Convertkit vs Squarespace: Everything You Need to Know

Convertkit vs Squarespace: It might sound like an odd matchup at first.

After all, ConvertKit is best-known as a creative marketing platform. It’s a tool designed to help companies generate leads and engagement online, through email advertising, landing page, automation, and various other features.

Squarespace, on the other hand, is a fully-fledged website building solution. Best-known for its beautiful creative templates and design options, it can help you to design everything from membership sites to portfolios and blogs.

However, if you dive a little deeper into the functionality of these two tools, you will begin to see some overlap. Both are solutions built specifically to help creators stand out and grow online. They also both offer options like landing page builders, email marketing, and ecommerce.

Here’s what you need to know if you’re comparing Squarespace to Convertkit for your creator needs.

Convertkit vs. Squarespace: An Introduction

Let’s start with the basics. Both Convertkit and Squarespace are creator-focused digital software solutions, intended to help you generate growth and sales online. Where they differ is in their focus area and a few specific functionalities.

Convertkit is a dedicated marketing solution created to help businesses and creative professionals expand their reach and attract a wider audience. You can use Convertkit to build beautiful landing pages, opt-in pages, and creator “profiles”, where you can organize all of your products, channels, and even a newsletter feed in one space.

Convertkit also offers a wide number of automations for your marketing strategy, with the option to build visual funnels for your customer’s journey, and even sell digital products directly online.

Squarespace is a little different. Though it offers tools for building landing pages like Convertkit, offers email marketing functionality, and even allows you to sell a range of products and services online, its focus is more on website building than marketing.

Squarespace focuses on helping creators to develop their online presence, by giving them the convenient tools they need to design an effective website. With Squarespace, you gain access to a range of powerful website templates, tools for blogging, and solutions for cultivating sales.

Convertkit vs Squarespace: Pros and Cons

Most tools for content marketing and promotion have their own selection of specific advantages and disadvantages. Convertkit and Squarespace are no different. Both of these tools are pretty popular in their own way, and they each have a great reputation with creators, but their strengths lie in different areas. Let’s look at the pros and cons.

ConvertKit Pros and Cons

Squarespace Pros and Cons

ConvertKit vs Squarespace: Core Features

While Squarespace and ConvertKit have some pretty significant differences, they also have some major similarities too. For instance, both will help you to grow your presence online, and offer drag-and-drop building tools for your pages and email marketing.

Both Squarespace and Convertkit also support creators in selling online, and come with a variety of promotional tools to help you stand out from the competition.

Let’s look at some of the major core features of each service.

Landing pages and websites

Let’s start with the most significant difference between Squarespace and ConvertKit. While Convertkit only allows you to build landing pages, forms, and email campaigns, Squarespace supports companies in designing entire websites.

Squarespace is probably one of the most popular website builders for content creators on the market today. Its themes and templates are award-winning, and look fantastic in any environment. They’re also brimming with customization options so you can adjust the appearance of your website to suit your specific brand.

The templates require absolutely no coding knowledge to edit, and they can adapt to suit a range of needs. For instance, you can create a powerful blog, a beautiful portfolio, an online store with dedicated ecommerce areas, or a membership site. The new “member areas” option makes connecting with your subscribers as easy as possible.

Squarespace also allows users to create landing pages using the same template designing tools as they would to create a full website, although they’re not quite as advanced as the landing pages you’d expect from ConvertKit.

ConvertKit doesn’t have an option for building a comprehensive website online, but it will allow you to build fantastic landing pages with a range of beautiful templates. You won’t need any coding knowledge to get started, and the drag-and-drop editor is easy to use.

Convertkit’s landing page builder templates work seamlessly on all devices, and they come with access to more than 100,000 stock images to help make your business stand out. There’s still CSS access available too, in case you need to adjust the code.

You can create custom forms and collect all kinds of data with Convertkit’s landing pages, integrate them with other tools, including full website builders, and connect your landing pages to automations and email marketing campaigns. You can also make your forms GDPR compliant.

Convertkit also offers ecommerce functionality for users too. You can use your landing page builders to sell eBooks, digital products like music, coaching, and so much more.

Ecommerce Features

As mentioned above, both Squarespace and ConvertKit support online sales for content creators, so you can make money doing what you love. Squarespace takes a slightly more traditional approach to this process, by allowing you to build an ecommerce store from scratch with a range of dedicated templates. However, you don’t necessarily need a full store to sell all of your digital products.

With Convertkit, you can use a fantastic landing page to sell access to your online courses and webinars, sell premium eBooks, and make money in a range of other ways. There’s no option for selling physical products, however, though you can integrate Convertkit with other tools to help bridge this specific gap.

Squarespace is a little more flexible when it comes to making money online. You can sell a range of products, manage your inventory in a convenient back end, and even align your online and offline selling strategies. Squarespace has a Square integration so you can more easily take payments offline and sync inventory changes within your digital store.

Convertkit offers a very simple path to monetization for content creators. You simply create a landing page, and use Convertkit’s existing payment processing tools, or an integration with a market-leading service to manage the payments.

ConvertKit allows you to add a buy-now button to your website, email, or a ConvertKit landing page too, and specifically market your sales to different audience segments. You can also choose your pricing structure from a range of options. Companies can set up one-time purchases, tip jars, recurring subscriptions, or custom donations for customers.

One thing Squarespace and ConvertKit do have in common when it comes to ecommerce and sales, is the ability to track valuable business information. Both tools will allow you to collect metrics about your top customers, products, and selling times.

Blogging and marketing

Both ConvertKit and Squarespace want to help creators stand out and earn more money online. It only makes sense they’d offer tools for promotion and marketing to achieve these goals.

Squarespace offers a range of ways to make your business appeal to your target audience. There are email marketing tools, which you can use to automate messages which nurture your target audience. Squarespace’s own “Email Campaigns” service comes with the same quality templates you’d expect from the company’s phenomenal website builder.

You can also integrate your website with other popular email marketing service providers like MailChimp, using the Squarespace Extensions store. Alternatively, you can link your website with social media to improve your chances of connecting with audiences through different channels.

Squarespace also makes it easy to stand out online with a blog creation tool for content management. Although the SEO options are a little basic, they can definitely help you to accomplish more on the web. You can submit a sitemap to Google through Squarespace, change URL slugs and meta titles, and add image alt text to your posts.

Unfortunately, ConvertKit doesn’t have a blogging function for SEO and content marketing, but it does give you other ways to connect with your fans and grow your audience. The built-in email designer allows users to create stunning and engaging emails to nurture customers anywhere. You can also create a customized automation path to help you connect with your audience at the right time.

ConvertKit helps you to segment your customers, to send the right clients the right information. There’s also the option to create email signup forms so you can collect a wider range of subscribers. You can also link ConvertKit to social media channels like Facebook, affiliate marketing tools, lead capturing apps, and website builders.

Both tools do give you wide range of ways to connect with your audience, but you might find you prefer Squarespace if you’re looking to create blog content. Alternatively, ConvertKit is likely to be the better option for you if you’re interested in email marketing and automation.

Convertkit vs Squarespace: Pricing

One of the most important things for small businesses to consider when investing in email marketing software, website builders, or anything else, is pricing. The cost of your Squarespace website, or your email marketing platform from Convertkit will make a huge difference to how much budget you have left over to invest in your company.

Let’s start with a look at Squarespace’s pricing. Similar to many other tools for bloggers and entrepreneurs like Shopify Wix, and WordPress, Squarespace’s pricing can vary depending on what you need. Costs range from around $12 to $40 per month. The cheaper plans are intended for those who want a Squarespace site for blogging and content creation, rather than selling online.

You may end up paying extra for some other things, too, like Zapier integrations if you can’t find the connections you need in the Squarespace store. Plus, if you don’t want to use email features of Squarespace, you’ll need to pay for a package with another provider.

Convertkit also has a number of packages to choose from, including a freebie option. The free plan allows you to sell digital products, create unlimited landing pages and forms, and send unlimited emails, but there’s only community support and a knowledge base (FAQs) for support.

The paid plans start at $9 and $25 per month, with the more expensive plan offering a newsletter block referral system, subscriber scoring and advanced reporting. For both of these plans, your cost will increase with your number of subscribers.

Convertkit vs Squarespace: Conclusion

Both Squarespace and Convertkit are relatively powerful tools for creators. Both allow you to build your email list with an email marketing platform and sell to customers online. You can embed forms into online pages, collect new subscribers with offers, and access marketing tools. What’s more, both solutions are relatively easy to use, even without a workflow tutorial.

However, Convertkit forms, landing pages, and automations are a lot more advanced than the promotional tools you get from Squarespace. While at the same time, Squarespace offers better website building features with custom fonts, themes, and Squarespace email marketing campaigns.

Your choice of which service to use will depend on whether you’re focused on making sales and conversions, or building a complete online presence for your business.