Webflow vs Squarespace: A 2024 Comparison for Business Leaders
Web Development
Updated
December 17, 2024
•
25 min read
Author:
Dasha Efimova
Chief Editor
Both Webflow and Squarespace are website builders but if you look closely enough you’ll see that they’re quite different.
As a visual CMS-enabled platform, Webflow promises that you can build your website from scratch without writing a single line of code (how amazing is that?). Squarespace catches up with template-based drag-and-drop functionality that makes it easy to set up a website in minutes. Still, there are many differentiators that create separate markets for these two competitive products.
We know that it takes plenty of time and mind space to make your way through all the site builder tools out there for your business. So here at Foursets we put together this Webflow or Squarespace comparison for you to pick up all the key criteria for choosing just the right foundation for your digital presence.
Read on to learn how the two platforms compare, which is better for small businesses and enterprises, and what things you should pay attention to before making the final choice.
Founded in San Francisco in 2013, Weflow is a SaaS platform for creating responsive and visually appealing websites using its in-built visual CMS editor and a range of powerful design and content management tools.
The platform is highly designer-friendly, as it automatically converts web design into HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript code. While it allows for seamless drag-and-drop composition of web pages, it still provides plenty of customization opportunities. This makes it one of the most user-friendly yet flexible website builders out there.
The platform is marketed as all-in-one. With a powerful CMS at its core, it requires no external plugins to extend its content management features, though there is a marketplace of compatible apps developed for specific purposes. Webflow websites are hosted using Amazon Cloudfront and Fastly as part of the package.
Since 2013, Webflow has grown from a venture-backed startup to a major contender in the website builder market. Today it’s used by roughly 0.8% of all websites in the world, leaving Squarespace, Wix and Shopify behind in terms of high-traffic websites that employ it.
Let’s start our Squarespace vs Webflow showdown with a detailed overview of how Webflow stands out and where it still has some room for improvement. You can read more on the topic in our guide to the pros and cons of Webflow.
We’ve picked the top five advantages that make Webflow an attractive option for those looking to get their business websites up and running.
Webflow’s visual CMS is built to make website creation and management accessible to everyone involved, but more so for designers and marketers.
Creating, editing and publishing content in Webflow CMS requires no developer help whatsoever. This means marketing teams are free to push their updates to production faster without being blocked by developer availability. Users get to see their updates instantly in Webflow’s visual canvas, which makes the whole process of dynamic content creation much simpler and definitely more straightforward for non-technical users.
This is another advantage of Webflow’s visual-first approach to website building that will delight marketers more than anyone. Using the platform’s visual editing tools, marketing users can build new pages out of prebuilt blocks in an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, composing new landing pages much faster and without waiting on designers or developers to assist them.
This removes bottlenecks to fast-paced website iterations and frees design and development resources to do more strategic tasks, like working on a core product.
The edit mode in Webflow takes visual-first website management up a notch. Now, content, design and marketing teams can collaborate right within the Webflow editor, sharing feedback and leaving comments in the UI as they go.
This functionality truly blossoms in the Enterprise plan. It makes it possible to collaborate on pages in parallel without disrupting other users’ work as well as control site access so no one can push unwanted updates live, in addition to other features we’ll cover below.
Webflow’s fully visual editor allows designers to unleash their creative imagination without ever thinking about code.
For example, you can set complex parallax and other motion animations triggered by the user’s scroll progress. Possibilities also include microinteractions that make web page elements come alive on hover. For those looking for easy setup in a few clicks, there are over 20 preset animations to choose from.
Being around since 2013 means Webflow has amassed quite a large community of clients, developers and designers who chose to add it to their stack.
Currently, the Webflow certified partner network includes freelancers and agencies around the world. While serving thousands of clients globally, they also contribute to a whopping 6,000+ Webflow templates to choose from.
On top of that, you get a strong community of 85,000+ Webflow enthusiasts who get to enjoy professional resources and events such as live streams, podcasts and learning resources to level up their skills.
While Webflow is among the leaders of the web builder race, it’s not without its limitations. Let’s look at some of them.
Webflow might be friendly to non-technical users, but it still requires web design knowledge to get around it.
The platform offers a minimal dashboard UI, advanced visual design tools and plenty of freedom with on-page content management, but this abundance of options can be sometimes frustrating for beginners.
To help those new to Webflow to navigate the platform successfully, there are educational resources like Webflow University but also certified partners who can guide in adopting Webflow for business needs.
Foursets is a certified Webflow partner since 2022. We’re here to develop a custom Webflow-powered website for your needs, sparing you the stress of having to learn a new platform on your own.
Once built in Webflow, your website will be locked in its ecosystem. Some features you’ve developed might only be supported in Webflow, which makes the migration a rather complex task.
The same limitation applies to hosting. While you can export and move your code to a different hosting services provider, it only works for static sites. Dynamic content can only be hosted on Webflow servers.
Webflow has worked hard to make it possible for ecommerce businesses to create visually stunning websites, but this comes at a price.
If you want zero transaction fees and more space for scaling, this starts with the Ecommerce Plus plan at $74 / month if billed annually. This includes the Business Plan features too, but your team of collaborators will be limited to 10 editors.
With five general Webflow site plans, three ecommerce-specific plans and seven more workspace plans, it’s quite a task to choose the right one for yourself. Your Webflow partner can advise on it, of course, but it still takes time to figure out the most cost-efficient option.
If you want advanced features, you might have to move straight to the most expensive Enterprise plan. It’s the only one making page branching and concurrent editing by multiple users possible. It also unlocks such features as in-built A/B testing and AI-driven personalization. Still, it can be beyond reach for many smaller businesses.
For all Webflow plans except Enterprise, customer support is only available by email. Even though they operate 24/7 and have a well-developed help center for most common issues, it can be limiting for companies expecting instant troubleshooting.
This is another way Webflow pushes clients towards the Enterprise plan. With this most expensive subscription, clients get their personal customer success manager aka support agent in addition to guaranteed SLA stating incident response times.
These limitations described above can be overcome with proper consulting and development assistance and a budget to accommodate more advanced plans.
Get in touch with Foursets to get the ball rolling. We’ve been a certified Webflow partner since 2022 and we’ll be delighted to assist in your digital journey.
Squarespace is an all-in-one SaaS website building and hosting platform that offers a drag-and-drop visual interface for creating visually stunning websites by creatives rather than developers.
The website builder enables advanced content management, domain name registration, ecommerce functionality for both products and services, analytics, SEO and more. The platform indeed makes it easy to set up a website in minutes thanks to a user-friendly web design tool and a range of beautifully designed templates included in the package for free.
Headquartered in New York, Squarespace has been around for much longer than Webflow. The startup was launched out of a dorm room in 2003, and now has grown to a mature product company with 1,700+ employees. It’s been a publicly traded business since 2021, but just in October 2024 it was again taken private through a buyout by an investor.
Today, more than 7,200,000 websites use Squarespace as their foundation according to BuiltWith, compared to 990,000+ websites running on Webflow.
Is Webflow better than Squarespace in terms of the pros and cons? Let’s look at what makes Squarespace one of the leaders in their market as well as consider the limitations that might hinder you from choosing it for your business.
This is surely a number-one advantage for a solution promoting itself as a web platform for everyone, especially for creatives who don’t necessarily have coding skills.
Squarespace’s user-friendliness and low adoption barrier come from the fact that everything is powered by templates. This is a cornerstone of their offering — making it easy for a non-technical user to browse beautifully and professionally designed Squarespace templates, pick one for your purpose, and get started in a matter of minutes.
This comes at the expense of design customization flexibility but is invaluable for small businesses looking to get off the ground and launch their websites real fast.
Squarespace offers a professionally designed curated collection of website templates, all of which come for free as part of each subscription plan.
Recognizing the variety of business domains their clients come from, the platform features templates in 15+ topical categories for such types of websites as blogs, online stores, portfolio websites, courses, services, donations and others.
Templates make it easy to get started with no developer help, which means you can set up a website literally in a few clicks. You’ll be able to play with fonts, colors, layouts and website copy to adjust it to your brand, but don’t expect too much flexibility as there’s a limit to customization options, as described below.
Even though it requires a separate subscription plan, ecommerce features are integral to Squarespace sites. The platform is marketed for sellers of anything and supports all types of ecommerce for products, professional services, subscriptions and digital content.
Squarespace makes it easy with all-in-one functionality, from AI-powered product descriptions to checkout and back-office management. There’s a range of third-party integrations available officially, including those for email marketing, shipping, fulfillment and inventory management. If you need more than that, there’s always an option to develop custom integrations for your ecommerce tools of choice.
Squarespace has a dedicated marketing tool called Email Campaigns. It starts at $7 per month to use but it unlocks an easy way to connect to your users with nicely crafted email and newsletter templates. Again, the platform offers a quick option to get started, as you can spare design and development costs with a template that’s already there to use. Templates are editable so you can adjust them to your branding. The tool also supports audience and email subscription management in addition to email marketing analytics.
With just four plans, Squarespace makes it easier to compare options and choose the right one based on your needs. The plans are divided into personal, business, and commerce (basic and advanced), which progress from $16 to $52 if billed annually. You’ll be able to see which one offers the scope of features you need without asking a professional to sort it out for you.
In addition to the core plans, there’s the Enterprise edition for large teams with custom quotes provided on request.
Squarespace has a few limitations that can be decisive if you want to build a robust and unique website. Let’s look into them.
Even though you can customize Squarespace’s templates, it’s possible only up to a point. You can change color palettes, fonts, grid layout display and behavior on hover, but you will still stay within the boundaries of your chosen template nevertheless. Any deeper customization and unique features will require a developer on board. Bear in mind that customizing your CSS and JavaScript on Squarespace only becomes available with the Business plan.
Squarespace’s tools for search engine optimization (SEO) might not be enough to manage your SERP performance at a professional level. It allows you to fiddle with meta titles and meta descriptions (a given for any website builder), hide pages from search engines, generate a sitemap and integrate correct semantic markup for products and events, but that’s about it.
Squarespace features a handful of official integrations so you can safely connect your social accounts, commerce and marketing tools, design fonts and images. In general, the range of available Squarespace extensions and integrations is smaller compared to other popular website platforms like WordPress or Shopify.
If you rely on third-party tools that have no official integrations with Squarespace, you might have to switch to those supported or develop your own integrations instead. In case you opt for developing custom integrations or adding a supported extension, these will fall beyond the scope of Squarespace support and you’ll need to troubleshoot by yourself if needed.
While providing a free 14-day trial period, Squarespace offers no free plan so you’ll need to start paying for a subscription plan in every case. This can be a deterrent for those who want to play around and see if the platform responds to their needs before committing to a paid plan. On the contrary, many other web builders like Webflow and Wix offer free plans, albeit with a limited number of pages and bandwidth.
Squarespace is a low-code platform for a reason, targeting non-tech users rather than developers.
Still, you can’t escape relying on a developer if you want to create anything more unique than their available templates and integrations. Squarespace supports custom code but you will still need to work from one of their templates, even if it’s a blank template. You also won’t be able to import your HTML or CSS pages created elsewhere, as you need to work within Squarespace from the very start.
Specifically for this reason, there are website designers featured by Squarespace as experts you can hire to implement deeper customizations and save your energy on trying to do everything yourself.
Choosing between Webflow or Squarespace, the pricing question comes first as it’s a decisive factor for many businesses.
Both web builders offer pricing plans within the same financial range, yet they pack these plans differently. For example, Squarespace provides unlimited bandwidth on all plans while Webflow limits the storage space and the number of pages you can create depending on your subscription level. Squarespace doesn’t cap your growth but instead limits the number of in-built features, especially for ecommerce.
Squarespace makes their pricing plans easy to grasp with just four options. These plans are distinguished by sets of functionalities:
Webflow provides much more detailed lists of features in each package, including SEO, security, publishing and site features. It helps but makes the choice trickier, as you’ll have to calculate precisely how many CMS items, collections and site pages you’re going to have.
These are plans for in-house web designers, freelancers and agencies that charge per account and user seats, not websites. For in-house teams, the biggest plan costs $49 monthly (if billed annually) per seat with 9 users max. For freelancers and agencies, the most expensive plan is $35/month (billed annually) for those managing multiple clients. Workspaces come with staging sites, user roles & permissions management and guest access.
Both Webflow and Squarespace provide quotes for their Enterprise plans on request so the final price will depend on the scale of your intended website.
Squarespace Enterprise includes:
Webflow Enterprise includes:
And the winner is: Webflow for professional sites, Squarespace for ecommerce. It’s a tie with two platforms serving slightly different audiences. Webflow looks like a better value for money in terms of in-built features and customizability, but Squarespace doesn’t cap your website size and bandwidth. For enterprises, Webflow might be a better option with enterprise-grade security, customer support and SLAs in place.
If you browse long enough, you’ll notice how Squarespace markets its platform primarily for creatives — designers, photographers, writers, video directors, musicians — and small online store owners. This explains one of the key distinctions between Squarespace and Webflow, which is less accessible for novice users and those not familiar with web design standards.
User-friendliness is a major strength of Squarespace with its template-based drag-and-drop interface that’s intuitive enough to use for beginners. Even though it makes flexible and unique customizations beyond non-tech users’ reach, it makes it easy to jump-start in a day or two without relying on professional developers.
Just by signing up to Squarespace, you instantly get access to:
This is quite enough to get started for small businesses and those in need of a personal website that’s not too expensive to maintain.
Webflow is a different matter as it’s more technical and pro user-oriented. While you can start with a ready-made template, free or paid, the main selling point of this platform is that it converts design into HTML, CSS and JavaScript code. Webflow sites are managed via a visual drag-and-drop interface, which can be less intuitive to navigate than that of Squarespace. You still need to have at least some knowledge of web design principles and have your design mockup at hand.
Another potential barrier to an easy start with Webflow is that there’s no free domain name included in the package. You’ll need to buy and connect it to your Webflow site.
However, Webflow offers a free plan for those just starting out with the platform. Beginners can use it as a sandbox to play around with 50 CMS items and 2 pages to get a taste of the possibilities.
And the winner is: Squarespace. It doesn’t get any easier than dragging and dropping elements in a visual canvas, even with the limited flexibility of your design choices.
Let’s review how Squarespace and Webflow compare when it comes to the breadth and flexibility of customization options.
Templates make it easy to set up sites in almost no time both in Webflow and Squarespace. Yet, how each platform approaches templates is different.
Templates are integral to the website building process in Squarespace, which offers 180 beautiful templates created by professional designers. When picking one for your site, you can choose based on your business area and pick from available color presets before moving on to customizing it according to your brand and vision. You can also opt for building your site with their Design Intelligence AI that takes a template and creates your branded online presence based on your creative inputs.
In comparison, Webflow offers more than 6,000+ professionally designed templates created by Webflow designers to speed up website creation. Only a few of them are free. Others are offered for a price ranging from $19 to $149. If you want to, you can design a Webflow site completely from scratch, without ever needing a template to start with, or tweak every single detail in your template if you need to.
Both Squarespace and Webflow offer plenty of customization options, but not all of them are suitable for beginners or non-tech users.
Squarespace offers its Fluid Engine as a tool for fully customizable drag-and-drop website design. Fluid Engine replaces Classic Editor starting from Squarespace v. 7.1 in all blocks except in blog posts, event descriptions and certain other components.
It’s their core content editing system that uses blocks and layout grids as the primary means of building custom-looking page sections. Working in a visual canvas, you can change such elements as
You can also move, duplicate and resize any block, as well as create your mobile layout separately from your desktop one. You’ll still be choosing from preset variations though, so it allows only a fraction of design freedom.
Webflow follows a design-led website building approach. This means you can start with your design and the platform will take care of converting it to editable code. You can start with a blank canvas and work from there or use one of the templates where again everything is customizable.
Compared to Squarespace, Webflow is intended for a more advanced user base, that’s why it offers more complex web design configurators and a full-fledged content management system. You can make use of and customize the following right in the visual editor:
On top of that, you can play with CSS classes for advanced styling options and insert your custom code into every element to adjust it to your vision.
This applies to ecommerce customizations as well. While Squarespace limits you to the possibilities of your chosen template, with Webflow you get full control over the layouts and styling of your cart and checkout pages.
Both Webflow and Squarespace are all-in-one platforms, but it doesn’t mean you can’t use any external plugins and apps to add more features. It’s often required for businesses in ecommerce and specialized professional services.
Squarespace supports a range of add-ons for social media integrations, blogging, commerce, marketing, payment and other tools. The vendor distinguishes between officially supported integrations and extensions. The latter simply make connecting an external service easier but are not supported by Squarespace. Anything not listed will require developing a custom integration through adding custom code. While you can do it, Squarespace support doesn’t cover such integrations either.
Webflow has a whole marketplace for integrations with external services, or apps, such as for Webflow HubSpot integration. Developed either by Webflow or experts in the community, there are free, freemium and paid apps for anything from analytics to localization and user management. If there are any integrations missing among the officially listed apps, you can request developing a custom app specifically for your purposes.
And the winner is: Webflow. You can’t beat a platform that’s been designed to build websites from scratch where every bit can be customized to your liking.
As both Webflow and Squarespace are content-centric site builders, one of their key features is making their clients’ websites easily discoverable by Google. For this, they offer multiple SEO controls that can be managed by professionals and beginners alike.
Webflow SEO features are fully available for any of the site and ecommerce plans. They include:
Using Webflow, you’re likely to get an edge from search engines thanks to mobile responsiveness, fast page load, clean code under the hood and advanced content management tools. Users of all site plans can benefit from the full scale of SEO features without having to pay more for access. In addition to its advanced CMS-driven content editing, you can enjoy complete freedom in how you drive organic traffic to your site.
Squarespace’s in-built SEO tools mostly overlap with those by Webflow and include:
In addition, Squarespace also makes sure your site is mobile-friendly, has clean URLs and SEO settings for each page or item. This is especially valuable for ecommerce businesses that can optimize their product pages in bulk. Unlike Webflow, this platform makes more advanced SEO capabilities available only for Enterprise-plan users, along with personal assistance by their SEO experts.
And the winner is: Webflow. With Webflow, you can take full control of your SEO and search engine visibility with more advanced and granular options. Squarespace covers the basics but this might be not enough for high-traffic content-led websites.
With Webflow, web designers can build fully custom animations and interactions, and it doesn’t require coding since it’s still managed in a visual interface.
Interactions in Webflow are advanced enough so you can create truly immersive experiences. You can choose from 20+ pre-built interactions and create animations that are triggered by user actions, page load and page scroll. Webflow also supports After Effects Lottie integration, which means you can introduce complex motion graphics to your site.
Some examples of animations you can create in Webflow:
Webflow doesn’t limit your ability to play with its in-built interactive features — users on any plan can access this functionality. To help beginners, there are video tutorials in the Webflow University learning center.
With Squarespace 7.1, you can set up animations that are either site-wide or applied to certain page blocks and images. Templates built on Squarespace 7.0 only allow tweaking in-built interactions from predefined parameters.
When setting up site-wide animations, it’s possible to define their speed and choose from a variety of styles like fading, scaling, sliding, etc. You can also set background art and image animations, adding effects to image blocks both in Fluid Engine and Classic Editor within the Squarespace interface.
Supported block animations styles include:
And the winner is: Webflow. The sky’s the limit for animating your website in Webflow, while you only have predefined options in Squarespace.
Webflow offers a comprehensive set of security and performance features for all plans, with Enterprise Webflow users getting the most of in-built security.
All plans get unlimited backups, uptime guarantees according to their standard agreement, two-factor authentication, SSL encryption, password-protected sites and pages, PCI-DSS compliance for payment processing, and basic DoS protection. Enterprise plan users benefit from this plus advanced DDos protection, single sign-on, custom security headers, custom SSL certificates and a private staging environment.
Learn more in our comprehensive guide to Webflow security.
Squarespace strives to give their users peace of mind so they’ve taken care of all cybersecurity essentials. This includes:
Squarespace also has a dedicated Security Operations Center (SoC) for 24/7 vulnerability monitoring and takes data privacy seriously, committing to compliance with international data protection regulations like GDPR.
And the winner is: it’s a tie. Both Webflow and Squarespace are serious about their clients’ site security and provide a comparable range of tools for safe online operations.
Let’s make a quick recap of how Webflow compares to Squarespace:
Some criteria will have more weight in your decision-making process based on your business needs, so let’s break it down:
These are key use cases to consider when opting for Webflow over Squarespace:
Webflow might be best for: professional services vendors, SaaS product businesses, corporate websites, advanced design-centric showcases.
Squarespace might be a better option when:
Squarespace might be best for: creative portfolio sites, personal blogs, local businesses, small online stores, artists and craftspeople.
Drag-and-drop, visual website builders that help you set up your own site with no professional developer help is a dream come true for creatives and marketers. Companies like Webflow and Squarespace redefined the game and keep innovating so more people can get their businesses off the ground more easily and without tremendous investments.
While both platforms deliver on that promise, our side-by-side Squarespace vs Webflow comparison showed the following.
Webflow just might be better for bigger businesses with a dedicated team (in-house or contracted) looking to create a completely unique digital presence. For such businesses, Webflow’s customizability and enterprise-ready features can be decisive factors.
Squarespace is for hipsters (joking). But seriously, this platform gives creatives and small businesses an easy and quick way to set up a website and get started in a few days. It doesn’t require custom design or development, and any beginning user can navigate the intuitive drag-and-drop interface with no problem.
The choice is yours, and if you ever need professional advice or help launching your Webflow-powered website, Foursets is here.
Foursets is here to create your custom Webflow site that makes the best use of what this platform has to offer.
It depends on the size of your business, the availability of designers and frontend developers for advanced customizations and your ambitions. If you’re serious about growing your business and the team that will support your online presence, Webflow indeed gives you more advanced features and flexibility.
Consider the following factors when making a choice: your budget, whether you want to implement a custom design or are ready to go with a ready-made template, whether you need a full-scale CMS to manage your content at an advanced level, and whether it’s just you or there’s a website team, at least potentially. Webflow is more suitable for professional web designers or those able to hire them. With Squarespace, you can go DIY easier.
Both platforms offer a similar value for money. Small businesses might find Squarespace pricing plans easier to navigate. Ecommerce businesses can also enjoy slightly cheaper plans with Squarespace. Webflow offers more subscription plans based on your website size and required bandwidth, so in certain cases it can be more cost-efficient to go with Webflow.
The key distinction is the degree of flexibility and customizability offered by each. Squarespace is more like a template-based drag-and-drop visual editor while Webflow is a pro-level visually composable CMS that allows users to build fully original websites from scratch. With Webflow, you can implement your custom design and further adjust it in a visual canvas, creating reusable on-brand components as you go.
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