Squarespace vs Shopify

Squarespace vs Shopify: an honest comparison from people who move stores between them

Squarespace is the better choice for a design-led website that sells on the side: a portfolio, a service business, a creator selling courses or memberships, or a small shop with a short catalog. Shopify is the better choice when products are the business, when you need multi-location inventory, wholesale, serious point of sale or a deep app ecosystem, or when you expect to grow past a few hundred products. We are a Shopify Plus Partner and we migrate stores to Shopify for a living, so read this with that in mind; we have tried to be fair, including where Squarespace wins or where staying put is the right call.

At a glance

Comparison point	Squarespace	Shopify
Pricing	Basic $25, Core $39, Plus $65, Advanced $139 a month billed monthly; $19, $29, $49 and $99 a month billed annually	Basic $39, Grow $105, Advanced $399 a month billed monthly; $29, $79 and $299 billed annually; Plus from $2,300 a month
Transaction fees	2% on store sales on Basic, 0% on Core and above; digital content and memberships 7%, 5%, 1% and 0% by plan	None with Shopify Payments; 2%, 1% or 0.6% on Basic, Grow and Advanced when a third-party gateway is used
Hosting and maintenance	Fully hosted; no updates to manage	Fully hosted; no updates to manage
Ease of use	One editor for the whole site; very quick to learn	Clear admin built around products and orders; theme editor is separate
Design and themes	Design-led templates and a flexible drag-and-drop editor	Free and paid themes, including Horizon; section and block editing, full code access
Apps and extensions	Squarespace Extensions: a curated list covering shipping, inventory, finance and marketing	Shopify App Store with thousands of apps for almost every ecommerce need
Product catalog	Up to 10,000 products; up to 6 options and 250 variants per product	No practical product limit; up to 3 options and 2,048 variants per product
SEO and content	Strong blogging and page building; SEO tools on every plan	Solid technical SEO; fixed /products/ and /collections/ URL prefixes; simpler blog
Payments	Squarespace Payments, Stripe or PayPal; 2.9% + 30 cents online on Basic and Core, falling to 2.5% on Advanced	Shopify Payments plus many third-party gateways; 2.9% + 30 cents online on Basic, falling to 2.5% on Advanced
B2B and wholesale	No native wholesale price lists or company accounts	B2B on all plans; non-Plus plans limited to 3 catalogs
Point of sale	Squarespace POS in the US and UK: Tap to Pay, Square Reader in the US	POS Lite free; POS Pro $89 per location per month; hardware, staff roles, multi-location stock
Inventory	One inventory pool; no multiple locations	Multiple locations on every plan, with stock tracked per location
Scalability	Comfortable for small and mid-sized catalogs	Built for high volume, from a first sale to Shopify Plus
Ownership and control	Closed platform; Commerce APIs on Core and above	Closed platform; extensive APIs, apps, checkout extensions and full theme code
Support	24/7 customer support on all plans	24/7 support on all plans; a large partner and developer community

Prices checked September 2026. Both platforms change plans and rates regularly, so confirm on their pricing pages before you decide.

Pricing and total cost of ownership

Squarespace began moving to four plans in February 2025: Basic, Core, Plus and Advanced, which replaced Personal, Business, Commerce Basic and Commerce Advanced. Every plan can sell products, services, subscriptions, courses and memberships; what changes is the fee on each sale, the processing rate and some commerce tools. On Basic, Squarespace keeps 2% of store sales on top of processing. Core removes that fee and adds discounts, carrier-calculated shipping, shipping labels, Google Shopping, code injection and the Commerce APIs. Plus lowers the processing rate, and Advanced lowers it again and removes the digital content fee entirely.

Shopify’s plans are priced higher at the top end but include more commerce by default. Basic costs $39 a month billed monthly or $29 billed annually, Grow $105 or $79, and Advanced $399 or $299. Shopify Plus starts at $2,300 a month. There is no Shopify transaction fee when you use Shopify Payments. If you use a third-party gateway instead, Shopify adds 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow and 0.6% on Advanced.

A worked monthly example

Take a store selling $10,000 a month online across 200 orders, with an average order of $50, paying standard domestic card rates and billed monthly.

Plan	Subscription	Platform fee	Card processing	Monthly total
Squarespace Basic	$25	$200 (2%)	$350 (2.9% + 30 cents)	$575
Squarespace Core	$39	$0	$350 (2.9% + 30 cents)	$389
Squarespace Plus	$65	$0	$330 (2.7% + 30 cents)	$395
Shopify Basic	$39	$0	$350 (2.9% + 30 cents)	$389
Shopify Grow	$105	$0	$330 (2.7% + 30 cents)	$435

At this size the platforms cost almost the same, and the 2% fee makes Squarespace Basic the most expensive option once sales pass a few hundred dollars a month. Three things move the real number. Apps: a Shopify store usually runs several paid apps. Automated sales tax: Squarespace lists a per-transaction fee of 0.15% on Core, 0.10% on Plus and 0.05% on Advanced, capped per transaction, and Shopify has its own pricing for Shopify Tax, so check both for your volume. Digital products: Squarespace Core charges 5% on course and membership sales, $500 on $10,000, so digital sellers should price Plus or Advanced.

Ease of use and maintenance

Neither platform asks you to manage servers, security patches or plugin updates. Squarespace is the easier of the two for a whole website. Pages, blog, store, forms, scheduling embeds and email campaigns all live in one editor, and a non-technical owner can change almost anything visually.

Shopify’s admin is designed around products, orders, customers and inventory. That makes day-to-day store operations faster once you have more than a handful of orders a week because bulk editing, fulfillment, returns and reporting are deeper. The trade-off is that design changes happen in a separate theme editor, and content pages are more constrained than on Squarespace.

Design and themes

Design is where Squarespace built its reputation, and it deserves it. Its templates are designer-made, typography and image handling are excellent out of the box, and the editor lets you place content freely without code.

Shopify themes are built for selling. Horizon, Shopify’s free flagship theme, arranges product pages, filters and cart areas with sections and blocks, and the full Liquid theme code is available for custom work. Shopify’s design ceiling is higher, but reaching it usually takes a developer. On Squarespace, custom code is possible through the CSS editor on every plan and code injection on Core and above, but you are working around the template rather than editing it.

Design never moves between the two, so switching always includes a theme build.

Apps and extensions

Squarespace Extensions is a curated marketplace grouped into sales and marketing, inventory and products, finance, and shipping and fulfillment, with tools such as ShipStation, Printful, QuickBooks Online and Mailchimp.

Shopify’s App Store is far larger, and most ecommerce software companies build for Shopify first. Subscriptions, bundles, loyalty, returns, search, ERP connectors and marketplace channels all have several competing apps. That breadth is the main reason growing stores switch, though every app adds a monthly fee and often storefront code.

Product catalog, variants and inventory

Squarespace allows up to 10,000 products on a site, and each product can have up to six options and 250 variant combinations. Inventory is tracked in one pool. Squarespace’s help center confirms there is no native support for multiple stock locations, so a shop with a warehouse and a retail counter, or two shops, has to use an extension or a workaround.

Shopify has no practical product limit, allows up to three options and 2,048 variants per product, and tracks stock per location on every plan, with order routing between locations. The option limit is the one place Shopify is stricter: a Squarespace product that uses four, five or six options has to be restructured when it moves, which we come back to below.

Subscriptions, digital products, memberships and scheduling

This is where Squarespace is strongest for service and creator businesses, because it is all built in.

• Subscriptions. Squarespace sells weekly to yearly subscriptions natively, through Squarespace Payments or Stripe only. There are limits: a customer can buy one subscription product per order and cannot combine it with other products, and subscription products do not track stock. Shopify handles subscriptions through its free Shopify Subscriptions app or third-party apps, which support mixed carts, bundles and more flexible rules.
• Digital products, courses and memberships. Squarespace lets you paywall courses, videos, blogs and whole member sites, with free, one-time, installment or recurring pricing. The trade-off is the digital content fee on Basic, Core and Plus. Shopify delivers downloadable files through its free Digital Downloads app, but it has no native course or member-area product; those need an app or a course platform connected to Shopify orders.
• Scheduling. Squarespace owns Acuity Scheduling, which it acquired in 2019. Its earlier Squarespace Scheduling product is now Acuity again, and it is a separate subscription rather than part of a website plan, though it embeds neatly in a Squarespace site. Acuity can also be embedded in a Shopify store, and Shopify has booking apps of its own.
• Invoicing and pay links. Squarespace includes invoicing and pay links on all plans, with no transaction fee on invoices.

If most of your revenue is services, bookings, courses or memberships, Squarespace is usually the simpler and cheaper home.

SEO and content

Both platforms produce crawlable, mobile-friendly sites with editable titles, meta descriptions, sitemaps and 301 redirects, and both rank well when the content is good.

Squarespace has the better content tools. Its blog is more capable, page layouts are more flexible, and a content-led site with long articles and rich galleries is easier to build. Its limits are structural: 1,000 pages on current plans, and store categories that often appear as query-string URLs such as /shop?category=Chairs rather than as their own pages.

Shopify’s strengths are on the catalog side. Collections are real, indexable pages, structured product data is standard in modern themes, and apps can extend schema, internal linking and filtered collection pages. Its weaknesses are the fixed /products/ and /collections/ URL prefixes, which cannot be removed, and a simpler blog.

Performance

Both platforms run on managed infrastructure with a content delivery network and SSL included, and both absorb traffic spikes without you provisioning anything. In our experience the speed of either site depends more on what you put on it than on the platform: oversized images, video backgrounds, third-party scripts and, on Shopify, too many apps. We would not choose between the two on raw speed alone.

Payments and checkout

Squarespace Payments, announced in 2023 and rolled out since, is Squarespace’s own processor and is available in the US, UK, Canada and a set of European countries. It accepts cards, Apple Pay, Klarna, Afterpay and ACH. In the US, standard online card rates are 2.9% + 30 cents on Basic and Core, 2.7% + 30 cents on Plus and 2.5% + 30 cents on Advanced; Amex is 3.2% + 30 cents on all plans; Klarna and Afterpay cost more. Stripe and PayPal are the alternatives. A store sells in one base currency, and Squarespace turns on multi-currency checkout automatically when you use Squarespace Payments or Stripe.

Shopify Payments charges 2.9% + 30 cents online on Basic, 2.7% on Grow, 2.5% on Advanced and 2.25% on Plus, and 2.6% + 10 cents down to 2.3% + 10 cents in person. Shop Pay, Shopify’s accelerated checkout, is a genuine conversion advantage. Shopify Markets adds local currencies, languages and pricing by country. Checkout can be extended with apps, with the deepest control on Plus; Squarespace checkout is clean and on your domain, but offers far less room for upsells or custom fields.

Selling in person and B2B

Squarespace point of sale runs in the Squarespace app on iOS and Android in the US and UK. It takes payments by Tap to Pay on the phone, a Square Reader in the US, pay links, manual card entry and cash, and sales update online inventory. It suits a maker at a market, but it has no multi-location stock, and its help pages say nothing about staff roles.

Shopify POS is a full retail system. POS Lite is free on every plan; POS Pro costs $89 per location per month and adds staff roles and permissions, advanced inventory tools, retail reporting and exchanges.

For wholesale, Shopify has native B2B on all plans, with company accounts, catalogs with their own prices, payment terms and quantity rules; non-Plus plans are limited to three catalogs. We have not found native wholesale price lists or company accounts in Squarespace, so trade customers there are usually handled with discount codes, hidden pages or invoices.

Scale

Squarespace is comfortable for small and mid-sized stores,. The ceiling appears when the catalog approaches thousands of products, when you need more than one stock location, when wholesale becomes a real channel, or when you need integrations with ERP, 3PL or marketplace software that Extensions does not cover.

Shopify runs everything from single-product shops to very large brands on Shopify Plus. Carrier-calculated shipping from third-party carriers needs Advanced or Plus (or Grow on annual billing), and expansion stores are a Plus feature, but the path from a small store to a large one does not require changing platform.

When Squarespace is the better choice

• Your website is the brand and design freedom matters more than commerce depth: portfolios, studios, restaurants, venues.
• You sell mostly services, bookings, courses or memberships, with a few products alongside.
• You want one tool for pages, blog, store, invoicing and email campaigns.
• Your catalog is small, your stock sits in one place, and you do not sell wholesale.
• You are already on Squarespace Core or above, sales are steady and nothing on the list below is holding you back. In that case moving costs more than it returns.

When Shopify is the better choice

• Products are the business, and the catalog is growing past a few hundred items.
• You hold stock in more than one location, or sell in a shop and online from shared inventory.
• You sell wholesale or want trade pricing for business customers.
• You need apps Squarespace does not offer: advanced subscriptions, bundles, loyalty, returns, search, ERP or 3PL connections.
• You want Shop Pay, local currencies by market, or a customizable checkout.
• You are on Squarespace Basic and paying the 2% fee on meaningful sales volume.

What switching actually involves

We have moved a good number of stores off Squarespace. Most of the data moves well; a few things catch owners out.

What moves easily. Products, variants, SKUs, prices, stock, weights and image URLs come out of the Squarespace product export as one row per variant and map cleanly to Shopify. Orders export with line items, tax, shipping and fulfillment status, and we import them as real Shopify orders with the original numbers and dates. Customers come from the order data and the Contacts export, and blog posts come out through Squarespace’s WordPress export.

What people underestimate.

• Products with more than three options. Squarespace allows six; Shopify allows three. Those products have to be split, combined into fewer options, or rebuilt with custom fields, which is a merchandising decision, not just a data task.
• Marketing consent. Consent lives in the Contacts export, not the orders file.
• Subscriptions. Subscription plans are recreated in the new app, and moving active subscribers usually means asking them to confirm payment details, depending on where cards are stored and what the new app can import. Plan the customer communication early.
• Member areas and courses. There is no native equivalent on Shopify, so each needs a decision: simple gated pages through customer accounts and an app, or a course platform connected to Shopify orders.
• Things that do not export. Discount codes, gift card balances and product page block content are recreated by hand, and customer passwords never move on any platform.

What breaks SEO if mishandled. Squarespace product URLs look like /shop/p/product-name and categories are often query strings, while Shopify uses /products/ and /collections/. Nothing lines up automatically, so every product, category, page and blog URL needs a 301 redirect built from a crawl of the live site, not just the sitemap, and tested against the live domain before launch.

Realistic timelines. Most Squarespace stores are live on Shopify in six to eight weeks, with the old site staying up until the new one is confirmed. Large catalogs, custom design or several integrations push that longer. Our Squarespace to Shopify migration guide covers the exports, the data mapping and the redirect process in detail. Moving from Webflow is similar; see our Webflow to Shopify migration guide.

Cost of switching

Our managed migrations start from $2,500 for stores under 500 products and 5,000 orders ($3,500 for larger stores), and typically take six to eight weeks for smaller stores. Custom design, long order histories and integrations are quoted as a fixed price after the audit. Terms are 50% to begin and 50% once the store is live and you are fully satisfied with the figures. As a Shopify Plus Partner we build in a free Shopify development store, so you pay Shopify nothing until launch, and you keep paying Squarespace only until the switch.

A small store with a simple catalog and little order history can also move with a tool, from Shopify’s free Store Migration app to paid services. Our comparison of Shopify migration tools explains what each one handles and what it leaves to you.

Frequently asked questions

If you are deciding whether to move, start with the migration survey and we will tell you honestly whether Shopify is worth it for your store. For the practical detail, read our Squarespace to Shopify migration guide, or see the full list of platforms we migrate from.