Shopify vs squarespace: Which is the best suitable solution for your business (2023)

Squarespace vs Shopify are now the two leading website builders on the market. Without any technological knowledge, you may easily construct and manage websites with them. If you are looking for a comprehensive comparison between Shopify and Squarespace, this is the place to give you the information you are looking for. In this article, we will take a close look at Shopify vs Squarespace to help you choose the right platform for you.

Defining Shopify vs Squarespace

Shopify is a hosted eCommerce platform that was founded in 2004. In general, Shopify is the best option for newbies who have no prior experience with coding, programming, or web building, launch and run a personal online store. Around the world, almost 4 million active websites currently use it.

Squarespace is a hosted CMS solution for creating and managing websites, blogs, portfolios, and online stores. It offers a drag and drop interface that enables companies of all sizes to build professional websites. Currently, nearly 3 million active websites are being hosted by Squarespace worldwide.

Detailed comparison Shopify vs Squarespace

Themes

Shopify themes

In total 9 free themes and 91 paid themes are available on Shopify’s theme store. That’s a total of 100 e-commerce priority themes! Paid themes can cost up to $350. Shopify themes cover a wide range of industries including electrical appliances, clothing, sports and cosmetics, and more.

In addition, it guarantees the performance of any theme you can choose as they are all created by UI-UX experts. You are free to choose a template for your storefront and switch to a more suitable one later.

Squarespace Templates

Besides, Squarespace is known for its beautiful templates and recommended themes for different types of industries. They provide more than 110 stunning, contemporary website themes. Most importantly, they are all expertly created to meet the standards of great design, usability, performance and mobile responsiveness.

In fact, it is inherently a blog hosting service. A lot of Squarespace themes are specially designed for users who want to blog or showcase their art, photography or music portfolio.

Pricing

Shopify Pricing

In total, Shopify has five plans: Shopify Lite, Basic, Shopify, Advanced, and Shopify Plus. Each plan includes all major features, unlimited products, unlimited bandwidth, fraud analysis, and support. And all plans come with a 14-day free trial.

Squarespace Pricing

Squarespace has a 14-day free trial and four plans: Personal, Business, Basic Commerce, and Advanced Commerce.

Marketing Features

1. SEO

Shopify you can effectively optimize your eCommerce site with its built-in SEO features. First of all, based on the content on your site, it auto matically generates titles and descriptions for all your products and pages, as well as canonical tags and sitemaps. Furthermore, uses its own name when referring to key SEO factors, namely page title, meta description, and image alt text.

Squarespace also provides users with useful SEO tools to well optimize your website for search engines. The platform also facilitates the SEO optimization process by automatically generating title tags, meta tags, sitemaps.

2. Social Media Integration

Shopify allows you to sell on 10 social networking platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, etc. In sum, Shopify gives merchants an effective tool to reach more potential customers.

Squarespace store owners can only sell on Instagram and push content to Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, and Twitter. Therefore, this poses many obstacles if you want to scale your business and get closer to your customers.

3. Email Campaigns

Shopify Email is available on all plans with no monthly commitment. You can design emails to match your brand and link directly to products to share them with customers. Thus, each merchant with a paid Shopify subscription will receive 10,000 free emails at the beginning of each month.

Squarespace Email also has a dedicated email marketing tool that allows you to import content from your website into an email draft to ensure voice and material consistency across your brand channels. Its email marketing tool also allows for customizable layouts, content, colors, and fonts, and its analytics tools allow you to track engagement so you can adjust your campaigns. In general, you will need to pay an additional monthly fee for one of the five Squarespace Email Campaign plans, which range from $5 per month to $48 per month.

4. Blogging

Shopify store owners can benefit from blogging without installing any apps. Thereafter, this website builder gives you some basic functionality for writing posts as it is not the main focus of Shopify.

On the other hand, Squarespace has outstanding blogging features. With the built-in Blog Page, you can create blog posts and excerpts, tag and categorize posts, enable comments, push content to featured social media platforms, and more.

Ease of Use

Shopify has a very user-friendly dashboard. Shopify uses a drag-and-drop design, which means you can manually add, remove, or move sections with just a few clicks. It also has a clean interface with visual cues and shortcuts to add products, customize themes, and add domains on the main page.

Squarespace is also a hosted cart, but it’s a bit harder to capture than its competitors. It applies drag and drop sections with several content blocks that make it easy for beginners. However, the editor’s homepage is a bit difficult to navigate and has no visual cues.

Payment Options

Shopify payments supports all major payment gateways like PayPal, Amazon Pay, Square, Shop Pay or even crypto as well as 100+ other options. To help store owners maximize conversion rates, Shopify continues to offer more payment methods, especially to local vendors.

Squarespace payments limits the options it supports to only PayPal, Square, and Stripe.

Apps & Extensions

Shopify App Store has one of the best eCommerce app stores with a total of over 2000 apps available. In particular, it’s like a feature buffet where you can pick and choose whatever you want from a variety of free and premium apps with prices starting at $15 per month.

Squarespace extension launched its extensions marketplace in December 2019. Currently, there are 31 extensions provided entirely by third parties. However, some of them are only available in certain countries, so you need to review the extension’s page before connecting it to your site.

Security

Squarespace

• Automatically add SSL certificates to all websites. This means that all data transferred to the website by users/customers (emails, phone numbers, credit card details, etc.) is encrypted.
• Provides two-factor authentication and user password hashing to provide account-level security.
• Choose highly secure data centers and cloud providers.
• There are safeguards and security systems that only they know about.

Shopify

In like manner, Shopify similar to Squarespace in terms of security. They add SSL certificates to all stores and have the system in place to avoid security disasters. One of the biggest threats to a platform like Shopify can be the vulnerabilities that third-party apps bring. But luckily, as long as you install an app from the Shopify app store, you’re safe. It also has strict security requirements for developers submitting apps.

Customer Support

Squarespace have access to live chat and email 24/7/365 on Monday through Friday from 4 AM to 8 PM EDT.

Shopify has options for 24/7 live chat, email tickets, and phone support.

Pros & Cons