Squarespace vs WordPress – easy to use vs limitless

In this WordPress vs Squarespace comparison, we look into two well-known website builders. Squarespace, a beginner-friendly solution with in-house tools to build any website, and Wordpress.org, the most popular content management system on the web.

The Cybernews research team and I tested and reviewed both providers and time has come to see how they hold up against each other. We contrast and compare these two providers across different aspects like ease of use, templates, pricing, and features, to determine which is better.

At the end of the comparison, you can also find a case study where I used Squarespace and WordPress to create a website. Here, I talk about my experience with each builder, including my likes, dislikes, and what you might find useful.

Squarespace vs WordPress - key takeaways

• WordPress is free to use, but things like hosting, security, and plugins may come at an extra cost. Squarespace offers subscription-based packages that include hosting services, domains, and apps.
• Squarespace is better for beginner users, while WordPress somewhat relies on code, and third-party apps, and requires expertise.
• Squarespace offers good quality template designs, especially for portfolio, blog, and eCommerce sites. However, the editor may be limiting and templates can appear repetitive.
• WordPress offers countless plugins, while Squarespace has only about 40. However, third-party plugins for WordPress may have some security risks.

Check out the comparison table below to see how the two builders are different.

	Top Choice
	Squarespace	WordPress
⭐ Rating:	4 ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆	4 ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
🥇 Overall rank:	#11 out of #32	#14 out of #32
💵 Price:	From $16.00/month	From $4/month
🪄 Ease of use:	Perfect for beginners	A pretty steep learning curve, made easier by plenty of great resources
🎨 Templates:	230+	13 000+
🏢 Business features:	Solid in-house eCommerce and marketing	All brought in by the plugins that you use – some of them cost extra
👨‍💻 24/7 live support:	Yes	Yes
✂️ Free domain (first year):	Yes	Yes
🔒 Free SSL certificate:	Yes	Yes
🔥 Coupons:	Cybernews Website Builder Coupons	Cybernews Website Builder Coupons
	Try Squarespace

Squarespace vs WordPress - the main differences

WordPress.org is a content management system, which is a little different from a website builder. Nevertheless, it functions in a similar way and is very flexible in terms of templates, designs, and plugin options. However, it doesn’t have a drag-and-drop editor and relies quite heavily on code. Overall, WordPress.org is not the best option for beginners.

Meanwhile, Squarespace is a website builder designed with beginners in mind. It features an easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor, numerous templates for a variety of websites, and tools that are easy to understand and use.

WordPress vs Squarespace video comparison

Squarespace vs WordPress pricing

The pricing comparison between Squarespace and WordPress is a little bit complicated. On the one hand, WordPress is free to download and use, however, you will need web hosting services to actually launch your site. Meanwhile, Squarespace offers various paid plans that include hosting and domains.

Squarespace

Squarespace, similarly to other website builders, offers pretty straightforward pricing. The four plans you can choose from are:

Plan	Features	Price
Basic	Unlimited bandwidth and storage, free SSL certificate, free templates, SEO features, basic website metrics, extensions	$16.00/month
Core	Professional email from Google free for 1 year, premium integrations, fully integrated eCommerce, sell unlimited products	$23.00/month
Plus	Fully integrated eCommerce, 0% transaction fees, customer accounts, powerful eCommerce analytics, and merchandising tools	$39.00/month
Advanced	Abandoned cart recovery, sell subscriptions, advanced shipping, and discounts	$99.00/month

Visit Squarespace

For a one-size-fits-all website builder like Squarespace, the prices aren’t that high. The four plans include features for any site ranging from a portfolio to a full eCommerce website, with more useful features added to each tier. For example, both the Business and the two Commerce plans include features for selling online. In my opinion, the best value plan is the Commerce Basic – even though it’s more expensive than the business plan, Squarespace does not charge 3% fees for every transaction you make. Additionally, the plan includes advanced analytics. However, if you’re not looking to sell online, the Personal plan will be sufficient.

Squarespace offers a 14-day money-back guarantee, which means that you can try out any plan for 2 weeks. Keep in mind that if you already purchased a domain, the subscription for it has to be canceled separately from the website builder subscription.

WordPress

WordPress is free. However, additional features might make it a way more expensive choice than Squarespace.

To set up a functioning WordPress website, you’ll need:

• Domain name – around $10 a year.
• Hosting – budget plans range between $30 and $60 a year, but you can also use more expensive plans that cost hundreds
• (OPTIONAL) Custom templates and themes – the most popular options range between $30 and $100.
• (OPTIONAL) Plugins – range extensively, depending on what additional features you want your website to have.
• (OPTIONAL) Developer fee – if you’re not confident in your own website-building skills, you might need to hire help to code your website.

Some excellent WordPress hosting providers offer not only hosting services and domains, but also good resources, WordPress website builders, and additional features.

Provideer	Description	Starting price
Bluehost	1 website, 50GB storage, WordPress integration, 24/7 customer support, free SSL and CDN, free domain for 1 year.	$1.99/month
Hostinger	1 website, 30GB storage, 100GB bandwidth, free SSL certificate, 1 email account, 1-click WordPress installation, and weekly backups.	$2.32/month
000webhost	1 website, no custom domain, 300MB storage, 3GB bandwidth, and no email account	$1.99/month

Bluehost is the most affordable WordPress hosting provider, with its prices starting at $1.99/month (for a 36-month plan). Best of all, it is one of WordPress’s recommended hosting providers. Besides good hosting plans, it offers a website builder specifically for WordPress. Whichever builder plan you choose, you can either build a website with the help of an AI or design it yourself from scratch. Bluehost also has a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Squarespace vs WordPress – a case study

There are three primary concerns when it comes to ease of use and I’ll talk about each of those factors:

• The sign-up process
• The dashboard
• The website creation process

To make things easier for you, we tested both Squarespace and WordPress and documented the most important details.

You can see how we did by clicking the images below and seeing the websites for yourself.

Here is our Squarespace website:

As for WordPress, it took us longer than with Squarespace, but we managed.

Ease of use – comparing apples and oranges

• Squarespace is a simple editor that follows a grid pattern, which makes it very suitable for beginners
• WordPress is more complicated because it requires additional tools and plugins, however, the results can be as diverse as you can imagine
• Regarding ease of use, Squarespace is friendlier than WordPress.

Using Squarespace

Starting with Squarespace is quite easy and straightforward. Once I clicked on the Get Started button and answered three questions about my website, I could choose to either build my site with AI or choose from templates. Choosing the AI option leads to a signup page. I chose to create my website using a template.

Once I selected a template, I was taken to the dashboard to name my website and receive a quick tutorial explaining how the builder works.

From the Squarespace dashboard, I could create and edit pages, access eCommerce and marketing tools, and more.

When it comes to design, I could modify the style a little bit by clicking on the paintbrush icon called Style Changes. From there, it’s possible to modify the fonts, and the color scheme, and add animations and spacing.

You can also add images, buttons, and many more elements.

Once you’re done playing with the design options, which there are plenty of, you can move to the editor. Squarespace provides sections that you insert and combine together to make a site. When choosing to add a section, you can choose whether to add image layouts, text, a gallery, or even a contact form.

While the fact that the editor is section-based limits creativity quite a bit, I think that it’s great for beginners who just want a beautiful, put-together website. Besides, the designs and individual sections are automatically adjusted to look great both on a computer screen and mobile devices. Nevertheless, experienced users who would like a unique website may find Squarespace too limiting and rigid.

Using WordPress

Building a site with WordPress is not as simple as with Squarespace. It requires some prior knowledge and experience, so total beginners might feel out of their depth a little bit.

Signing up for WordPress was also more complicated. First, I had to purchase hosting services and a domain from a hosting provider. Then, usually, you need to install WordPress yourself. While some providers offer plans with pre-installed WordPress, others give access to one-click installs. In my case, I used Bluehost as a hosting provider.

Once WordPress was installed, Bluehost gave me the option to build a site with AI, but I declined and chose to build from scratch to see the full website-building experience. Bluehost also has a WordPress plugin that helps with building a better user experience, but I deactivated it for research purposes.

The menu on the left of the WordPress dashboard includes everything you need to get started. I could add and access posts, pages, comments, media categories, forms, settings, and tools, edit the appearance of my site, and most importantly access plugins.

Editing the website itself was a little more tricky. The appearance category in the menu is very limited. There, I could select a template, however, the amount of editing I could do depended on the template I chose.

Most importantly, for more in-depth changes, I had to go to every single page and change whatever needed changing. The theme I selected allowed me to modify a few things, such as the header design, features, overlapping content, and a few others.

The design editing abilities are pretty limited, so if you wish to dramatically edit the look of your site, you can use a website builder plugin, such as Gutenberg from WordPress, Elementor, or others. Some of these WordPress website builders also provide previews, so you can try them out before purchasing a plan. Another option is learning HTML or CSS for more advanced changes.

Overall, WordPress is a bit complicated to use for beginners. The editor and templates are kind of limiting, and advanced changes can be made via website builder plugins or code. However, more experienced users will appreciate WordPress’ opportunities for design freedom, which is not necessarily the case with Squarespace.

AI features

Sqaurespace offers you to create a website using Blueprint AI right from the start. You can edit the website afterwards depending on your preferences and needs. If you choose to go the traditional website creation route, you can also use AI to generate templates. The Layout Switcher feature can suggest edits to the design layout based on the content of the site.

As for website content, there is the AI Content Generation feature for creating texts like copy or product descriptions. This feature can be especially useful for both bloggers and eCommerce websites. Additionally, there’s an option to also generate SEO descriptions, which will help anyone looking to boost their website’s visibility.

By contrast, WordPress software doesn’t include any AI features that are built in. Nevertheless, you can install numerous AI plugins if you need. For example. AI Engine plugin integrates several tools for content creation, chatbots, or workflow automation. It may be useful for bloggers to generate content, or can be helpful for data analysis.

Another popular plugin such as AI services is more advanced, as it includes translation, image recognition, enhanced search, and voice-to-text functionalities. Finally, popular plugins for SEO or analytics may also have AI features. For example, Yoast SEO uses AI to help with content optimizations by providing readability, keyword placement, and metadata feedback.

Templates – in-house order, third-party madness

• WordPress offers thousands of in-house and third-party templates
• Squarespace has fewer templates that are created by designers for a variety of different websites.

After exploring the template libraries of Squarespace and WordPress, I realized that when it comes to free templates, WordPress’s strength is in numbers, and Squarespace’s is in quality.

Starting with Squarespace, the website builder has an extensive template library full of free themes waiting to be picked up. There are about 189 of them, and they cover around 19 design themes. You also have the option to create a template using AI.

After browsing through the themes, I was pretty impressed with how modern they all look.

With WordPress, it’s a little different. In the template library online, you can find and install about 13,000 free templates. The downloaded and installed themes will appear under the Appearance tab in your dashboard.

Additionally, there are tens of thousands of templates created by third parties just waiting to be applied. While some cost just $2, and others cost a couple of hundred, the general price seems to range between $30 and $60. The chances of finding something that fits your vision are high.

Business features – which platform is better for selling?

• Squarespace offers an array of in-house tools and some additional apps
• WordPress depends on plugins for all additional features, including ones concerning business

When it comes to business features, one of the first things you’ll notice is that while WordPress relies solely on plugins, Squarespace chose to integrate most of the necessary tools. But overall, both platforms offer decent features that will help you build and grow your business.

eCommerce

With Squarespace, you can easily create an online shop in just a few steps, while on WordPress you’ll have to use third-party apps.

With a Squarespace shop, you can sell services and products, offer gift cards and subscriptions, and offer custom discounts as well. All can be done from the dashboard, of course. Just press on the Products and Services button, and you’ll be taken to your selling tools. The first time you want to set up an online shop, Squarespace will help you out. You’ll even get some pointers on what you need to do to start selling.

Squarespace also includes a setup guide section if you need help with setting up your store. There are also some suggestions on what you could sell.

The beauty of Squarespace is that it doesn’t make you chase integrations. You can find them right in your dashboard – managing orders and inventory, offering discounts, and setting up payment methods. It is also possible to manage customer accounts, shipping, and set up taxes for your customers.

WordPress has its own eCommerce solution – WooCommerce. Just visit the WordPress plugin library, and it’ll come right up.

With WooCommerce, you can create a completely custom marketplace. It offers guides and other features that can help you set up your store more easily.

WooCommerce is completely free, yet some additional features might cost extra, like selling commissions and memberships, bookings, bundles, and customizable products.

After you’re done selecting what you want to sell, WooCommerce lets you edit all of your product descriptions with an editor strikingly similar to WordPress.

While there may be some additional fees, using WooCommerce allows you to create a fantastic shop at a small cost.

Overall, both Squarespace and WordPress offer a commendable online selling experience. While Squarespace seems easier to navigate, WooCommerce by WordPress offers great guides for beginners.

Website monetization

Of course, eCommerce isn't the only way to make money from your website. There are other options, too, and here, both platforms do pretty well, with different approaches.

Both WordPress and Squarespace allow you to earn money from your site through exclusive member content, website ads, donation requests, and more.

Squarespace offers Content & Memberships for premium visitors only. This functionality will cost extra, starting at $9 a month.

For Business plans and up, Squarespace also offers a Donation functionality, letting to easily accept money from your visitors.

Finally, you can easily connect Google AdSense to your Squarespace site and monetize each visitor via ads—this doesn't require any additional purchases or top-level plans.

WordPress doesn't have any of these functionalities baked in; however, with full coding freedom and plenty of plugins, you can replicate just that. Most of the time, WordPress monetization features will follow a freemium model, with a free plugin that includes extra paid features.

There are plugins like Paid Memberships Pro Or GiveWP – and they both replicate what Squarespace does in-house.

Marketing

If you’re looking to make an online business or an aspiring entrepreneur, you already know how important it is to get that one right.

Squarespace allows you to email campaigns, but it focuses primarily on social media and your site’s content. On the other hand, WordPress gives you access to many plugins that will help you get the best results.

Starting with Squarespace, it is one of those builders that understand how important it is to grow your audience. As a result, you’re given access to a few in-built marketing tools that will facilitate reaching your goal.

One thing you can do is create powerful and effective emails and run campaigns that will bring you closer to your audience.

To run an email campaign, just click on the Email Campaigns button you’ll find under Marketing in your dashboard. From there, you can create drafts, schedule emails to go out and manage automation and mailing lists.

What’s even better is that you can create customer profiles and personalize your email campaign to engage with the right people by adding tags and filters to the emails that go out.

Moving on to WordPress, there aren’t any in-house features. Marketing and SEO tools are no different. However, WordPress’s plugin library has a lot of what you need.

In terms of marketing, WordPress also offers many choices.

One good example of an excellent marketing tool you find on WordPress is Creative Mail.

This tool lets you do up to 5,000 monthly emails free of charge. Paid plans offer bigger email limits, as shown below, as well as other features for growing businesses and even WooCommerce-specific automation options.

You’ll need to pay extra to do email marketing with both builders, nevertheless, the tools offered by both of them provide an admirable result.

Overall, both Squarespace and WordPress have decent eCommerce tools. The difference is that Squarespace makes things easier and charges you more, while WordPress costs less and gives you more headaches. At the end of the day, it’s a matter of skill and convenience, but whichever will do a good job.

Search engine optimization

Squarespace does well in the marketing department and SEO is not that far behind. To discover all SEO tools, you need to go to your dashboard and click on SEO Appearance under Marketing in the Settings section.

One thing I liked is that Squarespace provides an SEO checklist right at the top of the menu. If you’re a beginner, you might not know that SEO is incredibly dynamic and needs constant updates. Lucky for you, Squarespace updates its checklist quite often so that you can keep up with search engine specifications.

It’s also worth mentioning that Squarespace allows you to optimize your blog posts to improve your ranking. You can add an SEO title and description, as well as meta tags and alt tags.

Lastly, while Squarespace doesn’t have many apps to take advantage of, it does provide a few marketing and SEO extensions you can install, but there are a few you can look at.

With WordPress, to find SEO tools, click on the Plugin library and choose your favorite. One of my personal favorites is Yoast SEO.

Yoast SEO analyzes your content and suggests improvements. It gives you a score for each modification.

If you’re looking for a more advanced SEO plugin, you could go with RankMath. It has more features than Yoast, and it comes with a free version. For even more features, and if your budget allows it, it’s possible to go for a premium plan. The cheapest is $59/year.

Overall, both WordPress and Squarespace do a good job in the marketing and SEO departments. While Squarespace made sure to integrate almost everything you might need, WordPress makes you use its plugin library. The wide range of plugins is what makes WordPress better equipped as far as SEO and marketing are concerned.

Analytics

To better optimize your website, both Squarespace and WordPress give access to analytics tools.

The Squarespace Analytics menu can be found in the dashboard. There’s an overview of your sales and traffic, as well as the number of sales by products and purchase funnel. You can see what people abandon in their carts and where traffic comes from.

Squarespace’s analytics tool lets you know how many people submitted forms and how many clicked the buttons on your site. Your popular content is disclosed as well. This is to improve your website, which can generate more traffic and sales.

Other than this in-house analytics tool, Squarespace doesn’t provide anything else. While there are a few extensions in the app market, none are specially designed for analytics.

WordPress handles analytics pretty well, but you’ll have to install a plugin for that.

Most people go for the Site Kit by Google. It provides you with all the right information directly from the source.

While not overly complicated to use, Google Analytics won’t be easy on you—at least not as easy as Squarespace’s analytics tool will be. Take time to learn how to navigate it, and you’ll be fine.

Needless to say, analytics is a crucial part of website optimization, and no matter which platform you choose—Squarespace or WordPress—your needs will be addressed.

App stores

Squarespace’s app market, which is called Extensions, is pretty limited because Squarespace offers in-house features. By contrast, WordPress has a massive plugin library, as a matter of fact, it relies on it for everything.

Squarespace doesn’t offer a lot of apps. The subjects they cover are Shipping and Fulfillment, Finance, Inventory and Products, and Sales and Marketing.

One of the good things about Squarespace’s limited number of apps is that they are all developed by experts and deliver precisely what they are supposed to. Just like with its templates, Squarespace prioritizes quality over quantity.

While there are a few apps in Squarespace’s extensions library that are free, some of them are paid. The prices can be quite high. For example, the tax returns and reporting app starts at $71 per filing.

WordPress relies on plugins, so it makes perfect sense that its library is massive. It contains tens of thousands of plugins. This is a by-product of the fact that WordPress is open-source so anyone can create a WordPress plugin.

However, plugins from third-party websites and not from WordPress.org can be malicious. For that reason, some WordPress hosting providers offer plugin scanning as a security feature.

Besides that, WordPress truly can offer any plugin you can imagine. You can find both useful tools for your specific niche and joke plugins. The range of plugins is vast, offering tools for photography, analytics, or mailing. But there are also ones that make your site crash randomly or add clutter to your site.

If you're intrigued by joke plugins, I can offer you an example – considering the internet’s obsession with cats, you can try out this plugin called Quiz Cat.

This plugin combines the cuteness of cats with engaging quizzes you can present to your site visitors. Not only will it boost engagement, but it could also make visitors share your site with their friends or acquaintances, making it more popular.

While this specific plugin is free, you should know that WordPress offers both paid and free plugins.

Squarespace and WordPress both have an app store. However, Squarespace’s store is more limited, but the extensions you’ll find are all professional. WordPress has over 50k plugins in its library since it is open-source. That means not all apps are worthy of your consideration, but the rating system should help you filter them through.

Squarespace vs WordPress – side-by-side comparison

Squarespace and WordPress are both overall excellent options for creating websites. However, they also cater to quite different audiences. Squarespace is better for beginners and simpler websites, while WordPress offers more customization options for more experienced users. Personally, I prefer Squarespace because it is easier to use. The minimalistic interface design and AI features helped me create a really beautiful, if not super unique, website. Additionally, I appreciated that the numerous marketing and analytics tools, as well as features for different kinds of websites, were already integrated into the builder and not as third-party plugins.

Who should pick Squarespace?

Squarespace is the best option for beginners, since it offers easy ways to create and edit a website, and numerous, easy-to-use options for marketing, SEO, and more. However, it is rather limiting for professional users – the design options are a bit repetitive and not very unique, and Squarespace doesn’t offer a lot of application options or third-party plugins.

Who should pick WordPress?

WordPress is a great option for experienced users who want to build unique, highly personalized websites and prefer creative freedom over simplicity and minimalistic templates. The plugin library with thousands of apps gives the opportunity to create your website in any way you want. However, if you’re a beginner, WordPress might be a bit too advanced, and the interface can be confusing to navigate. Furthermore, some third-party plugins may pose security risks.

Squarespace vs WordPress FAQs