Starting a website is easy when you have the right tools. However, choosing the right tools for the job is often a misstep. We know many of you are wondering if it’s better to use Weebly or Squarespace. They’re both popular, easy to use, and ready for e-commerce.
However, after examining them in-depth, we found Squarespace superior to Weebly. This ultimately came down to Squarespace’s all-aroundness, as it’s great for both stunning website designs and online stores. Weebly, however, focuses primarily on e-commerce.
While this quick conclusion might be enough for some, for most, it’s best to read our full comparison. There are some nuances we need to explain that you should know before your final decision. Let’s now jump right into this Weebly vs Squarespace duel and give you some answers.
Weebly vs Squarespace: A Quick Comparison
| Weebly | Squarespace | |
| 📋 Our current ranking | #7 | #3 |
| 🤑 Starting price | $10/mo | $16/mo |
| 🆓 Free plan | Yes ✅ | No ❌ |
| 🌐 Free Domain | Yes ✅ | Yes ✅ |
| 🔐 Free SSL | Yes ✅ | Yes ✅ |
| 🏞️ Number of templates | 50 | 180 |
| ⚙️ Ease of use | Very easy | Very easy |
| 🏪 E-Commerce starting price | Available in the free plan | $23/mo |
| 👟 Number of sold items | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| 💲 Transaction fees | 2.9%+0.3c | 0% to 3% |
| 📧 Email marketing | Yes, 2 emails for free, $8/mo for more email sends | $7/mo for 500 emails |
| ☎️ Customer support | Chat, email, phone, and community | Chat, email, and community |
Designing a Website With Squarespace and Weebly
Website design is pretty straightforward in both cases. Squarespace and Weebly let you sign up in seconds, and right after that, choose how to build your website. In Weebly, we liked the option to sign up using Google or Facebook, as it doesn’t require account verification.
You virtually have to provide email, password, and your name, and boom — you can start. That’s because Weebly offers a free plan, so there’s no subscription right away. Squarespace doesn’t have a free plan, so you have one more step: choosing a plan and subscribing.
Website Editor
What happens next is magic. At least in Squarespace’s scenario. Squarespace offers two ways of starting your website — with a template and with a Blueprint AI. The latter is better for beginners. They just need to answer a few questions and let the Blueprint AI do the job.
In the first case, the user is “subjected” to a vast template selection. Once the user picks the template, they’re free to edit the website using Squarespace’s outstanding drag-and-drop interface. Squarespace is one of the simplest, most intuitive website builders we have used.
A huge plus in our eyes is its section-based philosophy, which means you can’t mess things up that much. This, however, means it’s less customizable than Wix — but not than Weebly. Weebly, first off, doesn’t have the option to craft a website with an AI, which is a bummer.
Instead, when you sign up, you’ll choose between a “normal” website and an online store. After that, you’ll name your website, answer a few more prompts, and start designing a website from scratch, because, when designing an online store, Weebly doesn’t let you choose a template.
To be able to do this, you have to pick the option on the left — to build a website. Its website editor supports some drag-and-drop functions, but it’s slightly more limited than Squarespace. It’s simple enough, though, and beginners will feel at home with Weebly.
Squarespace takes the first round without a hitch. Its inclusion of Blueprint AI makes it easier for newbies to come up with a website. With a drag-and-drop interface with more features and design freedom than Weebly, Squarespace ultimately wins this very important round.
Weebly vs Squarespace: Templates Comparison
In the previous Weebly vs Squarespace comparison, we stated that both website builders have templates. I mean, that’s expected from a website builder. Still, we found that Squarespace is much more impressive, not just in numbers, but also in quality.
Let’s define their numbers first:
- Squarespace has around 180 templates; all are free
- Weebly has around 50 templates; all are free
With just 50 templates, Weebly isn’t the strongest competitor. That’s one of the reasons it lost to Wix in our comparison, for example. Squarespace’s 180 or so templates are numerous, but not as many a Wix’s 900 or Webflow’s 6,000+, but that’s a comparison for another day.
In this duel, however, Weebly displayed an unimpressive performance. Its templates aren’t ugly, but they’re very boring, outdated, and far from sleek. They will do their job, no doubt. But if you want a unique, or God forbid, responsive website, Weebly simply won’t cut it.
On the other side, we have Squarespace famous for its attractive, imaginative, and elegant templates. During our assessment, we found just a few templates we didn’t like — the rest were stunning. All templates are responsive, so they’re optimized for mobile automatically.
We should also mention deep categorization. You’ll be able to sift through multiple template categories and find ones for your needs. For example, there are website templates for churches, photography websites, fashion blogs, fitness/wellness websites, and many more.
Weebly’s unrelenting focus on e-commerce can be seen from afar because its templates and design freedom suffer. Squarespace puts another nail in Weebly’s coffin, with 180+ stunning-looking, responsive, and elegant website templates.
E-Commerce Features Analysis
E-commerce is where you’ll find some stark differences between Squarespace and Weebly.
First of all, Weebly offers a free plan, but also the ability to sell online for free. To make things better, you can sell unlimited products, as well, making it great if you have no money to invest in an e-commerce website builder.
Squarespace is a premium-only website builder, so naturally, you’ll have to pay for e-commerce tools. The starting plan doesn’t offer those, so the next one, called Business ($23/mo), is the right option.
When it comes to e-commerce features, Weebly and Squarespace are pretty similar. Apart from selling unlimited items in all plans, they offer:
- Abandoned cart emails/recovery
- Multi-channel selling
- POS (Point of Sale)
- Item options/badges
- Physical and digital goods
- Inventory management
- Automatic tax calculation
- Gift cards
- Shipping calculator
- Shipping customization (weight-based, flat-rate, fee, etc.)
- User reviews and accounts, etc.
Of course, the features you get depend on the plan. For instance, Weebly’s free plan lets you sell only physical goods, while Squarespace’s Business plan lacks product reviews that are available in the Commerce Basic plan.
Setting up online stores in Weebly and Squarespace is straightforward. Both allow you to add bulk products, include product variants, and use a variety of third-party tools to optimize or even translate your store.
We’d give Squarespace an edge here, because of a more populated App Center, with impressive integrations that improve your store functionality and give it more life.
Payment Vendors
Squarespace and Weebly intersect in a few popular payment vendors — PayPal and Stripe. Stripe offers credit/debit cards, as well. While Weebly relies on these two, as can be seen in the screenshot below, Squarespace has its in-house Squarespace Payments solution.
An advantage of this solution is availability in multiple countries, such as the US, the UK, Germany, Ireland, and so on. Moreover, Squarespace Payments will extend its reach to Norway, Sweden, and a few more countries, so users on each continent can take advantage.
Best of all, Squarespace Payments houses even more vendors — over 70, according to the company. Some of these are PayPal, Stripe, Apple Pay, Klarna, Afterpay, Google Pay, and dozens more. As an in-house solution, it also fits right into your Squarespace account, allowing you to receive payments effortlessly.
Transaction Fees
Their transaction fees are dependent on the subscription plan and/or payment method.
- Squarespace has a 3% transaction fee in the Business plan, while Commerce Basic and Commerce Advanced plans reduce transaction fees to 0%.
- Weebly has two transaction fees: PayPal — 3.49% + 0.49c, Stripe — 2.9% + 0.3c.
When discussing transaction fees, it’s worth mentioning that, although Squarespace takes 0%, using credit cards and some digital wallets can produce “third-party” fees. For example, each bank takes a small fee to process the payment. Here’s another revelation.
Squarespace is a better website builder for smaller businesses — why?
Because of its fee model. With 0% transaction fees, you’ll have much higher earnings and be able to sustain a smaller online store. In Weebly, the more you sell, the more its fees consume your profit, so selling MORE means paying LARGER fees, which makes no sense.
If your sales aren’t great, again, Weebly still takes a good portion of your earnings, so it essentially doesn’t fit on either side.
As an e-commerce-first platform, Weebly isn’t miles ahead of Squarespace, as some would expect. While Weebly allows you to sell online for free and offers many sales tools, Squarespace capitalizes on lower fees, more payment vendors, and a variety of in-house and third-party sales tools.
We will declare this round a draw, because being able to sell unlimited items for free in Weebly is a considerable advantage, one that you can’t get in any other popular website builder.
SEO & Marketing: Which One Is More Efficient?
To drive more sales or even boost your website traffic, you don’t want to rely solely on e-commerce features. That’s why website builders include marketing and SEO tools, but as always, some are more impressive than others.
Weebly
In this case, we’re addressing Weebly, which comes with the basics. In terms of SEO, you’ll find all the features in the SEO menu of the dashboard. Basic functions, like altering your website description, meta keywords, and 301 redirects, are there. Plus, Weebly lets you include a Google Analytics tracking code.
The good news is that Weebly lets you deepen your SEO with a bit of coding. But then, if you know how to code, you wouldn’t use a website builder, whose aim is to simplify the process.
Email marketing is present in Weebly, and it’s free, which sounds awesome. Or does it? The website builder offers Weebly Promote. It packs a few email templates that you can sugarcoat, customize, and adapt to fit your brand for two recipients. Wait — two?!
Yes, Weebly Promote lets you send two free email campaigns monthly, which is, honestly, shameful. You can spend $8/mo on the premium plan for more email sends, though. Or you can use other marketing tools from its App Center, although they’re elementary.
Squarespace
Squarespace provides more in terms of SEO. The SEO tab offers the basics we already mentioned, but there is more analytics and vital information. The Geography tab lets you discover your audience’s location and see how they interact with your website, which is very handy.
The website builder also has an AI, which aids optimization and helps you rank better. Unlike some of its rivals, Squarespace makes a sitemap automatically, with important markups that keep your site optimization excellent.
Our favorite part is the SEO Checklist, which lists all the most important SEO tasks for you to complete. If you find specific issues you can’t resolve, Squarespace AI will help you fix that and get back on track in no time.
On the marketing side, Squarespace doesn’t have a free marketing suite, although there’s an in-house email marketing tool called Email Campaigns. It’s not free, but if you spend $7/mo, you can send 500 monthly emails. This tool has more email templates than Weebly Promote, which is great.
Squarespace also includes several marketing and SEO extensions on its App Store, such as Mailchimp, SEOSpace, GoDataFeed, Channable, and many more.
Squarespace is better in both marketing and SEO. It offers more features, which can further be extended via its first-party and third-party extensions. With Squarespace AI, you can also improve SEO considerably, even as a non-experienced user.
Weebly vs Squarespace: Pricing and Plans
In this Weebly vs Squarespace price comparison, we’ll consider two things:
- Which website builder is more affordable
- Which website builder offers better value for money
So, let’s see how much Weebly is:
These prices look pretty good. The Performance plan, which is supposed to be its flagship, is only $26/mo billed annually. But here’s the kicker. Strangely, Weebly’s plans aren’t all that different, and instead of building upon one another, they’re somewhat similar.
I mean, the Performance plan does include some extras, like abandoned cart emails, item reviews, etc. But all other plans allow unlimited items, advanced e-commerce tools, etc. Only Professional and Performance plans offer a free domain for a year, and what’s more irritating, only these two remove Square ads — what a joke!
So, even if you pay for Weebly and get the Personal plan at $10/mo, Square ads will still ruin your website. Despite its pocket-friendly prices, Weebly is a poor value for money, especially because it hasn’t added any new features since 2018, when Square bought it out.
What About Squarespace?
You’ll notice that Squarespace is pricier — so what?
At $16/mo, the Personal plan isn’t that expensive. When compared to Wix, Squarespace is priced similarly, although it offers e-commerce at $23/mo instead of $29/mo. Nevertheless, the highest-spec Commerce Advanced plan is $52/mo, which isn’t a lot for what you get.
Squarespace offers a free domain in ALL plans, along with collaborators, mobile-optimized templates, and other features we mentioned. It also allows you to test it for 14 days without paying, and as said, comes with 0% transaction fees in specific plans to maximize your earnings.
Let’s put it like this. Squarespace’s Commerce Basic plan is all you need to sell online and really get the best bang for your buck. To try (and fail) to match it, you’ll have to spend $26/mo on Weebly Performance.
With everything said, Squarespace is just a tad more expensive than Weebly, while offering a lot more features, both for blogging and selling online. With this proposition, it’s safe to say that Squarespace is a better purchase in 2026.
Customer Support
During our Weebly vs Squarespace testing, we found ourselves chatting with both providers back and forth. The great thing about Weebly is that chat and email support are available even in the free plan. Phone and priority support are in the Professional and Performance plans.
For the most part, Weebly’s chat and email support were enough to get the job done. It’s not the fastest in the world, but if you don’t have any urgent matters to discuss, you won’t mind. Weebly also comes with a community forum, where you can engage in discussions with other users.
Phone support is open from 6 AM to 6 PM PT, so you have 12 hours a day to call.
Squarespace primarily relies on live chat support, although that’s realized through a chatbot. If he can’t help you, you can choose to talk to a human and work things over. Phone support isn’t there, but the community forum is, and given Squarespace’s popularity, it’s very active and lively.
Their knowledge bases are sublime, with answers to typical questions and solutions to specific problems.
There’s virtually nothing to complain about on this front. Both Squarespace and Weebly have round-the-clock support ready to answer questions and tackle issues promptly, resulting in a satisfying user experience and, consequently, a draw.
Conclusion: Choose Squarespace Over Weebly
Another day, another time to be the judge. In the end, we must say be fair and say that Squarespace is way better. This decision isn’t surprising, considering that Weebly won no rounds. Weebly’s advantages are affordability and the ability to sell physical products online for free.
While some argue that Weebly is more beginner-friendly, for us, Squarespace is better for beginners because of its innovative AI tools. Other aspects, such as SEO, sales features, templates, marketing, transaction fees, and most importantly, value for money, are all on Squarespace’s side.
Ultimately, our recommended option is Squarespace, and if this comparison isn’t enough, feel free to explore our full review of this website builder, where we test and discuss its features in depth.