Squarespace vs Weebly vs Wix 2024: Which is Best For You?

Have you ever built a website?

Even if the answer’s “no,” you’ve probably still heard of these guys: Squarespace, Weebly, and Wix. 

From TV screens to Facebook feeds and Youtube Ads, there's a good chance you’ve seen at least one of these platforms advertized. 

Each is packed with some great features – so how do you choose the best one for your website building project? 

In this handy guide, we’ve rounded up everything you need to know – pricing, key features, pros, cons; you name it, we're covering it. So, hopefully, by the end of this comparison, you'll have all the info you need to make an informed purchasing decision. 

There's lots to discuss, so grab a coffee, and let’s delve into this in-depth Squarespace vs Weebly vs Wix comparison.

Pros and Cons of Squarespace, Weebly and Wix

Squarespace Pros and Cons

Weebly Pros and Cons

Wix Pros and Cons

What is Squarespace?

Squarespace has stormed the web creation game for an impressive 17 years, and since its launch in 2004, the company has gone from strength to strength – especially in recent years. For instance, Squarespace gained serious attention when Keanu Reeves created a stunning business site for his custom motorcycle business. Other notable users also include the likes of Winona Ryder and fashion designer Sadie Williams! 

Squarespace offers an all-in-one solution for those looking to create an engaging website with a focus on visuals. Business owners and creatives have a decent range of award-winning templates to choose from to kickstart the web design process. On top of that, users also enjoy access to in-built SEO (search engine optimization), email marketing, and website banner tools – to name a few!

What is Weebly?

Weebly's also been around for a while. In fact, the platform's been alive and kicking since 2006. Headquartered in San Francisco, this web building software is famous for its intuitive drag and drop editor and generous free website package. As a result, it's an excellent choice for beginners who don’t want to get bogged down with the ins and outs of advanced website creation. Weebly also comes with a range of templates, SEO tools, eCommerce integrations, and more. 

Fast forward to May of 2018 and Weebly was acquired by Square and now forms part of Square's suite of business tools.

What is Wix?

Founded in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 2006, Wix is a high-end cloud-based site builder, boasting millions of users worldwide. 

When it comes to the website creation process, Wix provides a few options:

• You can use the standard drag and drop website builder to customize your chosen template. 
• However, if you're a web developer after a more advanced creation experience, Corvid by Wix is an open development framework for users wanting to code their website from scratch. 
• Lastly, there's Wix ADI (Artificial Design Intelligence). This is the quickest way to set up a Wix site – with just a few clicks; you can harness the power of AI to build a tailor-made website for you. 

Squarespace vs Weebly vs Wix: What are the Main Differences?

All these platforms enable users to design and create their own websites – so, what’s the difference? 

You’ve already heard the term ‘drag and drop’ a few times in this comparison. But, this is one of the most significant differences between our big three – so we need to mention it again! 

Wix

For starters, Wix is a complete drag-and-drop builder, meaning you can use its drag-and-drop functions to move anything anywhere. Needless to say, this gives you a fair amount of creative control.

Essentially, you just select the web elements you like the look of (text boxes, buttons, videos, etc.) and position them wherever you want them to appear on your web pages. You also have over 800 templates to choose from – so you’re bound to find something to suit your needs!

Weebly

In contrast, like Wix, Weebly also offers a range of easy-to-use templates (around 50). However, these are more structured, and, as such, the drag-and-drop functionality doesn’t offer complete freedom. Instead, when you drag and drop elements, they snap into columns, so, consequently, you have less freedom to drag and drop as you please. That said, you have control over the layout and spacing of your columns.

Squarespace

Now, let’s turn our attention to Squarespace’s editor; you’ll need a little more patience and confidence. It’s not as intuitive as Wix or Weebly, and there aren’t as many template options as Wix (over 100).

That said, the quality of Squarespace’s templates is unparalleled – making it a bit of a quality vs quantity debacle.

Although drag and drop functionality is available, the majority of editing requires you to add sections into your template and add website design elements from there. Then, depending on your chosen block, editing options may appear which you can use to tweak the block how you wish.

Squarespace vs Weebly vs Wix: Key Features

Squarespace

Now, we’ve had a brief look at the main difference between these competitors; let’s take a closer look at all the bells and whistles on offer. First up, Squarespace:

Website Templates

As we’ve just said, Squarespace has around 60 responsive website templates. Most of them share a few key features: space for big photos, bold fonts, and clean and consistent design. But, despite these hallmarks, the templates are varied to suit the needs of a variety of business types and blogs. 

Once you’ve chosen a suitable template, you can customize it to fit your needs in the Squarespace ‘site style’ editor (found in the top right-hand corner). From here, you can modify the template’s color palette, fonts, styles, and layouts – all without any coding knowledge.

Email Campaigns

Using Squarespace’s in-built email marketing functionality, you can set up mailing lists, send campaigns, and track results. You can also choose to send either ‘blast’ or ‘automated’ campaigns. 

‘Blast’ campaigns contain a single email message that can be sent to one or more mailing lists. These, for example, come in handy for telling subscribers about one-off events. 

Whereas ‘automated’ campaigns are sent, yes, you guessed it, automatically in response to a visitor's action. So, for example, when someone subscribes to your mailing list or buys a product from you, this could trigger a welcome email or an order confirmation.  

With either campaign type, you can then track its success using Squarespace’s analytics tools, which brings us perfectly to the next feature on our list…

Scheduling

You can take online bookings and manage appointments via your Squarespace website. Squarespace makes it easy to share your available hours so that clients can book an appointment for a time that suits both of you.

You'll receive notifications when a new appointment is booked. On top of that, you can sync these appointments with your Google, Outlook, iCloud, or Office 365 calendar.

Lastly, you can also customize and automate:

• Appointment confirmations
• Appointment reminders
• Follow-ups
• Intake forms

Needless to say, this will save you tons of time, help you better organize your appointments, and reduce the likelihood of no-shows.

Built-in Analytics

Squarespace records visitor activity via JavaScript, so rest assured, you’ll gain a firm insight into your website’s performance and user behavior. You can also generate reports highlighting metrics like pageviews, conversions, bounce rate, sales – to name a few! 

Extensions

If you wish to expand the functionality of Squarespace’s native features, there are around 30 extensions available. These are organized into four categories:

1. Shipping and fulfillment
2. Finance
3. Inventory and products
4. Sales and marketing

To give you a flavor of what’s available, Squarespace currently integrates with Mailchimp, Quickbooks, ShipBob, Smart SEO – to name a few!

eCommerce Functions

Squarespace offers varied sales features, including:

• Inventory management tools: From one centralized location you can view, organize, search, and edit your inventory.
• Sales tax configuration: You can set rules to automate the calculation of different things like tax codes according to state, country, and/or province, making it easy for business owners to remain compliant with appropriate tax laws. 
• Sell digital products: Not only can you sell physical products, but you can also sell digital products too – for instance, software, ebooks, music, and downloads. 
• Product variant options: Adding different product variants is a breeze, which comes in handy for entrepreneurs selling products that come in different sizes, colors, styles, etc.  

SEO Tools

One thing Squarespace does incredibly well is SEO. For starters, Squarespace provides users with an SEO best practices checklist. It also enables you to integrate directly with Google Search Console to help you monitor the keywords that drive the most traffic. 

On top of that, Squarespace automatically generates SEO-friendly pages with static URLs for all product categories. You can also modify your SEO page titles and descriptions, hide pages from search engines, and benefit from automatic markup and sitemap generation.

Domain Name Registration

You can register your own custom domain name on any Squarespace plan.

But, best of all, Squarespace provides users with a free domain when they purchase an annual Squarespace plan. Also, anyone with a paid-for Squarespace subscription can register additional domains for $20 to $70 per year. 

Squarespace vs Weebly vs Wix: Weebly's Key Features

Now, let’s take a look at the key features offered by our next competitor, Weebly. 

Templates

Weebly offers over 50 versatile website themes to choose from, organized into seven categories:

• Business
• Events
• Portfolio
• Personal
• Blog
• Featured
• Online store 

Each theme is beautifully designed and boasts a responsive design, so fear not, your website will look just as good on mobile devices as it does on desktop.

Ecommerce 

Weebly has its own eCommerce website-building platform that provides everything you need to build your store from the ground up. Some of its more notable eCommerce features include:

• An integrated shopping cart with secure checkout
• Inventory tracking
• Customers can leave reviews
• Product search filtering for your visitors
• The ability to sell both physical and digital products
• Complete CSS/HTML editing. 

Setting up an eCommerce store with Weebly is simple. Like designing any other Weebly website, you begin by selecting your theme and customizing it to your like. Then you can add your product listings, configure your shipping and tax setting, choose your preferred way to accept payments, etc. –  and then you’re good to start selling online. 

SEO Tools

You can enter website titles and meta descriptions and edit them accordingly. All Weebly websites are designed with SEO in mind, featuring a sitemap, SEO-friendly HTML formatting, and responsive design. You can also set image alt-tags and create page-specific descriptions. 

On top of that, Weebly has an Ultimate SEO Guide you can use to help get you started with your SEO strategy. Not to mention, Weebly also integrates with a few third-party SEO tools like Google Search Console, MarketGoo, and Positionly. 

Email

Like Squarespace, Weebly also comes with email marketing features. This complete email marketing service allows you to build email marketing campaigns directly integrated into your website, store, or blog. 

You’ll also benefit from the following email marketing tools:

• Professional layouts and templates: Weebly’s email layouts and templates are explicitly designed to suit various email types, including newsletters and promotions. To help keep branding consistent, you can also save your own custom templates for future use.
• Import contacts: If you already have an email list, you can import contacts from Gmail, Mailchimp, and Yahoo! By uploading a CVS file. You can also capture leads from membership subscriptions, store orders, and opt-in forms on your site. 
• Email marketing stats: You can see exactly who opened, viewed, and clicked through on your emails – all from one centralized dashboard. These statistics help paint a picture of how specific campaigns are performing so that you can celebrate successes and identify areas for improvement. 

Blogging Platform

From the General settings section, you’ll find options to:

• Include a blog sidebar
• Insert specialized code for your headers and footers
• Designate how many posts each blog page displays
• Indicate if you want to publish Facebook or Twitter sharing buttons on your posts.

You also have a few options when it comes to comment management. For example, you can use Weebly’s own built-in comment system, the Disqus comment platform, or require readers to log into Facebook and comment from there. 

Analytics

Weebly monitors your website traffic in real-time and displays this data visually, in the form of charts and graphs. Needless to say, this goes a long way to condensing info into an easy-to-review format. You can keep an eye on your page views, unique visitors, pages with the most visits, search terms, and the sources that generate you the most traffic. 

Best of all, using Weebly’s mobile app, you can access this data while you’re on the go, and for more in-depth website analytics, you can install third-party tools like Visitor Analytics and StoreMetrics from Weebly’s app store. 

Domain Name Purchasing/Registration

Like Squarespace, you can register a domain name with Weebly.  You’ll have full ownership, DNS control, and private domain registration (For the uninitiated, this allows you to remain anonymous which helps to increase your website’s security). Alternatively, you can transfer your current domain to Weebly.

Integrations

You can connect Weebly with more than 200 apps, including big names like Mailchimp, Shopify, PayPal, Slack, Gravity Forms, JotForm, and many more. 

Squarespace vs Weebly vs Wix: Wix's Key Features

Ready to see how our next competitor Wix stacks up against our other big two? Let’s dive in. 

Templates

As we’ve already hinted at, Wix has way more templates than our other competitors. With Wix, you can choose from a massive 800+ functional, mobile responsive, and high-quality website themes. In addition, Wix templates cover various industries and themes, including travel and tourism, photography, online store, business, portfolio & CV, creative arts, and many more. 

However, a big downside is that you can’t change your website template once it’s gone live (without losing all your content) – so choose carefully. 

eCommerce Features

Depending on your chosen pricing plan, you’ll unlock all sorts of eCommerce features, including:

• A secure checkout
• Automated sales tax calculated at checkout 
• Abandoned cart recovery emails
• A currency converter: This enables customers to browse your shop in their local currency.
• You can set your own shipping rates for specific products and determine these rates by region, weight, category, and price range. 
• Multichannel inventory management: You can manage and sync your entire inventory. I.e., you can monitor stock levels, track top products, and stop selling when your inventory is sold out. 

Wix Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI)

Earlier in this comparison, we mentioned that Wix Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI) could automatically build a website for you.

Simply sign in to your Wix account, select the type of site you want to create, and get started. First, you’ll just need to answer a few simple questions about you and your business. From there, your answers are combined with your social media information to build you a customized site. 

This website-building process is nothing short of intuitive – it’s a huge time saver, making it one of Wix’s biggest selling points. Needless to say, it’s an excellent option for complete beginners who need a helping hand to get their website off the ground. 

‘SEO Wiz’

Wix’s ‘SEO Wiz’ provides you with a step-by-step plan to help improve your SEO. To use it, simply input a few keywords. Then, the SEO Wiz will generate a personalized plan for upping your SEO game. Then, you can track your success with Wix’s achievement updates. 

On top of that, you also have access to helpful articles and videos to learn more about SEO and how to improve your strategy, and like the other competitors, Wix comes with built-in SEO tools, including:

• The generation and submission of XML sitemaps
• You can create custom meta tags
• You benefit from smart caching to improve website load times
• Automatic image optimization for files under 25 MB – so there’s no need to compress images before uploading them!

…And more! 

You can also integrate your Wix website with Google Console and Google Analytics for further insights into your SEO performance.

Integrations

Wix has its own app market packed full of third-party integrations that are organized into six main categories:

• Marketing
• Sell online
• Services and events
• Media and content
• Design elements
• Communication

On the Wix app market, you’ll find many big names, including Mailchimp, Google Adsense, PayPal, Quickbooks – to name a few!

Domain Name Registration

Again, you can purchase a web domain through Wix. You’ll benefit from domain security and a free domain name for a year if you opt for one of Wix’s yearly premium plans. 

Collaborate

Wix makes it easy to invite others to collaborate on your website. This comes in handy if you have a small team supporting you. Team members can even create their own login details. However, you still retain full control over the specific roles team members have and what they can and can't do on your site. You're also free to customize these permissions from one centralized place according to the needs of your business – so the ball is totally in your court!

Squarespace Pricing

Squarespace has four pricing plans, which you can upgrade, downgrade, or cancel at any time. The prices below are based on annual billing which comes with varying discounts depending on your chosen plan:

1. Personal – $16 a month
2. Business – $26 a month
3. Basic Commerce – $35 a month
4. Advanced Commerce – $54 a month

There’s no free plan, but each package comes with a 14-day free trial – with no payment details required. 

Understandably, as the price of these plans goes up, so does the number of features on offer. For example, with the Advanced Commerce option, you’ll get access to more eCommerce features, like abandoned cart recovery, advanced shipping, Commerce APIs, etc – which aren’t available with the cheaper packages. 

Squarespace vs Weebly vs Wix: Weebly's Pricing

If you’re just looking to create a website (without an online), Weebly has four pricing plans to choose from:

• Free – $0 a month
• Personal – $6 a month
• Professional – $12 a month
• Performance – $26 a month

The free plan includes some handy features like:

• An SSL security certificate
• 500 MB worth of storage
• A Weebly subdomain
• SEO tools
• Lead capture and contact forms
• Chat and email support
• Access to Weebly’s community forum

Alternatively, if you’re looking to launch an eCommerce site there are three more pricing plans:

• Pro
• Business
• Business Plus

Like Squarespace, as the prices rise, you’ll unlock more features. For instance, with the Business Plus plan, you’ll unlock extra marketing tools, like in-built email marketing, abandoned cart campaigns, and real-time shipping.

Squarespace vs Weebly vs Wix: Wix's Pricing

Wix comes with eight pricing plans, ranging from $0 to $49 per month:

First, there are the website plans:

• Free – $0 a month
• Combo – $14 a month
• Unlimited – $18 a month
• Pro – $23 a month
• VIP – $39 a month

The free plan comes with the following features:

• 500 MB worth of storage
• 500 MB worth of bandwidth

However, you can’t connect your own domain, and you’ll have Wix’s ads displayed on your website. 

Then, there are the Business and eCommerce plans:

• Business Basic: $23 a month
• Business Unlimited: $27 a month
• Business VIP: $49 a month

This board range of paid plans ensures there’s something to meet everybody’s needs from personal use to larger-scale operations, there’s something for everyone. 

Squarespace vs Weebly vs Wix: Who's The Best Website Builder?

So, there you have it! We’ve weighed up everything you need to know about Squarespace, Weebly, and Wix, but who really comes out on top? Let’s take a look.

Ease of Use: For ease of use, we have to go with Wix. The ADI website builder and intuitive drag and drop interface make Wix the clear winner. Even the SEO optimization process is broken down into simple terms for novice users. 

Pricing: Squarespace doesn’t offer a free plan, but it does come with a free trial. However, this puts it slightly below our other competitors here. Ultimately, Wix and Weebly are both good if you want to try out a free plan, but, ultimately, we think Wix offers the best value for money.

With these considerations in mind, below, we’ve listed who we think each platform best suits: 

Squarespace

Squarespace is a creative's dream, as its website themes aren't only stunning, but they're also designed to emphasize visual content. That said, this platform comes with a slightly steeper learning curve. So if you’re inexperienced in using web design platforms and don’t have the time/inclination to familiarize yourself with the interface, Squarespace might not be the best option for you. 

Wix

If you’re a beginner, Wix is the best choice for you. It’s easy to use, offering an intuitive user experience, but there’s still an extensive range of features on offer and a massive selection of templates to choose from. Plus,  compared to Squarespace and Weebly, its features are geared to provide a little extra help with SEO and web building.

Weebly

If you’re a small business looking to make your mark, you can’t go wrong with Weebly. Its structured templates and drag and drop editor make this a beginner-friendly option, as you won’t have to spend too much time worrying about web design.

So, which (if any) of these three website platforms will you opt for? Tell us your thoughts in the comments box below!

FAQ

Before wrapping up our comparison review, let’s answer a few questions you may still have:

Which Competitor is Better for Ecommerce? 

Winner: Wix

Wix’s range of eCommerce features a little more extensive -abandoned cart recovery, the currency converter, multi-channel selling, you can sell subscriptions, etc, 

Which Competitor is Best for Beginner SEO?

Winner: Wix

If you’re just getting to grips with SEO, we recommend Wix. Wix SEO Wiz provides an intuitive step-by-step plan designed to help you improve your site's SEO. 

Which Competitor is Best for Email Campaigns? 

All our competitors are pretty much on a par with this one.