Squarespace vs. Pagecloud: Best Business Website Builder Review
As a business owner, you make a number of decisions when creating your business website. One of the first involves determining what type of website builder to use.
Squarespace, one of the most popular builders out there, and Pagecloud, an easy to use no-code website builder, represent two incredible options for small business owners. This review provides a side-by-side comparison of these business website builders, including the pros and cons of each, their ease-of-use and more. By the end of this in-depth review, you’ll be able to decide which tool will work best for your business.
Looking to compare other website builders? Check out our Best Website Builder review.
Squarespace vs. Pagecloud
A key factor influencing which website building platform busy small business owners choose is the ease of use. If you’re looking for a platform that will let you create a website for your small business quickly and without having to spend hours learning a new program, keep reading to see how these two options stack up against each other.
Squarespace
Ease of Use
Squarespace makes the sign-up and launch process fairly easy. Getting started, Squarespace will have you answer several questions to help find the right template to match your needs, which can be customized in the website editor later on. If you would like a little help customizing your template, Squarespace has designers standing by, but this service comes at an additional cost.
Squarespace does use drag-and-drop functionality, but it’s section-based, meaning you can’t place elements wherever you want. Getting your site up, running, and looking the way you’d like is pretty painless with Squarespace. However, because of a few hamstrings in the editor’s functionality, it may take a bit more time than some other platforms.
Pricing
Squarespace has four main plan tiers — these include Personal, Business, Basic Commerce, and Advanced Commerce. Squarespace’s features scale according to tier, with the Advanced Commerce plan offering all of the features available on the platform. For an in-depth discussion of each, check out our Squarespace Pricing and Plans guide.
Pros
- Simple, drag-and-drop functionality
- Affordable pricing
- Plenty of beautiful templates
- Ecommerce plans available for small business owners
Cons
- Editor can be tricky to use at times
- Limited app selections
Ecommerce
Squarespace offers some form of ecommerce functionality on a majority of its plans, however the two main plans for ecommerce are Basic Commerce and Advanced Commerce. Users can also take advantage of ecommerce features, like the ability to take payments in-house, with the platform’s Business plan. To see our full analysis of what Squarespace has to offer, read our Squarespace Review.
The core offerings of Squarespace’s ecommerce tools include the ability to create menus for restaurants teaming up with OpenTable, as well as integrations for businesses looking to sell products on Amazon. As you move up the tiers, Squarespace also offers integrations with point-of-sale (POS) systems like Square, as well as social media tagging for products, customer accounts, and more in-depth analytics to enable you to grow your reach.
Want to learn about other ecommerce options? Check out our Best Ecommerce Platforms of 2024 review and find the best service for your business.
Templates and Themes
Squarespace certainly has a wide selection of beautiful templates. Squarespace will automatically suggest templates suited for your needs based on your responses to a few preliminary questions. After that, all that’s left is to customize them by filling them with content that is specific to your business and brand personality.
Squarespace recently updated its software. In this update, different templates serve different functions. This has also made it easier to add extra features and to connect your site to Amazon, OpenTable, and more — albeit, at an additional cost. However, some options — like changing font color and style — have become more limited. You are also no longer able to switch templates, meaning it’s important to choose the correct one for your business when setting up your website.
Apps and Plugins
Squarespace offers extensions, which are all created and handled by third parties. Squarespace does not offer support for these extensions and, although it may not charge you to use them, you may incur an additional cost from the third-party provider. Connecting extensions to your site involves just a few steps and many of the extensions available have proven popular and useful.
See what you can create with Squarespace by checking out the best Squarespace Website Examples, then get started with your own Squarespace free trial.
Pagecloud
Ease of Use
Pagecloud is an easy-to-use website builder that utilizes drag-and-drop functionality to allow users to create a website from pre-made templates. This platform effectively strikes a balance between offering a range of editing tools to allow you to fully customize your website, while still maintaining enough simplicity so beginners will not get overwhelmed.
While no website builder can offer the degree of customizations that a content management system (CMS) like WordPress can, many large companies have demonstrated that Pagecloud can be used to create a website that is beautifully matched with their brand personalities. To see some of these websites, read our article on Beautiful Pagecloud Website Examples.
Pricing
Pagecloud has a dual pricing strategy — the first plan only includes website-building capabilities. The second includes ecommerce. Each offers three tiers and all ecommerce plans come with all of the features of the equivalent website-building tier. Website-building plans include Small Business, Business, and Pro. Ecommerce plans include Starter, Advanced, and Unlimited.
Website Plans – Pagecloud Pricing and Features
Business & E-commerce Plans – Pagecloud Pricing and Features
Pros
- High marks for ease of use
- Beautifully designed templates
- Plenty of apps to choose from
- A fairly wide range of ecommerce features
- The Small Business plan is a fairly affordable option
Cons
- Somewhat limited template selection
- No free plan is available
Ecommerce
Pagecloud offers three tiers of ecommerce plans, allowing users to expand their sites as their businesses grow. The Advanced plan will provide most business owners with all of the features they will need, including the ability to add up to 2,500 products, email integrations, integrations with third-party vendors like Amazon and eBay, product filtering, discounts and coupons, and more.
Smaller business owners in need of fewer features may be satisfied with the Starter plan, which lacks most of the aforementioned features, but still allows users to add up to 100 products and take payments in-house and using third-party payment gateways like PayPal.
Templates and Themes
Pagecloud templates allow users to create a modern website for their small businesses. While these templates are easily customized to suit the needs of your small business and sorted by industry, Pagecloud trails behind some other platforms in the number of templates to choose from. That being said, the platform’s template roster is continually growing, with new templates being added on a fairly regular basis.
Apps and Plugins
Pagecloud easily allows users to integrate their websites with a wide variety of commonly used apps. These include analytics, chat, forms, donations, social media, events, music, podcasts, and more. Many of these can be accessed for free directly from the platform’s responsive editing tool and can easily be dragged and dropped wherever you would like on your page.
Our Pick for Best Website Builder: Squarespace
We choose Squarespace as the better option for small business owners. Though both of these platforms offer some fantastic features, we believe that the Squarespace website builder is simply more powerful and offers a wider range of ecommerce options.
That being said, Pagecloud does have quite a bit to offer here too, however it is more expensive and less popular.
Get Started With Squarespace
Squarespace has a lot to offer small business owners. See for yourself with a free trial by clicking the button below.
