If you’re about to create a new website for your business, you may be wondering whether to go with Squarespace or Webflow for your site builder.

First off, both are excellent platforms offering plenty of online guidance and resources to help you along the way. You can create a beautiful, effective website using one or the other.

Beyond building your site, you’ll need to consider what’s available in terms of search engine optimization guides and tools. The good news is that resources are available to help you with your Squarespace SEO or your Webflow SEO.

What about other important considerations? We’ll go over some of the major ones in this guide written to help business owners and web developers trying to choose the right platform for building a site in 2023. We’ve explored both platforms, and we present some of our major observations throughout this guide.

Table of Contents in Detail Hide

Structure vs. Freedom

Image Source: Unsplash — *Image Source:* *Unsplash*

How you build your site matters. You have to strike the right balance between a structured approach and the freedom to create something new and beautiful.

Structure: It’s important to give your visitors a clear roadmap as they navigate through your site.
Freedom: You also need to be able to follow your vision and represent your brand in the best light possible.

When building your site, you need to strive for both a user-friendly experience and search engine optimization. Both are important in terms of attracting visitors to your site and keeping them there.

Too Much Freedom?

Webflow provides you with the freedom to design your website your way. You are free to create whatever design you have in mind from scratch or make use of a template. The one caveat we need to point out is that if you go into Webflow with no idea about what a class is, or what a div is, or what a section versus a container is, you are going to be very lost.

If you are a small business owner who wants to get a great site up and running as quickly and smoothly as possible, Webflow may end up providing you with too much design freedom and not enough development structure. To create the site you envision, you’ll have to get technically savvy in a hurry. You may not have the time for that, though. Squarespace would be the better choice in terms of providing well-structured templates.

Too Restrictive?

Of course, the other side of the coin is that you may find Squarespace’s templates too restrictive for your needs. If you want to begin with a template to give you the starting point you’re looking for, but you want to customize it to add in your own personal design concepts, you’ll have to resort to coding to make those modifications. This may get too technical for you, and you may not want to spend time and effort altering templates.

The Deciding Factors

Here’s the bottom line:

Webflow: If you’re technically savvy and have a set design in mind, you may appreciate the freedom that Webflow offers.
Squarespace: If you’re not a coder or a developer, you’ll likely appreciate the structure and ease of use provided by Squarespace through a wide selection of premade templates.

Squarespace SEO Versus Webflow SEO

Even though SEO is something you need to continually work at through ongoing content (such as blogging) and page optimizations, you will benefit from keeping good SEO practices in mind as you build your site.

Both Webflow and Squarespace offer excellent opportunities for building SEO into your site. By optimizing your titles, meta tags, and content with the use of good keywords and informative content your readers will value, you can make the most of SEO capabilities provided by both platforms.

Maintaining The Site

If you’re building an ecommerce site, you will be maintaining it frequently.

You’ll have to update your lists of products, add new products and remove obsolete ones over time, and refresh product descriptions for SEO purposes.

Webflow and Squarespace support ecommerce, offering the features you need to build and run these types of websites. But in terms of maintaining these sites, it’s much easier to maintain a Squarespace ecommerce site.

That’s partly because Squarespace is more established in the ecommerce space, supporting ecommerce for more than ten years.

Regardless of what type of site you build, whether or not it’s ecommerce, managing it is easier on Squarespace. When you want to update your site by adding content to your pages or creating new blog posts, you’ll find it much easier to work with Squarespace than you would with Webflow.

Squarespace: Easier to maintain an ecommerce site. Squarespace is more established in ecommerce. Overall, managing any Squarespace site is easier.
Webflow: Supports ecommerce. Overall, a little tricker to update, maintain, and manage

Cost Comparisons

In terms of cost, you won’t see too much deviation between some of the plans the two site builders offer.

Squarespace offers tiered pricing plans and a 14-day free trial.
Webflow also offers tiered pricing plans; a free plan is available that lets you do everything except publish your website.

You can check out pricing plans for yourself and compare what’s available.

Webflow offers site, ecommerce, and account plans, broken up into options that include basic, business, enterprise, and advanced, among others.
Squarespace offers personal, business, basic commerce, and advanced commerce plans.

Help And Support

In terms of support, here’s what you’ll find for each.

Squarespace

Large number of guides available
Resources created for users over the years
A library that keeps growing each year
Large repositories of useful information
Email support
Chat help
Additional tutorials

Webflow

Guides and resources are available
Large repositories of useful information
Email support

Friendly To Beginners?

Squarespace is relatively easy to use, geared more towards beginners. While it’s easy to get started with Webflow via walk-through onboarding, its user interface is more complex, geared towards experienced designers.

Squarespace’s mobile navigation works right out of the box. Squarespace has made the entire site build process easy to get up and running quickly, enabling business owners to produce a beautiful website that can be edited easily.

Whether you’re building a database, directory, or blogs, both Webflow and Squarespace will serve you well. For highly customized blogs, choose Webflow. If you want to add ongoing content (a great SEO strategy) quickly and edit information easily, opt for Squarespace.

Squarespace: Easy to use, good for beginners, easy to add ongoing content and edit information
Webflow: More complex, good for experienced designers, good choice when higher levels of customization are needed

While the customizability of Webflow is much more advanced, Squarespace out of the box is amazing, providing great, intuitive tools and the ability to set everything up correctly for SEO purposes.

How Are They Comparable?

As you might expect, both platforms are powerful and offer outstanding features that beginning, intermediate, and advanced developers can appreciate. Webflow and Squarespace share a number of similarities that make them great choices for web developers, including these:

Similar tools for generating ecommerce transaction emails
Same payment options
Great themes
Useful plugins that are worth looking into adding to your site
Custom settings you can play around with, if you have the time and inclination

Animations And Advanced Settings

Webflow is set up to enable animation incorporated into your site. This is a great feature, but only if you’re experienced with animation. The reality is that to create good animation, you need to have a great deal of advanced experience with graphic design and video software. Without this experience, you will not be able to create the quality of animation you envision.

To get a site up and running quickly, the simplicity of use provided by Squarespace will be on your side. Advanced settings are not helpful if they’re too complicated to implement. Too many options at your disposal can get really confusing really quickly. For new businesses, the ease of use and highly structured nature of Squarespace can give the site developer the support needed to do a beautiful job.

If you’re not clear on the difference between hover effects and actual animations, if you don’t know how to make opacity changes, or you’re not familiar with the nuances of using Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator, you may want to invest in researching these topics at Webflow University.

Or you could opt for the somewhat less flexible but much more user-friendly Squarespace platform and save yourself a great deal of time and hassle.
To summarize,

Webflow: Many advanced settings available; great choice for those with strong skills in
animation
Squarespace: Fewer advanced options but greater ease of use; probably the better choice
for those with less experience

Mobile Friendliness

Both Squarespace and Webflow provide tools to create websites that are mobile-friendly.
Squarespace provides the features you need for quality pages to be viewed and accessed via
mobile devices.

Webflow also provides these features, and more, giving you a high level of flexibility. But since the feature set is so large, coding knowledge is often required to correctly implement these features.

And there’s where the two platforms start to diverge in terms of mobile friendliness.

A site or page that is not implemented correctly will not help you rise to the top of relevant search results (which ultimately is what you want in order to give your site greater visibility and higher traffic).

For example, if you don’t get the mobile menu right, visitors to your site will not have a mobile-friendly user experience.

Because Squarespace is easier for beginners, you’ll have a greater chance of getting your mobile
menu right with this platform than you would with the more flexible yet more complex Webflow
platform.

Squarespace: Mobile-friendly, easier for beginners, simpler to use
Webflow: Mobile-friendly, coding knowledge is helpful, more complex

Our Conclusion

If you are technically savvy with a background in web development and design, and you’d like maximum freedom and flexibility to create the website of your dreams, Webflow might be right for you.

If you are a busy business owner or freelancer who wants to focus on building your business (not on becoming a web developer), and you need to get a beautiful, user-friendly site up as quickly as possible, then Squarespace is the way to go.

From our experience, if you're an agency or professional designer, Webflow has a huge range of features available and good possibilities for customization, however, it is complex. If you want to take advantage of more advanced features, you'll need coding knowledge.

Meanwhile, Squarespace is an excellent platform for small to medium-sized businesses of all types, developed to accommodate attractive, contemporary website designs. It provides features where someone looking to create their first site will appreciate the relative simplicity. For us, this makes Squarespace a winner.

Once your site is up, you can turn to our free Squarespace SEO guides to help with your search engine optimization efforts.

Turn to Us For Expert Help

We understand that business owners need to get a web presence up quickly and efficiently. Whatever platform is chosen for site building, there are tips and tricks to getting an attractive, professional site up fast without having to spend endless hours or a ton of money.

It’s a matter of finding the right expertise and tapping into it with laser focus.

We offer a service you can use to get over any stumbling blocks and hurdles you run into as you build your website. It gives you the opportunity to contact an expert and ask your specific question so that your problem is solved quickly.

We invite you to try it out and put our expertise to use. We can assist on a wide range of topics, from helping you find and install plugins that will make Squarespace more powerful for you, to how to improve your website’s loading speed, and much more. Our Squarespace support gurus are available for quick consultations that can move you forward significantly in your web development efforts, whether you’re a complete beginner or you have some web design knowledge. Whether you want to set up a blog or a photo gallery, you want to use a specific feature, you’re not sure how to set something up correctly, or you want to improve your Squarespace SEO, we’re here to help you.

Don’t waste time struggling with Squarespace issues we can resolve for you often within minutes. Reach out to us today.

Squarespace Versus Webflow: Our 2023 Guide