Webflow vs Squarespace: which website builder should you use?

Webflow and Squarespace both let you build a professional website without writing code, but they are made for different people. Squarespace is a template builder you can run yourself in an afternoon. Webflow is a visual development tool that gives a designer full control, with a stronger CMS for sites that grow. This guide compares price, design freedom, content, ecommerce and SEO, and tells you which one fits your project.

Webflow vs Squarespace at a glance

Prices are in USD and change from time to time, so check both pricing pages before you commit.

Pricing: what you will actually pay

Squarespace sells one plan per website that covers hosting, the builder and selling. Paying yearly saves up to 36%.

• Basic: $19/month yearly, $25 monthly. Blog, store and 2 contributors. 2% fee on store sales.
• Core: $29/month yearly, $39 monthly. No store transaction fee, unlimited contributors, automated taxes and shipping.
• Plus: $49/month yearly, $65 monthly. Lower card rates and lower fees on memberships and digital products.
• Advanced: $99/month yearly, $139 monthly. Lowest card rates and high-traffic checkout.

Webflow splits pricing into a Site plan for each live website and an optional Workspace plan for the people who build it. If you own one site, you usually only pay for the Site plan:

• Basic: $15/month yearly. Up to 300 static pages, no CMS, so no blog.
• Premium: $25/month yearly. 20,000 CMS items, site search and 50 GB of bandwidth to start.
• Ecommerce: Standard $29, Plus $74 and Advanced $212 per month yearly.

For a simple business site with a blog, the monthly cost is close: about $19 to $29 on Squarespace and $25 on Webflow Premium. Squarespace includes the domain for year one, and Webflow needs a separately bought domain. The bigger cost difference is the build. Most people set up Squarespace themselves, while most Webflow sites are built by a designer. Our Webflow pricing guide explains every plan in detail.

Design freedom and ease of use

Squarespace starts from a template. You add sections, drag blocks inside them and change fonts and colors from a site-wide style panel. It is hard to break, and almost anyone can update it. The trade-off is that layouts stay inside what the editor allows. Custom spacing, unusual grids or detailed mobile layouts often need custom CSS, and that gets fragile.

Webflow works like visual CSS. You control the box model, classes, breakpoints and interactions, so a designer can build almost any layout from a Figma file pixel for pixel. That power comes with a learning curve. For a business owner, the usual setup is: a designer builds the site once, and the team edits text, images and CMS items in the simpler Editor mode without touching the layout.

CMS and blogging

Both can run a blog. The difference shows up when you have more than one type of content.

• Squarespace has collection pages for blogs, events, portfolios and products. They work well for what they are, but you cannot design your own content types with custom fields.
• Webflow lets you create Collections with your own fields, such as case studies with client name, industry, results and gallery, or team members, locations and job listings. You design one template and every item uses it. References between collections, filters and nested lists make it practical for sites with hundreds of pages.

If you plan to publish case studies, service pages per city or a resource library, Webflow is the stronger choice. For a portfolio and a simple blog, Squarespace is enough.

Ecommerce

Squarespace includes selling on every plan with unlimited products. The Basic plan adds a 2% fee on store sales, and Core and above remove it. Squarespace also has built-in tools for memberships, courses and digital products, each with its own fee per plan. For a small shop run by one person, it is one of the easiest setups available.

Webflow sells ecommerce as separate plans. Standard allows 500 products with a 2% fee, Plus allows 5,000 with no fee and Advanced allows 15,000. The advantage is full design control over product and checkout pages. For stores with large catalogs or complex inventory, we usually recommend Shopify over both.

SEO and performance

Both platforms give you editable page titles and meta descriptions, clean URLs, automatic sitemaps, SSL and fast hosting. Neither will hold back a small business site in search.

Webflow gives more control over the details: custom schema markup, per-item SEO fields pulled from the CMS, 301 redirect management, full control over heading structure and lean code output. Those matter more as the site grows. We cover the details in Is Webflow good for SEO?. In practice, rankings depend on content, structure and links much more than on which of these two builders you pick.

Moving away later

Think about this before you start. Squarespace's export creates a WordPress-format file with your pages and blog posts, but not your design, and some content types do not export. Leaving Squarespace usually means rebuilding the site.

Webflow lets you export CMS collections as CSV files, and code export is included with paid Workspace plans. You still rebuild if you leave, but your content comes with you in a clean format.

From the studio: before you choose, write down the three types of content you will add most often in the next year, for example blog posts, case studies and team members. If all three fit a standard blog or gallery, Squarespace will serve you well. If any of them needs its own fields and its own template, start on Webflow. Rebuilding a Squarespace site in Webflow two years later costs more than starting there.

Which one should you choose?

Choose Squarespace if:

1. You want to build and edit the site yourself, without a designer.
2. The site is a portfolio, a local service business, a restaurant or a small shop.
3. You want one simple bill that includes the domain for the first year.

Choose Webflow if:

1. Your brand needs a custom design that does not look like a template.
2. The site will grow with case studies, landing pages or a content library.
3. A team will publish content, and you want SEO and layout under tight control.

If you are also considering WordPress, read Webflow vs WordPress next. If you decide on Webflow and want someone to build it, our guide on how to hire a Webflow designer on Fiverr covers what to check.

Related guides

• Webflow pricing in 2026: plan costs and which one you need
• How to hire a Webflow designer on Fiverr
• Our Webflow development service