Shopify Vs Squarespace – Which One Is Best For You?

When deciding whether to use Shopify or Squarespace for your online store, finding the right answer isn’t as simple as flipping a coin choosing whichever the coin favors.

In fact, choosing an ecommerce platform to entrust the future of your business requires a meticulous selection process wherein you compare the pros and cons of all the available platforms and choose which one has the best features for the right price.

And when making a choice between Shopify vs Squarespace, the crux of it all is that your needs will dictate which one is right for your online store.

If you're looking to start your own online store, this article should give you an idea of what to expect from these two platforms.

Squarespace Shopify Comparison: What Are They?

First, let us begin our Squarespace Shopify comparison by defining what these platforms are and examining their current popularity among ecommerce merchants.

After that, we’ll tackle their current pricing plans to see which one is more affordable.

Shopify

Shopify is a platform that allows you to sell your products online and manage your store. It's best used by individuals or businesses looking to sell physical products or services. It is a powerful eCommerce platform built specifically for online merchants.

It makes it easy for anyone to create an online store. It offers everything you need to sell online and build a business, including its eCommerce software and the tools to transform your ideas into a reality.

According to Store Leads, Shopify currently has more than 2.4 million active merchants as of August 2024. These merchants generally span across several categories. The most popular of which are the apparel, home & garden, and beauty & fitness categories.

Squarespace

Squarespace is a website builder that makes it easy to build professional-looking sites with no hassle whatsoever. It is a drag-and-drop website builder that lets you easily create websites without any coding skills.

With Squarespace, you can create a website, blog, or online store using professionally designed templates. The software is all inclusive — there are no hidden fees and no need to install any additional software.

According to Store Leads, Squarespace has 300,000+ active users as of August 2024. These users generally span across several categories as well and the most popular categories on Squarespace are arts & entertainment, food & drink, and people & society.

By simply comparing their numbers, it is evident that Shopify is bigger than Squarespace, by a huge gap, in terms of user base.

Thus, if one of your criteria in choosing between Shopify or Squarespace is the platform’s popularity, then Shopify would be the obvious choice.

Popularity isn’t just a number. Instead, this shows that a platform is trusted by more people. And this could speak for several things such as:

• User experience
• User support
• The capability of the platform
• Scalability
• App availability, and more.

Shopify Or Squarespace: Let’s Get Into Detail

When choosing between Shopify or Squarespace as to which one is best for your ecommerce business, you need to take their pricing and features into account.

After all, you’ll have to commit to your choice once it’s done. As such, you should pick the best option right off the bat.

The two most popular website-building platforms, Shopify and Squarespace, are often used by small business owners who don’t have a lot of experience with web design.

The main difference between the two is that Shopify is a complete eCommerce platform — it offers everything you need to run an online store — while Squarespace is more like a website builder, where you have more limited control over how your site looks and functions.

Let's take a closer look at some of the key differences between Shopify vs Squarespace.

Squarespace Shopify Pricing

Shopify

Shopify has four pricing plans designed to provide the right set of tools and features to every merchant depending on the size and needs of their ecommerce businesses. Let’s take a look at these plans.

Basic Shopify

• Monthly pricing: $39 per month
• Annual pricing: $348 per year (equivalent to $29 per month)

The Basic Shopify plan is for new merchants who want to establish their first online store. Being a basic plan, it’s the easiest one to set up because it has fewer features compared to the higher plans. And being the cheapest one, it’s also the most popular subscription plan among Shopify merchants.

If you have zero knowledge of setting up an online store, this plan is best suited for you.

Shopify

• Monthly pricing: $105 per month
• Annual pricing: $948 per year (equivalent to $79 per month)

The Shopify plan (yes, this plan is named Shopify) is best for growing businesses that attract more monthly visitors, carry more products, and process more orders from various locations. If your business is already popular among other channels and you have established quite a following, you could expect that your website could attract more visitors. As such, this is the best plan for you.

Advanced Shopify

• Monthly pricing: $399 per month
• Annual pricing: $3588 per year (equivalent to $299 per month)

The Advanced Shopify plan is for medium to large enterprises such as those that are in B2B or wholesale business. Additionally, the Advanced plan charges a smaller transaction fee compared to lower Shopify plans.

Thus, if you expect to generate more sales, moving up to a higher Shopify plan could help you save more profits from transaction fees.

Shopify Plus

• Pricing: Starts at $2300 per month

Lastly, the Shopify Plus plan is the top-tier plan of the platform. With this plan, you can manage several storefronts that are unique from each other depending on which country they are displayed in.

The Shopify Plus plan is great for enterprise-scale merchants that serve hundreds of local and international customers per day. Or those that have multiple physical stores, storage houses, and points of sale alongside their online store.

Further reading: 2024 Shopify Pricing Plans Demystified: Your Ultimate Guide to Calculating Costs

Squarespace

Just like Shopify, Squarespace has four pricing plans.

Personal

Most freelancers and very small businesses who just need an online presence can leverage Squarespace’s Personal plan at a minimal cost of $25/month when billed monthly and $16/month when billed annually.

This plan provides users with a free custom domain, excellent SSL security, basic analytics, limited yet required SEO features, and a wide range of responsive templates. It also permits 2 contributors at a time.

Business

The Squarespace Business plan costs $36/month when billed monthly and $23/month when billed annually. Along with all the features offered in the Personal plan, this plan also includes a custom professional Gmail account, complete customization using CSS and JavaScript, professional analytical tools, Google Ads credits, and so much more!

Basic eCommerce

This plan amounts to $40/month billed monthly or $28/month billed annually

The Squarespace Basic eCommerce plan is specifically built for online stores and aid in eCommerce functionality. And so it offers features like powerful eCommerce analytics, merchandising tools, Point of Sale (POS), customer reviews, and lots more.

Advanced eCommerce

This is priced at $72/month billed monthly or $52/month billed annually.

The Squarespace Advanced eCommerce plan is an extension of The Squarespace Basic eCommerce plan and offers many more features as compared to the latter. This includes commerce APIs, abandoned cart recovery measures, subscriptions, and so on.

Right off the bat, you can see that the pricing plans of Squarespace are significantly cheaper than Shopify.

• The lowest Shopify plan starts at $39 per month whereas Squarespace’s only starts at $25 per month.
• Shopify’s top tier plan is priced at $2300 per month whereas Squarespace’s Commerce plan only starts at $72 per month.

Thus, if a cheaper monthly payment is your sole criteria when choosing Shopify or Squarespace, the latter is the clear winner.

However, the pricing doesn't always tell the whole story.

Upon closer inspection, Squarespace's Commerce Basic and Commerce Advanced plans are the only subscriptions that have the right ecommerce tools.

As such, if you’re a new merchant choosing between Shopify or Squarespace, the pricing on their basic plans are almost the same.

Ease of use

One reason many online merchants opt for like Squarespace or Shopify is that they're easier to use. This is especially true if you've never built an eCommerce site before.

If you're just getting started with eCommerce, it's important that your website builder be easy to use so that you can focus on growing your business instead of worrying about managing your online store every day.

Shopify has a large learning curve because it requires you to have a basic understanding of how e-commerce works and how to set up an online store. It also has a higher learning curve because it requires you to have a basic understanding of programming languages like HTML and CSS. However, you can use simple tools like PageFly Page Builder to make this process much easier.

Squarespace, however, does not require any programming knowledge at all; it's designed for people who are new to e-commerce or want an easy way to build their own website without having to learn how to program in HTML or CSS.

Features

eCommerce Features

1. Product Types

Both the platforms let you sell physical as well as digital goods on your online store. However, you will have to take an extra step and integrate a dedicated app into your store in order to sell digital goods on your Shopify store.

Both of these website builders offer customizations for product options such as quantity and size. Additionally, they offer email alerts for low-stock, detailed analytical reports, and the ability to add unlimited products to your catalog.

2. Payment

Both platforms have built-in support for payment gateways like Stripe and PayPal so you can accept credit cards or PayPal payments through your site. However, Shopify also supports other types of payment options including Apple Pay as well as third-party payment processors like Braintree or WePay if you need something more advanced than what's built into the platform itself (such as recurring billing).

Moreover, with Shopify Payments, you’ll have all the most popular payment methods used by your customers. All you have to do is select it when you’re choosing your payment method.

So when it comes to payments, the Shopify store is clearly a better choice as compared to Squarespace.

3. Shipping

Both Shopify and Squarespace allow you to create shipping rules, including discounts and taxes for your online store. However, Squarespace does not allow you to set up your own shipping rates, so you'll need to use its standard rates.

One of Shopify's best eCommerce features is its robust shipping feature. You can set up different shipping rates depending on the size and weight of your product, and you can also take advantage of their shipping labels to print off your own labels that customers can attach to their packages when they ship.

4. Selling Offline (POS)

Shopify offers a full-fledged POS system, called Shopify POS. Customers can pay for their purchases by swiping their credit cards at cash registers or by scanning QR codes on their phones. The Shopify POS system also comes with tools for inventory management and monitoring sales trends. This feature is also available on all of the plans offered by Shopify.

Squarespace does not offer a POS system; however, it has integrations with third-party tools like Square. You will need the Squarespace Commerce app and a Square card reader. Also, note that POS is only available with a Commerce Basic or Commerce Advanced plan. Unlike Shopify, Squarespace doesn’t charge you any additional transaction fee on offline sales.

Marketing Features

1. Email Campaigns

Email campaigns are an incredibly useful tool for marketers, and both Shopify and Squarespace offer this feature.

In fact, 87% of brands say that email marketing is very critical to business success. (Source: www.litmus.com)

With Shopify, you can create different email campaigns, each with its own unique templates and subject lines. You can also set up autoresponders to make it more efficient.

Squarespace, on the other hand, has a much more robust email marketing system. It offers a functional way for you to grow and communicate with your audience with minimal effort seamlessly.

While Squarespace’s email tools come at an additional cost, the benefits it provides make it a fair bargain! One of the key features is that it lets you merge the website and mailing list and manage it from one place making it super convenient and useful.

2. Social Media and Marketplace Integrations

If you're just looking to sell on Instagram and push content to Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, and Twitter, Squarespace is a good choice because that’s all it permits.

Unlike Squarespace, Shopify has a much more advanced system that lets you sell on over 10 social media platforms along with your online store. Additionally, you can also sell your products on marketplaces like Amazon smoothly.

3. Blogging

Squarespace is a clear winner when it comes to blogging functionality. Unlike a Shopify store which is only built for eCommerce requirements, this is a much more advanced platform that can accommodate a wide range of use cases of a website. You can easily add images to your posts, create a blog post schedule, and even highlight the most important parts of your content.

Furthermore, you can add custom tags and categories to your blog posts, enable comments, and also share the content to your socials very easily.

A Shopify online store offers some of these same features, but not all of them. For example, the Shopify blog doesn't have a post-schedule option and it also doesn't let you highlight important parts of your content.

This means that Shopify is not the best for when you want to focus on your content. There is very little functionality when it comes to blogging on Shopify.

4. Analytics

When running any business, it is important to understand and analyze the numbers involved. This is going to help you assess your business’s performance and make strategic decisions to promote growth.

Squarespace has an "analytics" tab in their dashboard where you can see how many people have visited your site and what they're looking at, but it's fairly basic.

You can't really dive very deep into the data here, and if you want to do any kind of analysis on your own, you'll have to export the data in CSV format and open it up in Excel or Google Sheets yourself—a process that isn't exactly easy for most people.

Unlike a Squarespace website, every Shopify store has a dedicated analytics feature that lets you dive right into your data without having to do any exporting or importing.

Additionally, you can like both Shopify and Squarespace sites on Google Analytics.

Read more: Shopify Analytics: Get Data-Driven Approaches To Grow Faster

Shopify Vs Squarespace Ecommerce: Apps, Integrations, and Plugins

Shopify has a dedicated Shopify app store that has more than 10,000 apps across all business categories. You can find apps for everything from shipping to payment processing, marketing automation, and more.

Squarespace does not have an app store. However, they recently launched their extension market. While it does offer some handy extensions, the options are not really as robust as Shopify’s App Store.

At present, there are only 44 extensions in their platform. Thus when comparing Shopify vs Squarespace ecommerce in terms of apps, Shopify is the clear winner.

Support

The one thing that both platforms in this Shopify vs Squarespace ecommerce comparison can agree on is that they offer exceptional customer support. But the most important thing to know is that both companies are willing to go above and beyond for their clients.

Shopify's support team is available 24/7, 365 days a year by email, phone, or live chat. Shopify also offers free training classes on how to use your platform.

Squarespace has a similar 24/7 availability policy, as well as live chat support during business hours (Monday through Friday).

Security

Increased security is the main reason why online merchants choose trusted platforms Squarespace or Shopify rather than building a store from scratch with self-hosted solutions. They know that if they build it themselves, they'll have to maintain it themselves — and that means a lot more hands-on work.

Shopify has invested heavily in infrastructure security and has an excellent track record when it comes to keeping its users safe from hackers. A Squarespace site also provides the same level of protection.

So when it comes to security, Shopify vs Squarespace are excellent and commendable solutions.

Squarespace Ecommerce Vs Shopify: Pros And Cons

Shopify Pros & Cons

Pros

• Easy to use - Shopify is very easy to use - there are no complicated steps or processes involved with getting your store up and running.

• Excellent eCommerce features - This is a platform built for eCommerce businesses and hence it offers excellent eCommerce features that allow you to sell anything from physical products (e.g., clothing) to digital goods (e.g., books).

• Multi-channel selling - Shopify allows you to sell in multiple channels including desktop, mobile, and tablet devices as well as on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

• A great app store - With the Shopify store, you'll also get apps and integrations with third-party services that help you manage your inventory, process payments, deliver products, and more.

• Excellent customer support - Shopify offers 24/7 support via phone and email, as well as live chat. If you have questions about using Shopify, or if there's an issue with your store, you can always get in touch with a representative to help you out.

• Forums - Shopify has a large community of users and advanced Shopify developers who share knowledge and advice on their forums. You can find tutorials, ask questions and get feedback from other merchants on the platform.

Cons

• Additional transaction fees - While Shopify does offer Shopify payments, if you want to accept payments from customers using PayPal or other payment services, you'll have to pay an x% transaction fee (depending on your Shopify plan). This can add up quickly, especially if your store has a high volume.

• The monthly cost adds up with apps - The monthly cost adds up with apps. In order to fully utilize Shopify's features, it's best to invest in a range of add-ons. This can get pricey if you aren't planning on using the majority of their offerings.

Squarespace Pros & Cons

Pros

• Modern and sleek templates - Squarespace has a huge selection of modern templates that look great on desktop computers and mobile devices alike. You can customize these templates or start from scratch with one of their blank canvases.

• Affordable price - It's also very affordable compared to other website builders like Wix, Weebly, and Shopify. The basic plan starts at $19 per month and includes all of the features needed to get started with your online store.

• Easier setup process - Squarespace is designed with simplicity in mind. If you don't want to mess around with code, a Squarespace site offers an easier way to set up your store with just a few clicks (no coding required).

Cons

• No app store; only has extension market - Squarespace only has an extension market where you can find additional eCommerce features and tools. These extensions are usually paid.

• Limited payment options - You can only pay with a credit card or PayPal account. If you don't have either one, you won't be able to use Squarespace at all.

So, Which One Do You Choose, Squarespace Or Shopify?

It all boils down to what your business’s requirements and needs are.

It may seem like a tough choice in this Squarespace ecommerce vs Shopify comparison. But once you've gone through the list of pros and cons, things should become a bit more clear.  

If a Shopify store has everything you could want and Squarespace falls short, you should probably choose the former. However, if Squarespace is closer to your ideal website experience, there's nothing wrong with going for it. As long as it works for your business and provides an excellent platform for communicating with clients or customers, it doesn’t really matter which platform you use.

If you're just looking for a basic online store to sell your products, Squarespace and Shopify will both be suitable solutions. However, if you want a more advanced application that can integrate with marketing software and provide an extra boost, then Shopify may be the better option for you.

Nevertheless, whatever you decide, be sure to read both full reviews to make an informed decision.

Conclusion

We live in a digital age where the internet has become an ever-increasingly important component of daily life. Businesses realize this, which is why many of them have established websites that provide customers with one-stop access to all of their pertinent information—from products and services to contact information and customer testimonials.

These portals are vital for business success, so it is worth it to invest in a site that is not only dependable but will also drive traffic to your business.

Shopify is designed for professional businesses, while Squarespace is geared towards bloggers and small start-ups. Both are extremely affordable with affordable plans and both are easy to use.

Ultimately, both Squarespace ecommerce vs Shopify are powerful eCommerce solutions with an array of features. Whichever one you select will largely depend on your needs, but we've provided an in-depth comparison so you can make a more informed decision for your business.