If you want to commit to multiple years with Wix—and pay for those years up front—then you can get Wix’s high-tier plan cheaper than you can get Squarespace’s.
Just keep in mind that the price difference between Wix and Squarespace is pretty small. If you choose monthly billing on each brand’s lowest-tier plan, Squarespace will save you $84 when compared to Wix over the course of one year. Conversely, if you choose Wix’s high-tier plan and a three-year commitment, you’ll save $30 in a year over yearly billing of Squarespace’s high-tier plan.
So while every penny counts for small businesses, the difference between Wix and Squarespace is the cost of one business dinner, making it a pretty negligible difference. If you want the easiest building experience, then go for Wix, despite the slightly higher price. But if you need more e-commerce features, then Squarespace’s top plan is the way to go—even if costs you just a little more.
Of course, your price depends on more than just the plan you choose—there are also things like your domain name, apps, and themes to keep in mind (not to mention the offline costs that any small business incurs).
Both Wix and Squarespace offer a free domain for one year. After that, you’re on your own. You can continue to pay for a domain through Wix or Squarespace—and many people do just that—but you might get a better deal by switching to another domain registrar.
Each also offers plenty of free apps. Wix does have many paid apps, too, with varying prices (for example, Live Chat starts at $19.99, whereas the premium version of Constant Contact Form begins at $2.99). Squarespace apps are free, though you’ll need the Basic or Advanced plans to access some of them.
As far as themes go, Wix and Squarespace both offer free templates for their business plan users. Considering certain other website builders charge hundreds of dollars for themes (cough, BigCommerce, cough), that’s a pretty good deal.
So from plans to apps to themes, Wix and Squarespace stay pretty competitive, price-wise.
We asked small-business owners about their experiences with Wix and Squarespace. They had a lot to say.
Wix, as you can imagine, got some rave reviews.
Interestingly, business owners who tried both Wix and Squarespace came down on different sides.
As for reviews elsewhere, Wix has an A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau (BBB),1 but Squarespace has a D- thanks to its “failure to respond to 6 complaints.”2 On Trustpilot, Wix has a 1.7 out of 10,3 while Squarespace has a 2.9.4 Both builders have pretty universally great reviews for design and usability; the negative reviews mostly complain about customer service and billing issues.
But what about popularity? Neither Wix nor Squarespace publish the exact number of users or websites on their platform (both say “millions”), but BuiltWith estimates that over 3 million Wix websites are live right now.5 As for Squarespace, BuiltWith estimates 1.7 million.6