Are you looking to quickly get your website online? An intuitive website builder may be what you need to quickly get your online presence up and running.
You won’t need to write one line of code if you have the right platform. You can instead use pre-built templates to create stunning sites using simple design elements.
Squarespace as well as Weebly rank high on our list. Each platform offers many features that you can benefit from, regardless of what kind of website you are building.
It can be difficult to choose between the platforms if you don’t understand the details. Weebly vs Squarespace is our review to help you decide which provider is best for you.
There are many topics to be covered, so let’s get started!
What’s Squarespace?
Squarespace is the true giant of the web-building industry. It has been in existence since 2003 and boasts more than 3.79 million users. Designers and creatives love this platform. It’s easy to build stunning portfolio websites or eCommerce sites thanks to the beautifully designed templates.
Squarespace is also known for being an all-inclusive, turn-key solution. This means that you don’t need to rely on plugins or extensions. Squarespace’s flexible toolkit includes eCommerce functionality, membership creation and search engine optimization (SEO) capabilities.
Squarespace is a good fit for small- to medium-sized businesses.
What’s Weebly?
Weebly another website builder that claims to be the most user-friendly on the market. It is a great choice for beginners, as it has a lot more features than Squarespace.
You can build your website from a pre-designed template, just like its competitor. Weebly works best for small businesses. It is simple in its features and affordable, no matter what your budget.
Weebly has fewer features than Squarespace. It does have an app marketplace where you can purchase and install plugins and addons to fill in any gaps.
Design
As much as Squarespace has 113 professionally-designed templates. You’ll have a stunning site no matter what theme you choose. Squarespace themes are centered on your website’s visuals. This makes them ideal for portfolios, photography, illustrations, artwork, and so forth.
Since the 7.1 update, you cannot change a template without losing all of your content. Take your time and choose a template that you will be happy with for many years to come.
Squarespace also offers an intuitive layout system. You can choose different layouts for different sections on your Squarespace website. This allows you to have a lot of control over the styling of individual pages. This feature is also superior to Weebly’s cumbersome drag-and-drop system.
Squarespace’s drag-and-drop interface is easy to use when it comes web design and page building. You can’t place web elements anywhere. The editor works in sections so you can only move elements within specific areas. To customize your stylings, you can access the CSS codes of your elements. To be able this, however, you will need the right knowledge.
Squarespace allows you to use many website elements. Image galleries, slideshows, video backgrounds and many more are worth mentioning.
Squarespace’s image editor is the final piece of software. Squarespace automatically resizes images to make them suitable for display. You can also crop, edit, apply filters, and modify attributes such as contrast and saturation.
Weebly
Weebly offers a lot of design flexibility but is somewhat more limited. There are only 50 themes available. Squarespace templates are more professional looking than many of these themes.
You can also customize your theme, but it is not very flexible. The text can be changed in specific areas, including the font, color and spacing. You won’t have many color options and can’t change the in-built color palette. Squarespace however, allows you to use any color you like.
You have access to a drag and drop editor. Drag elements from the dark gray sidebar to edit them. Squarespace allows you to add custom fonts, audio, video and image galleries. The drag-and-drop functionality is limited, and it’s similar to Squarespace. Instead, drag and drop elements to snap them into predetermined sections.
You can also edit your website’s HTML and CSS if you are a good coder. You can also change your theme anytime you want without having to rebuild your entire site.
Squarespace is the winner in design
Squarespace offers more design options, including a wider range of professional-looking templates and a flexible editor. It’s also easier to modify your pages’ layouts and colors. It also has an intuitive image editor that will make it easy to get the best out of your visuals.
eCommerce Tools
You are in luck: Squarespace and Weebly both offer eCommerce capabilities that allow you to create an online shop and accept payments for digital and physical products.
Squarespace Commerce
Squarespace is a great solution for small and mid-sized businesses. It has fully integrated store management capabilities that allow you to sell unlimited products from your website. You can also sell digital downloads, subscriptions and appointments. You can also customize product descriptions and upload videos.
Squarespace eCommerce comes with:
- Commerce plan: 0% transaction fees
- Automated abandoned cart recovery
- Product catalogues (I.e. you can show products organized by category and easily-navigate menus).
- Schedule sales promotions and product launches
- Choose from flat-rate, pick up, weight-based, and other shipping options
- Gift cards can be sold and accepted
- You can generate discount codes
- A built-in tax calculation is available to improve compliance
- A user-friendly shopping cart is a benefit to customers
- Customers can create an account to access member-only content
- Access to inventory management tools
- Instagram is a great way to sell
Weebly eCommerce
Square Payments is integrated with Weebly to allow you to create an online shop. You can select a store template that you want to customize and then add the following eCommerce features.
- Track your inventory
- Access to bulk import and export capabilities
- With real-time shipping rates, you can ship products internationally or domestically. Although Weebly does not integrate with all major shipping carriers, the Shippo integration allows you to search for the best deals.
- Marketing tools such as gift cards and coupons can be a benefit to you
- Reviews can be left by customers
- A product search bar is a benefit to customers
- Product badges can be used for items that are on sale or have limited availability
- Accepting customer payments via Square, Stripe, and PayPal is possible
- Automatic tax calculations are a benefit
- Emails can be sent to abandoned carts
Squarespace is the winner in eCommerce
Squarespace and Weebly remain neck-and-neck in eCommerce features. Both offer the ability to sell unlimited physical and digital products, and both have similar store management tools. Squarespace has better design options and you can sell directly through Instagram. This is not something Weebly allows.
Blogging
A blog is an essential feature for all websites. So how does Squarespace and Weebly compare?
Squarespace Blogging
Squarespace’s blogging tools are included in the box, along with all of its main capabilities.
There are many beautiful layouts and templates for blogs in true Squarespace style, including grids and chronological feeds.
Squarespace makes it easy for you to organize your content by assigning tags or categories to your blog posts. You can also enable comments to your posts and allow multiple contributors create and publish blog articles. It’s easy to extract blog posts from your website and share them via social media.
Weebly Blog
Weebly has a simple blogging interface. It is easy to create blog posts, add text, images and videos. You can also add tags to your blog posts and allow threaded comments. Squarespace doesn’t allow you to organize content into subcategories. It is much more difficult to organize large, more complex blogs.
Weebly does not provide a standard template for blog posts, so it can be difficult to design blog posts. Every new post is created as a page. You can drag elements from the sidebar into each page. Although this may seem flexible initially, it ultimately makes creating blog posts more time-consuming and more complicated.
You can now invite website editors and limit access to certain pages to collaboration with you since a recent update in 2021.
Weebly might be a bit restrictive for those who are focused on blogging. It’s basic blogging functionality doesn’t offer many advanced features.
Squarespace is the winner of blogging
Squarespace is a better alternative to Weebly. It makes it easier to create a professional-looking blog, collaborate with other bloggers, and organize your content more efficiently.
SEO Tools
SEO is essential for websites to rank high in search engines and drive organic traffic. Here’s how Squarespace & Weebly approach SEO.
Squarespace’s SEO features are amazing and provide everything you need to create a strong SEO strategy. They are built into Squarespace, which is no surprise. You can edit your pages’ meta titles, descriptions, URLs, and URLs. You can also edit image alt text or create page redirects automatically.
Last but not least, Squarespace has the ability to create sitemaps automatically that can be accessed by search engines such as Google. Sitemaps are a must-have for SEO. They list every page and link on your website, making it easier for search engines to locate you and rank you accordingly.
Weebly
You can edit the basic SEO settings on Weebly’s dashboard. You can edit page titles, descriptions, meta keywords, footer, and header codes. Weebly’s search engine optimization features are not as extensive as this. It also contains a lot JavaScript, so the code behind the websites may not be the most clean.
Squarespace is the winner in SEO
Squarespace’s built-in SEO features are better than Weebly’s. This gives you more control over your SEO strategy and eliminates the need for third-party plugins.
Apps and Integrations
Apps and integrations let you expand the platform’s toolkit. Squarespace and Weebly offer integrations, however.
Squarespace
Squarespace does not offer many extensions like this. Squarespace is a complete platform that provides everything you need.
There are only 27 extensions available. They are organized into categories that include shipping extensions and accounting software.
Weebly
Weebly, on the other hand, offers access to an even larger app center with over 360 apps. These apps can be grouped into different categories such as marketing, communication, eCommerce, and so on. Many of these apps have poor ratings, so be cautious about which ones you choose to use.
Weebly is the winner in Apps and Integrations
Weebly’s App Market offers more flexibility if you want to extend your site’s functionality using third-party tools. Weebly offers a variety of integrations that allows you to choose the features you require, rather than Squarespace’s one-stop solution.
Pricing
Squarespace and Weebly both offer software as a service (SaaS) and require a monthly subscription. Let’s take a look at what you can get for your money using these platforms.
Squarespace Pricing
Squarespace does not offer a free plan. You can sign up for a free 14-day trial to find out if Squarespace is right for you. Users who opt for annual billing receive 25% off all pricing plans. We’ve also included the yearly premiums below.
The Personal Plan is $12 per month if paid annually. A free custom domain name and an SSL certificate will be yours for a year. Managed hosting, unlimited bandwidth and Squarespace’s SEO features are all included. You will also receive 24/7 support. You can also view basic website metrics like traffic sources, visitor geography and site paths. You can only review the contributions of two websites.
The Personal Plan costs $18 per month and includes everything in the Personal program. It also waives the contributor limit so that you can work as many people as possible. You also get more advanced analytics like additional sales and conversion metrics. You can add pop-ups and promotional banners to your website, as well as access fully integrated eCommerce features. There is a 3% transaction charge on all sales.
The Basic Commerce Plan costs $26 per month. It does not charge a transaction fee for sales. You can also unlock customer accounts and sell on Instagram. Additionally, you can display limited availability labels when stock is low.
The Advanced Commerce Plan is $40 per month. You can sell subscriptions and have automatic abandoned cart recovery. Advanced discounts can be offered, which allows you to limit the number of times customers can avail a discount. You can also choose to apply discounts automatically at checkout. You can also have your shipping calculated automatically using real-time rates provided by leading providers in the US, Canada like FedEx, USPS and UPS.
Weebly Pricing
Weebly may be the right choice for you if affordability is your primary concern. The platform comes with a totally free basic plan and its most expensive plan costs only $26 per month.
The free plan includes a free SSL certificate and a subdomain on Weebly. It also has basic eCommerce capabilities. You can also access an online shopping cart and sell unlimited products. You can list multiple colors and product variants with this customization. Item badges can be used to advertise sales items or products that are not widely available. You can also create coupons and automatically calculate taxes.
The free plan also includes Weebly’s search features, community forum, customizable forms to capture leads, chat support, and email support.
There are three options for paying to upgrade from Weebly’s free version:
You will need to sign up for the Personal plan starting at $6 per month, if paid annually. This plan also includes a shipping cost calculator and the ability to launch pop-up notifications from your website.
The Professional Plan is $12 per month. You get a domain free for one year, password protection to private pages you don’t want everyone to see, and Square ads are removed from your website. Advanced site stats can be viewed to view where visitors are coming from and what pages are most popular. The Professional plan also includes phone support.
The Performance plan is $26 per month. It includes additional eCommerce features such as item reviews, integrated shipping labels and abandoned cart recovery. You also get advanced eCommerce insights such as sales trends and coupon usage. Access to priority support is also available.
Pricing: Squarespace is the winner (unless you want a free website builder)
Let’s say you only need a personal website and have a limited budget. Weebly’s Personal or Free plan is a great solution in such a case.
Weebly’s Performance plan is more expensive, but Squarespace offers more features than the comparable priced Basic Commerce plan.
Customer Support
There are always questions with any new software. It is important that you get the support you require from your chosen website builder. This is what Squarespace and Weebly can offer:
Squarespace
Squarespace customer support can be reached via email and live chat 24/7. This support is available Monday through Friday from 3AM to 8PM EST. Squarespace also offers extensive online resources. There are many webinars, FAQs and guides that will help you navigate the site’s features. You can also find support from your peers in the active community forum.
Weebly
Weebly offers 24/7 email and bot support. These will direct you to relevant self-help documents if possible. Weebly’s support team is available to you via live chat between 9 AM and 9 PM EDT. According to reports, the team doesn’t respond as quickly as you might expect when it comes to returning messages. You might find their self-help material on Weebly’s knowledge base more useful.
There are many articles, guides and the Weebly community that can help you.
Squarespace is the winner in customer support
Squarespace has a longer customer support line than Weebly. Squarespace’s online community is more active and offers more detailed guides.
Both the pros and cons
We are almost at the end of Squarespace vs Weebly’s Squarespace vs Weebly comparison. Before we close, let’s recap the main benefits and drawbacks of Squarespace vs Weebly.
Squarespace’s Pros:
- A wide range of templates are available to you.
- You can easily showcase your photography using the powerful image editor
- With CSS access and many layout options, you have great customization flexibility
- Squarespace’s SEO tools and blogging tools are very robust
- Small to medium-sized businesses can benefit from strong eCommerce capabilities
- Squarespace’s interface seems intuitive.
Squarespace’s Cons:
- It is no longer possible to change themes at will without losing your content.
- Squarespace eCommerce does not offer multi-currency support.
- Only iOS devices can access the full mobile app for editing your website while on the move.
- Squarespace has very few extensions and integrations. You should ensure that Squarespace’s in-built toolkit is fully functional before you sign up.
- Squarespace is slightly more difficult to learn than Weebly due to its greater variety of design options and layouts.
Weebly’s Pros:
- Weebly’s editor offers an intuitive user experience
- You can also find additional widgets and tools in the app store.
- Even without a plan, you can sell.
- Weebly’s pricing policy is very affordable, even for the most expensive tiers
- Weebly’s mobile application is available for both Android and iOS devices.
- With minimal disruption, you can change themes at any time.
Weebly’s Cons:
- Squarespace templates are not as good as Weebly’s templates
- It is difficult to migrate to another service through Weebly
- Weebly’s SEO, eCommerce, and blogging features are all limited.
- Site-wide storage of photos is not possible
- Weebly’s editor does not have an undo function.
Which is the Best Website Builder?
There you go! This concludes our Squarespace and Weebly comparison. Our opinion is that price will be the most important factor in your decision. Weebly is more affordable for the budget-minded user who needs a simple but powerful site builder. The compromise is that Squarespace doesn’t offer as many customization options and Weebly won’t allow you to create a website with the same quality as Squarespace.
Squarespace, on the other hand, is more expensive but offers more robust features. Squarespace is a better option than Weebly for creatives who want to showcase their work online.
What do you think? We’d love to know which eCommerce platform and website builder you prefer for your next project. Are you also considering other options like Shopify, Wix, and WordPress? Tell us about it, in any case!
