Wix vs Squarespace in 2026 (and the third option most people miss)

Wix and Squarespace are both strong website builders, and the honest answer is that the right one depends on how you work rather than on a feature count. Pick Wix if you want to drag elements anywhere on the page and bolt on features from a large app market. Pick Squarespace if you want a structured editor that keeps the design tidy on every screen and a blog that handles a growing archive properly. Pick a third option if the site mainly exists to be found in search, because that is where both of them charge you more than you need to pay.

There is one thing you should know before you compare anything else. In July 2026 Squarespace raised its prices by up to 26 percent, and most comparison articles, including the summary Google shows at the top of this search, are still quoting the old numbers. The gap that every guide describes has closed. This piece uses the current figures, verified in August 2026.

Wix vs Squarespace at a glance

Here is the short version, with a third column for the option that rarely appears in these comparisons. The row that decides the most is not price or templates, it is what each platform charges you more for as you grow.

Pricing reflects publicly listed plans checked in August 2026, in US dollars. Squarespace changed its plan prices in July 2026, so older comparison articles still quote the previous figures. Both platforms run promotional first-term discounts at various times, and annual billing is cheaper than monthly on both. Confirm current pricing on each provider site before you commit.

The 2026 pricing reset

Squarespace increased its plan prices in July 2026, and the increase was not evenly spread. The plans in the middle, which are the ones most small businesses sit on, went up the most.

Some context worth having. Squarespace was taken private by the investment firm Permira in October 2024 in a deal valued at $7.2bn. Price increases after a private equity acquisition are common enough that it is fair to factor the possibility of further rises into a multi-year decision, though nobody outside the company can say whether that will happen.

What Wix costs in 2026

Wix has four paid plans plus a permanently free one. The published plans are steady, and the free tier is a genuine differentiator against Squarespace, with the caveat that it runs Wix advertising and does not allow a custom domain.

What Squarespace costs in 2026

Squarespace has four paid plans and no free tier, only a 14-day trial. The middle column shows what the same plan cost before July, because that is the number you will still find in most articles and in the summaries AI assistants generate from them.

Two things get missed in the headline numbers. Squarespace Basic caps you at two contributors, limits customization to CSS without full code injection, and adds a 2 percent Squarespace fee on store sales on top of the normal card processing fee, which is why most businesses end up on Core rather than Basic. And the plan price is not always the whole bill: Squarespace Scheduling runs roughly $16 to $49 a month and Email Campaigns roughly $7 to $68 a month, both on top.

What twelve months actually costs

Monthly headline prices flatter every platform. Here is a year at the plan you would realistically be on, at listed rates.

The point is not that cheapest wins. Squarespace at $348 a year may be exactly right for a design studio whose website is its portfolio. The point is that the difference between the top and the bottom of that list is most of an advertising budget for a small business, so it is worth knowing what the extra buys.

The six things that actually decide it

Feature tables make these platforms look more similar than they are. These six differences are the ones that change how the site feels to build and to run.

1. The editor

Verdict on the editor: this is the real fork in the road, and it is a preference rather than a ranking. If you want to control every pixel, Wix. If you would rather the platform stopped you making a mess, Squarespace. Be honest about which of those describes you, because it predicts your satisfaction better than any feature list.

2. Templates and design

Verdict on templates: Wix wins on choice, Squarespace wins on the floor. If you know what you want and will customize heavily, the larger library helps. If you want to look good without design skill, the smaller curated set is the safer bet.

3. SEO

Verdict on SEO: close enough that it should not decide your choice. Both give you the controls; neither gives you the content. What matters far more is whether the platform makes publishing easy, because pages you never write cannot rank. That is a good reason to look at what a website builder with SEO built in actually includes before you assume you have to bolt it on.

One thing neither platform addresses yet is how search itself is changing. A growing share of queries are answered inside an AI summary rather than by a click through to a website, which is why answer engine optimization has become its own discipline: structuring pages so assistants can quote them accurately. Both Wix and Squarespace will get there. Neither ships it as a feature today.

4. Blogging

Verdict on blogging: Squarespace, clearly, and it is not close. If content marketing is part of the plan rather than an afterthought, weight this difference heavily. It is one of the few places where the two are genuinely not equivalent.

5. Selling

Verdict on selling: Wix for a store that is the main event, Squarespace for a store that sits alongside a portfolio or a content site. If ecommerce is genuinely the business, a dedicated platform like Shopify will outgrow both of them and is worth the extra.

6. Extensions and support

Verdict on extensions and support: Wix, if you need to extend the site in a direction the platform does not natively cover. Just price the apps before you commit, because a $29 plan plus three app subscriptions is not a $29 plan.

Where each one genuinely wins

Both of these are good products with real strengths. Any comparison that declares a single winner is selling something.

Squarespace wins on design floor and on publishing. If you are a photographer, a designer, a consultant or any business whose website is essentially its portfolio, Squarespace will get you to a professional-looking result faster and with less risk of making it worse. Its blog is the better of the two by a clear margin. It is also the calmer product to use, which sounds soft until you have spent an evening nudging elements around in a drag-and-drop editor.

Wix wins on flexibility, breadth and the free tier. More templates, more apps, more selling features, more automation, and an actual free plan you can sit on indefinitely while you decide. If your site needs to do something slightly unusual, Wix is much more likely to have a way. It is also the better choice if you already know exactly what layout you want and do not want a platform arguing with you about it.

If you have already decided which of the two you are leaning away from, it is worth reading the full field rather than just swapping between these two. We compared the main Wix alternatives and the main Squarespace alternatives separately, both with current pricing.

The third option most people miss

Here is the thing almost every Wix versus Squarespace article leaves out: a lot of the people running this comparison do not actually need either of them. They need a professional site that ranks, a blog they will publish to, and a contact form that captures enquiries. They are choosing between two design tools when their real problem is being found.

That is the gap Fuzen Sites is built for. You pick a template, describe your business in plain language, and the AI tailors the copy, sections and styling to fit. What arrives is a lightweight site with SEO-ready pages, a real blog, lead capture forms and internal linking already included, hosted and maintained for you.

The pricing model is the part that differs most from both Wix and Squarespace. Neither of those charges you for traffic; they charge you for features, which means the way to unlock what you need is to move up a tier. Fuzen Sites prices by monthly visits instead. Every plan, including the free one, includes SEO and answer-engine-ready pages, the blog, AI customization and lead capture. The free plan carries 1,000 visits a month on a Fuzen subdomain. Starter at $7 a month adds a custom domain, removes the badge and gives you unlimited pages and posts. Pro at $15 covers 100,000 visits and up to three sites. Agency at $39 covers 500,000 pooled visits across up to 25 client sites, white-labeled.

There is a second difference that no website builder matches, and it is the reason this is worth mentioning at all in a comparison like this. A Fuzen site can grow into a real business application on the same account. When you need a CRM, a booking system, an inventory tracker or a client portal, you build it there rather than starting again somewhere else, and enquiries from the site can flow straight into it without a third-party connector.

Bottom line: if your website is the product, use Squarespace. If your website needs to do something specific and unusual, use Wix. If your website is how customers find you, a platform that bundles SEO, a blog and lead capture into a free tier and charges by traffic will cost you a fraction of either.

Which should you choose

Use the shape of the site rather than the feature list. Most people already know which of these describes them.

What about WordPress, and the rest of the field

WordPress belongs in this conversation because a lot of people comparing Wix and Squarespace are really asking whether a hosted builder is the right category at all. WordPress is the most capable of the three by a distance, with a plugin ecosystem nothing else comes close to, and it is the right answer if you need something genuinely custom and have or can hire the skills. The cost is that you assemble and maintain it: hosting, a theme, plugins for SEO and forms and caching, and updates for all of them. That stack is also the usual reason WordPress sites end up slow, and a typical SEO plugin set adds roughly $200 a year on top of hosting. If you are weighing it, we have a full comparison of the main WordPress alternatives.

Beyond the big three, Webflow and Framer are the design-led step up, aimed at people who want closer to hand-built control without writing the code. Ghost is worth knowing about if publishing is the whole point and you want nothing else in the way. Carrd is hard to beat for a single page at a few dollars a year. And if the AI-generated route is what appealed about Wix in the first place, we compared the current AI website builders on what each one actually produces.

Moving between them

If you are already on one of these and thinking about switching, plan for the fact that you are moving content, not a site. Neither platform lets you export a working website, so any move is a rebuild. It is worth reading what each one actually hands you before you plan the work, because both are more restrictive than people expect.

Squarespace can produce an .xml file intended for WordPress. Per its own export documentation, that file carries layout pages, one blog page with its posts, text blocks, image blocks and gallery pages. It does not carry store pages, portfolio pages, index pages, album, cover or calendar pages, a second blog, drafts, audio, video or product blocks, custom CSS or any style settings. There is also a detail that surprises people: Squarespace states you cannot export from one Squarespace site and import into another.

Wix is more restrictive still. Its help center states plainly that it is not currently possible to export blog posts to other platforms, and there is no site export either. Moving off Wix means copying content out by hand or rebuilding it, which is worth weighing now rather than in two years.

Two things protect the value you have already built. First, keep your URL structure the same wherever you can, and where you cannot, set up a redirect from every old path to its new one so the rankings and the links you have earned follow you. Second, move the domain rather than the design: your domain is the asset, the layout can be rebuilt in an afternoon on any of these platforms. If you are starting the process from scratch, our step-by-step guide to building a site with AI covers the sequence, and the no-code website builder guide covers what these tools can and cannot do before you commit.

Frequently asked questions

Who is better, Squarespace or Wix?

Neither is better across the board. Squarespace is better if design consistency matters most, because its structured editor keeps layouts clean on mobile without extra work, and its blog handles both categories and tags. Wix is better if you want maximum layout freedom, a much larger template library and a big app market to bolt features on. Since Squarespace's July 2026 price increase the two cost the same at the tier most small businesses buy, so price is no longer the tiebreaker it used to be.

What is more expensive, Squarespace or Wix?

They are now level at the middle tier. Wix Core is $29 a month billed annually and Squarespace Core is also $29 a month billed annually after the July 2026 increase, which raised Core from $23. At the entry tier Wix Light is $17 and Squarespace Basic is $19, so Wix is slightly cheaper there. Wix is far more expensive at the top, where Business Elite is $159 a month against Squarespace Advanced at $99. Most published comparisons still quote Squarespace's old prices and conclude it is cheaper.

What is a disadvantage of using Wix?

The most cited disadvantage is that the mobile version of a Wix site often needs manual work, because the editor positions elements by pixel rather than adapting to the screen, so you edit the mobile view separately. Wix also does not let you switch template after your site is live, which means a redesign is a rebuild, and its free plan runs Wix ads on a wix.com subdomain with no custom domain. Costs can also creep as you add paid apps from the app market on top of the plan.

Does Squarespace have a free plan?

No. Squarespace offers a 14-day free trial and then requires a paid plan, with the cheapest being Basic at $19 a month billed annually. Wix does have a permanently free plan, but it shows Wix ads and gives you a wix.com subdomain rather than your own domain. If a genuinely free plan with your own content and a real blog matters, that is one of the clearest differences between the two, and it is where a builder with a free tier that includes a blog is worth a look.

Is Wix or Squarespace better for SEO?

Both cover the basics well: editable meta titles and descriptions, custom URLs, alt text, sitemaps, redirects and structured data. Squarespace tends to edge it for content-led SEO because its blog supports categories and tags and its pages stay clean, while Wix gives you more marketing automation and integrations. The bigger SEO issue on either platform is what you build, not the platform: a thin five-page brochure will not rank regardless of which one you pick.

Is Wix or Squarespace better for blogging?

Squarespace. It began life as a content management system and its blog supports both categories and tags, which matters for organizing a growing archive and for internal linking. Wix supports blog categories but not tags. If publishing is central to how you plan to get found, weight that difference heavily, because it is one of the few places where the two platforms are genuinely not equivalent.

Is there a better website builder than Wix or Squarespace?

For a design-led portfolio or a store, probably not. For a small business site that has to rank and publish on a small budget, there are cheaper options that include SEO features, a blog and lead capture forms in the base price rather than in a higher tier or a paid add-on. Fuzen Sites is one, priced by monthly visits from a free tier, with a paid tier at $7 a month that adds a custom domain and unlimited pages and posts.

Can I move my site from Wix or Squarespace to another platform?

You can move your domain and your content, but not your design. Neither Wix nor Squarespace lets you export a working site, so a move means rebuilding the pages on the new platform and pointing the domain across. Squarespace can export a limited XML file that carries blog posts and some pages; Wix has no equivalent site export. Plan a migration around your content and your URLs, and set up redirects from the old paths so you keep the rankings you have earned.