Squarespace vs Shopify: which is better in 2026?

The quick verdict

Pick Shopify if the store is the business. It is built around products, orders, inventory and checkout, and it grows from a first product to a large catalog with staff accounts and in-person selling.

Pick Squarespace if the website comes first and selling is one part of it. Its templates look polished from day one, its Core plan adds a store with no extra transaction fee, and blogging, scheduling and email marketing sit in the same account.

Side by side

The prices come from the Squarespace pricing page and the Shopify pricing page. The exit score is our 10-point measure of how much of your site you can take with you if you leave. See how every builder scores on the exit scores page.

One more difference shows up fast: Shopify’s Basic plan has no staff accounts, so only the owner can log in. Squarespace’s Core plan allows unlimited contributors (Basic allows 2).

Cost over 3 years

Headline prices hide most of the bill. Here is the same small online shop on both platforms over 36 months.

The example site: about 10 pages and a blog, a .com domain, one business email address, and $2,000 a month in online sales from 50 orders (an average order of $40). That is $72,000 in sales and 1,800 orders over three years. Both plans are billed yearly.

We use Squarespace Core, not Basic, because Basic adds a 2% store fee (more on that below). On Shopify we use Basic with Shopify Payments.

How we got these numbers:

• Domain. Squarespace gives a free domain for the first year on annual plans. Neither company publishes its .com renewal price on the pages we used, so we use Namecheap’s listed .com prices as a stand-in: $18.48 a year to renew and $11.28 for a first year. Shopify’s free-domain offer is not confirmed, so we count all three years there.
• Email. Squarespace Core includes one Google Workspace account free for the first year. Squarespace does not show the price after that, so we budget Google’s own listed rate of $7.00 per user per month on the annual plan ($84 a year). Shopify does not include email, so that is $84 for all three years. See email hosting if this is new to you.
• Card processing. Both charge 2.9% + 30 cents per online card sale on these plans. That is $2,088 in percentage fees plus $540 in per-order fees. Squarespace charges 3.2% + $0.30 on premium cards, which would nudge its total up.

The takeaway: at this size the two cost almost the same. The gap is about $95 over three years, mostly from Squarespace’s free first year of domain and email.

What the table leaves out

Apps are the wild card. Shopify’s App Store has thousands of apps, and many charge a monthly subscription. Shopify does not publish a typical spend, so we cannot give one. Each paid app adds its monthly price times 36 to your total. Squarespace has an Extensions marketplace with its own add-on costs.

Two traps worth knowing

Squarespace Basic. Basic is $10 a month cheaper than Core billed yearly, which saves $360 over three years. But it charges a 2% fee on store sales, which costs $1,440 on our example’s $72,000, and it does not include the free Google Workspace account. Once you sell more than $6,000 a year ($500 a month), Core costs less. Basic also charges 7% on digital content and memberships.

Shopify with another payment provider. If you skip Shopify Payments and use a third-party payment gateway, Shopify adds its own fee on top of that provider’s charges: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus. On our example, that is another $1,440 on Basic. Our transaction fees explainer covers the difference between these fees and card processing.

Want to run your own numbers? Try the website cost calculator.

Design and ease of use

Squarespace is template-led. You start from a designer-made template and adjust fonts, colors and layout. Its Blueprint AI tool builds a starting site from those templates for you. The result tends to look polished with little effort, which is why creatives and service businesses like it.

Custom code depends on the plan. Basic gets a basic code block and a CSS editor. Core and up add the advanced code block and JavaScript.

Shopify’s design comes from themes in the Shopify Theme Store, which has free and paid options. Themes are written in Liquid, Shopify’s template language, and the code can be edited. That gives a developer a lot of room, but it also means bigger design changes often need one.

The dashboards feel different. Squarespace’s editor is about pages and layout. Shopify’s admin is about running a store: products, orders, inventory, customers and discounts. If you spend most of your time writing pages, Squarespace will feel more natural. If you spend it managing products, Shopify will.

Store, blog and SEO

Store

Shopify is the stronger store. Card rates drop as you move up: 2.9% + 30 cents on Basic, 2.7% + 30 cents on Grow, 2.5% + 30 cents on Advanced and 2.25% + 30 cents on Plus. In-person rates run from 2.6% + 10 cents down to 2.3% + 10 cents, so you can sell at markets or a shop counter from the same system. Staff accounts go from none on Basic to 5 on Grow and 15 on Advanced.

Squarespace covers what most small shops need. Card rates are 2.9% + $0.30 on Basic and Core, 2.7% + $0.30 on Plus and 2.5% + $0.30 on Advanced. Plus adds a reserved cart with a timer and advanced merchandising. If you sell courses or memberships, watch the Digital Content & Memberships fee: 7% on Basic, 5% on Core, 1% on Plus and 0% on Advanced.

Blog

Squarespace has the more complete blog. You can run several blogs on one site, with comments. Shopify includes a blog and pages, but they are there to support the store, not to be the main event.

SEO

Both give you the standard SEO controls, such as page titles and descriptions. Squarespace added an AI SEO Scanner in September 2025 that suggests titles, descriptions and image alt text. Shopify has SEO fields on every product, plus URL redirects in the admin. Neither platform will rank a site by itself. Your content and reputation do that.

AI features

Squarespace’s AI is aimed at building and marketing the site. Blueprint AI generates a starting design. Beacon AI, announced September 30, 2025, is a business guide that works across the platform. There are also AI composers for products, discounts and FAQs, plus AI image and video backgrounds. AI use is metered with credits: 10 one-time credits on Basic, then 20, 40 or 120 credits a month on Core, Plus and Advanced.

Shopify’s AI is aimed at running the store. Sidekick, its AI assistant, comes with your plan, though Shopify says features and usage limits vary by plan. It helps with store design, photo editing, product copy, discounts, email campaigns, inventory alerts and reports. Recent updates added a fullscreen mode (December 2025), payments and site-speed data (January 2026), and the ability to create customers and companies (February 2026).

Leaving later

Both score 5 out of 10, but they leave different things behind.

Squarespace exports a WordPress-format file with your basic pages, one blog with its posts, and gallery pages. Store pages, portfolio and index pages, video, audio and product blocks, drafts, style settings and custom CSS stay behind. Images download one at a time, and uploaded videos cannot be exported. On the plus side, products export to an editable CSV, and orders and contacts export too.

Shopify exports products, customers and orders to CSV. Product images come out only as web links, and those links stop working if the store closes, so download your images before you cancel. Themes download as a ZIP of Liquid files, but they only run on Shopify. We found no documented one-click export for blog posts and pages.

On both, you can move your domain out and keep it. The simplest protection is to register it with an outside domain registrar from the start. Our guide to leaving your website builder walks through the full process.

Pick Squarespace if…

• Your site is mostly about your work or services, and the store is a side line.
• You want a polished design without hiring a designer.
• You plan to blog seriously, or run more than one blog.
• You want several people editing the site on a mid-priced plan (Core allows unlimited contributors).
• You sell enough to justify Core, since Basic’s 2% store fee adds up fast.

Pick Shopify if…

• Selling products is the main point of the website.
• You sell in person as well as online and want one system for both.
• You expect to grow into staff accounts, more locations or a bigger catalog.
• You want a large app store to add features as you need them.
• You are happy to use Shopify Payments, which avoids Shopify’s extra 0.2% to 2% fee.

Neither? Look at these

• Wix has a free plan to try first and puts bookings, a store and marketing in one dashboard. Its exit score is lower, at 3/10. See Wix vs Shopify.
• Self-hosted WordPress scores 10/10 on exit: you own every file and the database, and any WordPress host can run the site. You take on more setup and upkeep. We build on WordPress every week, and our Squarespace vs WordPress comparison covers the trade-offs.
• Webflow suits design-heavy brands with a small catalog. Its Ecommerce Standard plan is $29 a month billed yearly ($39 billed monthly) with a 2% Webflow fee and up to 500 items.

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