Web design and web hosting platforms are the backbones of any online business. Gone are the days when a business could just go to a local printer and get some brochures made. Now, if we're planning on doing anything, from selling our products to promoting someone else's, we need a website.

Weebly and Squarespace are two of the most popular website builders today. They both offer a range of plans, so it's worth comparing them before we make our decision.

Here is a comparison of the plans, features, pros, and cons for each to help decide which is the best.

Weebly vs Squarespace: Overview 

When choosing a website builder, we want to make sure we pick the right one. Weebly and Squarespace are two of the strongest contenders in the online website-building space. Although Weebly has a 5/5 rating for value for money, Squarespace is far ahead in aesthetics - achieving an impressive 4.7/5 score - plus ease of use and design.

Weebly powers 40 million websites and provides high-quality features at affordable prices. Squarespace website builder powers over a million websites and has defeated Weebly in almost every category. Squarespace's strengths lie in its design. Its templates are sharp, with unmatched aesthetics and functionality.

What is Weebly?

Weebly is a website builder that lets us create beautiful, easy-to-use websites. We can use Weebly to create simple or complex websites with themes and plugins. We can also use Weebly to create online portfolios, blog posts, and more. 

What is Squarespace?

Squarespace offers a variety of templates and themes to choose from, as well as tools to create a website's layout and design easily. We also have the option to add content or use Squarespace's built-in blog features to share our story and connect with the audience.

With Squarespace, we can easily create a professional website that looks great on all devices and platforms. 

Squarespace vs Weebly

Here’s a look at the two website builders and how they compare.

Ease of use

Squarespace is more user-friendly for beginners than Weebly.

A website builder should be easy to use! If we don't want to code a website from scratch, a website builder can help us control our online presence.

With Weebly, adding features and design elements is easy! We can type in what we want and pull it into our website using the app store. It is also easy to work with features - just drag and drop them onto the page. Applying text changes is also easy.

Source: Weebly 

Weebly has an editor that's well laid out and easy to use. We can add the features simply by dragging and dropping them onto the page.

Source: Squarespace 

Squarespace is an intuitive website builder that allows anyone to create professional-looking websites. It's a design-focused tool that saves time and makes one feel like a true designer.

Squarespace's editor is clean and easy to use. It also has drag-and-drop capabilities where we can customize everything with just a few clicks.

Squarespace is the clear winner when it comes to usability and functionality, with a design that makes it easy to get the site up and running. It may take more patience than Weebly to get everything set up, but overall, Squarespace is the clear winner when comparing these two platforms in terms of ease of use. The platform has new tools, including Design Hero, for crafting our site's branding.

Weebly vs Squarespace: Design flexibility

Squarespace offers a more flexible design.

With a diverse design range, a good website builder can make the design easy to visualize and perfect for creatives who constantly want to try new things.

What sets Squarespace apart from other options is that it offers well-designed, mobile-friendly templates and stunning designs. Compared to Weebly's outdated designs, there's a more modern selection here, with many industries to choose from.

While successfully engaging users with the website, design makes all the difference! A good design can act as a magnet for users. People will only spend time interacting with a site when the visuals are on the spot.

Weebly's Design 

Weebly's powerful template library has 50 different themes. We can browse the themes or search them by categories (features, online store, business, portfolios, personal, blog, and events). Once we find the perfect one, we can preview and test it before editing.

Themes are an essential part of a website design, and Weebly has a variety of incredibly detailed and beautiful themes we can use to give our website a unique personality. It has a broad range of categories that appeal to different needs, so we're confident there's something for everyone.

Source: Weebly

Weebly's themes are simple, easy to edit, and make us look professional with minimal effort.

Weebly could improve by allowing users to search for their niche or industry. For example, if we're looking for real estate, we'll have to scroll through all the Business themes before finding a suitable site.

Weebly's themes are mobile responsive, but there is no way of previewing how they will render on screens of any size. We'd like a service allowing us to preview this before we build our site.

Squarespace Themes

Squarespace has what it takes to create the perfect site.

Source: Squarespace 

The beauty of Squarespace is that its themes are impeccable. They bring a boring website to life and are in a class of their own. When we spoke to design and UX experts, they agreed that Squarespace has the best themes available. It has some wonderful ecommerce options too.

Weebly vs Squarespace for Photographers

Squarespace themes are great for any website, whether it needs design and ecommerce features or has a creative focus such as photography.

Squarespace has responsive themes. Not only that, but it has mobile-friendly designs and a functional search bar to preview the website on different screen sizes; it is also better suited for creative industries. 

Drag-and-drop

Weebly and Squarespace offer drag-and-drop functionality, making it easy to move text and images without the hassle.

Weebly vs Squarespace: Features and Tools

Squarespace has more features and is a more versatile platform.

Thanks to Squarespace's wide array of features, as well as its marketing tools and ecommerce features, it has been crowned the winner in this category. 

Weebly offers tons of helpful built-in tools for website development. That's because it has an expansive marketplace with many great add-ons we can integrate into our website.

Weebly App Center

Both beginners and experts will be amazed by the Weebly app center's great apps. On the contrary, with exciting improvements in features and tools, Squarespace has seen a major increase in its website score from 3.9/5 to 4.4/5.

Compared to Weebly, we found that Squarespace has improved design, functionality, and tech features. This gives them an overall higher score than Weebly in this category.

Source: Weebly App Center

To compare Weebly and Squarespace's features, let's look at what each tool offers.

Ecommerce: Weebly vs Squarespace For a Store

For ecommerce, Squarespace is again the front-runner. Both platforms offer dedicated pricing plans to help us run our business more efficiently and sell unlimited products on the site, be it physical or digital. Here are some other important ecommerce features that both platforms provide:

• Discount creation - Create discount codes for our customers
• Abandoned Cart Recovery - Send customers a reminder if they don't complete the checkout process 
• Shipping Management – Manage our orders, postage cost, and information
• Multiple Payment Options - Accepting payments from multiple payment options such as PayPal
• No transaction fees - No transaction fees and no extra charges for upper-tier plans

Squarespace's multi-channel integration makes it easy to sync our website and sell products directly through social media platforms. With the change of ownership, Weebly might not be the best option for someone looking for an ecommerce website builder.

Both companies have an integration with Square that makes it easy to collect card payments face-to-face or online.

As of 2022, there are over 600 million blogs worldwide. Squarespace and Weebly offer great blogging features and can help us create blog posts. Let's look at what makes them unique in comparison:

The comment system allows users to comment on individual articles, posts, and the entire site. Search features are highly advanced. If we're new to the SEO world, using advanced search tools will help improve our results.

For its ease of use and superior design, Squarespace is our recommendation for running a blog. It allows us to easily schedule content and choose categories, two features that Weebly still needs to offer. Yet, it has a powerful interface that will work well with any website.

We can create a custom email address with G Suite relevant to our domain. We can get the ball rolling from there by creating and sending out campaigns to our Squarespace and Weebly site visitors.

Weebly offers a service called Weebly Promote. It's free to try, and pricing starts at $10/month. We can use this service to craft interesting content, use live templates for our email messages, and schedule send-out times.

From branding our email campaign to letting our subscribers know about the latest happenings with our company, Squarespace offers a variety of templates that are perfect for almost any situation. You'll find everything from elegant designs to customized design elements that ensure our emails are personalized and impactful.

With Squarespace, We can automate our email marketing. It helps us set up campaigns, contact lists, and store analytics to ensure the marketing strategy hits its target market.

Social Media Integrations 

Social media is an indispensable part of today's marketing landscape, and it’s important to integrate our social media strategy with our websites. Social media integration helps us better promote our business through Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, and more.

Both platforms allow putting social buttons on a website. We can use these social media tools like likes and follows to get visitors directly to our site with the latest statuses, tweets, or photos. Another benefit is that they both allow embedding live social feeds so visitors can see our latest activity, no matter where they are.

But one of the great features of Squarespace is that they'll allow creating social posts directly from their platform.

Analytics

Both platforms offer the same analytics options. Each website builder has built-in tracking features, allowing real-time monitoring everything from page views to bounce rates and sales. Both platforms also integrate with Google Analytics to get a more detailed view of our performance data should we need it.

Weebly vs Squarespace SEO

Squarespace has better SEO!

Although Weebly and Squarespace offer similar features, Squarespace edges out the win in terms of SEO. On the other hand, Weebly offers useful SEO apps that can help with SEO analytics, coding, and more. Squarespace offers a mobile-friendly design and keyword support, where it takes the lead.

Squarespace and Weebly offer similar features, such as editing content for better SEO. Both of the platforms can optimize the website for search engine visibility. Here are a few common features that make these platforms best for a business’s SEO needs: 

The SEO feature helps manage the following:

• Meta Titles/Descriptions
• The Slugs
• Image Alt Text

Weebly vs Squarespace Price

Weebly provides users with better value for money than Squarespace.

Weebly is a more affordable option for customers, and it gets the nod from us in terms of value for money. Sure, Squarespace has its benefits too, but Weebly edges the contest for our pick in terms of affordability.

The majority of people opt to use website builders because they're affordable. Most people aren't able to afford web designers and expensive websites. Weebly has some of the most affordable website plans, sizes, and budget-wise. It’s ideal for those who only need a simple site created quickly without breaking the bank.

With a three-tier pricing model, Weebly can help build our dream website. If we want to pay less than the average price, we can subscribe to the Budget plan ($6/month). Or if we have more money than time, the Pro plan is the best for us ($12/month).

Weebly has a free plan that gives us access to all the same features and tools. However, there is one big catch: our website will have the ugly '.weebly' attachment and ads plastered everywhere.

Before we hit publish, it's a good idea to test the site. We'll have time to take it offline and make changes.

Weebly Pricing Plans

When looking for an affordable website builder, consider Weebly. It provides excellent value for money, letting us build a site for as little as no cost.

Source: Weebly Pricing Plans 

Squarespace Pricing 

Squarespace has four pricing plans. These plans range from $16 to $49. The two priciest plans include ecommerce functions and data storage.

Squarespace offers a 14-day free trial to help us evaluate the service and determine if it's right for you. The platform prides itself on design, so it doesn’t want to compromise the website with ads.

Source: Squarespace Pricing 

From a price perspective, Weebly is the better choice.

If we want to use a website for personal or small business needs, Weebly may be the better option. If we need a website for a portfolio of work, a brand, or a business, or if we work in a creative industry, Squarespace would be our best bet.

Convert website into Online Business Card with UPQODE! 

Weebly and Squarespace both offer great features and have unique pricing options. However, Weebly is more affordable for small business needs, while Squarespace provides more control over our site's look and feel. 

Ultimately, the decision comes down to what we want in a website builder. If we're just starting, then either Weebly or Squarespace is a good option. However, if we are looking to take our business further than just basic web hosting and want more control over the design of our site, Squarespace is likely the better choice.

A website is an online business card. At UPQODE, we provide various web design services, including responsive, customer-focused, custom-built websites that offer quality, professional design.

Contact us today to get a quote for your upcoming website project!