Top 7 Squarespace Alternatives for Your Business [2021 Update]
By LitExtension
Introduction
Squarespace is a preferable platform for many merchants thanks to the numerous features it brings to the table. However, it may not be suitable for everyone. You have no choice but to find a more robust platform to replace Squarespace. Hence, in this article, we’ll be providing you a list of the best Squarespace alternatives for your consideration. Let’s check it out!
Thanks to the rapid growth of the eCommerce industry, it’s not difficult to migrate from Squarespace to a more robust platform. You can consider transferring from Squarespace to Shopify or WooCommerce — some leading eCommerce solution providers in the market that surely benefit you in many ways.
Why do you need to look for Squarespace alternatives?
Undoubtedly, Squarespace comes as a rescue for newcomers or those with little to no technical skills thanks to the easy-to-navigate menu and user-friendly interface. However, there are pitfalls that may fall short of your expectations. So let’s take a look at some convincing reasons below to see why you should go for another Squarespace alternatives:
First, Squarespace does give you the flexibility to customize your website, but it also puts a limit on this aspect. To be more specific, you’re able to add CSS and JavaScript as well as change the style of your store layout, and so. However, you’ll need to fly by the seat of your pants whenever problems arise because Squarespace won’t help you discover and fix the bugs until you remove the modifications.
Second, Squarespace is quite expensive to opt for. If you want to display and promote your products, the recommended pricing plan for you is the Business package. You need to spend $26 on a monthly basis regardless of other Squarespace fees. This really matters when it comes to further scalability, especially if you have a tight budget.
Last but not least, Squarespace lacks direct support via phone call. This seems not to be a big problem, is it? You can still start the conversations with the support team, discover the answers by yourself by digging into the Help Center and community or ask for help from an expert. But let’s imagine when you want immediate support because there is an issue that needs troubleshooting as quickly as possible. So now you can see, no phone support is one of the drawbacks that make you think of moving to Squarespace alternatives.
Top 7 Squarespace alternatives for your business
If Squarespace no longer meets your requirements, finding a more robust eCommerce solution is essential for your business. Based on some criteria like pricing, features, ease of use, support, and the like, we’ve listed here the top 7 Squarespace alternatives that you should go for.
Without further ado, let’s get this show on the road!
Wix
Suitable for: newcomers, non-coders, creators, and those who love a dazzling store layout
Pricing plans: 0 — $35
Similar to Squarespace, Wix is also one of the best website builders that many newcomers love to embark on. It possesses a sheer number of superior features that both merchants and creators would fall in love with. This is the reason why Wix vs Squarespace are the direct rivals of each other. For an insightful comparison between these two, let’s take a look at our video below:
The main strength of Wix lies in its high usability with the Wix ADI and Wix Editor. Also, this Squarespace alternative offers more than 500 templates that cover a wide range of industries (fashion, accessories, art & craft supply,…). If picking up a suitable layout for your store is too difficult, we hope that our suggestions of the best Wix themes would be helpful!
Another plus point of Wix is that it allows you to create a website for free. Although there is a limitation of essential features for a store, this free plan turns out to be an ideal option for portfolio, resume, or artwork showcase. Besides the free plan, Wix pricing is much cheaper than that of its competitor when it comes to premium packages, domain, or transaction fees.
Indeed, Wix is a great Squarespace free alternative for those who are finding a more affordable eCommerce solution. If you’re fond of becoming a Wix user, don’t forget to have a glance at our comprehensive Wix tutorial for beginners to make your first step with this platform easier:
Shopify
Suitable for: both beginners and big sellers & enterprise-level businesses.
Pricing plans: $9 — $2000+
The next Squarespace alternative that you shouldn’t miss is Shopify. Thanks to the hosted cart nature, Shopify provides everything you need to create an online store effortlessly. Especially, you can benefit from a 14-day free trial to discover the features of this platform before making the final decision.
Different from other shopping carts, Shopify diversifies its pricing plans for different business sizes and requirements. To be more specific, merchants who are looking to sell in-person can spend $9/mo for the Shopify Lite plan. Basic Shopify, Shopify, and Advanced Shopify are suitable for small and medium stores, meanwhile Shopify Plus is a special deal for big sellers to scale up their business. For more information, you can have a glance at our comparison between Shopify vs Shopify Plus here.
Besides its scalability, Shopify also gets its name on the scoresheet with the biggest App Store in the market and more than 70 professional-designed themes. Don’t forget to check out our article about the best Shopify apps for a brand-new store and highly recommended Shopify themes if you find it more beneficial to move from Squarespace to this platform.
In brief, Shopify outweighs Squarespace in terms of eCommerce features as well as apps and themes. In addition, it’s much easier to extend the scope of your business with Shopify rather than Squarespace. You can take a glance at our comprehensive comparison between Shopify vs Squarespace here for more information.
WordPress.org
Suitable for: bloggers, creators, and e-merchants with technical skills
Pricing plans: Free
Inherently, WordPress has been operating as a blogging platform with outstanding CMS features before offering eCommerce solutions. Therefore, it’s made-to-measure for releasing blog posts and e-magazines besides uploading products and managing the workflow of the orders.
If you’re new to the eCommerce industry, high chances are that you may feel confused between WordPress.com vs WordPress.org. It’s a little bit tricky as these two platforms have the same name, however, they function differently. In this post, we only mention WordPress.com, and you can take a look at our insightful WordPress.com vs WordPress.org comparison here for more information.
In the most general sense, WordPress possesses the standard features like Squarespace and you can check out our analysis on key features between Squarespace vs WordPress for more information.
If you’re still wondering why WordPress can be a self-hosted alternative to Squarespace, let’s keep reading as we’ll figure it out in the next paragraphs.
First, it’s totally free to download and install WordPress. All you need to pay is the fee for hosting, domain name, and security patch, which is around $15 per month.
Second, WordPress is not a steep learning curve although it requires you to have a technical base to edit the underlying code. In addition, this CMS comes with a clear control panel, so beginners and non-coders wouldn’t have to spend too much time picking the basics.
Third, WordPress has an enormous amount of apps and plugins, and the most popular one is WooCommerce. Once WooCommerce is active, you can avail of out-of-the-box eCommerce features like inventory management, shipping & tax, payments, analytics, multisite, and more.
Plus, both WordPress and WooCommerce are famous for their high level of customizability. Hence, you can freely modify your store as you wish such as adding custom fonts or integrating third-party extensions.
You can watch our video tutorial for step-by-step instruction on how to creating an online store with WooCommerce:
As you can see, WordPress can help you overcome the biggest shortcomings of Squarespace.
We highly recommend that you can take a look at our head-to-head comparison between Wix vs WordPress and Shopify vs WordPress if these three platforms all get your attention.
BigCommerce
Suitable for: business-to-business (B2B) or wholesales mainly rather than small and medium-sized stores.
Pricing plans: $29.95 — $224.95 for Essential and Contact for pricing with Enterprise plan.
The next Squarespace alternative we’d like to share with you is BigCommerce — a prominent hosted eCommerce platform. In terms of price, BigCommerce seems not to be a decent choice for those with a tight budget (please check out BigCommerce pricing for more information). It’s true because the main customer segments of this platform are big sellers and entrepreneurs. However, BigCommerce is still an astonishing platform for e-merchants with some advantages below.
BigCommerce is always in an attempt to keep itself up-to-date with the latest technologies. Besides traditional eCommerce, BigCommerce powers the commerce engine by offering the headless model for those who are in the sweet spot of growing up in size. You can read more about how headless eCommerce works in this article.
Besides, BigCommerce also possesses an impressive array of templates at various budgets for you to choose from. You can follow our suggestion of the best BigCommerce themes and pick up a suitable one. Similar to Squarespace, you can freely customize the theme to personalize your BigCommerce store thanks to the “Style Editor” function.
Plus, BigCommerce gives you the flexibility to control everything like background colors, logo positions, navigation arrow colors, and more. Most importantly, you can make changes to the CSS and raw HTML to update the front-end and back-end simultaneously instead of separately.
Likewise, BigCommerce won’t let you down with more than 900 apps of different categories that help streamline your business. Don’t forget to have a look at the top 6 BigCommerce apps we’ve compiled for better navigation.
In short, BigCommerce is feature-rich enough to help you extend your business while Squarespace serves beginners and small businesses merely. This leads to our decision to put BigCommerce in the Squarespace alternatives list. You can also check out some best practices to enjoy a more comfortable journey with BigCommerce as follows:
- Step-by-step BigCommerce tutorial for beginners
- A comprehensive BigCommerce SEO guide for better rankings.
Webflow
Suitable for: website designers
Pricing plans: $12 — $212 and contact for pricing with Enterprise plan.
Founded in 2013, Webflow is a newborn in the eCommerce industry. However, while other platforms aim at serving e-merchants merely, Webflow takes another route by choosing “designers” as the target customers. Hence, Webflow comes with more freedom than Squarespace and other website builders regarding on-site editing features.
Regardless of the fact that Webflow is mostly suitable for website designers, it doesn’t mean that merchants with little to no technical skills can’t opt for this platform. Indeed, front-end customization requires no coding skills at all. Besides, Webflow doesn’t limit the intervention of developers to the back-end modifications. Thus, this platform is well-tailored for website development professionals as well.
Spectacularly, Webflow is also a CMS that allows you to impress your customers with blog posts, portfolio projects, and so on. Most importantly, the installment of plugins is not required. Plus, you can totally create a multilingual website with Webflow, which helps you a lot when it comes to entering the global market.
All in all, Webflow vs Squarespace are both worth opting for, however, Webflow is truly one of the alternatives for Squarespace that you can consider.
Weebly
Suitable for: beginners and non-coders
Pricing plans: 0 — $38 (billed annually)
Defining itself as an assistant for e-merchants to create a personal website simply, Weebly is proud to be one of the fastest-growing eCommerce platforms worldwide. Let’s see why Weebly can be the next destination after leaving Squarespace.
The first thing that we want to mention is pricing. Similar to Wix, Weebly allows you to publish your store free of charge. Although there is unlimited bandwidth and store capacity, you’ll still benefit from basic eCommerce features such as shopping cart, inventory management, tax calculation,…
Besides, Weebly is also highly appreciated for its simplicity and smoothness. Therefore, it’s the best choice for newcomers or even experienced merchants who are looking for a cost-effective solution.
Magento
Suitable for: tech-savvy and those who want to scale up their business
Pricing plans: flexible depending on the average gross sales revenue.
Magento is a self-hosted alternative to Squarespace that we’d like to mention in this article. This prevailing open-source cart is renowned for state-of-the-art features that help manage hundreds of products seamlessly.
Hence, it’s free to install and download, however, you need to pay another cost to maintain the operation of your store and you can see more in our article about Magento pricing here. Plus, there is no need to worry about store performance and scalability when your brand starts to grow with increasing traffic and customer orders.
Currently, Magento is offering 2 eCommerce solutions. The first one is Magento open-source, also known as Magento Community, and you need to install and download this edition on your own. The second one is Magento Commerce Cloud exclusively built for enterprise-level stores. Therefore, Magento users can be diversified in different business sizes as this platform welcomes all the merchants to come and join. For more information about key differences between these two editions, please check out Magento Community vs Enterprise comparison here.
Spectacularly, Magento also comes with built-in CMS features as a way to optimize its content capabilities. However, unlike WordPress, Magento truly has a steep learning curve as you need to be an experienced developer to edit the code line. In turn, you have the opportunity to extend the eCommerce functionality of your store as you wish when the sales volume rockets.
Along with the state-of-the-art features, Magento is always in an attempt to bring better UI/UX to the table by utilizing payment gateways. By doing this, the checkout process would be more comfortable and secure. Don’t forget to check out 10 best Magento Payment Gateways for your consideration.
If you find Magento fruitful for your business, don’t hesitate to perform a big movement out from Squarespace. Don’t forget to have a look at some useful sources about Magento tips below for more information:
- Best Magento themes for a mesmerizing storefront
- Magento SEO tips for the improvement of brand awareness
Squarespace Alternatives FAQ
1. Why you shouldn’t use Squarespace?
There are several reasons why Squarespace is not your ultimate choice. First, it limits the ability to customize your store. Second, Squarespace is quite expensive because its pricing plans range from $16-$54 while other solutions may allow you to create a website at no cost. Last but not least, it lacks phone call support, which is a disadvantage when you need your problem solved immediately.
2. Who competes with Squarespace?
The competitors of Squarespace are Wix, Shopify, WordPress, Weebly, Webflow, BigCommerce, Magento,… Each of these Squarespace alternatives comes with a more affordable price and/or high usability for bigger business sizes.
3. Opensource Squarespace alternatives?
WordPress and Magento are two names that appear on the top of this list. WordPress is quite easy to use for beginners and even non-coders. Meanwhile, Magento requires you to have a firm technical base. However, Magento is especially suitable for big brands thanks to out-of-the-box features for high sales volume.
Final words
Among all the factors discussed above, we are sure that you have a better understanding of Squarespace’s disadvantages and why you should go for other platforms. Also, we hope that our recommendations of the top 7 Squarespace alternatives will somewhat help you take the hassle out of choosing a more suitable one.
If Squarespace is no longer up to snuff, proper migration would be beneficial for you and your business. You can choose to migrate from Squarespace to Wix, Shopify, WordPress, WooCommerce, BigCommece, Weebly, Magento, or any platforms in the market automatically, accurately, and securely with LitExtension.
With more than 10 years of experience, LitExtension is proud to be the #1 Shopping Cart Migration Expert. We have successfully performed 160,000+ store migrations for 60,000+ customers from all over the world. Besides dedicated support, LitExtension also offers 10+ Additional Options that extend the migration possibility. In addition, you’re able to migrate products, orders, customers, multiple languages, and the list goes on.
In case you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact our customer support team. We are 24/7 available to get all your problems solved as quickly as possible! Besides, don’t forget to join our Facebook community where thousands of store owners and marketers share tips and news about eCommerce.
