Squarespace Review: Features, Pros and Cons, Pricing

Squarespace is one of the best website builders on the market today, and remains a great option for users and businesses looking to create a visually stunning website.

Its focus on design means Squarespace has been slower than competitors to incorporate AI into its website building, but its long-awaited AI website builder produces results that are as high quality as its pre-built templates. It’s also an easy platform to use, making Squarespace ideal for beginners who need to create a slick, professional website without the hassle.

That said, Squarespace isn’t the best option for businesses looking to grow into large ecommerce stores, since its sales tools can only accommodate small businesses.

I tested Squarespace myself and, in this review, I’ll go over my experience using its AI builder and give you a rundown of the pros and cons of the platform, as well as its key features.

Getting Started With Squarespace

When I signed up for a Squarespace account, I was given the option of either creating a website using a pre-built template or building one with Blueprint AI, Squarespace’s AI website builder.

I opted to test out Squarespace’s AI website builder, since it was only launched in late 2024. Despite its newness, I was surprised by how little Squarespace promotes its AI builder to users. The option to build a website using Blueprint AI was a very discreet button in the top right corner of the screen, dwarfed by the library of pre-built templates below.

This is in stark contrast to competitor website builders such as Wix or Hostinger, which shuttle new users down the AI website builder pipeline.

Creating a website with Squarespace Blueprint AI didn’t take long, but there were around six prompts to get through, more than competitors Hostinger, which only has two prompts. Most of the prompts are multiple-choice questions, so they were quick to get through, and the prompts were much more design-focused compared with competitors, asking me, for example, to choose a “brand personality” and color palette.

By contrast, competitor AI builders, such as the ones offered by Wix or Shopify, ask fewer questions on design preferences, and are more focused on finding out the purpose of your website.

When Squarespace’s AI website builder has finished generating your website, you’ll be taken straight to the website editor, something which wasn’t the case with Wix. This makes it easy to get to work personalizing your website.

When it comes to the results, I was very impressed with what Squarespace’s AI website builder created. The design was in line with the high standard of Squarespace’s prebuilt templates: very modern and polished-looking, with tailored and professional imagery.

That said, the stock images Squarespace’s AI builder chose had absolutely nothing to do with the purpose of my website. This might have something to do with the fact that the AI prompts were so focused on design that the website builder never asked what my site was for.

AI website builders that asked about my website’s purpose, such as Wix and Hostinger, had more fitting stock images.

I also wasn’t given the option of generating a new website with AI based on the same prompt, an option most competitors offer. So, if you aren’t easily pleased, I’d suggest skipping the AI and choosing one of Squarespace’s prebuilt templates.

My experience with the Squarespace editor

Like Wix, Squarespace’s editor is drag-and-drop, which means you can easily move elements around on the page by clicking on them.

However, unlike many of its competitors, Squarespace’s editor has a background grid layout that appears whenever you drag an element, such as a text box. This made it easy to align different elements when I was customizing a page and led to a more cohesive, attractive final result.

Squarespace’s editor doesn’t have a sidebar menu, so to make changes to the style elements of your website you need to click on what you want to edit, then a menu appears with a small selection of options.

I liked this design choice since I felt it simplified the process of editing and allowed me to change elements one at a time.

The benefit of Squarespace’s intuitive editing is the time and stress you’ll save. With clear and helpful pop-up tips, you feel as if you already know how to use Squarespace, even when you’re just getting started.

However, the editor isn’t perfect. Because there’s no sidebar menu, you have to exit the editor and use the dashboard menu to edit another page of your website, instead of staying in the editor the whole time. This can slow down the editing process, and it can be a confusing extra step when you’re first testing out the website builder.

The Pros and Cons of Squarespace

Like every website builder I’ve tested, Squarespace has strengths and weaknesses. Here’s a quick summary of what they are:

✅ Stunning website templates

Squarespace’s website templates are the most attractive on the market, a quality that’s remained unchanged throughout the years.

While Squarespace might not have as many templates as top rival Wix (Squarespace has a little over 150, while Wix has over 900), Squarespace templates are overall more attractive and better organized than Wix’s.

Because of this, Squarespace is ideal for businesses that need to showcase appealing design and visuals, such as trendy restaurants, fitness studios, fashion brands, and photographers.

✅ Easy-to-use dashboard and editor

Squarespace is a great option for users with limited technical knowledge who want an easy-to-use website.

I found both its dashboard and editor very straightforward to navigate, a factor that’s in part helped by the fact that Squarespace doesn’t have an overwhelming number of features, unlike Wix, and doesn’t offer advanced business management tools, like Shopify.

Squarespace also gives new users a setup checklist, and the main dashboard features several tutorials on how to complete basic tasks, such as creating a new website page or adding products. Although most website builders offer setup guides and video tutorials, Squarespace was the only one to suggest a library of tutorials for basic tasks, right on its main dashboard.

✅ Excellent booking management tools

Squarespace has its own native booking and scheduling app, Acuity Scheduling, which offers a comprehensive range of booking management and scheduling features. These include creating a calendar with availability based on both business and staff hours, as well as a client contact library.

Although rivals Wix and GoDaddy also offer built-in booking management tools, Squarespace’s Acuity scheduling app is particularly well organized and syncs seamlessly with the rest of your Squarespace website.

❌ No hardware for in-person selling

Although you can sell products and services online with Squarespace’s ecommerce features, it doesn’t offer any hardware for selling in person. This means it’s not the best option for businesses that want to sell both online and in person.

While it’s not a requirement for a website builder to offer equipment and tools for selling in person, Squarespace’s rivals, such as Wix and Shopify, are offering card machines or even full-blown POS systems to make it easier for businesses to combine online and in-person selling.

❌ Site speed – can be slow to load

Squarespace didn’t perform well in our site speed tests, perhaps due to its high volume of content and imagery. While not a fatal flaw, a slow-to-load website can be irritating for customers and cause them to leave before completing a purchase or booking.

If you’re expecting high website traffic, you might prefer a faster-loading option, such as Hostinger or GoDaddy.

❌ Limited AI tools

Squarespace is a little behind the competition when it comes to AI. It launched its AI website builder a year or more after rivals Wix and GoDaddy launched theirs, and the only other AI-powered tool Squarespace offers is an AI writer.

Meanwhile, competitors Wix and GoDaddy offer a range of AI content creation tools, with AI capable of creating marketing content, logos, and helping with SEO. Wix and Hostinger even offer an AI image generator.

That said, given the emphasis Squarespace places on the quality of its designs, it’s not surprising that it hasn’t dived headfirst into using AI for all aspects of website content creation. But if you’re looking to create a website quickly, you might prefer more AI-heavy website builders, such as the ones discussed in the paragraph above.

How Much Does Squarespace Cost?

Squarespace has four pricing plans, with costs ranging from $16 to $99 per month. There’s no free plan, although Squarespace does offer a 14-day free trial, which is the industry norm.

See our guide to Squarespace pricing for an in-depth review of costs, or take a quick look at the table below for an easy comparison:

Like all website builders, Squarespace has increased its costs over the years, and is quite average when it comes to pricing.

Its most expensive plan, the $99 per month Advanced, is still quite a lot less than the Wix equivalent, which is $159 per month, or Shopify’s $2,300 Enterprise plan. That said, Hostinger remains the cheapest way to build a website, with a maximum cost of $13.99 per month.

Squarespace’s Key Features Explained

Squarespace’s key features as a website builder include booking management, marketing tools, and SEO elements.

Booking and scheduling tools

Squarespace has some of the best booking and scheduling features on the market. Its Acuity Scheduling app is built into the platform and is a powerful scheduling software package that Squarespace acquired in 2019.

With Squarespace’s tools, you’ll be able to create a customized bookings page, set availability for different staff across different locations, and send automated reminders to clients via text or email. You can also create invoices, a variety of intake forms for customers, and sync your scheduling software with other calendar programs, such as Outlook and Google Calendar.

Any business that requires robust scheduling features, such as a restaurant, exercise studio, salon, or clinic, will benefit greatly from this.

Of course, as I’ve noted earlier in this review, Squarespace isn’t the only website builder to offer built-in booking tools, with Wix and GoDaddy offering alternatives. However, since Squarespace’s booking tools come from the acquisition of a specialized booking system, Acuity, they allow for better appointment management.

Marketing tools

While Squarespace doesn’t offer any built-in tools for social media marketing, it does offer quality built-in email marketing tools.

You can create an email marketing campaign directly from the Squarespace platform by selecting one of its pre-built templates, which are just as attractive as Squarespace’s website templates. Plus, you can easily match any template to your website design with the click of a button. This makes maintaining consistent branding easy.

You can also schedule emails directly from the Squarespace backend and set up a variety of automations, such as abandoned cart recovery or welcome emails. Plus, for more advanced features, you can also integrate a specialized email marketing platform into your Squarespace website, such as Mailchimp.

While Squarespace’s email marketing tools aren’t unique – Wix, Shopify, and GoDaddy offer similar tools – they’re still a useful addition for most businesses.

Where Squarespace falls short is in the fact that it doesn’t offer an AI email marketing campaign creator, and doesn’t offer built-in tools for creating and managing social media content. These are features that competitors Wix and GoDaddy offer, making them better options for users who want an all-in-one platform.

Squarespace does, however, integrate with social media platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram, and with third-party apps, such as Unfold, which let you create social media content.

SEO

Like most website builders, Squarespace offers basic SEO (search engine optimization) tools. These are essential for making sure your website appears high in search engine results.

My central critique is that the SEO tools are quite difficult to find in Squarespace’s backend. There’s no dedicated SEO tab in the main dashboard menu. To find any SEO tools, you need to go to a separate “Settings” page, and then select the “Marketing” subtab, which is actually the SEO tab.

Although Squarespace claims to offer AI assistance with SEO, the tool is quite limited. Squarespace’s “AI SEO assistant” will essentially do a sweep of your website for you and check that all pages have meta titles and descriptions. It will also give you the option of editing these.

However, unlike Wix’s version, it won’t give you specialized advice on how to improve your website’s SEO. You’ll have to rely on the guides in Squarespace’s knowledge center for that, or hire an expert, which you can do through Squarespace.

On the plus side, your Squarespace website will also automatically resize to fit mobile phone screens. This is an important feature since Google counts mobile optimization when ranking websites, placing those that are well-optimized for mobiles higher up in the search results.

Squarespace’s Ecommerce Features

Squarespace’s ecommerce features are available from its starting plan, the $16 per month Basic plan, which is actually quite unusual for a non-ecommerce-focused website builder. For context, competitors Wix, Hostinger, and GoDaddy don’t let businesses take payments on their starter website builder plans.

This makes Squarespace one of the best ecommerce platforms for small businesses looking for an affordable starting plan.

As I’ve noted when discussing Squarespace’s booking tools, it’s a particularly good option for businesses that sell services and take appointments and that want to give their customers the option to pay online.

But Squarespace’s ecommerce tools can also be used for selling physical products. With Squarespace, businesses can sell an unlimited number of products, unlike Wix, which has a 50,000 product cap on its most expensive plan. Squarespace also integrates with third-party shipping apps and marketplaces, like its rivals Wix and Shopify, and businesses can create a customized checkout page that matches the aesthetic of their Squarespace website.

Like many website builders, Squarespace offers its own payment processing service, Squarespace Payments, with processing fees ranging from 2.5% + $0.30 to 2.9% + $0.30 depending on your plan (fee percentages go down as plan prices go up). These fees are in line with what competitors Wix and Shopify charge.

You can also integrate with third-party payment processors at no extra cost, most notably Square, with which Squarespace has a partnership. This has allowed users to integrate their Squarespace website with Square’s POS hardware since 2019, a workaround for the fact that Squarespace doesn’t offer its own equipment for selling in person.

Squarespace also integrates with other popular POS systems, like Clover and Lightspeed.

However, this still puts Squarespace behind competitors such as Shopify, Wix, GoDaddy, and even Square itself, which all offer an ecommerce website builder and their own card machines or POS equipment for selling in person.

Squarespace’s AI Tools

Besides its AI website builder, Squarespace’s only other AI tool is its AI writer.

Squarespace’s AI website builder, which Squarespace calls Blueprint AI, produces great results and is more design-focused than competitor AI website builders, as I’ve noted in my overview of getting started with Squarespace.

The AI writer Squarespace offers is quite versatile, capable of drafting both long and short copy for your website or blog, and even creating product descriptions for an online store.

When it comes to the quality of the writing, it’s about what you’d expect from AI – not particularly inspiring. Squarespace’s AI writer also tends to draft long pieces of copy over short ones. This isn’t ideal when you’re using it to write product descriptions or blurbs, and it meant I had to ask the AI writer to shorten the copy on several occasions.

Additionally, although Squarespace states that its AI writer can be used to write copy for email marketing campaigns, I wasn’t able to use it to create new content, only edit existing content.

Getting Help and Support With Squarespace

Squarespace has a wide range of customer support options, including live chat, email, and social media support.

However, it lacks phone support, which Wix, Shopify, and GoDaddy all offer. This makes it harder to get adequate support for complicated issues with Squarespace.

That said, Squarespace has a well-stocked knowledge center and user forum for DIY troubleshooting. It also makes its video tutorials, covering website-making basics, readily available for new users on the main dashboard in the backend.

It’s also possible to hire an expert to help you with your website directly through Squarespace, from web developers to SEO specialists. This is a service that competitors Wix and Shopify also offer.

How Does Squarespace Compare to Its Competitors?

Here’s a quick comparison chart of Squarespace’s nearest competitors:

• Wix: Wix is a great alternative to Squarespace if you want a website builder that does it all. Wix offers a wide range of built-in content creation tools, over 900 modern-looking templates that cover a larger range of topics than Squarespace, and a huge app market for integrations. But be warned, Wix isn’t quite as easy to use as Squarespace. Read our Wix review for more details.
• Hostinger: If your priority isn’t so much how your website looks, but how fast and easy it is to build, you might prefer Hostinger to Squarespace. Unlike Squarespace, Hostinger has put an emphasis on AI tools to enhance and speed up website creation and is a good option for creating a simple website without putting in too much work. Read our Hostinger review for more details.
• Shopify: If you’re an ecommerce business, you might want to consider Shopify over Squarespace, especially if you plan on growing and expanding. That’s because Shopify is much more scalable than Squarespace, and it offers a native POS system, allowing you to integrate and manage online and in-person sales from the same software. Read our Shopify review for more details.
• GoDaddy: If you’re looking for a quick and easy way to get online, but want a platform that offers a few more content creation tools than Squarespace, while still being easier to use than Wix, then GoDaddy is a great option. Read our GoDaddy review for more details.

For a direct comparison of our two top website builder picks, see our Wix vs Squarespace review.

How We Reviewed Squarespace