Squarespace and Wix are two of the best website builders on the market. Both provide the tools you need to create a website without learning code or complicated technology — but there are some key differences to consider before choosing one.
Squarespace’s collaborative AI website builder is ideal for users who want to create a unique site in minutes. Squarespace’s unlimited storage also allows for exponential growth. Wix, meanwhile, has an extensive collection of free site templates and a more intuitive site editor, perfect for those seeking a more hands-on experience. However, Wix’s storage limits on its entry-level plan make it less than ideal if you’re building a large site — like a long-running hobby blog — that isn’t expected to generate much revenue.
Squarespace vs. Wix: At a glance
| Squarespace | Wix | |
| Templates | 190 designer-made templates | Over 800 templates of varying quality |
| AI tools | Collaborative AI site builder, some generative AI/AI editing tools | Lackluster AI site generator, some generative AI/AI editing tools |
| Usability | Intuitive setup, sometimes frustrating editor | Semi-intuitive setup, streamlined site editor with lots of guidance |
| Performance (uptime) | 100% during test week | 100% during test week |
| Performance (speed) | 2.67-second average | 2.38-second average |
| Security | SSL certification, firewall, DDoS Protection, two-factor authentication, 24/7 security monitoring | SSL certification, firewall, DDoS Protection, two-factor authentication, 24/7 security monitoring |
| Customer support | Excellent knowledge base, poor live chat service, reasonable email service | Solid knowledge base, fast callback service, acceptable live chat service |
| Value | Starts at $16 a month for unlimited bandwidth and storage with some e-commerce features available | Starts at $17 a month for unlimited bandwidth and 2GB of storage with no e-commerce features |
Squarespace
Squarespace makes initial site setup easy for complete newcomers with excellent AI website design and designer-made templates for various niches like photography and fashion. Moreover, all Squarespace plans include unlimited storage, bandwidth and the ability to sell unlimited products and services through its fully integrated e-commerce platform. This makes Squarespace ideal for building large websites — like a long-running blog with thousands of posts — as well as for e-commerce businesses.
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Wix
Wix’s overwhelming library of 800-plus templates can make initial setup frustrating if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for. But the site editor is highly intuitive — even more so than the Squarespace site editor — and flexible. This makes Wix a good choice for users who are happy to invest more time into choosing a theme upfront in exchange for an easier site editing experience down the line.
However, Wix’s lowest-cost plan only includes 2GB of storage (enough for 20 large pages or 200 small pages) and doesn’t provide e-commerce features. Most higher-tier Wix plans also limit storage and certain e-commerce features, like the automated sales tax calculation, which can only be applied to 500 transactions per month — a stark contrast to the unlimited sales tax calculation available on comparable Squarespace plans. This means Wix can be great for small websites like professional profiles, but it’s not ideal for large websites or e-commerce stores.
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Usability: Squarespace makes design selection easier, but long-term site editing is simpler with Wix
Squarespace and Wix both offer intuitive tools for building and maintaining professional portfolios, hobby sites and blogs. Squarespace’s collaborative AI site generator simplifies initial site setup, while Wix requires a more involved setup process but has a simpler editor. This makes Squarespace a better choice if you want to get your site up fast, whereas Wix is better if you want to invest more time into setup and less time into future site updates.
Purchasing a plan is oddly difficult on both Wix and Squarespace. You’ll need to set up the basics of your site — whether that’s by using the AI website generator or selecting a template — then create an account and sign up for your free trial. Both Wix and Squarespace only provide the option to buy a plan after you’ve completed all of these steps.
When it comes to building the site itself, Squarespace’s most obvious benefit is its Blueprint AI website builder. This collaborative site generator lets you name your site and select a brand personality, color scheme and font pairing (header font and body text font). You can also choose homepage sections and separate pages (about, contact, etc.) for it to generate. This creates a unique, beautiful website — the complete opposite of the hideous sites Wix’s AI generated for me.
Choosing a site template with Squarespace is also simple, with roughly 200 beautiful site designs you can filter by niche (like photography) or functionality (like e-commerce). Wix provides similar filters for your template search, but with over 800 templates — some of which look like they came straight out of the early 2010s — it can still be overwhelming to find the right one.
Furthermore, Wix makes switching templates unusually difficult. You’ll need to create a new website with the template you want to switch to, then transfer your data, domain and hosting plan to this new website. This puts enormous pressure on users to choose the perfect template — both for now and for the future of their website — right out of the gate. Squarespace, on the other hand, makes it easy to change your site template at any time.
Once you get to site editing, however, Wix becomes the simpler program. Wix provides a customized site creation to-do list and extensive guidance on how to use its already-intuitive editor. Squarespace, meanwhile, doesn’t offer a startup guide or a virtual tour of the editor; you have to figure everything out on your own. Some processes in Squarespace — like moving from customizing the main page to editing sub-pages — are also unnecessarily complicated.
In terms of actual functionality, things are pretty equal. Both Wix and Squarespace give you complete control over fonts and color schemes. They also both let you drag-and-drop elements from sidebar menus into the pages themselves, with almost complete control of where you place your text, images and other content. However, Wix has one advantage: the mobile site editor, which lets you view — and change — exactly how your site appears on mobile devices. With 64.35% of all internet traffic coming from mobile devices, this editor is a massive benefit — and there’s no equivalent tool in Squarespace.
Squarespace and Wix each have numerous extensions (mostly paid, with a few free options) you can use to expand your site’s functionality with things like event calendars and lead generation/email marketing tools. While I haven’t tested most of these extensions, the few I’ve played with have been both intuitive and effective.
Value: Squarespace provides way more bang for your buck
At first glance, Wix and Squarespace’s starting plans seem to have similar value, as their prices are almost identical — $17 a month for the Wix Light plan and $16 a month for the Squarespace Basic plan. However, Squarespace’s Basic plan provides unlimited storage and bandwidth, plus full e-commerce integration for selling products and services. This makes it a significantly better value than the equivalent Wix plan, especially if you’re building an online business or starting a blog you hope to run for many years.
| Company | Plan | Storage and bandwidth | Notable Features | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Squarespace | Basic | Unlimited | Collaborative AI builder, designer-made templates, e-commerce tools, content monetization tools, basic marketing tools, free domain for the first year, robust security | $16 a month (billed annually) |
| Wix | Light | 2GB storage (enough for 20 large pages or 200 small pages) and unlimited bandwidth | 800 templates, lead capture forms, free domain for the first year, robust security | $17 a month |
Both companies offers solid website creation tools that are easy enough for any beginner to master, and flexible enough to satisfy most seasoned pros. Wix and Squarespace both give you full access to their site generation tools, templates and drag-and-drop website editors on their lowest-cost plans. Both also offer robust security suites with features you won’t find from most traditional web hosts — such as two-factor authentication and 24/7 security monitoring by real humans who constantly check servers for vulnerabilities and fix them.
You’ll get more storage space with Squarespace on its entry-level plan than with Wix, so if you expect to have a larger site or predict your site will grow, it’s a better choice. Wix’s Light plan includes unlimited bandwidth, but only allows for 2GB of storage, a minuscule amount compared to most web hosts. Wix’s Core and Business plans also have strict storage limits — enough for 500 and 1,000 large pages, respectively — which can force you to spend a lot of money if you’re building a big website.
Squarespace, meanwhile, offers both unlimited bandwidth and unlimited storage on Basic, allowing your site to grow exponentially without forcing you onto a higher-cost plan. Squarespace does recommend limiting your pages to 400 or less, but it won’t actually stop you from creating more pages.
Business websites can also get much more from Squarespace than from Wix, with Squarespace offering fully integrated e-commerce and content monetization tools on its Basic plan. There are steep transaction fees at this level — 2% for online store transactions and 7% for digital content fees (on top of payment processor fees) — but this can still be an effective option for small stores that can’t afford the upfront payments for higher-cost plans. Wix, meanwhile, requires you to purchase the $29 a month Core plan to access even basic e-commerce features.
Squarespace provides more value in the marketing department, too; while Wix only provides lead generation forms on its Light plan, Squarespace’s Basic includes analytics, keyword analysis and lead generation tools. Basic also provides several e-commerce-specific marketing features, including abandoned cart recovery and gift card creation.
Security: Where both website builders excel
Squarespace and Wix use many of the same tools and protocols to secure their websites — and help you secure your account. These matching security protocols earned both website builders top security marks during our tests, so you can rest assured that your site will be safe with either company.
These protocols include:
- SSL certification to encrypt data sent to and from your site.
- Firewall protection to filter out malware and harmful traffic/data attempting to access your site.
- Anti-DDoS protocols to prevent your site from being overwhelmed by floods of malicious traffic.
- Two-factor authentication to make it more difficult for unauthorized users to access your account.
- 24/7 security monitoring with a team of real humans constantly evaluating company servers and the website builder software to quickly find and fix vulnerabilities.
The 24/7 security monitoring is the most notable of these features, as most traditional web hosts either don’t offer this feature or rely on AI for their security monitoring. However, this feature seems pretty common for website builders, as it’s also offered by Shopify, an e-commerce site builder that also offers robust anti-fraud protection — so if you’re building an e-commerce store, you might want to choose Shopify over Squarespace or Wix.
Performance: Wix has a slight edge, but Squarespace is also fast and reliable
Whether you’re starting a blog or building an e-commerce store, you can trust Wix and Squarespace to deliver your content to your visitors at rapid speeds while remaining available reliably. I was impressed by the excellent uptime (the percentage of time my site was available online for) and fast site speed (how many seconds it takes a site to load) I experienced with both Wix and Squarespace.
Squarespace provides the industry-standard 99.9% uptime guarantee — meaning server issues won’t cause more than 10 minutes of downtime per week — and had a full 100% uptime during my week of monitoring with Betterstack. Wix, meanwhile, offers an above-average 99.99% uptime guarantee, meaning server issues won’t cause more than two minutes of downtime per week, and it also had 100% uptime during my week of monitoring. This suggests that both website builders not only live up to their uptime promises but actually exceed them.
I used WebPageTest to determine average site speeds for both website builders in locations throughout North America, Europe, the Middle East and Australia. I was looking for a site speed of less than three seconds, as the bounce rate — the percentage of people who leave a website after viewing only one page — decreases by 32% when site speed goes from three seconds to one second.
Wix excelled at speed tests with a 2.38-second average speed, one of the fastest site speeds I’ve experienced when testing web hosts. Squarespace was slightly behind with a 2.67-second average speed, but still fell within the recommended maximum. This suggests that you can trust both Wix and Squarespace to serve your website to visitors quickly.
Customer support: Squarespace makes it easier to help yourself, while Wix offers better support staff
Squarespace and Wix provide a mix of self-service support through knowledge bases and direct communication channels. However, my experience seeking support from both companies was mixed. Squarespace failed utterly to provide live chat service but responded to support tickets in a timely manner. Wix, meanwhile, had a somewhat frustrating AI live chat that made it difficult to speak with a human, but offered fast, helpful support when I placed a callback request.
I explored the Squarespace knowledge base first and was pleased with the intuitive search, wide range of tutorials and the inclusion of video in almost every article. Wix didn’t provide as many video tutorials, but its help center was fairly easy to navigate and provided tutorials for various website design and management tasks.
Things deteriorated when I attempted to use live chat. Squarespace only offers live chat — a feature most other website builders and web hosts offer 24/7 availability for — between 4 a.m. and 8 p.m. ET. Moreover, when I attempted to use it, I saw a notice saying live chat was “temporarily” down. I was eventually able to access support from a chatbot, but when I asked to speak with a person, it told me to open a support case. I submitted my support case and kept the window open throughout my workday, but never received a response.
Wix live chat was functional when I tried to use it, but the AI was very determined to direct me away from human support. I had to ask to speak with a human twice in a row before it connected me with an agent. Thankfully, the agent I spoke with was fast and, after clearing up a brief misunderstanding I suspect resulted from the representative speaking English as a second language, helpful.
Squarespace’s email support proved much more helpful than its live chat, with the first response arriving in less than an hour (the usual timeframe I expect for an initial reply to email support). The representative forwarded my question to a specialist, who responded roughly one hour later. In total, I waited around two hours to have my issue addressed, and the agents I spoke with were highly professional and pleasant to deal with.
Wix doesn’t offer email support, so I went directly to testing its callback system. I placed my request and settled in for what I imagined would be a long wait, and was pleasantly surprised when I received a call two minutes later. Again, I had some communication issues that I suspect were caused by a language barrier, but I did get comprehensive answers to my questions after some clarification.
Bottom line: Wix is easier to use, but Squarespace gives you more room to grow
Wix’s highly intuitive site editor and website creation checklist make it ideal for first-time website owners who want the simplest possible process. Its fast customer service makes Wix great for users who anticipate needing considerable support. Wix offers many templates, with particularly great options for professional portfolios and other static (rarely changing) websites. However, its strict storage limits and the lack of monetization options on the lowest-tier plan make Wix a poor choice for fast-growing sites or e-commerce businesses.
Squarespace, meanwhile, provides unlimited storage and bandwidth on all plans, so it’s great if you’re expecting (or even hoping for) rapid site growth. The built-in e-commerce features on the lowest-tier plan make Squarespace excellent for selling products and services online. You can use Squarespace’s Blueprint AI to build a unique website in minutes. However, its sometimes confusing site builder and impossible-to-reach live chat agents make Squarespace somewhat less appealing for absolute beginners than Wix.
