Squarespace vs WordPress

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Squarespace

2.1K
381
+ 1
85
WordPress

96K
38.6K
+ 1
2.1K
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Squarespace vs WordPress: What are the differences?

Squarespace: Everything You Need To Create An Exceptional Website. Whether you need simple pages, sophisticated galleries, a professional blog, or want to sell online, it all comes standard with your Squarespace website. Squarespace starts you with beautiful designs right out of the box — each handcrafted by our award-winning design team to make your content stand out; WordPress: A semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. The core software is built by hundreds of community volunteers, and when you’re ready for more there are thousands of plugins and themes available to transform your site into almost anything you can imagine. Over 60 million people have chosen WordPress to power the place on the web they call “home” — we’d love you to join the family.

Squarespace and WordPress are primarily classified as "Website Builder" and "Self-Hosted Blogging / CMS" tools respectively.

Some of the features offered by Squarespace are:

  • SELL ANYTHING- Easily add a store to any Squarespace website and start selling physical and digital goods immediately.
  • PAINLESS STORE MANAGEMENT- Manage your inventory, process customer orders, print packing slips, and customize emails all in one intuitive interface.
  • BUILD BETTER PAGES WITH LAYOUTENGINE- LayoutEngine technology gives you the freedom to create visually rich pages with any configuration of text, images, products, and content blocks. Simply drag and drop your content exactly where you want and we'll automatically align them in a perfect grid.

On the other hand, WordPress provides the following key features:

  • Flexibility
  • Publishing Tools
  • User Management

"Easy setup" is the primary reason why developers consider Squarespace over the competitors, whereas "Customizable" was stated as the key factor in picking WordPress.

WordPress is an open source tool with 12.6K GitHub stars and 7.69K GitHub forks. Here's a link to WordPress's open source repository on GitHub.

Stack Exchange, ebay, and LinkedIn are some of the popular companies that use WordPress, whereas Squarespace is used by Accenture, Avocode, and Runscope. WordPress has a broader approval, being mentioned in 5305 company stacks & 1389 developers stacks; compared to Squarespace, which is listed in 419 company stacks and 23 developer stacks.

Decisions about Squarespace and WordPress
Xander Groesbeek
Founder at Rate My Meeting · | 5 upvotes · 219.8K views

So many choices for CMSs these days. So then what do you choose if speed, security and customization are key? Headless for one. Consuming your own APIs for content is absolute key. It makes designing pages in the front-end a breeze. Leaving Ghost and Cockpit. If I then looked at the footprint and impact on server load, Cockpit definitely wins that battle.

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10 Years ago I have started to check more about the online sphere and I have decided to make a website. There were a few CMS available at that time like WordPress or Joomla that you can use to have your website. At that point, I have decided to use WordPress as it was the easiest and I am glad I have made a good decision. Now WordPress is the most used CMS. Later I have created also a site about WordPress: https://www.wpdoze.com

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Pros of Squarespace
Pros of WordPress
  • 36
    Easy setup
  • 31
    Clean designs
  • 8
    Beautiful responsive themes
  • 6
    Easy ongoing maintenance
  • 3
    Live chat & 24/7 support team
  • 1
    No coding necessary
  • 415
    Customizable
  • 366
    Easy to manage
  • 354
    Plugins & themes
  • 258
    Non-tech colleagues can update website content
  • 247
    Really powerful
  • 145
    Rapid website development
  • 78
    Best documentation
  • 51
    Codex
  • 44
    Product feature set
  • 35
    Custom/internal social network
  • 18
    Open source
  • 8
    Great for all types of websites
  • 7
    Huge install and user base
  • 5
    Perfect example of user collaboration
  • 5
    Open Source Community
  • 5
    Most websites make use of it
  • 5
    It's simple and easy to use by any novice
  • 5
    Best
  • 5
    I like it like I like a kick in the groin
  • 4
    Community
  • 4
    API-based CMS
  • 3
    Easy To use
  • 2
    <a href="https://secure.wphackedhel">Easy Beginner</a>

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Cons of Squarespace
Cons of WordPress
  • 1
    Hard to use custom code
  • 13
    Hard to keep up-to-date if you customize things
  • 13
    Plugins are of mixed quality
  • 10
    Not best backend UI
  • 2
    Complex Organization
  • 1
    Do not cover all the basics in the core
  • 1
    Great Security

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- No public GitHub repository available -

What is Squarespace?

Whether you need simple pages, sophisticated galleries, a professional blog, or want to sell online, it all comes standard with your Squarespace website. Squarespace starts you with beautiful designs right out of the box — each handcrafted by our award-winning design team to make your content stand out.

What is WordPress?

The core software is built by hundreds of community volunteers, and when you’re ready for more there are thousands of plugins and themes available to transform your site into almost anything you can imagine. Over 60 million people have chosen WordPress to power the place on the web they call “home” — we’d love you to join the family.

Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

What companies use Squarespace?
What companies use WordPress?
See which teams inside your own company are using Squarespace or WordPress.
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What tools integrate with Squarespace?
What tools integrate with WordPress?

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What are some alternatives to Squarespace and WordPress?
Wix
Creating your stunning website for free is easier than ever. No tech skills needed. Just pick a template, change anything you want, add your images, videos, text and more to get online instantly.
Webflow
Webflow is a responsive design tool that lets you design, build, and publish websites in an intuitive interface. Clean code included!
GoDaddy
Go Daddy makes registering Domain Names fast, simple, and affordable. It is a trusted domain registrar that empowers people with creative ideas to succeed online.
Joomla!
Joomla is a simple and powerful web server application and it requires a server with PHP and either MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQL Server to run it.
Weebly
Weebly is an AJAX website creator that allows you to create pages with template skins and content widgets. Users can easily drag-and-drop content widgets like pictures, text, video and Google Maps in WYSIWYG-fashion.
See all alternatives