Wix vs Shopify vs Squarespace — 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 my deeper dive into each feature.

At-a-glance feature breakdown

The table below highlights the key features to consider when choosing a website building tool — particularly one you’re intending to use for ecommerce purposes — and gives you data on how Wix, Shopify and Squarespace compare for each one.

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 host images and other files on your site — oddly Wix limits space, while the other two platforms give you an unlimited amount of it.

Templates

In terms of the quantity of free templates, it’s a definite win for Wix, which offers 830 of them — far more than Shopify’s 13 and Squarespace’s 177.

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

There are 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.

The ‘responsive template’ issue is significant because Google can give preferential treatment to sites using a responsive design. (More on search engine optimization 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 ‘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.

(This may be about to change however. A recent issue of ‘Shopify Editions’ — one of the company’s newsletters — contained an announcement that an improved and more flexible drag and drop editor is on the way).

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

Product options and variants

In terms of how many products you can sell on your store, Shopify wins. While Wix and Squarespace restrict the number of products you can sell to 50,000 and 10,000 respectively, Shopify places no restrictions on how many items you can list.e

But what about creating options and variants for these products?

First, let’s get an understanding of both.

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.).

Now, despite being the most obvious ‘ecommerce’ solution of the three (because the other two products started life as more general website building tools), I’ve found Shopify to be more restrictive than its competitors when it comes to both product options and variants.

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

So a win here for Wix.

It’s not quite that simple however, because technically you can lift all product option and variant limits for Shopify. The problem is that you’ll have to pay for a third-party app to do so, and these can be quite expensive (the popular ‘Infinite Options,’ for example, starts at $12.99 per month).

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 into your site, 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 respectively apply.

Squarespace and Wix also apply limits to the number of products you can export, 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, gallery-creation and image manipulation tools are all more feature rich, and more flexible.

(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 (a payment gateway being the software that processes credit card transactions online).

Of the three products, Shopify and Wix let you connect considerably more payment gateways to your store than Wix — both let you connect over 100. By contrast, Squarespace restricts you to using just three: its native payment system, ‘Squarespace Payments,’ PayPal and Stripe.

(Note: Square can also be used with Squarespace if you are using its POS system).

For me, the most significant thing to note here is that Shopify and Wix both let you accept Google Pay — a hugely popular method of payment — while Squarespace, very strangely, doesn’t.

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, my tests revealed Shopify’s to be the most sophisticated — the platform let me identify more types of cart abandonment, and control the outreach process to a much greater degree than Wix or Squarespace.

Significantly, Squarespace only makes abandoned cart saving available on its most expensive plan, while it’s bundled with most Wix and Shopify ones (making the feature more affordable on the latter two platforms).

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 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 definitely the winner — its POS hardware range is the most extensive and its offering for selling in physical locations the most developed.

(Below you’ll find my video interview with Liz Jones, a Shopify POS merchant — she gives a very digestible first-hand overview of the pros and cons of Shopify POS.)

Not only that, but it’s accessible at the cheapest price point — its ‘Starter’ plan, which costs just $5 per month, now bundles POS features.

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 (i.e., no other POS hardware is available for the platform).

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 these 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 (I counted 578 apps 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.

You can learn more about the dropshipping starter kit here.

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 here, offering integrations with a much wider range of POD services. It connects with 528 POD suppliers, while Wix connects with 36 and Squarespace just five.

(It’s worth noting that all three products integrate with the two major POD suppliers Printful and Printify, however, which should cover the majority of merchants’ needs when it comes to print on demand).

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 (13,000+), making the Wix and Squarespace app offerings look pretty modest by comparison (I counted 947 apps in the Wix app market, and just 43 in Squarespace’s).

I feel it’s worth highlighting something important here, however: although on the whole, Shopify’s massive app library this gives the platform an ‘extensibility’ edge, it also highlights the fact that in quite a lot of 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.

Gated content and online courses

When it comes to offering premium content to your audience — for example gated members’ areas or online courses that users pay to access — this is technically possible with all three platforms.

However, while doing so in Shopify or Wix will involve adding apps to proceedings, Squarespace offers some dedicated features for offering premium content, namely:

These features are available on all Squarespace plans, albeit with a fairly large transaction fee of 9% in effect.

(You can reduce this fee by purchasing a digital products add-on plan, costing between $12 and $111 per month, from Squarespace.)

When testing Squarespace’s digital content tools, I found them very easy to enable and very easy to use; I loved how completely integrated into the Squarespace environment they were.

I liked the way Squarespace also lets you paywall your blog too — this is a nifty little feature that opens up significant content monetization options.

So if selling premium content or courses is a key requirement for you, Squarespace may well be your best choice.

International selling

When it comes to international selling, I have to say that the clear winner — by some margin — 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,

I’ve sold a lot of digital products using a lot of different platforms in the past — and only Shopify ever let me deal with the VAT MOSS issue effectively.

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 the most expensive Wix plan, you can only perform 500 automatic tax calculations per month, which probably won’t 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 (SEO)

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.

None give you the precise 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 all three platforms.

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’s search algorithm know when a page has changed location, and allow it 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.

(As discussed earlier, 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.

Tip: you can learn more about search engine optimization for these three platforms in our dedicated guides to Wix SEO, Shopify SEO and Squarespace SEO.

User accounts

If you need to provide a lot of staff members with access to the back end of your website (so that they can update it), you should pay close attention to the number of user accounts that Wix, Shopify and Squarespace let you have.

Squarespace has a substantial edge over both Wix and Shopify on this front, because nearly all its plans let an unlimited number of users access your account (while Shopify and Wix cap user access quite tightly).

For context, on Shopify’s ‘Basic’ plan you get access to just one staff account; and even on its $399 ‘Advanced’ plan, only 15 seats are provided.

Wix is a bit more generous, with its mid-level ‘Core’ and ‘Business’ plans providing you with 5 and 10 seats respectively — but its ‘Business Elite’ plan caps the seat count at 15.

Customer support

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

(On its non-enterprise plans, Shopify and Squarespace limit you to chat and email support).

When it comes to online resources, Shopify’s help center is available in more languages than Wix and Squarespace’s — Shopify support materials are available in 21 languages; Wix’s come in 13; and Squarespace’s eight.

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, I’d give Wix a win on customer support, because it provides a larger 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, I’d have to say that Squarespace and Wix arguably offer better value, because they let you do a lot 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, 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 very short — just 3 days. However, once it’s over, you can choose to subscribe to Shopify for just $1 for your first month of service. This gives you access to the platform for around 30 days at a very low cost.

You can learn more about the Shopify for $1 offer here.

There’s also a special dropshipping trial available for Shopify. This lets you try the product out, but also gives you access to a free dropshipping pack that helps you start a dropshipping business.

You can learn more about the Shopify dropshipping starter kit here.

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).

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: