Squarespace vs Square (2024) – Which is Best For Small Businesses?

Trying to decide between Squarespace and Square (yes they are different companies) for your online store?

Awesome because we’ve got you covered as we have done a deep-dive comparison between these two very popular ecommerce platforms to see which one is the best for building an online store, so let’s get started…

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Squarespace vs Square: Quick Summary

Squarespace vs Square – which one is the best? Even though both are great platforms, Squarespace does come out on top for a few reasons:

1. It has a better website builder
2. It comes with more features and integrations
3. It is easier to get started with and slightly easier to use

It really is very close between these two platforms but we just feel that Squarespace is a better overall platform and it would be our choice for building an online store.

4.2/5

EcommerceGold Score

Try Squarespace

4.2/5

EcommerceGold Score

Try Square

Pricing

• Business $33/m
• Basic Commerce $36/m
• Advanced Commerce $65/m

Try Squarespace

• Free: $0/m
• Plus: $29/m
• Premium: $79/m

Try Square

As you can see, there really isn’t much difference in price between Squarespace and Square, especially on the paid plans but Square does have a slight advantage as they offer a completely free plan.

It should be noted that the Squarespace prices are for if you pay monthly, if you pay for your plan annually, you do get a discount.

Squarespace

When it comes to pricing, Squarespace is very straightforward as all plans include:

• No product limits
• No annual turnover limits

And the only plan that charges a transaction fee is the Business plan, which is 3% but there are no transaction fees charged on the Basic or Advanced Commerce plans and the two larger plans do work out cheaper than Ecwid.

Square

Square is very similar in terms of their plans as they all include:

• Unlimited products
• No additional transaction fees
• No annual turnover limits

The lack of additional transaction fees does give Square a slight edge over Squarespace and the free plan will be appealing to many small online businesses but just be aware that the free plan doesn’t allow you to use your own domain name and includes Square branding on your site.

Free Trial

Squarespace and Square take a different approach to letting you try out their platforms:

• Square offers a Free Plan
• Squarespace offers a 14-day free trial

Features

As two very popular options for small businesses, you would expect them to both come with a good range of features, but what do you get exactly?

Features

Squarespace

To access all of the features that Squarespace offers, you do need to be on the Advanced Commerce plan and the Business and Basic Commerce plans are a little light when it comes to features, which is why we have summarised all of the features that are available on Squarespace:

Squarespace Extensions

Squarespace also offers a range of extensions that allow integrations with third-party platforms, such as:

• Printful
• Xero
• Quickbooks
• Shipstation

Square

For a platform primarily marketed at small businesses, you might think that Square might be limited in terms of features, but that isn’t true and even the free plan comes with a good selection but if you want to see a more in-depth breakdown of the features available, check out our full Square Review.

Below is a summary of the features that are available with Square (any features marked with an * are only available on the Performance and Premium plans):

One of the main negatives with Square online is the limited payment gateways that they offer, which may be a bit restrictive for some businesses as they only offer:

• Square
• Apply Pay
• Google Pay
• PayPal*

Square also has a selection of reporting and ecommerce analytics but these are only available on the paid package.

To see a complete breakdown of all the features that Square Online has to offer, check out our full Square Online Review.

So Square comes with a good range of features but they also offer a little bit more with their App Marketplace and this includes a selection of apps across a range of categories that allow you to link your Square store to third-party companies.

Some of these apps are not available for Square ecommerce (just the Square POS) and some are paid options.

Website Builder

Squarespace

The Squarespace website builder is one of the best on the market as it offers a full-site website builder that not only includes a lot of customization options but is also very easy to use.

One big change that Squarespace made recently was to basically scrap their theme selection and instead use a core template that can be easily customized using the selection of sections and content blocks that are available in the customizer.

You can start with a pre-built design but unfortunately can’t switch to any other designs, instead you have to customize your existing design to match the one you like.

The customizer also has a selection of site-wide options that includes fonts and colors.

The Squarespace website builder is one of the few website builders that not only allows for full site customization but also offers a good selection of design options and more importantly, is very easy to use and even someone brand new to building websites can build a beautiful site with Squarespace.

The one thing Squarespace does do better is when it comes to creating blog posts as you can use all of the sections and blocks to create truly custom posts.

Square

Square’s website builder is surprisingly good as it uses Weebly as its foundation (it acquired it in 2018) and allows users to build a nice website for their business.

One area where Square is lacking is theme selection as they only offer 1 base theme, now this might not seem great but fortunately, theme customization with Square is very good as there are plenty of options to help you build a good-looking site, including:

• A good selection of sections that can be added, removed and rearranged
• Options for the header and footer
• Theme options including colors and fonts

But where Square’s website builder is better than Ecwid is that it is a full site builder, meaning that you can not only customize all the different page types on your site but you can also create custom pages and build them using the customizer.

They also have a built-in blog (Square call them stories) and while the content is added using a text editor, you can add additional sections to the page and all Square pages come with a good selection of SEO tools including custom URL and metadata.

Support

One of the reasons why people choose a hosted platform such as Ecwid or Squarespace is that they get help and support to run their website. But how good is either platforms offering?

Squarespace

Squarespace offers 24/7 support to all users but this is only available via email.

They do offer live chat support but this is only available 4 am – 8 pm EST, Monday to Friday and they don’t offer any phone support.

Square

Square offers a range of support options, including:

• Email Support – which aims to get back to you within 48 hours
• Phone Support – available 9 am – 5 pm Monday to Friday
• Community Support Forum

These are available to all users, Square also has some very good help documentation, which covers many of the more common issues that users experience when using Square.

Hosting & Performance

Squarespace and Square both offer ecommerce grade hosting, that includes:

• Unlimited Bandwidth
• Unlimited Storage
• PCI Compliant Servers
• Free SSL Certificate

The problem is that we can’t put Square to the test as they don’t showcase any customer websites on their site, which means we can’t do our usual testing.

We were able to test Squarespace and they performed very well:

• Mobile Load Time: 1.91 Seconds
• Desktop Load Time: 2.27 Seconds
• PageSpeed Score Mobile: 23/100
• PageSpeed Score Desktop: 65/100

In terms of load time, Squarespace are one of the fastest ecommerce platforms but the PageSpeed scores could be better.

Ease of Use

Now I do know that ease of use is subjective to the person using the site so the following is just my opinion and should only be used as a guide.

Getting Started

Squarespace

Getting started with Squarespace is also very simple as you only need an email address and to create a password.

You will then be taken through the onboarding process, which includes some questions about the type of site you are creating, what type of products you will be selling and if you want to choose a pre-built design or do your own from scratch.

Once you have completed this, you will be taken through to your admin dashboard and initially it doesn’t seem like there is much help to get you started but if you click on the selling heading in the sidebar, you will be taken to a short setup guide to help you get your store configured.

The Squarespace dashboard is very well-designed and easy to use, this is mainly down to the sidebar navigation menu being well-labeled and easy to navigate, with any options not labeled being available in the settings such as payment and shipping options.

Square

Getting started with Square isn’t the most straightforward process because when you sign up, you are not just signing up to the ecommerce platform but also the payment gateway and this means there are many more steps in the signup process, which isn’t ideal if you just want to try it out.

Once you have gone through the signup process, you will go through to the main Square dashboard and to access the website builder, you will need to click on the Online Store option, you will then be taken through to the Ecommerce dashboard.

On your first sign-in, you will be greeted by a short setup guide that takes you through the basics of setting up your store including designing your site, creating a product listing and setting up your domain. Overall, a good intro to the platform but a prompt to set up the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy would be a good addition.

The dashboard itself is very easy to use as it has a nice, clean interface and the clearly labeled sidebar navigation menu makes it very easy to learn where everything is.

Adding and Managing Stock

Being able to manage your stock efficiently and effectively is a hugely important part of running an online store and there are three main areas to this, which are:

• Adding products
• Organizing your Products
• Managing your inventory

Squarespace

One thing that is very noticeable with Squarespace is the number of different product types that you can sell when it comes to adding a new product, this is because when you click to add a new product, you are presented with eight different options.

And the add new product page is slightly different for all of these product types, for example, when adding a physical product there are fulfillment (shipping) options and for digital downloads there is a field for uploading your file.

The design of the add new product pages are very well done and easy to use with a good workflow between all the different sections and it is all done on a single page.

Organizing your products isn’t quite as good as the category system feels like a bit of an afterthought as there isn’t an option to manage your categories from the main navigation menu, they have to be done through the product add/edit page or through the website customizer, which isn’t ideal.

Squarespace also doesn’t have the option to create sub-categories, which makes creating a product hierarchy a bit difficult.

When it comes to managing your inventory, Squarespace has one of the best systems we have come across as you can update titles, prices and stock quantity directly from the product overview page, which removes the need for a separate bulk editor and this can save a lot of time when it comes to inventory management.

Another nice inventory management feature is that all of the product types are listed under different tabs, which makes finding your products a lot easier than a single list of all of your products.

Square

Creating a new product is very simple and easy to do with Square as they have opted for a well laid-out, single-page layout.

With Square offering many different product types, including Physical, Digital and Membership products, the sections available on the page does depend on the type of product you are creating.

Organizing your inventory is very simple as Square has opted for the traditional category system and you can create main and sub-categories, making it very easy to create a nice, easy-to-use hierarchy for your customers. You can also create multiple sub-categories, which makes this even better.

Managing your inventory isn’t great in Square as they don’t offer any real bulk editors and most changes including stock quantity and price need to be done on a product-by-product basis, which isn’t ideal for large inventories.

Managing Orders

Squarespace

Squarespace has made order management very simple as you can easily:

• Print invoices
• Update order statuses
• Export orders

This can be done to orders in bulk or individual orders, which makes order management very easy to do with Squarespace.

Square

Unfortunately, we were unable to test the order management system as we only set up a test environment and didn’t complete the signup process for the Square payment gateway, which meant we couldn’t create a test order.

Summary

Conclusion

Squarespace vs Square – Which one is better for an Ecommerce Website?

Even though both platforms are very good options, Squarespace does come out on top for a few reasons:

• It has a better website builder that allows you to build better-looking websites
• It has a better selection of both standard features and integrations
• It is easier to get started with and it is slightly easier to use

We do like Square and think it is a really solid offering and it really is very close between the two platforms but we feel that Squarespace just offers the better overall package, especially considering the paid plans are so similar in terms of pricing and it would be our choice for building an online store.

4.2/5

EcommerceGold Score

Try Squarespace

4.2/5

EcommerceGold Score

Try Square

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Paul Haywood

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Hi, I'm Paul, the Owner and Founder of EcommerceGold.
I ran my own Ecommerce Business for over 7 years and now help others start their own online retail empires!

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