Webflow vs Squarespace: Which Should You Choose in 2026?

We build websites on Webflow and Squarespace every single week. We have launched portfolios on Squarespace in a weekend and built complex web applications on Webflow that took months. We have migrated clients from one to the other and helped businesses choose between them more times than we can count.

So when someone asks us "which is better, Webflow or Squarespace?" our answer is always the same: it depends on what you are building, who is going to maintain it, and how much design control you actually need.

This is not a surface-level overview. This is what we have learned from building on both platforms, with real pricing, real trade-offs, and a clear recommendation based on your situation.

Quick Verdict: Webflow vs Squarespace in 2026

If you need to make a decision in 30 seconds, here it is.

Choose Webflow if you want pixel-perfect design control, plan to scale your content operations, need clean semantic HTML for SEO, or want to export your code someday. You will need to invest time learning the platform or hire a developer.

Choose Squarespace if you need a professional site live this week, prefer managing everything yourself without touching code, want built-in email marketing and scheduling tools, or run a small ecommerce operation. You will trade design flexibility for speed and simplicity.

Choose neither if you are building a SaaS application, need complex user authentication, or require server-side logic. Use Next.js, Rails, or a custom stack instead.

Key Differences at a Glance

Here is how the two platforms compare across every category that matters.

• **Design Control:** Webflow exposes every CSS property visually. Squarespace uses a section-based editor with predefined layout zones. Webflow wins for custom design. Squarespace wins for consistency.
• **Learning Curve:** Squarespace takes hours to learn. Webflow takes weeks to learn well. If you understand HTML and CSS concepts, Webflow clicks faster.
• **Pricing Entry Point:** Webflow starts at $14/month for a basic site. Squarespace starts at $16/month with more features included at the base tier.
• **CMS Power:** Webflow supports 40 collections with 20,000 items on the Business plan. Squarespace has no collection limit but fewer field types and no relational data.
• **Ecommerce Fees:** Squarespace charges 0% transaction fees on Commerce plans. Webflow charges 2% on Standard ecommerce, 0% on Plus and Advanced.
• **SEO:** Webflow generates cleaner HTML, gives you full control over meta tags, and outputs faster pages. Squarespace handles SEO basics automatically but with less granular control.
• **Code Export:** Webflow lets you export your site code. Squarespace does not. If you ever want to leave, this matters.
• **Built-in Tools:** Squarespace includes email marketing, scheduling, member areas, and courses out of the box. Webflow focuses on the website and relies on integrations for everything else.

Pricing Comparison: Webflow vs Squarespace

Pricing is closer than most people think, but the value equation is different at each tier.

Webflow Site Plans (Billed Annually)

• **Starter:** Free. Two pages, 50 CMS items, webflow.io subdomain. Good for testing, not for launching.
• **Basic:** $14/month. Custom domain, 150 pages, no CMS. For static brochure sites only.
• **CMS:** $23/month. The sweet spot. 2,000 CMS items, 20 collections, 50GB bandwidth, site search.
• **Business:** $39/month. 20,000 CMS items, 40 collections, 2.5TB bandwidth. For content-heavy operations.

Squarespace Plans (Billed Annually)

• **Basic:** $16/month. Custom domain, unlimited pages, basic website analytics, 2% transaction fee on sales.
• **Core:** $23/month. Includes member areas, advanced analytics, and 0% transaction fee for commerce.
• **Plus:** $39/month. Email marketing, SEO tools, advanced analytics, everything in Core.
• **Advanced:** $99/month. Advanced commerce, abandoned cart recovery, subscriptions, advanced shipping.

The Real Price Comparison

At the $23/month tier, both platforms offer a fully functional website with a CMS. Squarespace includes more at this price (member areas, 0% transaction fee) while Webflow gives you more design control and better code output.

At the $39/month tier, Webflow gives you massive CMS capacity (20,000 items) while Squarespace adds email marketing and SEO tools.

For the full breakdown of every Webflow plan, add-on, and hidden cost, read our complete Webflow pricing guide. And if you are wondering what a website costs overall (not just the platform), check our complete guide to website costs in 2026.

Design Flexibility and Templates

This is the single biggest difference between the two platforms, and it is not close.

Webflow: Full CSS Control

Webflow's visual editor exposes every CSS property. Margins, padding, flexbox, grid, transforms, transitions, filters, blend modes, custom animations. If CSS can do it, Webflow can do it visually. You are not choosing from preset options. You are building from scratch with the full power of modern CSS.

This means infinite design possibilities. It also means you need to understand layout principles. A blank Webflow canvas is intimidating if you do not know what flexbox does. But if you do, or if you hire someone who does, the results are indistinguishable from a fully custom coded website.

Webflow also offers templates and a marketplace, but most professionals start from scratch because the point of using Webflow is the control.

Squarespace: Template-First Design

Squarespace's Fluid Engine is a section-based drag-and-drop editor. You arrange content blocks within predefined layout zones. The results look professional because the templates enforce visual consistency. You are designing within guardrails.

Squarespace offers over 100 templates across industries. Every template is mobile-responsive out of the box. You can customize colors, fonts, spacing, and content, but you cannot break the underlying grid system. This is a feature, not a limitation. It prevents you from creating something ugly.

The Design Verdict

Webflow is a design tool. Squarespace is a design system. If you need a site that looks exactly like the mockup your designer created, Webflow is the only option. If you need a site that looks great without a designer, Squarespace delivers.

Ease of Use and Learning Curve

Squarespace: Hours to Launch

You can have a professional Squarespace website live in an afternoon. Choose a template, swap in your content, connect your domain, publish. The interface is intuitive enough that anyone who can use a word processor can manage a Squarespace site.

Adding pages, writing blog posts, uploading products, changing images. All of it is straightforward. Squarespace also handles hosting, security, backups, and updates automatically. You never think about infrastructure.

Webflow: Days to Proficiency

Webflow has a genuine learning curve. If you understand HTML and CSS, you can be productive in a few days. If you do not, expect a few weeks of tutorials and practice before you are comfortable.

The University section of Webflow's site is excellent, with hours of free video training. But there is no getting around the fact that Webflow is a professional tool with professional complexity. You are trading simplicity for power.

CMS and Content Management

Webflow CMS

Webflow's CMS is structured and flexible. You define collections (like blog posts, team members, case studies) with custom fields. Field types include plain text, rich text, images, videos, links, references to other collections, multi-references, colors, numbers, dates, switches, and options.

The reference and multi-reference fields are particularly powerful. You can create relational data structures, like linking blog posts to authors to categories, without any code.

Limits on the CMS plan: 20 collections, 2,000 items. Business plan: 40 collections, 20,000 items.

Squarespace CMS

Squarespace's CMS is simpler but effective for most use cases. Blog posts, products, events, galleries, and pages are all built-in content types. You can add custom fields to products, but the overall CMS is less flexible than Webflow's.

The big advantage: Squarespace has no hard limit on the number of pages or blog posts. You can publish thousands of blog posts without hitting a ceiling. The disadvantage: you cannot create custom content types or build complex data relationships.

The CMS Verdict

If your content needs are standard (blog, products, events, gallery), Squarespace handles it cleanly. If you need custom content structures, filtered collections, or relational data, Webflow is significantly more capable.

SEO Capabilities: Webflow vs Squarespace

Both platforms handle basic SEO. The difference is in the details.

What Webflow Does Better

Webflow generates clean, semantic HTML with minimal bloat. Page load times are consistently fast because there is no unnecessary JavaScript or CSS overhead. You get full control over meta titles, descriptions, Open Graph tags, alt text, and URL slugs. You can edit the head code of any page to add custom schema, tracking scripts, or anything else.

Webflow also gives you control over 301 redirects, canonical URLs, sitemap generation, and robots.txt. For technical SEO, it is as close to a custom build as you can get without actually coding.

What Squarespace Does Better

Squarespace handles SEO automatically for people who do not want to think about it. It generates sitemaps, adds SSL, creates clean URLs, and includes basic meta tag editing. The built-in SEO checklist walks you through optimization step by step.

Squarespace also added more advanced SEO tools in 2025, including search appearance previews and structured data for products. It is getting better, but it still does not match Webflow's granular control.

The SEO Verdict

For serious SEO work, Webflow wins. The code is cleaner, the pages are faster, and you have full control over every technical element. Squarespace is fine for basic SEO needs but will limit you as your strategy gets more sophisticated.

For a deep dive into advanced Squarespace customization including developer mode, read our Squarespace developer mode guide.

Ecommerce: Webflow vs Squarespace

Squarespace Ecommerce

Squarespace is the better out-of-the-box ecommerce solution. The Commerce plans (starting at $23/month with Core) include product management, inventory tracking, shipping labels, tax calculations, and 0% transaction fees. The Advanced plan ($99/month) adds abandoned cart recovery, subscriptions, and advanced shipping rules.

Setting up a store is straightforward. Add products, set prices, connect Stripe or PayPal, and you are selling. Squarespace handles the checkout flow, order management, and customer notifications.

Webflow Ecommerce

Webflow's ecommerce is more customizable but more limited in built-in features. The Standard plan ($29/month) charges a 2% transaction fee on top of payment processor fees. The Plus plan ($74/month) drops that to 0% but costs significantly more than Squarespace's equivalent.

Where Webflow ecommerce shines is design control. Every element of the product page, cart, and checkout can be customized visually. If you need a unique shopping experience that does not look like every other online store, Webflow delivers.

The Ecommerce Verdict

For most online stores, Squarespace is the better value. Lower cost, more features out of the box, and no transaction fees on Commerce plans. Choose Webflow ecommerce only if design customization is your top priority and you are willing to pay more for it.

Blogging: Webflow vs Squarespace

Both platforms support blogging, but they approach it differently.

Squarespace's blogging tools are mature and full-featured. The editor supports rich text, images, videos, audio, code blocks, and embedded content. You can schedule posts, manage multiple authors, add categories and tags, enable comments, and share directly to social media. The reading experience is polished out of the box.

Webflow's blog is powered by the CMS. You create a blog collection, design the listing page and individual post template, and publish through the CMS editor. The result can be anything you want visually, but you are building the blogging infrastructure yourself. There is no built-in comment system, no social sharing, and no scheduling (without third-party tools).

For businesses that blog regularly and want the simplest workflow, Squarespace is better. For businesses that want a completely custom blog experience integrated into a larger content strategy, Webflow is more flexible.

Who Should Choose Webflow?

Webflow is the right choice if any of these describe your situation:

• **Designers and agencies** who need pixel-perfect implementation of custom designs
• **Growing businesses** with complex content needs (directories, resource libraries, multi-type content)
• **SEO-focused companies** that need clean code, fast pages, and full technical control
• **Businesses planning to scale** that want a CMS capable of handling thousands of items
• **Teams that value code export** and want to avoid vendor lock-in
• **Anyone who already understands** HTML and CSS concepts

Who Should Choose Squarespace?

Squarespace is the right choice if any of these describe your situation:

• **Small business owners** who want to manage their own site without technical help
• **Creative professionals** (photographers, artists, writers) who need portfolio-style layouts
• **Service businesses** that need scheduling, member areas, and email marketing in one platform
• **Small ecommerce operations** that want a simple, affordable online store
• **Anyone who needs** a professional site live quickly without a development budget
• **Non-technical teams** that need to update content regularly without training

Webflow vs Squarespace vs WordPress

People often include WordPress in this comparison, so here is how all three stack up.

WordPress powers about 43% of websites globally. It is the most flexible option because it is open-source. You can build literally anything with WordPress. But that flexibility comes with responsibility: hosting, security, updates, plugin management, and ongoing maintenance are all on you.

Choose WordPress over both if you need a complex web application, have very specific plugin requirements, want total ownership of your hosting and data, or are building something neither Webflow nor Squarespace can handle.

Skip WordPress if you want a managed, hassle-free experience. Both Webflow and Squarespace handle hosting, security, and updates for you. WordPress requires either technical knowledge or ongoing developer support to maintain properly.

The maintenance cost of WordPress is the hidden factor. A $5/month hosting plan sounds cheap until you factor in the value of your time managing updates, security, and plugin conflicts. For most small businesses, a managed platform like Webflow or Squarespace is more cost-effective when you account for total cost of ownership.

Migrating Between Platforms

Squarespace to Webflow

Squarespace supports content export in XML format. You can export blog posts, pages, and basic content. However, the export does not include design, custom CSS, images stored on Squarespace servers, or product data. Realistically, you are rebuilding the site in Webflow and importing your written content.

Plan for 2-4 weeks for a full migration depending on site complexity. Budget for a developer unless your site is very simple.

Webflow to Squarespace

Webflow lets you export your site code (HTML, CSS, JS). But Squarespace cannot import that code. You are starting fresh in Squarespace and manually recreating your content. This direction is less common because people typically move toward more design control, not less.

Our Recommendation

If you are on the fence, start with the platform that matches your current needs. Migration is always possible but never free. It is better to spend an extra week choosing the right platform now than to spend a month migrating later.

The Bottom Line

We have built on both platforms for years. Neither is the wrong choice. They serve different people with different priorities.

If you value design control, clean code, and long-term scalability, choose Webflow. If you value speed, simplicity, and an all-in-one platform, choose Squarespace.

The worst choice is spending weeks agonizing over the decision. Pick the one that matches your situation today, launch your site, and focus on what actually drives business results: your content, your offer, and your customers.

---

Need help deciding or building? We work with both platforms and can give you a straight recommendation based on your specific situation. No bias, no upselling. Talk to the BKND team and let us help you launch the right way.