BEST OVERALL

4.2

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• 14 Day Free Trial Available
• Free Unlimited Hosting, Top-Of-The-Line Security, Dependable Resources, and 24/7 Personalized Support
• Flexible & Customizable Website Templates for Every Purpose, Membership Sites, Email Campaigns, Social Presence & More

4.5

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• Powerful Free Website Builder with Customizable Webpage Designs and Useful Tools
• Freedom to Sell Anytime, Anywhere with Weebly + Square
• Customer Success Team to Guide You Via Email, Chat, Or Phone Call

Weebly vs. Squarespace: Quick Summary

After testing both, I’d say Squarespace takes the win. It’s more flexible, packed with built-in tools, and performs better overall. I really like how clean and modern its templates look, and having 24/7 support is a big bonus.

Weebly is still a good pick if you’re just getting started or want something affordable with ecommerce features. It’s easier to use and even has a free plan, but Squarespace just feels more polished and gives you more creative control.

What Is Weebly?

Weebly is one of the fastest-growing and longest-standing brands in website building. It is one of the most user-friendly, robust, and reliable website builders, and anyone can use it to launch a blog, online store, or personal website without writing a single line of code. Weebly gives you a personalized domain and email address, reliable and free hosting, fully customizable and modern themes and templates, premium support via email, chat, and phone, video tutorials, webcasts, and more. It’s known for ecommerce, but Weebly’s pricing (starting from free) and robust app marketplace make it a leading choice and one of the best site builders for small businesses in most industries. Weebly nearly nails what a combo of a website builder and business tools should do. Even when it doesn’t, it still is an excellent choice for beginners. Because at the end of the day, Weebly is super easy to use, and you can seriously launch an entire business in under an hour. If you want to learn more about Weebly and everything it offers, you can check out our expert review on the builder, where we cover all of that.

What Is Squarespace?

Squarespace is a versatile website builder that can accommodate creatives, bloggers, and even ecommerce site owners.

Although it initially started as a tool for building static, brochure-style websites, Squarespace has evolved over recent years into a platform that now offers built-in ecommerce and marketing features. Known for its templates’ visual appeal and professional design, Squarespace can help you create a professional-looking site. The intuitive drag-and-drop Squarespace website editor simplifies the process of creating a website, making Squarespace a popular option for those lacking the design and coding skills to build a professional-looking website from scratch. Its affordable pricing and inclusive plans make this site builder a top choice for many site owners. With complimentary email marketing Squarespace can support many different business types. Squarespace is a fully hosted website builder, meaning you don’t have to purchase hosting services separately as you would with other services. To learn more about Squarespace, you can read our expert review on the builder, where we cover all of that and more.

Weebly vs. Squarespace: Quick Comparison

Before we get into our Full Comparison and analyze both Weebly and Squarespace in detail, here is a quick look into what’s to come from the full Weebly vs. Squarespace comparison:

Weebly vs. Squarespace: Full Comparison – Who is Better?

Value for Money (Pricing): Which Offers Better Value For Money?

Weebly Pricing

Weebly offers one free and three premium plans for websites, ranging from $5 to $25 a month when paying annually. For online stores, Weebly provides three plans, ranging from $12 to $38 a month. These prices seem pretty low when compared to other Weebly alternatives. However, it’s important to remember that these are the prices if you pick the annual plan, paying for 12 months in advance. They will increase should you decide to pay monthly. You can pay monthly if you want more flexibility, but this will cost more per month. If you are using the free plan, you’ll have adverts displayed on your site, you only have limited features (such as 500MB storage), and you can’t use a custom domain. Building your business on the weebly.com domain does not give you complete control over your business website – you are essentially renting space on their online platform. If you have the Free Plan and decide to move to a different website builder in the future, you may lose your website. Therefore, selecting a paid plan and installing your unique domain is better.

You can see Weebly’s pricing plans and features in the photos below.

Squarespace Pricing

There are four Squarespace plans, with monthly licensing fees ranging from $14 to $65 depending on your service tier and whether you want to pay monthly or annually. Squarespace does not offer a free plan, though it offers a free 14-day trial.

The cheapest Squarespace plan is the Personal plan at $14 a month, with website features but no ecommerce functionality. For an online store, the lowest plan is $27 a month, which includes unlimited products, no transaction fees, label printing, and more. You’ll unlock extra features as you upgrade, including ecommerce functions and promotional pop-ups.

The primary differences between the plans are the number of features offered. Ecommerce functionality is available on all plans except the Personal plan. Squarespace isn’t the cheapest web builder and host out there. But if you’re primarily looking to easily build jaw-dropping websites that catch your target audience’s attention, the price tag for even a personal plan might not be an issue for you. The main drawback to Squarespace’s prices is its lack of a free plan. Once your 14-day free trial is up or you want to publish your website, you’ll need to commit and upgrade to a premium plan.

You can see Squarespace’s pricing plans and features in the photo below.

Winner

Comparing pricing between Weebly and Squarespace can be tough because their tiers are completely different. Weebly has levels based on technical and eCommerce features. Squarespace pricing has stories based on the number of users, email, and other features. And Weebly has a free plan. Thus, Weebly is the winner of this category because of their true free plan, and the paid ones are generally cheaper than Squarespace.

Ease of Use: Which Builder Is More Intuitive To Use?

Weebly’s Ease of Use

Weebly is a beginner-friendly website builder that allows users to create a website without coding knowledge easily. It’s a great option for those who want to quickly create a professional website or online store. Everything in the platform is built the way a complete beginner would have no issues learning and mastering the system, unlike other Weebly competitors. Setting the website up was a super simple process, so no other Weebly requirements are needed. The editor is intuitive and easy to manage, and the overall business management experience is pleasurable. Weebly has an excellent, intuitive website editor. The platform is currently maintaining two different editors for creating websites: the Weebly editor and the Square editor. Existing users will be familiar with the Weebly editor. It’s an excellent, easy-to-use editor that Weebly suggests is best for customized, non-ecommerce websites. But then there is the new Square editor. It’s significantly less flexible but a bit easier to use. It’s meant for ecommerce websites. Pages in the Weebly editor are built by dragging elements or sections from the side drawer into your page. Elements and sections are then edited within the page. The Square editor is significantly less flexible than the Weebly editor. With the Square editor, you create your website by adding predesigned sections.

Squarespace’s Ease of Use

Squarespace is a drag-and-drop website builder, but unlike other Squarespace competitors, you can’t just drag anything anywhere. It’s more section-based, which takes a little longer to get to grips with. Once you’ve spent a few minutes exploring, the added structure helps keep your overall site design clean and tidy. Squarespace has a handy tutorial when you first start, helping you find your way around with no other Squarespace requirements needed. It also provides a checklist, which beginners will appreciate. While Squarespace’s interface is modern and minimal, it can feel too clean initially. It takes a few clicks to find the elements you’re looking for, and sometimes we want it to be more obvious where to find certain features.

The best part is that you don’t need to know a single line of code. You can use code if you want to, but one of Squarespace’s greatest strengths is that anyone can use it to create a professional website without ever worrying about their coding skills.

Winner

If you’re looking for a tool that makes it easy to build and manage a website, Weebly and Squarespace are both great options, particularly if your technical skills are limited. Weebly offers a simple drag-and-drop editor so designing a site is intuitive for every skill level. The Squarespace editor is a bit more complicated than Weebly’s. Thus, the winner in this category is Weebly because it’s much more intuitive. Squarespace’s minimalistic design makes users work harder to learn the basics

Templates (Design Flexibility): Which Builder Offers More Design Flexibility?

Weebly’s Templates and Design

There are only about 50 templates, many repeated among the seven categories of Weebly themes. Each of Weebly’s templates is free. They are simple but diverse enough to offer a good selection for many different niches and design preferences. Weebly’s themes are split into categories to help you find the best design for your site. You can get an overview of these categories and their themes below, or read on to find out how customizable Weebly’s themes are. Once you start your website, you’ll be asked to pick a starter theme. However, you can easily change the template in the middle of editing without losing any content on the website.

Weebly allows you to upload and use a third-party theme. All you need to do is find those third-party themes on various marketplaces on the internet. The options cost anywhere from $20 to $50 a piece, so they’re not very expensive, too. The ecosystem is amazing, and you can be assured of many sources if you’re planning to build on Weebly. The wide variety of choices gives you much creative freedom to develop your site. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all mentality, and individual likes and dislikes are welcome here.

Squarespace’s Templates and Design

Squarespace offers around 110 templates, split into many categories, including Photography, Local Business, Weddings, Entertainment, and more. These templates are free to use and edit as you like, unlike other Squarespace competitors, no matter which plans you choose.

While it’s not a “pure” drag-and-drop builder, you can drag certain elements around and reformat the image layout by changing your design settings – for example, by creating a collage or making images overlap. You add pages from the side menu panel, with several choices, including Album, Blank Page, Blog, Cover Page, Events, Folder, Gallery, Link, and Products. You can move pages up and down in the navigation, but you can’t drag them onto other pages for a subordinate navigation level, as you can with other Squarespace alternatives. Instead, you have to use the Folder type to effect nested navigation.

With their sleek, stylish, and modern designs, Squarespace’s templates are created to meet its standards of “great design, usability, and performance.” All templates are free to preview and edit, including in your monthly subscription.

You can browse templates by category and industry if you like. Each template comes with features and layouts specially designed to match the industry it was made for, but you can easily switch up any template’s design and features to fit your needs. All Squarespace templates are mobile responsive.

Winner

Weebly has a nice range of templates, and they’re easy to edit, but they are blown out of the water by Squarespace’s themes. Squarespace is well-designed, good-looking, and mobile responsive. Overall, Squarespace templates are more modern and more customizable, and there are more of them. It’s a good option for design flexibility. Squarespace is the winner in this category.

Features and Tools: Which One Offers More?

Weebly Features and Tools

Weebly has many helpful built-in features that give you so much variety when creating your website. On top of that, its comprehensive app market is full of useful add-ons you can integrate into your site. Some of its most significant features and tools include:

• SEO Tools  – All Weebly sites come with: a sitemap, SEO-friendly HTML formatting, meta descriptions, and responsive design. You can also edit your meta titles and descriptions, customize URLs, and benefit from more advanced SEO features, including adding alt text to images and page-specific descriptions.

• Blog – Weebly’s blog remains one of their strongest points. All the important basic features are included, and it’s very search engine friendly. Blog entries can be scheduled, and you can integrate alternative commenting systems such as Disqus or Facebook. On paid plans, it’s also possible to add multiple editors and authors.
• Domain Names – For your first year, you’ll get a domain name for free, which will cost you $19.95 from the second year onwards. Some of the available domain endings are .com and .ca. Or you can bring your domain with you from another provider and redirect it to Weebly.

Weebly has an impressive App center where you can find free and paid apps, which you can install with just one click and integrate with your website, and no other Weebly requirements are needed. You get all the basic features built into your Weebly editors, such as text blocks and image galleries, but the Weebly App Center is perfect for adding more advanced tools and features to your website.

Squarespace Features and Tools

Squarespace also has many valuable features and tools that you can utilize to do all kinds of things. Squarespace has multi-channel integration. Squarespace can sync with Instagram, allowing you to sell directly via social media. Some of the features that companies like Squarespace include are:

• Email Marketing – Squarespace lets you create email campaigns. It costs an additional fee, but you’d be paying it anyway if you used a 3rd party provider like Mailchimp or Constant Contact. With Squarespace, you can send one-time email campaigns or automated email campaigns.
• Security – All Squarespace and third-party domains come with free SSL certificates when connected to your Squarespace site. Squarespace has built-in security to fight off malware and unwanted bugs and DDoS protection to help protect your site from malicious traffic.
• Blog – Squarespace includes a solid blogging suite, quite perfect for beginners. All it takes is a minute of your time – and an example blog full of pre-made posts for you to edit will be added. It’s a very simple way to get started.  Squarespace is the only website builder that competes with WordPress on blogging.

Squarespace offers a native mobile app for iOS and Android. Squarespace offers quite a simplistic app, but you can edit all your pages directly from your smartphone or tablet. It also lets you manage your inventory, eCommerce orders, and check analytics.

Winner

Both platforms have great features, but Squarespace has better features than Weebly. While Weebly has more features, Squarespace’s are built to a slightly higher standard. It also shades ecommerce features, which is a big bonus if you’re looking to build an online store. So, the winner in this category is Squarespace.

Performance: Which Builder Is Faster?

Weebly Performance

To test the speed and overall performance of our Weebly and Squarespace websites, we will use a speed testing tool and test both websites using the same location. In this situation, we used the location Europe – Germany – Frankfurt. That way, we can compare both builders more accurately and determine which provides better performance. When we tried our Weebly website, we received the following results:

• Performance grade D 68;
• Page size 1.1MB;
• Load time 2.56s.

Our Weebly website showed excellent results, including a load speed of 2.56 seconds. Regarding loading time, anything between 1 and 3 seconds is considered fast, so our Weebly website performed well. Our website also ranked pretty well with other metrics, which you will see in the photo below.

Squarespace Performance

We tested our Squarespace website using the same speed testing tool and location as our Weebly website. Our Squarespace website received the following results:

• Performance grade B 81;
• Page size 1.9MB;
• Load time 1.39s.

Our Squarespace website performed exceptionally well and had a load time of 1.39 seconds for a website that takes up 1.9MB of storage space. B score and “81%” on performance are excellent. Our website also ranked pretty well with other metrics, which you will see in the photo below.

Winner

Squarespace performed exceptionally well during our speed tests and had excellent load times and similar performance grades, and it had a faster load time and better performance grade in regards to the performance report from Weebly. So the winner in this category is Squarespace.

Help and Support: Which builder offers better support?

Weebly Help and Support

Your help and support level for companies like Weebly depends on which plan you buy. It has the basic stuff available to everyone, including a knowledge base, FAX, and even some video tutorials. It also has other support channels – live chat, phone, or email. Unless you are on anything other than a free or starter plan, you won’t have access to their phone support or priority support. Weebly offers an email support option and a well-done Knowledge Base for free accounts. For paid accounts (even starters), they offer email, chat, AND phone. With an all-inclusive platform, customer support can troubleshoot and fix any issue. It is a huge general advantage of website builder platforms, especially Weebly since they have phone support. Unlike other Weebly alternatives, you can quickly access the documentation directly from the website builder. The documentation is nicely written, and everything is well-categorized. The search function also works well, and you shouldn’t have problems finding the basics. However, if you try to search for something more specific, the documentation might not be able to help. If you decide to contact support, you will get a chat box where you write your question.

If you run your site, you must figure out exactly who can fix a problem before getting in touch with them. With companies like Weebly, you get in touch with them. Customer support is certainly one of the stronger suites for Weebly, unlike other Weebly competitors. They have plenty of options to connect to live agents, plus a solid list of articles and tutorials to help you learn more.

Squarespace Help and Support

Squarespace offers 24/7 customer support. They do support via live chat and email tickets. Additionally, they have a thorough knowledge base with video walkthroughs and guides. They also maintain a pretty high-quality customer forum. The only thing lacking is phone support, but given the chat/email efficiency and direct competitor’s support options, Squarespace’s customer support is a strong pro for using the platform.

One final thing to be aware of is that while Squarespace email support is available in six languages (English, French, German, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Spanish), live chat support is English-only.

In addition to a help page with extensive, informative guides, videos, and articles, companies like Squarespace also offer free webinars to help you develop your Squarespace skills. Community forums can also help you get answers to specific questions. Squarespace customer support is available 24/7 through live chat and email if you still need assistance.  Squarespace’s knowledge base is one of the best on the market. It offers a wide range of high-quality, in-depth help articles, guides, and video tutorials.

Winner

Both website builders provide excellent customer support. Weebly has email, phone, and live chat support available. Squarespace has 24/7 email and live chat support available. Currently, there are no phone services. But, Squarespace takes home the win for this category. Weebly has extra support over the phone, but Squarespace has round-the-clock personal support for email. It also has a more intuitive help center.

Weebly vs. Squarespace: Summary and Recommendation

When to Choose Weebly?

Weebly is an easy, affordable, and beginner-friendly way to build a website with an online store. While Weebly is best known for built-in ecommerce, those not selling online will also find essential features in its plans and third-party app integrations to get just about any type of functionality desired in a small business website. We recommend using Weebly in the following circumstances:

• If you are a beginner – Whether using Weebly’s drag-and-drop builder or the Square editor (for ecommerce sites), you’ll get an intuitive, easy-to-use interface—perfect for beginners looking to build a site quickly. As Weebly’s offerings are anything but basic, you’re assured of enough features to scale and grow your business.
• If you want a more affordable option –  The monthly cost of Weebly’s paid plans starts at $5, making it one of the cheapest site builders small businesses can use to get online. However, your site won’t be ad-free until upgrading to the $12 per month Professional plan. Still, the features you get could be well worth the cost, including a free domain, robust ecommerce, built-in SEO, and a wide selection of third-party app integrations.
• If you want a website for event-based businesses – Weebly has templates for event-based operations. They make event management easy with calendars, RSVPs, forms, registry pages, and maps. You can even include free plugins like DonorBox for charity events, making Weebly one of the most affordable ways to market events online and sell tickets.

When to Choose Squarespace?

Squarespace offers users a fast and easy way to build websites through a drag-and-drop interface. What makes site builders like Squarespace unique is that it not only empowers individuals but also supports small businesses by giving them the power to create with limited technical knowledge. We recommend using Squarespace in the following circumstances:

• If you have 24/7 support – If you ever have issues or questions, you can get in touch with Squarespace Support through 24/7 emails or live chat. Their technicians will take all the possible steps to help you, even logging into your site from the back-end to identify issues or walk you through how to make certain edits.
• If your priority is creating a good-looking blog – Squarespace is an excellent blogging platform for beginners. Many bloggers prefer Squarespace because the website builder makes it easy to create a beautiful website quickly. Squarespace is an all-in-one platform, which means you don’t have to acquire hosting services or mess with plugins to accomplish basic blog functions. The templates are gorgeous, and the drag-and-drop editor is intuitive.
• If you want your website to have great security – Squarespace is a “closed” system developed by an internal development team. There is a much lower chance of your website having security vulnerabilities than an open-source system like other Squarespace alternatives. All their built-in features are developed with security so you can have peace of mind.

Our Recommendation

Overall, we recommend Squarespace over Weebly, as it proved to be the better website builder. We recommend Squarespace because it provides more design flexibility, allows users to have more creative freedom over their website, and has more built-in features and tools that you can use to do all kinds of things, like make bookings via your website, sell tickets, sell products, manage events, and more and offers better help and support.