Squarespace Versus WordPress

Squarespace and WordPress are two of the world’s leading website building software and since they are both excellent options, it can be difficult to choose between the two for your next website. Though they share many of the same features, they do have many differences that we’ll lay out to help you decide which to use.

Squarespace Versus WordPress

What is WordPress?

WordPress is the world’s leading website building software, which makes sense as it is free and quite easy to use. WordPress offers both hosted and self-hosted website building tools. Hosted or SaaS (software as a service) WordPress allows you to combine templates, apps, WordPress/third party features, and themes to build your ideal website, without any necessary coding experience.

Self-hosted WordPress is a software that allows you to code your website in order to modify and personalize it to create just about anything you can imagine on a website. Since WordPress is an open-sourced platform, it means anyone can contribute coded features, themes and templates to the website for public use.

While this means you will have access to over 11000 themes and 50000 plug-ins created by the public, it also means it can be difficult to find quality, finished, professional templates and plug-ins amongst all of the choices. Though WordPress is free, there are many features, themes and plug-ins that you must pay to use.

What is Squarespace?

Squarespace is a closed source Saas website builder and was created to be a “code-free” way to create a beautiful website. Users have access to Squarespace’s professional catalog of themes, plug-ins, templates and features for you to mix and match to create your website.

Squarespace has almost all features you would need to create your website including an e-commerce feature (you would have to use a third-party source with WordPress). Since Squarespace is closed source, it means you only have access to Squarespace’s catalog themes, templates and features while creating your website. This can be seen as both a positive and a negative. It’s positive because every feature you will use will be finished, professional and high quality (unlike WordPress which has many unfinished publicly created features that can be hard to sort through).

The negative side is that you are limited to Squarespace’s features (though certain plans do allow for more outside plug-ins) which means you will not have access to all the helpful third-party plug-ins such as Yoast SEO, for search engine optimization on your website.

Costs

When comparing prices, it is far easier to come up with a succinct monthly cost for Squarespace as they offer four monthly plans that cover everything. There are no extra fees once you have paid your fee.

Their plans are offered at a range of price points, though the prices can be reduced if you pay them grouped annually rather than monthly. That cost covers your domain, hosting, themes, templates, features, analytics and likely best of all customer support. Squarespace’s customer support team answers every question you may have within an hour, so all can keep running smoothly and stress-free.

WordPress’ costs, on the other hand, are a little harder to nail down. Though using WordPress is technically free, there will likely be many other fees. The first of those fees is your domain and hosting. You’ll have to pay separately for them and you will have to research which hosting option works best for you. Depending on your needs, these fees may be the end of it, in which case WordPress can be quite a bit cheaper than Squarespace. However, more than likely, your website will have more costs involved.

As mentioned above, WordPress is an open-sourced software which means there are tens-of-thousands of publicly created themes and plug-ins. Many of the most appealing themes are not free and with so many themes to choose from, it is often easier to just select from the often more professional-looking paid-for themes. These themes can range in price quite a lot, which makes start-up budgeting a little bit difficult.

Along with themes, many of the most essential plug-ins are not free. If your website is an e-commerce store, you will have to pay another fee for e-commerce integration. Overall, all of these hidden costs can make creating your website more difficult to plan for, especially for a beginner.

That being said, WordPress’ hard-to-nail down price point is not without reason. Unlike Squarespace, WordPress is completely free in how you personalize, customize and alter your website. It has tens of thousands of publicly-created themes and plug-ins, limited options so you can pay for what you need and a self-hosting option so you can code (or hire someone to code) anything that WordPress may be missing.

Related Content >> Wix versus WordPress

Conclusion

WordPress and Squarespace are both excellent website building and hosting platforms. Squarespace’s catalog of themes and features are all professional options that make creating a website quite simple. They also boast an unmatched customer support team and a regular monthly (or annual) fee at four different price points.

WordPress is an open-sourced software with both hosted and self-hosted options, meaning you can code or have access to any publicly coded theme, feature or plug-in. The prices are a bit more difficult to nail down, since there are so many options which can make it harder to make decisions, find professional themes and to budget for. Overall, both are great options it just comes down to what you are looking for in a website building platform.

Need help with making decisions for your website? Contact our Orlando web design agency to see how we can help you!