Wix vs Squarespace: an honest comparison

Choose Wix if you want the most freedom and features: more templates, an editor where anything goes anywhere, more SEO settings, and faster sites on average. Choose Squarespace if you want a polished design with fewer decisions to make, and you're happy inside its grid. On price they're close: both start under $20 a month billed yearly. The real differences are in how you'll work, and what you'll sell.

Wix vs Squarespace at a glance

	Wix	Squarespace
Cheapest plan with your own domain (as of Nov 2026)	Light, about $17/mo billed yearly	Basic, $19/mo billed yearly ($25 monthly)
Free option	Free plan (Wix address)	14-day free trial
Editor	Drag and drop, place anything anywhere	Drag and drop on a grid (Fluid Engine)
Change template later	No, a new design means a new site	Style changes in the Design panel
SEO settings	More: editable structured data and robots.txt, bulk redirects, automatic hreflang	Fewer: fixed structured data, redirects, no automatic hreflang
Mobile sites passing Core Web Vitals (Sept 2026)	81%	71%
Selling online	From Core (about $29/mo)	From Basic, with a 2% fee; 0% from Core
Phone support	Yes, callback 24/7 in English	No

Pricing

Both list their lowest prices for yearly billing.

Wix (plans as of November 2026, billed yearly): Light about $17 a month, Core about $29, Business about $39 and Business Elite about $159. Light gives you a free domain for a year, 2 GB of storage and two collaborators, but no payments. Core adds payments, basic e-commerce and scheduling, with 50 GB of storage. Business adds 100 GB and standard e-commerce. There's also a free plan on a Wix address.

Squarespace (pricing as of November 2026, US): Basic $19 a month billed yearly ($25 monthly), Core $29 ($39), Plus $49 ($65) and Advanced $99 ($139). Every plan can sell, but Basic charges a 2% transaction fee on store sales and 7% on digital content and memberships; Core and above charge no store transaction fee. Basic allows two contributors, and custom CSS and JavaScript need Core. Yearly plans include a free domain for the first year, and there's a 14-day free trial.

Verdict: for a site that doesn't sell, they cost about the same. For a small shop, Squarespace Core at $29 and Wix Core at about $29 meet in the middle; Squarespace Basic is cheaper to start selling but takes 2% of each sale.

Templates and design

Squarespace is known for its design: its templates look finished out of the box, and the grid makes a messy page harder to build. On version 7.1, site-wide styles live in the Design panel, so you can change fonts and colours across the site without rebuilding pages.

Wix offers more than 1,000 templates and more room to make something unusual, which also means more room to make something cluttered. The catch: you can't switch a Wix site to a different template once you've created it. A redesign means building a new site.

Verdict: Squarespace for a polished look with little effort; Wix for variety and freedom.

Editing

The Wix editor is drag and drop: you can put an element anywhere on the page. That's freeing, and it also means keeping layouts tidy is up to you.

Squarespace's Fluid Engine is also drag and drop, but blocks snap to a grid that shows while you drag. You get less freedom and fewer ways to break the layout.

Both now offer to generate a first draft with AI (Squarespace, Wix). After that, the site is yours to keep up to date in either case.

Verdict: Wix if you want total control of every element; Squarespace if you want guardrails.

SEO

Both cover the basics: editable page titles, descriptions and URLs, an automatic sitemap, redirects and Google Search Console. Wix goes further.

Wix's SEO tools include structured data markup you can edit or add in bulk, an editable robots.txt, a 301 redirect manager that imports up to 500 URLs at once, a personalised SEO checklist, and an AI Visibility tool that shows how your site is mentioned in AI answers. On multilingual sites, Wix adds hreflang tags by default.

Squarespace generates structured data for blog posts, events, local businesses, organisations, products and websites, but you can't edit or remove it. URL mappings handle 301 and 302 redirects, up to about 2,500 lines. If you build a site in more than one language, Squarespace doesn't add hreflang tags for you.

Verdict: Wix, clearly, especially for multilingual sites or a move from another platform. For more on what matters, see the best website builders for SEO.

Selling online

Squarespace lets you sell on every plan, with no limit on products and services, and card rates from 2.9% + $0.30 with Squarespace Payments. Basic takes a 2% fee on top; Core and above don't.

Wix needs Core or above to take payments. Its e-commerce tools allow up to 1,000 variants per product and selling through Google, eBay, Etsy, Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Wish.

Verdict: Squarespace for a small, good-looking shop; Wix for selling on more channels. For a large catalogue, look at a dedicated commerce platform instead.

Blogging

Wix blogging includes scheduled posts, access for multiple writers and editors, paid subscriptions, and display ads through services like Google AdSense. Squarespace's blog includes scheduled posts, categories and tags, and contributors.

Verdict: both are fine for a business blog. Wix if you want to earn from it directly with subscriptions or ads.

Speed

The HTTP Archive Core Web Vitals Technology Report uses real visitors' data from Chrome to count how many sites on each platform pass all three Core Web Vitals. In September 2026, 81% of Wix sites passed on mobile (177,709 measured) against 71% of Squarespace sites (89,052 measured). On desktop: 87% against 76%.

That's the average site, not the best possible one: big images and too many apps slow down any site. But on the evidence, a Wix site is more likely to be fast.

Verdict: Wix.

Support

Wix Customer Care offers chat, phone and email, free on every plan. English phone callbacks run 24/7; English chat with a person runs Monday to Friday, 2 am to 6 pm EST, with an AI assistant around the clock.

Squarespace support answers email 24/7 and runs live chat Monday to Friday, 4 am to 8 pm EST, in English, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese. It doesn't offer phone support.

Verdict: Wix if you want to talk to someone on the phone; otherwise, even.

Which should you choose?

Portfolio, photographer, designer, creative studio: Squarespace. The templates do the work.
Small shop with a few dozen products: Squarespace Core, or Wix Core if you want to sell on marketplaces too.
Local business that wants to be found on Google: Wix, for the extra SEO settings and better speed record.
Site in more than one language: Wix, because it adds hreflang for you.
You want to design every detail yourself: Wix.
You want it to look good with the fewest decisions: Squarespace.

A third option: when Firetend fits better

Both Wix and Squarespace give you the tools; you still build the site, write the pages and keep them current. For many service businesses, that last part is where the site quietly goes out of date.

Firetend (our product) works the other way round. An AI design agent reads your current website (or your description), shows you a design brief and a first look in about five minutes, then builds the full site in 15 to 40 minutes, with your content moved over and structured data added. After launch, a content agent keeps it current: ask in plain words for a new service page, an article or a refreshed page, and it proposes the search phrase (with real keyword data), the title and the outline before writing. You approve every change before it goes live. Sites are fast by default, and the SEO and AI-search basics are built in. See how it handles a redesign.

It fits best for clinics, schools, studios and firms that want the site kept up to date without doing it themselves. Our one measured example: Fresh Minds Academy, a tutoring school whose Google Sites website became a 49-page site; its mobile PageSpeed score went from 68 to 98.

It's the wrong choice if you:

Run an online store. Firetend has no checkout. Squarespace or Wix will serve you better.
Want drag-and-drop editing. You edit by clicking text, using forms, or asking the agents; there's no free-form canvas.
Need your own booking system or member logins. Firetend embeds booking calendars such as Calendly and Acuity, but has no booking system or member area of its own.
Have a site whose old URLs rank well. Firetend doesn't create 301 redirects from an old site's addresses today.

Plans start at $39 a month ($32 billed yearly); see pricing. The research, design brief and first look are free: try it on your own site.

FAQ

Is Wix or Squarespace cheaper?

About the same for a site that doesn't sell: Wix Light is about $17 a month and Squarespace Basic $19 a month, both billed yearly, as of November 2026. Wix has a free plan on a Wix address; Squarespace has a 14-day free trial.

Which is better for SEO, Wix or Squarespace?

Wix. It has more SEO settings (editable structured data and robots.txt, bulk redirects, automatic hreflang), and more of its sites pass Core Web Vitals on mobile: 81% against 71% in HTTP Archive's September 2026 data.

Does Squarespace or Wix take a cut of sales?

Squarespace Basic charges a 2% transaction fee on store sales and 7% on digital content and memberships; Core and above charge no store transaction fee. Card processing through Squarespace Payments starts at 2.9% + $0.30, as of November 2026. Wix needs the Core plan or above before you can take payments at all, so compare the plan price you'd actually need rather than the cheapest one.

Is Squarespace easier than Wix?

For most people, yes. Squarespace's grid editor and consistent templates make it harder to end up with a messy layout. Wix gives more freedom, which takes more care.

Can I switch from Wix to Squarespace, or the other way?

Yes. Plan to rebuild the pages and set up 301 redirects from the old addresses so you keep your rankings. Even within Wix, changing template means creating a new site. See Wix alternatives and Squarespace alternatives.

Which is better for a small business?

For a business selling products, Squarespace for a small shop, Wix for selling on marketplaces. For a service business that wants to be found locally, Wix's SEO tools give it the edge, unless you'd rather have the site built and kept current for you, which is what Firetend does.