Webflow vs. Squarespace
It’s a professional web design platform with a robust CMS facing up against a template-based, drag-and-drop tool — is there even a contest?
.svg){kind=logo}
Compare
Design & code
Design freedom
With Webflow, you can create whatever design you have in mind, or use a template.
Start from a blank canvas to enjoy true creative freedom. Or pick a starter template and customize every single element.
Squarespace is template-based, with limited customizability.
Animations & Interactions
Webflow lets you build completely custom interactions and animations without coding.
Create 100% custom interactions and animations based on user interactions, page load, page scroll, and much more.
Work with your template’s built-in interactions and animations — or subcontract a developer to create custom experiences.
User-friendliness
Squarespace emphasizes user-friendliness at the expense of flexibility. That makes it easier for most people, but frustrating for creatives who want something unique.
Enjoy on-page content editing, a minimal dashboard UI, and intuitive visual design tools founded on web standards.
Squarespace’s template-based approach makes it easy for anyone to have and manage a website.
Templates
While Squarespace offers a wealth of gorgeous templates, Webflow’s templates are both beautiful and far more customizable.
Webflow offers over 100 beautiful templates, including quite a few free options — and you can customize every detail without coding, something you’ll never get from Squarespace.
Squarespace’s templates are undoubtedly a big part of their success. Clean, minimal, and adaptable to many uses — they’re also inflexible unless you know your way around code.
Free plan
If you’re building sites for clients, Webflow can be 100% free for you. Otherwise, you just pay for hosting (and a 2% transaction fee on the cheapest Ecommerce plan).
If you’re building sites for clients, you may not need to pay Webflow a cent. Ever. Just build your site, add hosting, and pass the bill along to your client with Client Billing. Otherwise, you only need to pay for hosting.
Squarespace offers a free 14-day trial. That’s it.
SEO & content marketing
CMS & blogging
Webflow makes dynamic content creation and publishing a breeze, so you can easily create a blog, case studies, lookbooks — whatever content you and your products need.
Use Webflow’s visual CMS to create a beautifully structured database, quickly create templated pages for your blog and case studies, and integrate your content anywhere on your site.
Squarespace offers solid blogging, event publishing, and email marketing tools. But if you’re looking to do anything unique, well, enjoy hiring a developer!
Dynamic product and content integration
Seamlessly feature your products within your content, so every blog post, look book, and case study becomes a sales page.
Turn readers into buyers with our CMS’s powerful and flexible multi-reference field, which lets you effortlessly integrate product highlights — complete with add to cart buttons — right in your blog posts, case studies, whatever you publish.
With Squarespace, you can “embed products into blog posts, events, and more to make your content drive sales.” But you’ll never have the flexibility to publish unique content types with Squarespace templates — unless you can code.
SEO
Webflow gives you all the tools you need to rise to the top of relevant search results. Webflow sites load fast, are mobile-friendly by default, and give you all the content tools you need to give people the answers they’re looking for.
Every aspect of Webflow was built to help you get found in search, including auto-generated sitemaps, clean and performant code, out-of-the-box mobile-friendliness, dynamic meta title and description generation, simple 301 redirects and canonical URLs, easy HTML5 semantic tagging, and free SSL / HTTPS.
Squarespace lets you customize basic SEO markup like page titles and descriptions, and has very basic tools for semantic element markup. But with limited custom blogging capabilities, Webflow gets the edge.
Marketing integrations
Webflow comes with a bunch of built-in integrations, and makes custom integrations easy.
Webflow comes out of the box with built-in integrations for email, social media, and analytics, but lacks the built-in email marketing tools and customer database management pieces that set more mature ecommerce platforms apart.
Along with a foundation of built-in integrations, Squarespace has built out impressive email and lifecycle marketing tools that make it easy to attract new customers and re-engage old ones.
The buyer experience
Customizable checkout
Webflow lets you design fully customizable checkout experiences.
Webflow gives you complete control over the layout of your checkout page, along with payment customization options.
Unless you want to hire a developer to customize your store template, you’re stuck with the checkout page that comes with.
Customizable carts
Webflow lets you build beautifully customizable carts.
Create clear, engaging cart experiences with robust positioning and animation options, plus full layout control within the cart.
You’re limited to the cart that comes with your template, unless you want to do custom development work.
The store owner experience
Store management tools
Both platforms offer an intuitive interface for updating your site’s content.
Enjoy a clear, clean site-management experience that works like your browser, with on-page editing just a click away.
Squarespace has been built to be user-friendly from the start, so managing your store’s products and overall look is pretty straightforward.
Order management
With similar integrations and straightforward fulfillment tools, both platforms make it easy for site owners to manage operations.
Immediately see open orders as soon as you log in, add and edit items right on the product page, and add teammates to help with site management. Integrate with ShipStation via Zapier to automate printing shipping labels.
Manage orders in a simple dashboard, get real-time shipping rates from USPS and FedEx, and automate printing shipping labels with a ShipStation integration.
Transactional emails
Squarespace’s email marketing tools are extensive and impressive in the realm of ecommerce.
Easily create and style all the automated emails online shoppers expect, right inside our Designer. Connect to third-party email marketing services like Mailchimp with simple integrations.
Create and customize transactional emails, and set up lifecycle marketing emails to re-engage existing customers.
Payment options
Both platforms manage payments via Stripe and PayPal, though Squarespace’s Square support may give it a slight edge.
Accept payments through credit card, PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Pay. You can accept payments from 200+ countries across the globe, and open a store in 119.
Squarespace’s built in Stripe support gives customers a flexible checkout experience, including for Point of Sale transactions.
Design
Build with the latest layout technologies
Use CSS grid or flexbox — or both — to build cutting-edge layouts — and adjust them for every breakpoint.
Take control of your typography
Use any font out there, tweak every detail from line-height to text direction, and use any unit, from ems to vw.
Go responsive
Easily preview and tweak your design for every breakpoint, and use relative units to reflow gracefully.
Get colorful
Save your brand palette as global swatches, layer background images, gradients, and overlays, even add CSS filters.
Advanced interaction and animation tools
Bring your site to life with engaging animations and trust building microinteractions based on page load, scrolling, mouse movement, and clicks.
Flexible product CMS
Webflow’s flexible, code-free CMS powers your store and all your other dynamic content, so you can seamlessly feature your products.
Pricing
Price
Design & Creation
Marketing
Payments
Product management
Store management
Shipping
Taxes
What people are saying about
Webflow Ecommerce
I've never been so obsessed with something as @webflow. Someone finally created a smart app to build websites for non-coders designers.
When Squarespace asked why I was leaving their platform today I said Webflow. 🙃
Take a look at Webflow. It's like SquareSpace, all in one platform, but you have vastly more granular control over your site.
