Wix vs Squarespace: Which Website Builder Wins?

Both Wix and Squarespace are leading website builders, but Wix excels in design flexibility, business features, and affordable pricing, while Squarespace stands out for ease of use, superior performance, and polished templates. The right choice depends on your specific needs and technical comfort level.

Ease of Use

Squarespace is easier for beginners thanks to its intuitive grid-based editor that guides users toward professional designs. The platform makes it difficult to create poorly designed sites, ideal for those without web design experience.

Wix offers more creative freedom with its drag-and-drop editor, providing total creative control that experienced builders love but newcomers may find overwhelming. Wix does include an AI chatbot builder that generates sites based on your answers to guided questions.

Design Flexibility and Templates

Wix dominates with 2,000+ templates covering diverse industries from real estate to blogging, offering five times more options than Squarespace. This massive library provides variety for virtually any business need.

Squarespace curates 150+ professionally designed templates that prioritize quality over quantity. These templates are ideal for creative businesses, portfolios, and those who value polished aesthetics over extensive variety.

Pricing Comparison

Squarespace is cheaper overall, ranging from $16 to $99 per month compared to Wix's $17 to $159 per month. However, Wix offers a free plan (Squarespace doesn't) and more competitive entry-level and mid-tier pricing. Wix users can access all features with the $32/month Business plan, while Squarespace requires the Advanced Commerce plan for full functionality.

For high-tier plans, Squarespace becomes more affordable, making it a better value for established businesses needing premium features.

SEO Capabilities

Wix has more advanced SEO features, including default schema markups for Q&A, images, and products, plus an editable robots.txt file. Wix provides all heading tags (h1 to h6) versus Squarespace's h1 to h4.

For social SEO, Wix is superior. While Squarespace only allows changing featured images for pages, Wix lets you customize Open Graph titles, descriptions, and different tags for Twitter, giving better control over social sharing appearance.

Squarespace offers solid basic SEO with customizable meta titles, URLs, descriptions, and automatically included XML sitemaps with built-in schema markup.

eCommerce Features

Wix provides superior eCommerce capabilities with pre-order tracking, extensive tax automation, multichannel selling through Amazon, eBay, and Facebook, plus built-in dropshipping features. Most business tools come natively without requiring paid add-ons.

Squarespace offers unlimited storage and product uploads across most plans but has fewer sales features and multichannel integrations. Tools like appointment scheduling require paid add-ons that Wix includes for free.

Performance and Reliability

Squarespace significantly outperforms Wix in speed and uptime. Squarespace renders pages nearly twice as fast, with a Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) of 3.6 seconds compared to Wix's slower rendering. Squarespace achieved 99.99% uptime during testing with minimal disruptions.

Squarespace uses Content Delivery Network (CDN) technology to store website components on servers worldwide for faster access and automatically resizes images for quicker loading.

Apps and Integrations

Wix vastly outshines Squarespace with 500+ apps versus only 35+ extensions. Wix offers 80+ payment gateways and unified social media publishing across Facebook, Instagram, X, and YouTube Shopping. This extensive app library provides superior business tools and marketing features.

Squarespace's limited extensions across Shipping, Inventory, Sales, and Finance categories mean businesses requiring advanced functionality must turn to third-party solutions or custom coding.

Customer Support

Wix excels with live chat, phone support options, and an extensive Knowledge Center, though phone support costs extra. Wix also provides online courses and dedicated SEO resources.

Squarespace offers only email support, lacking phone help, online courses, and comprehensive SEO resources like Wix.

Bottom Line: Which Should You Choose?

Choose Wix if you:

• Need extensive design customization and creative control
• Plan to build a serious online store with multichannel selling
• Want affordable entry-level or mid-tier plans with a free option
• Require comprehensive customer support and advanced SEO tools
• Need 500+ apps and extensive integrations

Choose Squarespace if you:

• Prioritize ease of use with minimal learning curve
• Want professional results quickly without extensive customization
• Need superior website performance and reliability
• Prefer unlimited storage and simplicity over features
• Run a creative business, portfolio, or blog where aesthetics matter most

For most business websites requiring flexibility, eCommerce, and extensive features, Wix is the better choice. For creatives, portfolios, and users who prioritize simplicity with beautiful design, Squarespace delivers exceptional results.