Wix vs Squarespace: 5 Important Differences To Know

I want to start with a graph this is the top 20 website builders ranked by how many websites they power wicks and Squarespace are number one in number two together they have 55% of the market while Wix and Squarespace are both popular they actually have some big differences that are important to understand it's almost like Mac versus PC hello I'm a Mac and I'm a PC well after five years vistas finally here would be for the whole entire world Squarespace is curated and intuitive like a Mac well Wix is occasionally chaotic but it allows for a lot of freedom to customize kind of like a PC I recommend Squarespace / Wix but it's important to understand the differences and that's what this video will explain if you'd like to try Wix or square space you can find a link to them in the video description my work is supported by affiliate commissions so I may earn a commission if you click that link so the biggest difference between wicks and Squarespace is the page editor with Wix you can move any element anywhere on your page I can even move this element over pixel-by-pixel Wix is what I call an unstructured editor being able to drag an element anywhere on a page feels freeing but it leads to frustrating problems let me explain let's move this image from the top of the page to the bottom now let's see how that looks on the mobile preview and whoa okay we just move the image to the bottom of the page and yet it's still on the top on mobile we actually have to make this change twice which is unstructured editor didn't automatically do this and that's not good in Squarespace you can't just move an element anyway instead Squarespace only allows you to drag elements into rows and columns see these lines and boxes these are the spots we can drop this text squarespace's editor has a sensible structure that you stay within I call it a structured editor overall I recommend Squarespace is page editor / wix's unstructured page editor there are features that every website builder just needs to have photo galleries forums maps audio players that kind of thing I call them core features in both wicks and Squarespace have these covered so it doesn't really make sense to compare it's really only when you move beyond these core features that the differences become clearer overall I would characterize it like this Wix has more features but Squarespace tends to do a better job of features for example this is a list of features that Wieck supports out of the box the only way to get these features with Squarespace will be to integrate with a third-party provider now one important note is that many of the features I just listed have additional fees for example Wix chat starts at $10 for the add free version and Wix events charges a 2.5 percent commission on ticket sales Squarespace does not match what's on every feature but they do often do a better job of the features that they do match let me give you some examples but I've noticed before that many restaurants just post their menu as a PDF they do this because restaurant menus are like deceptively hard to format for websites that's why both Wix and square space have a unique restaurant menu editor this is what editing a restaurant menu looks like on Wix watch how many clicks this takes that's just way too long Squarespace on the other hand invented a simple markup language you follow the formatting patterns and write your menu in real time it's clever and intuitive much easier right here's another example of Squarespace doing a better job of features donations Wix can technically accept donations but is just a basic donation button that sends visitors to PayPal it's not a full donation system Squarespace has an excellent fully featured donation system with a donor specific check out donor specific email receipts and suggested amounts for donations I used to work for a non-profit and all three of these features are critical for example you'll find suggested donations on every major nonprofit it's a best practice Squarespace has the best templates of any website builder this is subjective to a degree but honestly there's no other website builder that matches their clean modern templates templates often have a similar look and feel bold typography and plenty of whitespace to frame photography in terms of volume Wix has significantly more templates than Squarespace Wix has 691 and Squarespace has 70 but even Wix is best templates aren't quite as nice as square spaces and they're worse templates can be just kind of corny an outdated Squarespace also has better template customization for example it's easy to apply your own brand colors to a template basically you create a palette then that palette applies throughout your website if you want to get more specific and choose colors for individual elements you can of course do that too and it's all very intuitive frankly it's confusing and difficult to do this with Wix I'll show you so you can technically sort of do it but this is just way too complicated I'd be surprised if many users took advantage of this system witson squarespace of both aggressively built ecommerce features over the last few years and now they both do a good job of covering the fundamentals of an online store things like inventory management discounts product variation taxes they've got that covered but they are also moving into advanced features both Wix in Squarespace support digital products custom email receipts they let you connect to print on demand services they have point-of-sale systems Instagram shop tagging automated cart recovery and recurring payment products but beyond that Squarespace does have some ecommerce features that Wix does not for example gift cards back in stock notifications and low stock notifications also thought Squarespace tends to build more sophisticated features for example Squarespace lets you add sophisticated forms to products basically it lets you ask customers for additional info you can choose from a variety of field types like a date picker radio buttons phone numbers text fields and even more Wix technically lets you add form fields to products but you can only add text fields it's not quite as sophisticated I just want to give you a few tips for comparing pricing plans Squarespace is cheapest plan is personal and it costs $12 per month Wix cheapest plan is combo and it costs $13 per month so Wix is about $12 per year more expensive in both Wix and square space include a free domain name if you buy these plans annually it's common for website builders to advertise their annual plan on a per month cost which doesn't always make sense to me you aren't actually paying $30 a month you're actually paying 156 dollars per year Squarespace at least makes this clear on the pricing page this toggle shows you the difference Wix doesn't make this clear at all unless you read the fine print so just remember that when you're comparing prices all Squarespace plans have unlimited bandwidth but combo Wix is cheapest plan has a 2 gigabyte limitation which frankly is ridiculous in 2020 YouTube streams 4k video for free bandwidth should be unlimited how limiting is 2 gigabytes per month while calculating bandwidth is tricky but here's one thing to think about this Wix website is 1.4 megabytes so if your visitors only ever visited this page and they probably would load more pages you still wouldn't want to average more than 50 visitors per day okay so in the end I recommend Squarespace / Wix here's how I would summarize Squarespace is structured editor is much more stable you may prefer Wix is unstructured editor but just keep in mind some of the problems it creates Wix has more features but Squarespace tends to do a better job of features Squarespace has better templates and template customization Squarespace has the cheapest plan but not by that much just $12 a year it's worth mentioning that this all doesn't mean Wix is bad my recommendation is more about how good Squarespace is because there are honestly plenty of worse website builder options than Wix seriously much worse ultimately the difference could be about preference if you'd like to try wicks or Squarespace you can find a link to them in the video description below my work is supported by Fiat Commission's so I may earn a commission if you click that link I hope you found this video helpful thanks for watching

Channel: Steve Builds Websites

Views: 56,192

Keywords: wix, squarespace, wix vs squarespace, website builders

Id: VmNvakQ9kOw

Length: 9min 23sec (563 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 06 2020