Wix vs Shopify vs Squarespace (2023) — The Essential Comparison

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In this Wix vs Shopify vs Squarespace comparison, we put three of the web’s most popular website builders head-to-head, and help you find out which one is best for your online business.

The comparison is divided into two parts — first up you’ll find a table that gives you an ‘at-a-glance’ overview of how key features compare across the three platforms.

That’s followed up by a deeper dive into each feature — but if you’re in a hurry, you can use the table below to navigate to aspects of this comparison that are of most interest to you.

At-a-glance feature breakdown

The table below highlights the key things to look out for when choosing a website building tool (particularly one you’re intending to use for ecommerce purposes).

Bandwidth and storage

All three platforms offer unlimited bandwidth on their paid-for plans, which means that there’s no restrictions on the number of visitors to your site using any of these website builders.

As for storage — the amount of space you get to store images and other files for your site — oddly Wix limits space, while the other two platforms give you an unlimited amount.

Templates

In terms of quantity of free templates, it’s a definite win for Wix, which offers 800+ compared to Shopify’s 12 and Squarespace’s 155.

In terms of quality, this is a subjective area but for me I’d say that Squarespace wins — the templates provided are contemporary, classy and a notch above those of the other two rivals.

There’s a couple of other template issues to consider.

First, the availability of ‘responsive’ templates — themes that adjust themselves automatically to suit the device they’re being viewed on.

Wix doesn’t provide fully responsive templates, and depending on your chosen one, you may have to edit the mobile version of your site in various ways to get it to display correctly on mobile. (Note: Google prefers responsive templates. More on SEO later!).

By contrast all Squarespace templates and Shopify themes are 100% responsive.

There’s also template editability to think about — while Shopify gives you full access to your template’s code, Squarespace and Wix don’t.

Ease of use

For me, the winner in the ease-of-use department is Squarespace — it’s got the slickest, most intuitive interface of the three.

It gives you easy to use, sophisticated style controls, along with a new ‘fluid engine’ content editor that lets you position content around both the desktop and mobile versions of your site exactly the way you want to (while preserving the responsive nature of your site).

Wix’s drag and drop editor isn’t bad, and gives you a lot of flexibility of content layout too — but its interface is in general a bit sluggish by comparison to Squarespace’s.

Although Shopify has a drag and drop editor too, it currently only lets you edit page templates, not pages themselves — and this makes for a confusing workflow.

That said, Shopify’s tools for adding products and categories are superb — when it comes to ecommerce, its interface is extremely well thought through and the best of the three platforms.

Product options and variants

Despite being the most obvious ‘ecommerce’ solution of the three (the other two products started life as more general website building tools), Shopify is more restrictive than its competitors when it comes to creating product options and variants.

Product options are things like size, color and material (‘large’ or ‘red’ or ‘leather’).

Variants are the combinations of these (a large blue suede shoe would be one variant, a small black leather shoe would be another etc.).

Shopify limits you to creating 3 product options and 100 variants, but…

So a win here for Wix.

Importing and exporting

When it comes to importing regular website content from another platform (i.e., pages and posts rather than products), Squarespace is the winner — it lets you import pages and posts from WordPress, Bloggr and Tumblr.

By contrast Wix just permits WordPress imports, and Shopify doesn’t come with any built-in features for importing external pages and posts from other platforms (you’ll need to either copy and paste your content in, or pay for a third-party app to gain importing functionality).

Squarespace is a bit better than Shopify and Wix too for exporting content, letting you output most of your site content in WordPress format — this isn’t possible in Wix at all, and again, Shopify requires you to invest in an app to gain this functionality.

Shopify definitely wins when it comes to importing and exporting products however — you can import between 50,000 and an unlimited number of products (depending on plan) and there are no restrictions on the number of items you can export.

Squarespace and Wix limit the number of products you can import more tightly — caps of 10,000 and 50,000 apply respectively.

Squarespace and Wix apply limits to the number of products you can export too, with Wix restricting you to exporting 5,000 products and Squarespace 10,000.

Content creation tools

When it comes to content creation tools, Wix and Squarespace offer more ‘out of the box’ options than Shopify.

Their blogging features, galleries and image manipulation tools are all better than what you get from Shopify.

(That said, Shopify does let you improve the situation here via the addition of apps — more on which later).

Squarespace is a particularly good choice if you’re working in a creative area — music, video, photography, art etc. — as not only are its templates particularly impressive when used for these sorts of projects, its tools for creating and showcasing creative content are particularly good.

Payment processing

To accept payments on an online store you need to connect a payment gateway to it — the software that processes credit card transactions online.

Of the three products, Shopify lets you connect more payment gateways — 100 to Wix’s 90+ and Squarespace’s fairly minimal offering of 2.

And significantly, Shopify lets you accept Google Pay for payments — something that is not the case with either Wix or Squarespace.

As for transaction fees — a cut of sales taken by your ecommerce platform — these can be avoided on all three platforms (depending on location and plan).

The situation here is as follows:

(Note that credit card processing fees — charged by a payment gateway — are different to transaction fees, and you can’t avoid these on any of the platforms under discussion).

Abandoned cart recovery

Abandoned cart recovery is where you identify visitors to your store who only went part of the way through a purchase — and try to convince them to complete it.

You do this by emailing these visitors encouraging them to complete their transaction (usually with an incentive like a promo code).

Wix, Shopify and Squarespace all give you tools for automating this process. However, Shopify’s are the most sophisticated (you can identify more types of cart abandonment, and control the outreach process to the nth degree).

Significantly, Squarespace only makes abandoned cart saving available on its most expensive plan, while it’s bundled with all Wix ecommerce ones and all Shopify ones (and thus available at a much cheaper price point on Wix and Shopify).

Point of sale

“Point of Sale” (POS) refers to the process of accepting payments for in-person purchases at a physical location — for example, a retail store or market stall.

POS functionality lets you merchants make use of card readers, barcode scanners and other selling hardware during the purchase process, while automatically recording sales and updating inventory levels in the dashboard of your online store.

Wix, Shopify and Squarespace all provide point of sale features, but of the three platforms under discussion, Shopify is currently the winner — its POS hardware range is the most extensive and its offering for selling in physical locations the most developed.

Wix comes second in this department — it gives you quite a lot of POS functionality, via both third-party companies (Square and SumUp) and and its own new POS system, Wix POS (note that the latter is currently available only in Canada and the US, and to a ‘select’ number of Wix users only).

Squarespace’s POS features are the least developed of the three — you can only use its POS system in the US and you are limited to using a card reader with it.

Dropshipping and print on demand

Dropshipping is a method of selling products where you don’t manufacture, purchase, store or deliver any of them yourself. Instead, you take orders for products via an online store, and send theses to a supplier. The supplier then ships the products to the customer and charges you a fee for doing so.

Shopify is by far the best option of the three products when it comes to dropshipping. Not only does it offer you a much wider range of dropshipping apps than the other two platforms (444 versus Wix’s 36 and Squarespace’s 8), it also gives you access to a dedicated dropshipping starter kit containing resources and dedicated tutorials to help you make the most of the business model.

It’s a similar story with print on demand (POD). This is a form of selling where you apply custom designs to products which are then printed and fulfilled by your chosen printing supplier every time an item is ordered from your store.

Shopify is again the winner, offering integrations with a much wider range of POD services. It connects with 414 POD suppliers, while Wix connects with 37 and Squarespace just four.

(It’s worth noting that all three products integrate with the two major POD suppliers Printful and Printify, however, which should.)

Apps and integrations

As with dropshipping, Shopify is the winner when it comes to apps and integrations (add-ons that enhance the basic functionality of your website or store).

There is a huge range of apps in the Shopify app store (8,000+), making the Wix and Squarespace app offering look pretty modest by comparison (you’ll find 500+ apps in the Wix app market, and just 32 in Squarespace’s).

One thing worth noting here that although on the whole this gives Shopify an edge, it also highlights the fact that in some cases, Shopify relies more than the other two platforms on the addition of apps to gain key functionality.

For example, selling digital downloads, adding fully-featured data capture forms and removing tight limits on product options all require the addition of Shopify apps; in the other platforms, these are built-in features.

Overall though, because of the huge range of additional features and integrations available via Shopify’s app store, the winner here is still Shopify.

International selling

When it comes to international selling, the clear winner — and by some distance — is Shopify.

Its ‘Shopify Markets’ feature lets you create different selling areas based on country or groups of countries. You can then manage currencies, languages, international domains and payment gateways for these markets easily, all in one place.

Wix comes second here. It lets you build multilingual sites easily enough, and you can create more of them than Shopify (Wix lets you translate your site into 180 languages; Shopify’s limit is 20).

Wix also lets you display prices in local currencies — although significantly, your store visitors won’t be able to check out in their local currency (something that can negatively affect sales).

Squarespace has a long way to go before it competes with Wix and Squarespace in this area. It has no multi-currency selling features at all (you can only display prices and sell in one currency), and if you want to translate your site, you’ll need to use the Weglot app, which can end up being very costly if your site requires translation into a large number of languages.

Automatic tax calculation

It’s another clear win for Shopify here. Its automatic tax calculation features are more sophisticated than those of either Wix or Squarespace, work in more countries and crucially cater for VAT MOSS (a complicated tax that must be paid if you are selling digital products — music, eBooks etc. — to consumers in the EU).

Wix does come with some automatic tax calculation features out of the box, but limits apply to the number of transactions that they can be applied to (and they’re quite tight: even on its most expensive ecommerce plan, you can only perform 500 automatic tax calculations per month, which won’t necessarily be enough for professional merchants).

Squarespace’s automatic tax feature involves making use of a TaxJar extension — and currently only works in the US.

Email marketing

Ecommerce platforms are increasingly bolting email marketing features onto their feature set, and it’s easy to see why — e-newsletters and mailing lists remain hugely effective tools for generating sales.

Shopify and Wix are the winners here, because they offer free email marketing tools, while Squarespace doesn’t.

Shopify lets you send up to 10,000 emails for free every month; Wix’s equivalent limit is 200.

Although email marketing tools are available in Squarespace, they aren’t as effective from an automation point of view, and you have to pay extra to use them.

Search engine optimization

All three of these website builders are reasonably good when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), giving you more control over SEO elements (URLs, redirects, meta descriptions etc.) than several competing products. You won’t have the control over hosting and technical SEO that you get with self-hosted platforms like WordPress, but the key SEO aspects are taken care of by each platform.

Shopify and Wix both beat Squarespace when it comes to URL redirects however — you’ll be automatically prompted to create them whenever you change a URL, while Squarespace forces you to do this manually.

(Redirects are important from an SEO perspective because they let Google know when a page has changed location, and allow the search engine to crawl and rank the new version).

Wix and Shopify also give you more control over your robots.txt file (a file that tells search engines what to crawl on your website) than Squarespace.

Shopify and Squarespace both beat Wix in one key SEO respect, and that’s in their use of responsive design — Google’s preferred approach to website creation.

(Sites that use responsive design automatically adjust their sizing to suit the device they’re being viewed on.)

Although Wix sites do feature some responsive elements, they’re not fully responsive yet. While for the majority of users this isn’t something to worry about massively, in super competitive SEO niches, the lack of responsive templates might not be ideal.

Customer support

Wix and Shopify provide a more comprehensive customer support offering than Squarespace, giving you access to phone support, live chat and email support (Squarespace limits you to chat and email support).

The Wix and Shopify help centers are available in more languages too — Shopify support materials are available in 21 languages; Wix’s come in 12; and Squarespace’s six.

One thing about Shopify’s support center that I don’t like is that by comparison to Wix’s and Squarespace’s, it is extremely light on images and video tutorials.

Overall therefore I’d give Wix a slight win on customer support, because it provides a large range of support channels (in a lot of languages) and gives users a help center that unlike Shopify’s is rich in multimedia content.

Pricing and value for money

For the purposes of a pricing comparison between Wix, Shopify and Squarespace, I’m going to assume that you’re interested in using the platforms for ecommerce.

That being the case, you’ll find that the entry-level plans for creating an online store are fairly similar. When you pay upfront for your plan, the per-month costs for the entry level commerce plans work out as follows:

It’s worth saying that occasionally Wix and Shopify offer heavily discounted options — I’ve seen both platforms discount their plans by up to 50% at times (usually when plans are paid for on an annual basis). Squarespace’s discounts tend to be more modest — more in the region of 10%-20%.

Overall, I’d say that for ecommerce, Shopify is by far the best value option — the feature set you get for selling online (possibly with the exception of product options) trumps those of Wix and Squarespace.

(And if you don’t need a fully-fledged online store, but just want to embed products on an existing website or social media presence, the Shopify Starter plan, which costs just $5 per month, gives you a very cheap way to do so).

However, when it comes to content creation tools, Squarespace and Wix arguably offer better value, because they let you do more with text, images, blogs, galleries and videos out of the box. Although Shopify does give you access to good content management tools, these typically come in the form of apps (many of which involve a fee).

One last thing to note about pricing is that if you pay for Wix or Squarespace on an annual basis, you’ll get a free custom domain name for your first year of service.

Note: for a detailed overview of Wix, Shopify and Squarespace costs, you can check out our detailed guides to Wix pricing, Shopify pricing and Squarespace pricing.

Free trials

The three platforms take quite different approaches to free trials.

Squarespace’s trial is the most conventional — you simply get 14 days to try the product out (with extensions available if you need more time to build your website).

Shopify’s trial is super short — just 3 days. However, once it’s over, you can choose to subscribe to Shopify for just $1 a month for the first 3 months. This gives you access to the platform for over 90 days for next to nothing.

Wix gives you an entirely free plan to play with. It’s very basic, doesn’t let you sell anything and features prominent Wix ads — but it’s a good way to try the platform out.

If you want to try the selling features of Wix out without committing to the platform permanently, the best thing to do is to start a free trial, upgrade to a paid plan, and then cancel it during your first 14 days if you think the platform is not for you (doing so will give you access to a full refund).

You can learn more about this process here.

Wix vs Shopify vs Squarespace: the conclusion

I hope our Wix vs Shopify vs Squarespace comparison has helped clarify your thinking on the three products!

Based on my experience of building websites and online stores using them all, I would use them as follows: