Weebly vs. Squarespace: Best Business Website Builder Review

Weebly

Ease of Use

Weebly is a drag-and-drop editor, which has its benefits and drawbacks. On the positive side, you can place elements on your website wherever you want them. This is easier on Weebly than on Squarespace. Weebly doesn’t depend on predesigned sections like Squarespace does, allowing more flexibility in your design without making it harder to use.

On the downside, the Weebly editor can be temperamental. Sometimes you can’t get an element to drop exactly where you want it to go. Often however, just using a different browser solves this issue.

Pricing

Weebly offers a lifetime free plan, which is great to use while building and testing your site. Weebly’s paid plans cost between $6/month (paid annually) and $26/month (paid annually). We don’t recommend the $6/month Personal plan because that still includes Weebly branding.

We recommend Weebly’s Professional plan for most small businesses, at $12/month (paid annually).

Learn more about Weebly and its pricing plans to figure out which plan is best for your business.

Pros

• Weebly is a true drag-and-drop builder
• Weebly allows for customization, though that can be confusing
• You can change your theme to change the look and feel of your website
• Hundreds of apps can be used to increase the functionality of your website

Cons

• Weebly can be glitchy, making dropping an element exactly where you want it challenging at times
• No search engine optimization (SEO) wizard. You have to do your own SEO.
• Limited blogging features

Ecommerce

Weebly doesn’t charge a transaction fee on top of the payment processor’s fee. Weebly’s Performance ecommerce plan is $26 per month, though you can sell an unlimited number of physical products on any of its plans, including the free plan. You have to have a paid plan to sell digital products.

Since Weebly is owned by Square, it prefers that you use the Square payment platform. However, it will let you use PayPal if you have the Performance ecommerce plan.

Overall, we recommend Weebly for selling a few products, but for larger stores, we recommend Shopify.

Templates and Themes

When you start your website with Weebly, it will give you the option of over 40 themes that you can use. Unlike Squarespace, you can switch your theme once you’ve started your website.

Overall, Weebly wins for templates and themes because it allows you to choose from different themes as well as change your theme once you’ve started your website.

Apps and Plugins

Weebly has over 360 apps in its App Center, some created by Weebly and others by third parties.

The highest-rated apps include:

• PaidMembersApp for creating recurring membership programs for your website
• Printful for selling products made with your own designs, but Printful prints and ships them for you
• SalesPop adds social proof to your ecommerce store by telling visitors that someone just purchased a product

Many apps have either a one-time or monthly fee, though most have a free trial period. The apps made by Weebly are usually free. Weebly only supports its own apps, so if you have problems with an app, you have to contact the app maker for support.

Adding an app to your website is very easy with Weebly.

Squarespace

Ease of Use

Squarespace uses templates built around predesigned sections. If you are happy with one of the sections it provides, then it’s pretty easy to modify it. However, if you want to start with a blank section, designing it becomes trickier. You can only add items above or below other items. If you want to add an item to the left or right, you have to add it first then drag it to its new location. Every time you want to edit something, you have to click on it and then click on an edit icon instead of just clicking on the element.

Pricing

Squarespace doesn’t offer a free plan. Instead, it offers a free trial for 14 days. After that, you have to pay for a plan to continue to build and use your website.

We recommend the Business plan at $23/month (paid annually) for most small businesses.

Learn more about Squarespace pricing plans to figure out which plan is best for your business.

Pros

• The Squarespace template is image rich, perfect for businesses such as photographers, interior decorators, and others that have beautiful photography for their website
• It has an Undo button in case you make a mistake, which Weebly doesn’t offer
• Squarespace has lots of different predesigned sections that make building a beautiful website easy

Cons

• Unless you know how to alter the code, it is hard to customize
• There’s no free option so you only have 14 days to see if you like it
• Some people are still using the older version, 7.0, so that can make finding tutorials online more confusing

Ecommerce

Squarespace doesn’t offer ecommerce on its Personal plan. With the Business plan ($23/month) you can sell products, but Squarespace charges an extra 3% fee per transaction on top of what the payment processor charges you. If you want no transaction fee, you need one of the two Commerce plans ($27 or $49/month). One nice feature that Squarespace offers on the Commerce plans is product tagging on Instagram so, if you use Instagram to promote your products, this is a definite plus.

Templates and Themes

With Squarespace 7.1, the latest version of Squarespace, there’s only one template available, but multiple layouts.

When you first start a Squarespace website, it will ask what industry your business is in and show you layouts based on that.

While you can’t change the template for your website, you can change the layout, fonts, etc.

Apps and Plugins

Squarespace has integrations with several third-party platforms, such as OpenTable and Amazon, plus it offers third-party extensions that you can add to your website.

With Squarespace, the main way you add functionality to your website is to add sections and elements rather than apps. Here are a few examples:

• Appointment scheduling
• Reservations through OpenTable
• Instagram feeds
• SoundCloud streaming

Squarespace also offers third-party extensions, but they make it difficult to find and add them. Popular extensions include:

• TaxJar
• FreshBooks
• QuickBooks
• Shippo
• Printful