Wix vs. Squarespace Website Builders

Wix and Squarespace are two of our top-rated website builder services. Wix takes the No. 1 spot for Best Website Builder, Best Free Website Builder, and Best Website Builder for Small Businesses, while Squarespace ties for No. 3 in the Best Website Builder category. Both companies sell four site-creation plans suitable for small businesses, although the least-expensive package sold by both services lack e-commerce capabilities. Wix also offers a free plan that places ads on your site, among other limitations, as well as a website-building service for enterprises.

The site-building packages sold by both companies that are best suited to small and midsize businesses are priced comparably and offer a similar range of features, although Wix provides more support for content and service monetization. All but the lowest-price plan sold by Squarespace include a free professional Gmail and Google Workspace account for one year. Wix sells business email services separately.

The prices charged by Wix and Squarespace for their website-building packages are similar, though Wix’s top-end plan for small and midsize firms is priced at $159 a month, while the high-end package from Squarespace is $65 a month, discounted to $49 a month when purchased on a yearly basis. These prices are in line with comparable services sold by other vendors in our ratings. Less-expensive plans are available from Weebly, WordPress, and Bluehost, while more expensive packages are sold by Shopify and Duda.

The four Wix Premium plans – Light, Core, Business, and Business Elite – cost from $16 a month to $159 a month and are designed to meet the website-building needs of small and midsize businesses. All four packages include a custom domain and free domain registration for one year, a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate, and 24/7 customer support via chat and telephone callback.

The free plan offered by the company uses a Wix subdomain rather than a custom domain. It allows up to 500 MB of storage and bandwidth, and places ads on every page of your site.

Squarespace’s four website-building packages are Personal, Business, Commerce Basic, and Commerce Advanced. They are priced from $16 a month to $49 a month, with discounts of 24% to 30% for annual agreements. The plans include 24/7 support via email and live chat support during extended business hours. They provide unlimited bandwidth and 30 minutes of video storage. All four packages give your business a custom domain when you buy an annual agreement. Also included are an SSL certificate, website metrics, and access to the company’s library of third-party extensions.

Wix’s Light plan and Squarespace’s Personal package are priced similarly and offer comparable features, such as a custom domain with an annual agreement. However, neither of the vendors’ low-end packages lets you sell products on your site. More practical website builder options for most small businesses are Wix’s $32-a-month Business package and Squarespace’s Commerce Basic and Commerce Advanced, which cost $27 a month and $49 a month respectively when purchased annually.

Both Wix and Squarespace offer 14-day money-back guarantees, although Wix applies the guarantee only to plans purchased by credit card, and Squarespace limits the guarantee to annual subscriptions. Wix lets you cancel your subscription at any time, but the cancellation doesn’t take effect until the plan’s expiration date. You can cancel a Squarespace account via the account’s Billing panel or by disabling auto-renewals.

The website-building packages sold by Wix and Squarespace that represent the best value for most small businesses are Wix’s Business plan and Squarespace’s Commerce Basic and Commerce Advanced offerings. The low-end services sold by the companies lack e-commerce and other features most small businesses will require, while Wix’s Business Elite is a better choice for midsize firms.

Wix offers three ways to create a website: by using the Wix Editor to customize the company’s page and site templates; via the Wix Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI) tool, which generates a complete site using answers tog a series of questions; or by hiring a professional designer through the Wix Marketplace.

Wix’s template library gives you more than 800 options for your site’s design. The templates are presented in five major categories, each of which has several subcategories:

Nine blank templates can be used to design your own site. They include a one-page site, portfolio, split screen, gallery, and strip header. Once you’ve selected your template and gathered your site’s content, you create the site by opening the Wix Editor and adding elements such as text boxes, galleries, menus, and buttons. Then you copy and paste your content into the corresponding element.

Squarespace takes a similar template-based approach to site design but also offers to match your business with a design professional through the Squarespace Marketplace.

The Squarespace template library has more than 100 templates that are divided into seven types and 18 topics:

You can also create your own template by using a five-step wizard:

An alternative to using one of the templates offered by the companies is to pay for professional site services. Both Wix and Squarespace link to web design companies:

Both companies also offer services for developers:

Your site’s success depends on understanding how well it’s performing, and what your site’s visitors are experiencing. Wix and Squarespace apply various analytics to report on these and other aspects of your site.

Wix’s Core, Business, and Business Elite plans have features designed for bookings, subscriptions, and memberships. Other features support ticket and event management, restaurants, hotels, fitness businesses, and monetization of music, video, and artwork. Squarespace’s fee-based vertical categories include marketing, email marketing, scheduling, and professional email via Google Workspace.

The Wix App Market offers free and fee-based add-on services for your site in categories that include marketing, services and events, media and content, design elements, communication, and selling online. Squarespace’s third-party extensions are available in free and fee-based versions. Extension categories include shipping and fulfillment, finance, inventory and products, and sales and marketing.

Both Wix and Squarespace sell domain name registrations and transfers. Wix offers free tools for branding, marketing, design, and finance; the company sells business email services, Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns, and client-management services. Fee-based services available from Squarespace include Acuity Scheduling, Bio Sites for establishing a social media presence, the Tock restaurant management app, and Unfold for creating social media content.

Squarespace provides 24/7 support via email, Twitter, and Facebook Messenger. Live chat support is available from 4:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. Eastern time Monday through Friday. The company doesn’t offer telephone support because it claims live chat and support via email and Twitter are faster and more effective.

Wix’s customer support begins by choosing a category on the main Help page and choosing one of the support documents on the topic, or by opening a chat session. If the chat session doesn’t provide a solution, you’re prompted to select a topic before being connected to an expert. You can then request a callback and are shown the estimated wait time for the call. The wait can be anytime from 25 minutes to “within 24 hours.”

The Squarespace Help Center features articles sorted by product and topic, as well as dozens of videos that describe analytics, billing, design, commerce, marketing, domains, SEO, pages and content, and other subjects. The company also offers webinars and a forum that you can browse by topic or search by entering keywords.

Wix’s support resources include a privacy and security hub, SEO learning hub, the Wix Encyclopedia, website examples, and a video library with more than 100 videos on topics that include business essentials, SEO, digital marketing, e-commerce, coding, and site essentials. The company offers certifications in Velo and site accessibility.

Squarespace’s website-building packages lack some of the features of the plans sold by our top pick Wix, but the company’s Business, Commerce Basic, and Commerce Advanced offerings represent a bargain for small businesses. In particular, the Commerce Basic and Commerce Advanced packages are affordable options for small businesses looking to start an online store on a limited budget.

Squarespace can’t match the variety of designs and capabilities of the Wix template library, which features more than 800 site and page options geared to the needs of dozens of business types and purposes. However, Squarespace’s template collection holds its own in comparison to Wix by offering dozens of looks and feature combinations for specific industries, such as restaurants, professional services, local businesses, and health and beauty.

The Commerce Advanced plan sold by Squarespace costs $49 a month when purchased annually and doesn’t charge a transaction fee on credit card and debit card purchases. (The company’s Commerce Basic plan also waives transaction fees.) By comparison, Wix Payments charges a transaction fee of 2.9% plus 30 cents for all purchases in the U.S., and the company’s Business plan, which costs $32 a month, is limited to 100 transactions per month. (The $159-a-month Business Elite package from the company supports up to 500 transactions per month.)

The Business, Commerce Basic, and Commerce Advanced plans from Squarespace set no limits on the number of products you can sell, while Wix caps the number of products available on your site at 50,000. However, Squarespace charges extra for its scheduling tool, while Wix bundles scheduling and booking with its Core, Business, and Business Elite plans. The Wix packages also include features designed for ticket and event management, restaurant and hotel management, fitness businesses, and art and content monetization.

When you look at the long list of website-building features provided in Wix’s Core, Business, and Business Elite packages and peruse the company’s extensive template library, it’s easy to see why Wix is our No. 1 rated Website Builder, Free Website Builder, and Website Builder for Small Businesses. While Wix’s prices are higher than the average for all the services in our ratings, the company’s plans for small and midsize businesses deliver value for your investment.

The area where Squarespace may have an edge over Wix is the discounts of 24% to 30% Squarespace offers when you purchase an annual plan for its Business, Commerce Basic, and Commerce Advance products. In particular, small businesses that want to make a splash with their online store and other website features without exceeding their limited budget will appreciate the design, functionality, and usability of Squarespace’s Commerce Basic and Commerce Advanced website-building plans.

Choosing between Wix and Squarespace as your website-building partner comes down to how much your company can benefit from the industry-specific features Wix offers, such as booking and scheduling for service businesses, ticket and event management, and tools for restaurants, hotels, fitness operations, and firms looking to monetize art, music, and other content.