We compared Webflow vs Squarespace: Which is better for your situation?

Helpful summary

Overview: We compare Webflow and Squarespace, key no-code website builders, to help businesses choose the right platform for their online presence. Webflow caters to SaaS, online brands, and eCommerce with advanced features, while Squarespace is beginner-friendly, offering quick website setup with pre-made templates.

Why you can trust us: We are a premium content marketing agency specializing in helping startups grow. Our expertise in SEO and digital marketing strategies, backed by successful case studies, ensures our insights are practical and effective for growing businesses.

Why it matters: Choosing the right website builder impacts the ease of creating and managing your online presence. Webflow offers design freedom and advanced features but requires design experience. Squarespace provides ease of use and quick setup, ideal for beginners and budget-conscious businesses.

Action points: We suggest assessing your team's design experience and website requirements. For advanced design needs and experience, choose Webflow. If you're a beginner or need a quick, budget-friendly option, Squarespace is ideal.

‍Further research: Explore specific features of both platforms in detail and consider other user reviews. Assess your business needs and skill level to make an informed decision.

Our evaluation of Webflow and Squarespace, coming from practical usage

The first step to launching an online business is creating a website. No-code automation tools and website builders and CMS platforms allow founders to create the perfect website for their brand without any coding knowledge.

Webflow is a powerful and popular tool for SaaS businesses, online brands and eCommerce businesses - with over 3.5M active users. 

However, in recent years, Squarespace has grown in popularity. Users love the platform for its beginner-friendly editor and animation tools. 

What is the best no-code website builder for your online brand? Should you go for Webflow and benefit from its full creative freedom? Or, is Squarespace the better option for its ease of use?

In this article, we at Embarque will explore Squarespace and WebFlow so that you can choose the best website builder for your business.  

Why listen to us?

Our experience with Cleanvoice, a SaaS company, is a testament to our SEO expertise. Despite the highly competitive AI niche, we increased their monthly SEO traffic by over 30k, achieved an average CTR of 7.9%, and significantly boosted their organic traffic and impressions​​. We developed a content strategy focusing on trending topics, optimized content with Google Search Console, and implemented a content update system for sustained SEO performance​​.

Webflow vs Squarespace: Key differences

Webflow and Squarespace are both great choices for startups and businesses looking to build websites without code.

• Webflow is designed for web design professionals, freelancers and in-house teams with plenty of design experience. Don’t let the no-code interface fool you, experience is needed to get the most out of the platform. 
• Squarespace is instead a beginner-friendly option. Hobbyists and indie creators can use this platform to keep their websites up and running quickly. Individuals can create a beautiful site much faster in comparison to Webflow. 
• Both platforms offer some great eCommerce tools. However, Webflow - given its enterprise and freelance target audience - offers these features at a much higher price point. Squarespace is the best platform for online stores on a budget. 
• The base plan on Squarespace comes with unlimited bandwidth and storage, whereas Webflow only starts at 50 GB. Webflow continues to have a bandwidth cap on its highest tiers. 

What is Webflow?

Webflow is a robust no-code website design and development platform. Users design and build their websites using a drag-and-drop visual builder, and is used by founders who want professional websites fast.

While Webflow doesn’t require any code to create a website, the platform is best used by those with a web design background. 

The tool presents a steep learning curve for beginners, making it difficult for them to get the most out of it. This could lead to lengthy onboarding processes for new users, which isn’t optimal if you need to start designing straight away.

If you’re interested in exploring what Webflow is capable of creating, why not check out the ‘Made in Webflow’ collection? 

Webflow Key Features

Design and develop at the same time

As Webflow itself puts it, the platform helps “bring your whole team together”. This visual editor allows web designers to put their UI/UX designs into practice! 

Webflow transforms every design choice you make into clean and efficient code. From there, developers can adjust code, add new elements and build experiences as they see fit. 

Traditional web design gets lost in silos - where prototypes are seldom fully realized. A no-code editor like Webflow lets designers and developers build websites collaboratively - as they envisioned. 

Webflow integrates a powerful visual CMS into websites

In the modern digital landscape, content is king. Online businesses must publish and push content to reach new audiences and establish their reputation. 

Website admins can use Webflow’s visual CMS to create structured pages and databases to house blogs, video content, case studies, and more. 

Webflow lets you easily create well-structured content with custom fields and even allows you to insert content while editing your live site’s design.

This is combined with a suite of SEO tools, such as auto-generated sitemaps and meta title and description generators, to elevate your search visibility. 

Interested in using content to supercharge your online brand? Embarque offers high-quality, productized content services. We write premium SEO content to help you rank fast. 

Wide range of eCommerce features

For those businesses looking to sell products online, Webflow contains a wide array of features to make eCommerce possible. 

With Webflow, you can: 

• Quickly sell new products and add descriptions and product categories within a few clicks. 
• Take payments through all major credit cards, debit cards, Apple Pay and PayPal. 
• Keep track of orders through an order management dashboard - where you can view details, issue refunds, and more. 

Want to explore how to build an eCommerce store on Webflow? We’ve found a handy guide on how to get started. 

Pricing

Webflow is a paid website builder, and some of its advanced plans can be a tad more expensive than competitors like Squarespace and Wix. 

Let’s explore how Webflow prices its service. 

There are two types of pricing plans: 

• Site plans 
• Account plans 

A site plan allows you to pay for each website you build and host. If you're creating a website for your own business, this should be the option you choose.

Account plans - also known as Workspaces - are ideal for freelance web designers who create multiple websites for clients. 

If you’re building an online store, you’ll need an eCommerce plan. The most advanced eCommerce plan will set you back over $200 a month - if billed annually. 

Should you use Webflow? Pros and Cons

Pros

• Webflow is a powerful and adaptable visual editor
• Allows designers and developers to work together on the same site 
• Useful eCommerce dashboard

Cons

• Steep learning curve 
• Expensive

What is the best alternative to Webflow for small businesses and indie hackers? 

Webflow is a brilliant tool for tech startups and businesses with more resources to craft a unique website. However, small businesses, individuals, and those on a tight budget will find Webflow too cumbersome to use, especially if you do not have any prior web design experience.

Squarespace is often touted as the best Webflow alternative for these use cases. Let’s explore how it stacks up!

What is Squarespace? 

Squarespace is a beginner-friendly no-code web design and development platform. It allows users to create beautiful websites in just a few minutes - although a web browser. 

Whereas Webflow focuses on building a website from a blank canvas, Squarespace encourages users to work from pre-made templates. 

That’s by no means a downside. Squarespace's template library offers jumping off points for websites of all styles, sectors and brands. 

Once you’ve found the perfect template, Squarespace lets you add elements and customize your site with a drag-and-drop editor. 

There’s less technical control on offer here when compared with Webflow. But for beginners and non-developers, this simplicity removes an important barrier to your creativity. 

Pages are organized into content blocks that can be arranged and positioned on a grid. The editor isn’t particularly hard to learn, but can something be hard to wrestle with.

We’ve found the UI and controls to be glitchy at times. But when it works, you can create a beautiful site in a fraction of the time of Webflow.

Why choose Squarespace? 

Customizable templates

Squarespace sites are built from customizable templates. The vast majority of these pre-made frameworks are created by the platform’s in-house design team - but there are a few community-created ones in the library too. 

What sets Squarespace apart from other builders like WordPress in particular is the quality of these templates. The vast majority are stunning and can be moulded quite easily. Webflow’s template library doesn’t offer the same range. 

Each template design carefully considers how you’ll want to present your content - with support for all major content types, including pages, galleries, blogs, commerce, calendars, and more. 

Smart animation tools and backgrounds 

In Squarespace's view, great animation is the key to creating a website that stands out. Standard animations are a few clicks away in a distinct ‘Animations’ stab in the Site Design panel. 

You can add site-wide effects so that elements fade, slide or scale in and out. These effects can also be added to individual elements. 

Want to go a step further? Squarespace’s new background art feature allows you to add interesting animated backgrounds to your page. 

These shapes and patterns are fully-customizable within the Background menu. Many of the available styles are 3D-animated. This adds a modern, futuristic flair to your designs. 

Powerful eCommerce Platform

Squarespace continues to push eCommerce as a primary use case for its platform, in the hopes to tackle the likes of Shopify and WordPress WooCommerce head-on.

If you’re setting up an online shop, and don’t need the hassle of adapting your user experience or checkout flow, Squarespace is one of the fastest ways to get selling. 

In particular, we’re impressed with the inventory management system recently added to Squarespace 7.0. 

It gives you email alerts for limited stock, can manage orders - just like Webflow - and will sync with your other applications using APIs.

Squarespace will even help you set up shipping options and purchase shipping labels.

Pricing

Squarespace’s plans offer some great value - especially if you’re interested in the Commerce plan. 

As Webflow’s Commerce plans can reach over $200 a month, the unlimited offering for online stores seems quite attractive at around $50 per month. 

The standard packages are comparable to Webflow’s offerings, but they do also offer a free 1-year domain. 

Should you use Squarespace? Pros and Cons

Pros

• Beginner-friendly, accessible website building: Squarespace is far easier to learn than Webflow. Sure, some parts of the UI are frustrating to use, but once you’ve gotten used to Squarespace’s quirks, you can make websites much faster. 
• Brilliant stock templates, animations and effects: Bringing your website to life only takes a few clicks. You don’t even need to wrestle with CSS or adjust any code to get animations working.
• Robust eCommerce tools: It’s really easy to start selling products and services using Squarespace. We think it’s even more straightforward than Webflow. If you want to start an online store fast, pick Squarespace. 

Cons

• Limited by templates: You don’t get the benefits of full design freedom with Squarespace. Your website design is shaped by the theme you pick. 
• You can’t edit code or add elements manually: You’re stuck with the visual editor, meaning your developers can’t do much to add interactive elements or adjust parts of your site.
• No support for third-party apps and plugins: This limits the ability to add functionality to your site. With Webflow, developers can easily build in add-ons. That’s not the case here.

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Harness SEO content and convert customers with Embarque

Scaling an online business requires more than building a website. The content you publish on your site has a far greater impact on your website traffic and sales than web design.

Embarque can help you with content marketing and SEO - which are essential for any website to succeed.

Embarque is a premium productized content marketing agency that helps hyper-growth tech startups grow their traffic and convert more customers. 

Let us help you create a content strategy that propels your business to the front page of Google with high-quality, premium SEO content. We’ll help identify keywords that you can rank high in - and our writers will create engaging content to publish on your site. 

Getting external links from trustworthy websites (with a high domain authority) is another crucial part of digital marketing. Combining high-quality content with results-driven backlinks, our blended SEO packages provide a holistic marketing strategy for your business. 

Get in touch with us today to see how we can help!