Squarespace vs. WordPress – 100% Unbiased Comparison [2022]

There are tons of online website builders out there, but in this in-depth comparison, I’ll be reviewing two of the most popular website builders, Squarespace vs. WordPress.

As we delve deeper into this article, I will guide you in discovering the best website builder that will suit you best.

I’ll be tackling their key features, pros and cons, pricing, and more. Knowing these pieces of information will help you in choosing the best website builder for you.

Without further delay, let’s get started.

1. Squarespace vs. WordPress At A Glance

Squarespace and WordPress are both household names in website building. Let’s see how they pitch against each other.

4.6	4.8
Best for accessibility. Intuitive and easy-to-use platform for creating websites with great designs. Starts at $16/month.	Best for Overall. Customizable, flexible, and rich platform with libraries of extensions and integrations. Starts at $4/month.
Try Squarespace	Try WordPress

2. Who Is Squarespace Best For?

Squarespace is best for people who lack expert technical skills and want to build high-quality, professional-looking websites. 

Creatives such as photographers, musicians, artists, and more will also find Squarespace suiting their needs since Squarespace’s powerful creative tools let you create stunning websites that stand.

Squarespace’s high-quality builder comes with powerful creative tools that are easy to use and allows you to unleash your creativity.

Burkhard Berger

3. Who Is WordPress Best For?

WordPress caters both to people looking to create simple websites and those who seek to create complex and powerful ones. 

Hosted WordPress or WordPress.com, though not as powerful as its open-source counterpart, will perfectly suit those who need easy-to-make and straightforward websites, like bloggers.

Self-hosted WordPress or WordPress.org, on the other hand, is a powerful open-source website builder that requires technical skill. Self-hosted WordPress offers a great deal of customizability that makes creating complex websites possible. 

Individuals with technical skills and businesses that can hire technical experts will utilize WordPress’s capabilities to the fullest.

Although WordPress requires you to have technical knowledge, the freedom and flexibility you get in exchange, along with its powerful toolset, allows you to shape and customize your website exactly the way you want it to.

Burkhard Berger

4. A Close Look At The Features Of Squarespace and WordPress

Let’s have a closer at the tools and features of Squarespace and WordPress. Where does one have strength over the other?

Features
Plugins/Extensions
Website Builder
eCommerce solutions
Customizable Themes
Open Source
Built-in Logo Maker
Domain Registration
SEO Tools
Get Started	Try Squarespace	Try WordPress

5. Key Features Of Squarespace

#1 Squarespace’s Website Builder

Like Wix and Weebly, Squarespace is a household name for website building. Squarespace prides itself on helping you create stunning websites.

Squarespace has various award-winning designs to choose from that you can customize to match your brand.

Squarespace’s website builder has a drag-and-drop design to make customizing easy. 

Squarespace optimized its websites so that it’s responsive regardless of what device you use.

Squarespace provides you with starter layouts, which are pre-design page structures for pages like Contact, About, Products, and more. Squarespace also gives you design tools and a built-in custom CSS editor, so you can do more in customizing your website.

#2 Squarespace’s Ecommerce Solutions

Squarespace can go toe-to-toe with the big names in the eCommerce industry, such as Shopify and BigCommerce, with its eCommerce solutions. Squarespace helps make managing your online store worry-free.

Here are some of the eCommerce tools and features that you get with Squarespace.

• Sell  Products, Services, Digital Content, and Subscriptions – Aside from physical products, Squarespace lets you sell digital content like ebooks and music and have your customers download them directly from your website. You can also offer your services to your customers by letting them schedule an appointment.

For recurring revenue, Squarespace enables you to offer subscriptions to your products and services.

• Inventory Management – With this feature, Squarespace gives you an easy-to-use interface to let you track your products and stock levels.
• Order Management  – This lets you track outstanding orders, print, packing slips, and send customer update emails all in a single interface.
• Sell on Instagram – With the Instagram integration, you can tag your inventory in an Instagram post or story and sell directly on your Instagram page.
• Multiple Payment Methods  – Squarespace has integrations with major payment solutions like Stripe, Paypal, and Square, which lets you accept credit cards, debit cards, and Apple Pay.

#3 Squarespace Marketing

Building your online presence, growing, reaching, and communicating with your audience is made easy with Squarespace. Squarespace’s marketing tools will bridge you and your audience together.

Squarespace lets you create highly impactful email campaigns without the need for separate email marketing software. Squarespace gives you access to a wide range of email layouts that you can customize to create compelling emails.

With Squarespace profiles, you get a consolidated view of your donors, customers, and email subscribers. 

You can keep your customers updated with the latest from your website with Squarespace’s integration with the leading social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Adding banners or promotions to your website is made possible with Squarespace so that you can feature important announcements like sales and discounts on your website.

#4 Squarespace Extensions

Squarespace Extensions enables you to add third-party extensions that will help optimize, expand, and manage your website.

Here are some of the types of extensions that you can add to your website.

• Finance Extensions – These tools will help in reconciling sales transactions, filing sales taxes, managing accounting, and streamlining bookkeeping.
• Inventory and Product Extensions – With these, you can optimize managing your inventory, SKUs, and stock levels and even offer new products.
• Marketing and Sales Extensions – These tools can help in promoting products across selling channels and incentivizing shoppers.
• Shipping and Fulfillment Extensions – Having these tools will help you fulfill orders, ship products, manage returns, and more.

#5 Create your Logo with Squarespace

If you’re having trouble creating your logo, Squarespace has a solution for that. Squarespace Logo is a logo creator that will help in making your desired logo come to life.

With Squarespace Logo, you can select from a set of icons provided by The Noun Project. Squarespace provides you with a simple and straightforward UI to help make creating your logo easier. 

Creating your logo with Squarespace Logo is free if you’re a customer and costs $10 plus applicable taxes per logo for non-customers.

6. Key Features Of WordPress

#1 WordPress Gutenberg Editor

WordPress recently updated its editor to Gutenberg editor. It is a block editor that makes building media-rich pages and posts more effortless and more flexible.

With the Gutenberg editor, you get to see the effect of the changes you make to your website in real-time. 

WordPress’s Gutenberg editor lets you customize your website by easily dragging and dropping page elements, and customizing font sizes and color schemes to match your brand identity.

#2 Thousands of Plugins Options

WordPress is widely known for its plugins. WordPress offers over 58,000 free and paid plugins available to its users. 

These plugins let you customize your WordPress site and give you additional features and capabilities that you don’t get with your standard WordPress theme.

Two of the popularly used plugins with WordPress are WooCommerce and Yoast. 

WooCommerce is a WordPress eCommerce plugin that lets you sell any product on your online store.

Yoast is a highly rated WordPress SEO plugin that boosts and improves your site’s SEO, increasing your site’s chances of ranking higher in search results.

#3 WordPress Themes

WordPress has a vast library of beautiful and professional themes. There are free themes to choose from that you can use if you’re on a tight budget, but premium themes are guaranteed to be more responsive and secured.

All WordPress themes can be customized and edited to suit your style and needs.

#4 Flexibility with Open-Source

Being free and open-source is one of WordPress’s most underrated features.

A free and open-source CMS, which is what WordPress.org is, offers the user great flexibility and customizability. Meaning you can do whatever you want with little to no limitations.

As an open-source platform, it has a large community with active forums and has hundreds of thousands of users ready to give help and advice and offer guidance to other users.

#5 Google Apps integration

WordPress’s integration with Google gives you easy access to Google tools and services for your website.

Here are some of the Google tools and services that you can get:

• Google Analytics – Adding Google Analytics to your WordPress site will help you track your site’s performance. You’ll be able to receive detailed statistics on where your visitors are coming from, how they interact with your site, and how they respond to your marketing campaigns.
• G Suite by Google Cloud – You can have a professional Gmail address and add Google Drive, Docs, Calendars, and Hangouts to your WordPress account. 
• Search Console – With this integration, you can view your site just like how a search engine does. You can receive detailed reports that tell how visitors are searching for you, what they are clicking on, who is linking to your site, and more. 
• Google Docs  – With this integration, you can write, edit, and collaborate in Docs and then save it as a blog post on your WordPress site. 
• Google Photos – Google Photos for WordPress lets you manage your media easily, save web storage, and more.

7. Squarespace vs. WordPress – Pros And Cons

Let’s have a look at Squarespace’s pros and cons to find out if it’s what you need.

Squarespace:

Pros	Cons
Stunning Customizable Templates and Designs	No phone support
Social media integrations are amazing	Not great for large websites that need a deep menu hierarchy
The mobile app lets you edit your website on-the-go	Google’s Page Speed Tool scores Squarespace templates low ratings.
Allows you to restore deleted posts and pages for up to 30 days.
Themes are responsive

Here let’s take a closer look at WordPress’s pros and cons.

WordPress:

Pros	Cons
WordPress.com is excellent for blogging	It has a steep learning curve and not beginner-friendly.
Reasonable prices
WooCommerce plugin gives you a powerful eCommerce
Offers a free plan

8. Where Do I Get The Most For My Money?

Between Squarespace and WordPress, which one offers the most bang for your buck? Which one should you invest in?

Let’s take a look at the pricing plans of Squarespace and WordPress.

Squarespace Pricing Plans

Squarespace offers monthly and annual pricing.

Annual Pricing:

Monthly Pricing:

• Personal ($144/year or $12/month if annual, $16/month if monthly): Squarespace’s lowest plan comes with the core features, such as SSL Security, Unlimited Bandwidth, and Storage, SEO Features, 2 Contributors, 24/7 Customer Support, etc. Do take into consideration that the eCommerce feature is not in this plan.
• Business ($216/year or $18/month if annual, $26/month if monthly): Squarespace’s most popular plan. It comes with all Personal features plus the features Unlimited Contributors, Premium Integrations and Blocks, Professional Email from Google, and Fully Integrated E-commerce. Squarespace charges a 3% transaction fee on sales in this plan.

• Basic Commerce ($312/year or $26/month if annual, $30/month if monthly): This plan with all Business features plus the features No Commerce Transaction Fees, Checkout on Your Domain, and Customer Accounts.

• Advanced Commerce ($480/year or $40/month if annual, $46/month if monthly): This plan comes with all the features of the Basic Commerce plan plus the features Abandoned Cart Recovery, Gift Cards, and Sell Subscriptions.

WordPress Pricing Plans

WordPress offers two different solutions, the self-hosted solution WordPress.org and the hosted solution WordPress.com. 

WordPress.org is free and open-source, meaning you can download the software for website building for free. However, with WordPress.org, you have to take into consideration the following costs:

• Hosting – You need to look and pay for a web hosting service provider that will host your WordPress site.
• Themes – Although WordPress offers free themes, some high-quality themes come at a price, or if you want your high-quality theme, you can create your own or get a designer.
• Ecommerce – You’ll need eCommerce tools if you intend to sell via your site.
• Plugins – Trustworthy and reliable plugins offer your website versatility and flexibility and may come at a cost.
• Developer cost – Unless you are technically adept, it would be wise to hire a developer to help build your site.

Meanwhile, WordPress.com offers a free plan and four paid plans.

For the paid plans, if you decide to pay annually, you save 20% per month.

• Personal ($4/month): This is WordPress’s lowest-paid plan. The features included are: free domain for a year, hosting, no WordPress.com ads, collect payments, and unlimited email support.
• Premium ($8/month): The next tier of a paid plan includes all of the features of the Personal plan plus the following features: live chat support, earn ad revenue, premium themes, upload videos, and integration with Google analytics.
• Business ($25/month): This plan includes all the features of the Premium plan plus the following features: install plugins and access to 50,000+ WordPress plugins, advanced SEO tools, automated site backups, and one-click restore and SFTP and database access.
• eCommerce ($45/month): This plan includes all the features of the Business plan plus the following features: you can accept payments in 60+ countries, integrations with top shipping carriers, and premium design options for online stores.

9. Conclusion – Which Is Better: Squarespace Or WordPress?

We’ve arrived at the end of this guide. Now, all that’s left is to decide which one is for you.

If you’re a blogger, freelancer, or a small business that’s just starting and just needs a simple website at reasonable costs, WordPress is the pick for you.

WordPress’s paid plans have decent features to help you set up your website easily as well as integrations and extensions that can upscale your website before committing to a full-fledged customized and maintained site.

Otherwise, If you’re looking to create stunning professional-looking websites easily without coding knowledge, Squarespace is the best solution to go for. Squarespace’s built-in features are easy-to-use and powerful, making creating your website easy and hassle-free.

Photographers, musicians, artists, and other creatives will indeed find Squarespace to be right up their alley since Squarespace has powerful creative tools that allow you to express your creativity.

On the other hand, if you’re an established business or an individual with coding knowledge, WordPress.org’s free and open-source solution will fit you best since you have the freedom and flexibility to customize and shape your website as you want it, without any limitations.

10. Squarespace vs. WordPress – FAQ

Google for the given search term and list 4 of the most common related questions and provide a quick and to-the-point answer.

Is WordPress cheaper than Squarespace?

WordPress offers an entirely free plan and relatively cheaper paid plans with WordPress.com. A free and open-source solution with WordPress.org allows you to have more control over your website’s cost than the fixed and somewhat pricier plans of Squarespace.

Is WordPress the best for SEO?

WordPress’s SEO tools work well with Google and other search engines, enabling you to rank higher in the search results.

Does Squarespace own my content?

Everything you upload to Squarespace is yours. However, with uploading to Squarespace, you permit them to use it in ways that will help improve their services.

How safe is Squarespace?

Squarespace websites come with free SSL certificates to encrypt your data and keep your website secure.