Wix vs Squarespace is still the first real fork in the road for most owner-operated businesses building a site in the United States, and in 2026 the two have drifted apart rather than converged. Wix has split into two products with separate editors and separate price lists. Squarespace has rebuilt its plans around commerce fees and stopped showing one of them to American buyers. Neither is cheap once you count what happens at checkout, and neither lets you leave with your site intact.
Every figure below was checked on wix.com, squarespace.com and the vendors’ own help centers in September 2026. Where a vendor publishes no number, this article says so.
Wix vs Squarespace At A Glance
| Wix | Squarespace | |
|---|---|---|
| Cheapest paid plan in the US | Light, $17 per month on a yearly subscription | Basic, $10 per month billed annually, $14 billed monthly |
| Free tier | Yes, 500 MB storage, 1 GB bandwidth, wixsite.com address | None, a 14 day trial only |
| Editor model | Absolute positioning in the Wix Editor, plus a separate responsive editor in Wix Studio | Fluid Engine, one grid-based drag and drop editor |
| Storage and bandwidth | Storage published per plan, 2 GB to unlimited; no bandwidth figure for Premium plans | No site quota or bandwidth published, 20 MB per file, video capped per plan |
| Store transaction fee | None listed in the published plan comparison | 2 percent on Basic, 0 percent on Core and above |
| US card processing | 2.9 percent plus $0.30 | 2.9 percent plus $0.30, falling to 2.5 percent on Advanced |
| Support | 24/7 chat, English callback 24/7 | Email 24/7, weekday live chat, no phone support |
| Taking the site elsewhere | Not possible, sites must run on Wix servers | WordPress .xml export with documented gaps |
Pricing Compared In 2026
Squarespace vs Wix pricing is harder to compare than it looks. Squarespace shows a monthly price and toggles between annual and monthly billing. Wix quotes yearly subscriptions paid in full and publishes no monthly price.
Wix Premium Plans
| Plan | Published price | Storage | Collaborators | Selling |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 500 MB | Not published | No |
| Light | $17 per month | 2 GB | 2 | No, payments not included |
| Core | $29 per month | 50 GB | 5 | Basic eCommerce |
| Business | $39 per month | 100 GB | 10 | Standard eCommerce |
| Business Elite | $159 per month | Unlimited | 100 | Advanced eCommerce |
Every paid plan includes a free domain for one year and removes Wix branding. The free plan does neither.
Wix Studio Plans
Wix Studio is the agency and freelancer product, with its own price list: Basic at $12 per month, Standard at $20, Plus at $32, Elite at $149, and an unpriced Enterprise tier. Media storage runs 10 GB, 50 GB, 120 GB and unlimited, with CMS ceilings of 1,500, 4,000, 20,000 and 10,000,000 items. Every Studio plan lists unlimited bandwidth, which Premium plans do not publish.
Squarespace Plans
The US pricing page shows Basic, Core and Advanced. Squarespace’s help center documents a Plus plan between Core and Advanced, and states that it may not be available to you on the pricing page based on your country. It is not shown in the US, and no price is published for it.
| Plan | Billed annually | Billed monthly | Store fee | Digital content fee | Video storage |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | $10 per month | $14 per month | 2 percent | 7 percent | 30 minutes |
| Core | $14 per month | $20 per month | 0 percent | 5 percent | 5 hours |
| Plus | Not published in the US | Not published in the US | 0 percent | 1 percent | 50 hours |
| Advanced | $23 per month | $32 per month | 0 percent | 0 percent | Unlimited |
Squarespace also sells a contact-sales Premium tier at no published price.
What The Sticker Price Hides
Squarespace Basic is the cheapest headline here and the most expensive place to sell. It adds 2 percent on top of card processing, caps you at two contributors, limits video storage to 30 minutes and blocks JavaScript and iframe code, which stays in the block after a trial but stops working.
Wix hides its costs elsewhere. Light does not accept payments, so the real entry point for a business taking money online is Core at $29. The true spread is closer to $29 against $14.
Ease Of Use And The Editor Models
The Wix Editor
The classic Wix Editor uses absolute positioning. Drag an element and it stays at the pixel you dropped it. For a non-designer this is the most forgiving experience in the category, because nothing snaps away from you.
The cost arrives on mobile. Desktop layout is positional rather than structural, so Wix keeps a separate mobile view you also have to tidy, a second layout to maintain for the life of the site.
Wix Studio
Wix Studio is the answer to that criticism, and it is a different editor rather than a setting. Wix describes it as a responsive editor that lets you create freely on canvas, including in pixels, while optimizing designs for every screen size, with custom CSS, no-code animations, concurrent editing, a code-free CMS and a Blocks workspace for developers.
The catch is that Studio is a fork, not an upgrade path. Wix states that Premium plans are only for Wix Editor sites and that a Studio Editor site needs a Studio plan, so you make that call at the start of a build.
Squarespace Fluid Engine
Squarespace runs one editor, Fluid Engine, which it describes as a precision drag and drop editor for flexible, custom layouts. It is grid-based, reflows responsively, and offers mobile-specific block settings. There is no second mobile layout and no second editor.
Fluid Engine is more constrained than the Wix Editor, and that is the point. There are fewer ways to produce something ugly and fewer ways to produce something distinctive. For a founder who wants a credible site in a weekend, the constraint is a feature. For anyone with a specific layout in mind, it is a wall.
Verdict: Squarespace is easier to keep tidy over three years. Wix is easier on day one and gives more rope. If anyone on your team edits the site monthly, the single-editor model is worth more than the freedom.
Design, Templates And Content
Squarespace wins on out-of-the-box taste. Its templates are art-directed and typographically disciplined, and it layers site-wide color palettes and font styles over them. A Squarespace site built by a careful amateur looks like a Squarespace site, which is a compliment in most industries and a problem in a few.
Wix ships a much larger template library, including templates built around bookings, restaurants, hotels and events, with less consistent quality, and it will generate a site from a single prompt. Squarespace gives you a high floor and a low ceiling. Wix gives you a lower floor and a higher ceiling.
Blogging And Content
Squarespace is the better writing environment: drafts, scheduling, a Needs Review status for teams, multiple authors with distinct bylines, paywalled posts, AI drafting, and one-click conversion of a post into a draft email campaign. Wix’s blog is competent, but Squarespace treats content as a first-class product while Wix treats it as one app among many.
One limit is worth knowing. Squarespace blog post URLs always begin with the blog page URL slug. You can set a default format using title, year, month and day variables and edit individual slugs, but you cannot lift a post out of its parent blog path.
Ecommerce And Payments
Wix vs Squarespace for ecommerce turns on fee structure more than feature lists, because fees compound with every order you take.
The Fees, Verified
Selling is now included on every Squarespace plan. The cost is Basic’s 2 percent commerce transaction fee, charged on top of processing. Core, Plus and Advanced charge none. Digital content and memberships are billed separately at 7 percent on Basic, 5 on Core, 1 on Plus and 0 on Advanced.
Squarespace Payments US rates are 2.9 percent plus $0.30 on standard cards for Basic and Core, 2.7 percent plus $0.30 on Plus and 2.5 percent plus $0.30 on Advanced. Premium cards, which Squarespace defines as American Express and select business and corporate cards, are 3.2 percent plus $0.30 on every plan. International cards add 1.5 percent and currency conversion 1 percent.
Wix Payments US rates are 2.9 percent plus $0.30 on cards, Apple Pay and Google Pay, and 3.7 percent plus $0.30 on American Express. PayPal and Venmo are 3.49 percent plus $0.49. In-person selling beats either vendor’s online rate: point of sale is 2.6 percent with no fixed fee, Tap to Pay 2.6 percent plus $0.20. A chargeback costs $15.
Wix’s published plan comparison lists no commerce transaction fee on store orders at any tier. It does list one on Pricing Plans, which is how you sell memberships and recurring subscriptions: 4 percent on Core, 2 percent on Business, 0 percent on Business Elite.
The practical read: physical goods cost 2.9 percent plus $0.30 on both platforms at entry level, plus another 2 percent on Squarespace Basic. A high-volume merchant on Squarespace Advanced pays 2.5 percent plus $0.30, the lowest published online card rate here. Courses and memberships are far cheaper on Squarespace Advanced at 0 percent than on Wix Core at 4 percent.
Catalog And Selling Tools
Wix Stores carries 50,000 products on Core, Business and Business Elite, with abandoned cart recovery, automatic discounts, pre-orders, loyalty, branded gift cards and Modalyst dropshipping at 25, 250 and 50,000 products by tier. Automated sales tax is metered at 100 transactions per month on Business and 500 on Business Elite, and is absent on Core.
Squarespace Commerce allows unlimited products on every plan, with subscriptions, gift cards, donations, product reviews, abandoned checkout recovery, customer accounts, point of sale in its mobile apps, and USPS and UPS label purchase. Automatic discounts, carrier-calculated shipping and Google Shopping start at Core, and connecting your own carrier requires Advanced.
Verdict: Wix has the deeper merchandising toolkit and much better in-person rates. Squarespace has the better fee curve at volume and a far better deal on digital products. Large, varied, physical catalog: Wix. Small catalog, or courses, memberships and content: Squarespace. If the catalog is the whole business rather than one part of the site, read how Wix compares with Shopify, a platform built around the store rather than the website.
SEO And Search Visibility
Wix wins this on published capability, and not narrowly. It provides an editable robots.txt with its own editor, customizable canonical tags, editable structured data including custom markup applied across page types using variables, patterned meta tags, bulk 301 redirects importing up to 500 URLs at once, a Google Search Console integration that handles verification from the dashboard, server-side rendering, and an SEO Setup Checklist built on a Semrush integration. It has added an AI Visibility tool tracking how a site is mentioned in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity.
Squarespace’s position is that plugins should not be necessary. It generates clean markup, automatic sitemaps and canonical tags, supports SEO title formats and alt text, offers 301 and 302 redirects, and has added an AI SEO Scanner, AI-generated titles and descriptions, and its own AI visibility reporting.
What it does not give you is control. Squarespace says it generates robots.txt automatically, and the only crawler control it documents is a Block Search engine crawlers checkbox that adds a rule to that file. You also cannot exclude individual collection items or portfolio sub-pages from crawler scans without excluding the whole collection page.
Apps, Extensibility And Custom Code
The Wix App Market spans design, functionality, marketing, ecommerce and vertical tools, and Wix runs a developer program letting third parties build and monetize widgets and applications through its Blocks workspace. Business Elite and Studio Elite include the advanced developer platform.
Squarespace Extensions is narrower and curated, and its categories say what it is for: sales and marketing, inventory and products, finance, shipping and fulfillment. The names in it are operational tools such as Mailchimp, QuickBooks Online, Printful and ShipStation rather than things that change how the site works.
One detail catches buyers out. Squarespace’s own plan documentation lists the Developer Platform as version 7.0 only, and 7.0 is the older generation. New sites are built on 7.1, so templating a current site from the ground up is not an option. Customization happens through CSS, code injection and code blocks, which need Core or higher.
Verdict: Wix, comfortably. This is also where the answer to “wix or squarespace” tends to flip for growing businesses in year two rather than year one.
Support When Something Breaks
Wix offers chat 24/7 and lets you escalate to a Customer Care expert by chat, phone or email. English callback hours are listed as 24/7, with English chat Monday to Friday, 2AM to 6PM EST. Top tiers get priority.
Squarespace does not offer phone support and publishes an article explaining why. You can reach it 24/7 by email or social message, and by live chat on weekdays only. Its help center is among the best in the industry.
Getting Your Data Out
Both vendors would rather you read this after signing up. It should carry the most weight in the decision.
Wix is unambiguous. Its help center states that a Wix site is built with Wix’s technology, must be hosted and operated on Wix’s servers, and that the SaaS architecture does not support external hosting. Wix is clear that your content belongs to you and equally clear that the site does not leave. It also records that exporting blog posts to other platforms is not possible, listing it as a feature request collecting votes. You can export CMS collections, store data and contacts as files. You cannot export your writing, and you cannot export the site.
Squarespace does better, but only just. It produces a WordPress-format .xml file and publishes an honest list of what does not survive. Layout pages, text blocks, image blocks and one blog page with its posts and up to 1000 comments per post will export. At risk is everything else: album, cover, index, info, calendar, portfolio and store pages, page-specific headers, footers and sidebars, additional blog pages, audio, product and video blocks, drafts, style settings and custom CSS. Squarespace also warns that importing to self-hosted WordPress may pull only reference links for images, so those images die when you cancel the site.
Read that with a real site in mind. A Squarespace store with a portfolio and two blogs exports as one blog, some text and some images. That is not a migration, it is the start of one.
Keep source copies of your images and long-form content somewhere you control from day one. If you need to move, this is specialist work, and there are companies that migrate Wix and Squarespace sites for a living who will rebuild what the exporter drops.
Verdict: Squarespace, narrowly, because something comes out. Neither platform is portable, and anyone telling you the lock-in compares to WordPress is not being straight with you. Our WordPress vs Wix comparison for ecommerce shows what that difference means in practice.
Which One Should You Choose?
Squarespace vs Wix has no universal winner, but it has a clear winner for almost every specific situation.
Choose Squarespace if you are a designer, photographer, writer, therapist or consultant selling a small number of things. Basic at $10 billed annually covers a portfolio and invoicing, and Core at $14 is the sweet spot once you want custom code, unlimited contributors or commerce analytics.
Choose Squarespace if you sell courses, memberships or paid content. The digital content fee falls from 7 percent on Basic to 0 percent on Advanced at $23 billed annually, while Wix charges 4 percent on Core and 2 percent on Business for recurring plans.
Choose Wix if the site has to do something specific. Bookings with staff calendars, restaurant ordering, hotel reservations, fitness memberships, ticketed events and a real dropshipping catalog are native Wix products with published limits, not add-ons you assemble. Squarespace handles scheduling through Acuity as a separate subscription and does not compete on the rest.
Choose Wix if organic search is your main acquisition channel. Editable robots.txt, custom structured data across page types, patterned meta tags, bulk redirect import and the Search Console integration give your SEO lead something to work on.
Choose Wix Studio if you build for clients. Standard at $20 undercuts Wix’s own Business plan while adding a responsive editor, custom CSS, concurrent editing and client handover controls. Basic at $12 is the cheapest credible professional plan either vendor publishes.
Choose Wix if you sell in person as well as online. Point of sale at 2.6 percent with no fixed fee beats what either platform charges for a card-not-present order.
Choose Squarespace if you are a high-volume online-only merchant. Advanced’s 2.5 percent plus $0.30 is the lowest published online card rate here, with no commerce fee on top. Most merchants at that volume also shortlist Shopify, so check our Squarespace vs Shopify fee breakdown before you commit.
Choose neither if you already know you will outgrow a hosted builder. If you are planning thousands of pages, or a store with complex inventory logic, take the migration pain now rather than in year three.
On the best website builder in general terms, there is not one. There is only the best website builder for a set of constraints, and the constraints that matter are what you sell, who edits the site, and how likely you are to leave.
Who To Hire Once You Have Chosen
Both platforms are marketed as tools you do not need help with. True for the first site, untrue for the third. The sites that earn money usually had a professional involved at the build, the search setup, or the move off.
For the build, the distinction that matters is between a template customizer and someone who works in the platform daily. On Squarespace the work is largely typographic and structural, because Fluid Engine constrains the rest, so you are buying judgment about hierarchy, imagery and conversion. A specialist from a vetted list of Squarespace designers will have views on which template family to start from. On Wix the editor will let you do anything, so you want someone who knows what not to do, particularly on the mobile layout. Experienced Wix web designers also tend to know whether a project belongs in the Wix Editor or in Wix Studio, and that call is hard to reverse.
For search, hire after the build rather than during it, and hire someone who will tell you plainly which of your requirements the platform cannot meet. On Wix that is a conversation about structured data, redirects and architecture. On Squarespace it is mostly about content and internal linking.
For a migration, budget for a rebuild rather than a transfer, and ask any supplier exactly which content types they expect to lose. One who answers precisely has done it before.
Conclusion
Wix vs Squarespace in 2026 comes down to a trade that has not changed even as both products have: Squarespace sells restraint and Wix sells reach. Squarespace gets a good-looking, low-maintenance site live faster, includes selling on every plan, and has the better fee curve for digital products and high-volume stores. Wix gives you more room, a deeper SEO toolkit, native products for whole industries, better in-person rates, and a professional editor in Wix Studio priced below its own consumer plans.
Weigh the costs honestly. Squarespace’s cheapest plan taxes your sales at 2 percent and blocks JavaScript, and its US pricing page no longer shows the Plus plan its own documentation describes. Wix quotes yearly prices without publishing monthly ones, and its Light plan cannot take payments, so the real entry price is $29 rather than $17. Both make leaving expensive: Squarespace exports a partial WordPress file and tells you what breaks, while Wix does not let the site leave at all and does not currently let you export your blog posts.
Pick on what you sell and who maintains the site. Then keep your own copies of everything you write and upload, because the platform will not hand them back.
