Compare the Best Squarespace Alternatives
The Best Squarespace Alternatives of 2025
What Squarespace Does Well
Squarespace does a great job for many companies, especially those needing point-of-sale (POS) integration, paywall blogging features and an easy initial setup.
POS Integration
Most location-based companies need both e-commerce and POS capabilities. Squarespace partners with Square, so merchants can easily sell in person with Square hardware and the Squarespace app. Itโs particularly helpful for SMBs such as food trucks, craft fair vendors and individuals selling at pop-up shows.
Blog Paywalls
Flexible content paywalls for bloggers are often hard to come by, especially easy-to-configure paywalls. Squarespace does a great job of making paywalled content, including subscriptions and memberships, manageable for content creators. In fact, itโs one of my top blogging platform picks.
Easy Initial Setup
Learning curves can murder motivation, especially for DIYers creating their first websites. With a streamlined creation process, Squarespace makes setting up a first e-commerce website much easier than many platforms.
Where Squarespace Fails
Weโve all seen pro and con lists for e-commerce platforms and website builders. But going beyond the short, pithy comments, letโs dig into common Squarespace problems, including SEO, customization limits, transaction fees and integrations.
SEO
While far better than it was a few short years ago, Squarespace SEO still lags behind, especially in heading schemes. What needs to be marked as H1 for SEO may not always need visual H1 formatting, but Squarespaceโs heading and design structures are often linked. That means you can be forced to choose between a pleasing visual design and good SEO mojo. Wix is one of our alternative picks that offers more SEO choices.
Integrations
Squarespace calls third-party integrations and apps extensions, but there arenโt that many to choose from. For example, there are only two dropshipping extensions, Spocket and Syncee Collective. For more integrations, look at Shopify with its over 4,000 options.
Design Customization
Beyond the often-dated themes and templates with limited customization, Squarespace has issues with generic 404 pages, accessibility features such as limited alt text and even poor mobile optimization. All of those design issues add up to a serious problem for many shops in the long term. Wix is hard to beat for its design options.
Transaction Fees
Transaction fees paired with low (or free) plans can greatly help new businesses on a shoestring because they only pay when they make a sale. However, as sales and budgets increase, that initial cost savings measure can quickly become more of a burden that costs more than a more expensive subscription without transaction fees. That said, some Squarespace competitors, such as GoDaddy, can be even more costly when considering add-on costs. To avoid transaction fees, look at Wix and Hostinger.
Learn more: Read our full Squarespace review.
What To Look for in a Squarespace Alternative
Much of the process of choosing the best Squarespace alternative for you depends on matching features, pricing and service to your specific needs.
- Strong e-commerce tools: Squarespace focuses on e-commerce, so when evaluating Squarespace competitors, itโs important to compare the most desired e-commerce features. Look for features such as payment processing options, product variations, third-party integrations, inventory management and store management tools.
- Sustainable pricing: Be sure to evaluate not only plan costs but also transaction fees, add-on and integration costs and additional equipment costs.
- Customer service and tech support: Itโs the nature of tech that errors occur occasionally. Quick and efficient help can save aggravation, downtime and money.
- Hosting resources: Hosting resources and support tools are the computing power and software powering your website. Features such as storage space, server response speed, bandwidth, security features such as automatic off-server backups and firewalls, CDNs and user access controls work together to keep your website online and functioning properly.
- Powerful website builder: Unless you are fond of coding and technically skilled, finding the best website builder is important to create a professional-looking and functional website with good mobile optimization.