Shopify and Squarespace are similar in some aspects and far apart in others. They both let store owners develop an eCommerce site without the need for coding skills — but is one better than the other for your business? If you want to build an online store, it’s time to make a decision: Shopify vs. Squarespace.
What Is Shopify?
Shopify is an eCommerce platform designed for one purpose only: developing your online store and POS system.
With it, you can build a fully functioning website without hiring a web developer. You choose a Shopify plan that meets your needs and budget, find a free or paid theme that matches your brand’s style, and start uploading products.
Shopify accommodates businesses of varying types and sizes. As your business grows, you can expand your capacity and offerings by upgrading to a more powerful plan.
What Is Squarespace?
Whether you want a blog, artist portfolio, corporate website, or eCommerce store, Squarespace is an all-in-one solution that caters to the general needs of building a website. The platform started out in 2004 as a content-based site creator, gradually rolling out eCommerce features later on.
Shopify vs. Squarespace: Features and Functionalities
Do Shopify and Squarespace offer competitive services? Keep reading as we compare the features and functions of both platforms.
| Shopify | Squarespace | |
|---|---|---|
| Summary | An eCommerce-focused platform that gives you almost everything you need to start your online business | A drag-and-drop site builder that offers optional eCommerce functionality |
| Difficulty | With more capabilities comes slightly more difficult setup and site management | Intuitively designed for beginners, which makes site setup easy |
| Domain & Hosting | Hosting included | Hosting included* |
| Themes | +70 eCommerce options | 8 eCommerce options |
| SEO | Basic optimizations are included with options to improve SEO through apps | Basic optimizations are included |
| Social Media | Apps required | Included |
| Blog | Included | Included |
| Customer Support | Full support provided | Full support provided |
* Free domain included when signing up for annual payment.
Difficulty
Winner: Squarespace
Squarespace users praise the platform for its slick look and simplicity. It employs drag-and-drop functionality, like Wix and Weebly, that lets you build a page in minutes.
Users find Shopify slightly more complex, which is not necessarily a bad thing when creating an eCommerce store as more options usually mean more possibilities.
Shopify utilizes a WYSIWYG editor (what you see is what you get) to play with the page layout in real time. For some users, this type of editor may feel limiting in the way the content can be presented on the page. In contrast, the drag-and-drop editor in Squarespace allows greater flexibility.
To overcome this limitation, Shopify users can install a third-party app for a monthly fee that brings the drag-and-drop functionality into the platform.
Domain and Hosting
Winner: Tie
While buying a domain through Shopify is an optional add-on for all plan levels, it’s possible to get a free domain through Squarespace when you sign up for the annual plan. Since a domain only costs around $10–20 a year, it’s not a strong enough incentive to choose one platform over the other. Both also provide a free SSL certificate and hands-free DNS setup and management.
As for hosting, Shopify and Squarespace provide free and unlimited services to all customers, with no restrictions on bandwidth or storage.
Read more: Creating, Changing, and Migrating Domains in Shopify
Themes
Winner: Shopify
It’s widely agreed that the themes offered by Squarespace are more aesthetically pleasing to the eye, but Shopify’s eCommerce themes are better optimized for the internet.
Shopify users get to choose from over 70 themes, both free and paid, and you can even scout for more themes from third-party providers like ThemeForest (which aren’t eligible for Shopify support).
Squarespace offers free themes, too. Users have a larger pool to pick from with around 100 general free templates, however, currently only eight themes are designed specifically for eCommerce.
Both platforms allow changes to the theme’s HTML and CSS, which are responsive out of the box (the design and layout automatically resize to fit the visitor’s desktop, tablet, or phone).
The Shopify Theme Store is well-stocked exclusively with eCommerce themes, and browsing is made easy by filters that list the templates based on size, industry type, layout style, etc.
While Squarespace’s free themes are attractive, Shopify also offers many equally appealing paid themes that come with much more functionality.
Search Engine Optimization
Winner: Shopify
You may have the best and most beautiful digital storefront, but that’s not enough. Your eCommerce store needs to be optimized to attract the attention of both customers and search engines.
The Shopify platform is far ahead of Squarespace in this regard. Shopify gets almost everything right, except for some restrictive URL structuring of the product and blog article pages. While this limitation doesn’t negatively affect visitors, it’s something that SEO specialists complain about.
Squarespace is constantly working to improve the effectiveness of its platform for SEO, but there’s still a long way to go. Other minor complaints can be overlooked, but the one serious issue with Squarespace is its slow page speed. Visitors, and Google, don’t like to wait for webpages to load, so slow page speed not only can make your visitors leave your site before making a purchase but can also make Google rank your site lower in search results.
Read More: Actions You Can Take to Make Your Shopify Site Rank
Social Media
Winner: Shopify
Shopify not only helps you build an eCommerce store, but it also provides the necessary tools to market your business on social media.
- The built-in and third-party tools help you market to the right audience.
- Shopify lets you create email campaigns, Facebook ad campaigns, and Google smart shopping campaigns.
- Shopify lets you focus on your business by providing a marketing automation tool called Kit.
- You can track and analyze the progress of your marketing campaigns from the Shopify marketing dashboard.
There is more. Shopify lets you integrate your store directly into Facebook and Instagram posts, which makes it even easier and faster for customers to complete the checkout process.
Squarespace comes with several built-in marketing tools. However, like other features in Squarespace, they are designed with ease of use over functionality. For an eCommerce store, we feel that the ability to run long, sophisticated, and successful marketing campaigns is more important than ease of use.
Blogging
Winner: Squarespace
Blogs are still an effective medium to boost SEO and connect with your audience. Most in the industry consider WordPress to be the best content management system (CMS) available but there are other equally strong contenders out there like Squarespace.
That said, if you have an eCommerce store, Shopify provides the basic tools for setting up and maintaining a blog, and we mean basic.
Its features include a visual editor, the ability to insert images and videos, and auto-optimization of article titles and meta descriptions. You can also insert tags, schedule posts, and add a comments section. If you want more features, you need to pay for a third-party app.
On the other hand, Squarespace started as a premium blogging platform, which continues to be one of its strongest features.
While an eCommerce storefront should look clean and be user friendly, blog content is about providing longform answers in creative ways. The design and functionality of Squarespace’s blog templates are far superior to Shopify. If blogging is going to be a primary channel for selling your products, then it’s best to go with Squarespace.
Read More: How to Grow Sales Through a Shopify Blog
Customer Support
Winner: Tie
Besides traditional customer support channels, such as email and chat, both platforms have built a comprehensive support system over the years. This includes well-maintained marketing blogs, large forums with dedicated communities, comprehensive tutorials, and how-to videos.
Read More: 11 Best Resources for Troubleshooting Shopify
Pricing
It’s important to understand that you will likely need additional apps to make your store function the way you want it to. Both platforms offer free and paid apps, so this will make a difference in how much you finally end up spending on developing and maintaining your store.
| Shopify | Squarespace | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Plan | Monthly Price | Plan | Monthly Price |
| Basic Shopify | $29 | Basic Commerce | $30 |
| Shopify | $79 | Advanced Commerce | $46 |
| Advanced Shopify | $299 | ||
Shopify is designed to scale your business as you become more successful, which is why the monthly pricing is significantly different between the three plans.
The modest difference in pricing between Squarespace’s two plans can be attributed to additional features provided in the advanced plan that are useful but not essential for running an online store.
- Abandoned cart recovery
- Automatic discounts
- Carrier calculated shipping
- Limited availability labels
- Subscription products
To get a better idea for what each platform provides, the following table compares what is included with each of the basic plans.
| Features | Basic Shopify | Squarespace Basic Commerce |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly price | $29 | $30 |
| Staff accounts | 2 | Unlimited |
| Free Domain | – | Annual plan only |
| Free Hosting | ✓ | ✓ |
| Free SSL certificate | ✓ | ✓ |
| Guaranteed uptime | 99.7% | 99.8% |
| Storage space | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Maximum image size | 19 MB | 20 MB |
| Email account | – | Free for the first year |
| Sales channels | Online, Facebook, Instagram | Online |
| Products | Unlimited | 10,000 |
| Discount codes | ✓ | ✓ |
| Gift cards | ✓ | ✓ |
| Payment processor options | +100 | 3 |
| Online credit card rate | 2.9% + 30¢ USD | 2.9% + 30¢ USD |
| Discounted shipping | Up to 64% | – |
| Print shipping labels | ✓ | Requires an app |
| eCommerce analytics | ✓ | ✓ |
| Dropshipping | Requires an app | Requires an app |
| eCommerce themes | +70 | 8 |
| 24/7 Customer support | ✓ | ✓ |
| $100 Google Ads credit | ✓ | ✓ |
Important features to consider are:
- Staff accounts: How many people will need individual access to your store admin panel?
- Discounted shipping: Will you be dropshipping, selling digital products, or fulfilling your own orders? Shopify negotiates discounted rates on behalf of its users.
- Print shipping labels: Again, dropshipping, digital products, or running your own business?
Shopify vs. Squarespace: Which Is Best?
No doubt, Squarespace is an excellent website builder; an ideal choice for your blogging needs. As an eCommerce platform, it has more work to do to catch up with Shopify.
Unless you’re looking to create a digital magazine where aesthetics are essential for your brand or you’re running a niche blog with a small store and limited inventory, Shopify is currently the better choice for running a long-term eCommerce business.
We hope this side-by-side comparison helps you with making the best decision for your business.
