth adding the free Wix Blog app to your site.

This app unlocks more blogging features, including:

• Comment management
• Categories
• RSS subscription
• Advanced SEO settings
• On-the-go blog management
• Automatic notifications for members
• Built-in social features

The Wix Blog app also lets you add multiple writers, comes with stylish layouts, and even lets you post on the go. It’s totally free, and super easy to add to your site – it only takes a click!

Squarespace, of course, comes with all its brilliant blogging tools built-in, such as multiple author contribution, scheduled sharing, and category support. Some of its especially useful features include:

• Adding contributors
• Setting individual permissions for members of your team
• Social integration – publish, sync, and import
• Adding excerpts of longer blog posts
• Adding a location to blog posts
• Setting a time limit for comments

With its top-quality designs, Squarespace is ideal for anyone who uses a lot of photography or graphics in their blog posts.

Don’t be shy – make sure you shout about your website with top-notch marketing tools.

Marketing Your Site With Wix

Create, customize, and run email campaigns, then share them on your social networks, send out newsletters, track your stats, and more with Wix’s Email Marketing tools. If that’s not enough, you can add apps such as the Facebook Like Popup to engage a wider audience.

One of Wix’s main marketing features is Wix Email Marketing, which lets you run email campaigns to promote your website, blog, or business. This includes features such as:

• Customizable styles – change your font, background, and more
• Contact integration – add and store your contacts’ details
• Stats tracker – see how many people open, view, and click your emails
• Social media tools – share campaigns across social platforms

On the free version of Wix Email Marketing, you can send up to 5,000 emails over three campaigns. This limit resets monthly, and there’s no pressure to upgrade.

If you want to increase your number of campaigns, you’ll need to go to your Wix Email Marketing dashboard and upgrade to an Ascend plan. Wix Ascend is Wix’s all-in-one business solution, designed to automate your workload.

With Wix Ascend, you get even better marketing tools – for example, you can run email, social, and video campaigns.

Squarespace’s Marketing Tools

Meanwhile, Squarespace helps you stand out from the crowd with its highly customized, stunning email campaigns. Combine these with integration across social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, and guage their impact using built-in analytics.

Squarespace has an all-in-one platform called Squarespace Email Campaigns. This integrates fully with your website, providing a streamlined service across your brand.

Unlike Wix’s email campaign add-on, Squarespace Email Campaigns doesn’t have a free version. Instead, you get a trial period that lets you send out three campaigns in total, with 50,000 sends per campaign.

The trial has no time limit, but once you’ve sent your three campaigns, you’ll need to upgrade to send any more. Squarespace Email Campaigns has four price plans, ranging from $5 to $48 per month when billed annually.

Is Squarespace’s email marketing platform worth the cost? Here are a few things you can do with it:

• Import content from your website to draft emails
• Send automated emails to subscribers
• Choose from over 30 starter layouts
• Manage your marketing on the go with mobile editing
• Track your campaigns’ success with integrated analytics

There’s no denying you get a stellar service from Squarespace’s email marketing. However, if Squarespace’s service doesn’t tick your boxes, you can integrate with MailChimp instead.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and refers to the processes that help your website rank higher up in Google’s search result pages.

All sorts of things go into optimizing your website, including setting keywords and meta titles. Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of those – this is exactly where our website builders can help.

Both Wix and Squarespace have built-in SEO tools to help you boost your website’s ranking. These include mobile responsive pages, optimized headings, and alt text for images.

Wix also has an SEO Guide where you can find tons of guides and helpful information on how to set up your site’s SEO, and then develop it as your website grows. This is super beginner-friendly, and is a great introduction for even the most nervous beginners.

And that’s not all Wix offers – you can also use Wix SEO Wiz to receive a personalized step-by-step plan to follow. You just enter information such as the name and purpose of your site, add in some keywords, and Wix does the rest. It’s easy to follow and sets you up for success.

Squarespace has great SEO tools built in, and has an SEO Checklist in its help center for you to follow. You have everything you need to succeed with Squarespace, and it provides a very thorough coverage of SEO to help you get to grips with it.

However, Squarespace isn’t quite as beginner friendly as Wix, and doesn’t have the same personalized SEO journey that Wix provides.

Wix provides support through email, forums, social media, a dedicated Support Center, and over the phone (available from 6am to 5pm PST). There are currently no live chat functions available.

Squarespace, in addition to providing a forum and a Knowledge Center, also has a live chat function (from 3am to 8pm EST, Monday through Friday) and a 24/7 email response team. There’s currently no phone support available, but if you need a speedy reply you’re in luck – it’s Squarespace’s policy to respond to all emails within 1 hour – impressive stuff!

Both Wix and Squarespace have thorough help centers full of articles and guides to help you out.

One of the best features of Wix’s support is its on-page help while you edit. If you get stuck, or don’t know what something is, all you have to do is click on one of the little question marks on your screen.

Squarespace doesn’t have the same in-editor support, but it does go the extra mile with its help center. This provides extra resources such as webinars and workshops, videos, and a great community forum. Squarespace may not offer phone support, but what it does offer is high quality service.

With all that in mind, did Wix or Squarespace score higher in our research for help and support? The answer is undeniably Wix, with a stunning 5 stars out of 5! It really does have it all. Squarespace got a solid 4 stars out of 5, but its lack of phone and in-editor support cost it a star.

Before we dive into our analysis of each builder’s pricing plans, let’s take a look at what they offer in terms of monthly packages. All prices listed refer to monthly prices on annual plans.

Squarespace offers 4 premium pricing plans. The higher the plan, the more features become available to you:

If you sign up to an annual plan, you can save between 13% and 25% compared to signing up to a month-to-month plan.

For $12 per month, the Personal plan gives you everything you need to create a stylish, simple website. It comes with unlimited bandwidth and storage, which is unusual for a low-tier plan and shows just what you’re paying for. This plan is best for personal use, or for those just starting out.

The $18 per month Business plan comes with everything available on the Personal plan, plus a huge array of extra features. These include promotional pop-ups, ecommerce functions, and a professional email from Google. As the name suggests, this plan is best for businesses.

The Basic and Advanced plans are designed for building online stores, and come with features to match. These include all the features from the Business plan, plus extras such as 0% transaction fees, an unlimited number of products to sell, management tools for inventory, orders, tax, and coupons, and much more.

Meanwhile, Wix’s premium plans offer you seven different packages. Four are aimed at websites, while three are ecommerce plans:

The $13 per month Combo plan is the cheapest Wix offers. It allows you to connect a domain and remove Wix adverts from your website. You also get 2GB bandwidth and 3GB storage. It’s good for upgrading from the free plan, but not ideal for long-term use.

The Unlimited plan is great for freelancers, costing $17 per month. It’s a big upgrade for only $4 more, unlocking unlimited bandwidth and 10GB storage. You also get spending value for some cool apps, such as Site Booster.

The $22 per month Pro plan is Wix’s most popular website plan. Increased storage, as well as extra bonuses like the Professional Logo app, make this plan ideal for perfecting your site’s online branding.

The VIP plan doesn’t offer much more than the Pro plan, but for an extra $17 per month, you do get priority support, meaning your problems are fast-tracked to the front of the queue. Best for those who can’t afford to wait!

Here’s a quick look at Wix’s ecommerce plans – you can find a full breakdown of Wix’s ecommerce features and prices in our Wix eCommerce Review.

These plans provide scalability for online stores. They start from $23 per month on the Business Basic plan, increasing to $27 per month for the most popular Business Unlimited plan, and reaching the top price of $49 per month for the Business VIP plan.

If you sign up for a 1-year or 2-year plan, you can save from 17% to 38% per year, depending on which package you select:

*eCommerce represents Business Basic, the cheapest of the three ecommerce plans – read our Wix eCommerce Review to learn more

If you compare the monthly fees for Wix and Squarespace’s annual plans, you’ll see that Squarespace’s prices start just $1 below Wix’s cheapest plan. There’s not much in it at all, but you get more for your money on Squarespace’s low-tier plans than you do with Wix.

For example, Squarespace gives you unlimited bandwidth and storage straight away on its $12 per month Personal plan, whereas Wix only unlocks unlimited bandwidth on its $17 per month Unlimited plan. You won’t find unlimited storage on any of Wix’s plans.

However, Wix has a larger range of plans, making it easier to find one that suits your needs. Squarespace’s plans get more expensive more quickly because there’s less choice, whereas Wix has more tiered pricing, making it more affordable long-term.

Our top tip would be to think about the features that matter most to you, and see which builder offers the plan that will provide you with the tools you need, at a price you can afford.

If you want to build a site for free, than Wix is the obvious choice. Its free plan is great for getting started – however, we don’t recommend staying on it long-term. With adverts displaying on your site, a “wix.com” sub-domain, and limited resources, the free plan makes it impossible to create a truly professional looking site.

Squarespace, meanwhile, doesn’t offer a free plan. Instead, it has a 14-day free trial. This is a great chance to test out whether Squarespace is the right builder for you, and you don’t need to enter any payment details unless you decide to sign up to the paid plan.