Square vs Squarespace — Two Different Businesses That Happen to Sound Alike

On This Page

• First, the name
• At a glance
• What Square costs
• What Squarespace costs
• The in-person question, which settles most of this
• The website question, which settles the rest
• How each handles a catalogue
• Limits worth knowing before you commit
• A worked comparison at three sizes
• What else comes in the box
• How hard is it to leave?
• You can also use both
• Being found is not included either way
• Which one is right for you
• What FLUF does with each
• Pricing
• Sources & Verification

First, The Name

A large share of the people comparing these two are here because the names look alike and they want to know whether they are the same company. They are not, they never have been, and they are not really in the same industry.

Square is a payments company. It started with the little white card reader that plugged into a phone headphone jack, and everything it has built since sits on top of taking card payments — a point-of-sale system, a card terminal, invoicing, payroll, loyalty, and an online store that exists so your in-person catalogue has somewhere to live on the internet.

Squarespace is a website builder. It started with beautifully designed templates for portfolios and restaurants, and everything it has built since sits on top of making a site look good without a designer — domains, email campaigns, scheduling, and a commerce layer so the beautiful site can take money.

That origin story is not trivia. It predicts almost every difference below. When Square makes a decision, it optimises for the transaction. When Squarespace makes one, it optimises for the page.

At A Glance

What Square Costs

Square’s UK pricing page lists three tiers: a £0 per month plan, Plus from £29 per month, and a custom Premium tier for businesses processing more than £200,000 a year. The online store is included from £0 a month — it is one of the tools in the box rather than a separate product ladder, which is why there is no Square Online price list to compare against Squarespace’s.

What you actually pay is processing:

Add-ons are priced separately and honestly: Marketing from £9 a month, Loyalty from £25, Advanced Access at £20 per location per month, Kitchen Display at £15 per device, Clearpay at 6% + 30p, and Instant Transfers at 1.5% if you want the money today rather than tomorrow.

The number that matters is 1.4% + 25p online. That is a low rate by any standard, and combined with no monthly fee it means a Square store costs you nothing until it makes you something. For a business testing whether it should be online at all, that is a materially different proposition from committing to a subscription.

What Squarespace Costs

Squarespace charges a subscription, and the tier you pick changes both your transaction fee and your card rate. Its UK pricing, on annual billing:

Those figures are confirmed independently on Squarespace’s own transaction-fees page, which also gives Amex at 3% + £0.25, Klarna at 5.99% + £0.30 and Clearpay at 6% + £0.30, and notes that legacy Business plans carry a 3% transaction fee. Third-party processors such as Stripe, PayPal and — yes — Square charge their own rates on top, varying by country. Prices shown are annual-billing prices; paying monthly costs more.

The Basic plan’s 2% transaction fee is the trap in that table. It sits on top of card processing, so a £12 plan is not the cheap option it appears to be once you are selling with any volume — at a few thousand pounds a month, the £5 step up to Core pays for itself several times over. Squarespace is not hiding this, but it is the single most common mistake made by people picking a plan on price alone.

On ownership: Permira completed its all-cash acquisition of Squarespace on 17 October 2024 at $44.00 per share, taking the company private and delisting it from the NYSE. Squarespace also divested Tock — it agreed to sell the restaurant-reservation platform to American Express for $400 million, and Amex completed that purchase. If you were considering Squarespace partly for Tock, it is no longer part of the same company.

The In-Person Question, Which Settles Most Of This

Here is the shortcut that saves most people the rest of the article.

If you take money from people standing in front of you, use Square. Not because its website is better — it is not — but because everything else about running a shop, a stall, a studio or a café is already in the box, and your online store shares one catalogue and one stock count with the till. Sell the last one at a market on Saturday and the website knows.

Squarespace has no meaningful answer to this. It is not a point-of-sale company and it does not pretend to be one. You can bolt a payment terminal onto a Squarespace business, but you are then running two systems and reconciling them by hand, which is exactly the problem Square was invented to remove.

The inverse holds. If nobody ever hands you a card in person, the entire in-person half of Square is dead weight, and you are choosing between a functional website from a payments company and an excellent website from a website company. That is not a close contest.

The Website Question, Which Settles The Rest

Squarespace’s templates are the reason it exists, and pretending that is a soft factor undersells it. For a small brand with no designer and no development budget, the difference between a site that looks considered and one that looks assembled is a real difference in conversion and in what you can charge.

Square’s online store is competent. It will render your products, take a payment, and look tidy. It will not make a visitor think you are a more serious operation than you are, and for certain kinds of business — a ceramicist, a small label, a photographer selling prints — that perception is most of the pricing power.

There is a practical wrinkle worth knowing: Squarespace enforces a /p/ segment in product URLs, so your product addresses are not as clean as a purpose-built commerce platform’s. Minor, but it irritates people who care about URLs, and people who choose Squarespace tend to be people who care about URLs.

How Each Handles A Catalogue

Square’s inventory model is built for a business that physically holds stock, because that is who it was designed for. The catalogue is shared between the till and the website by default, item variations behave the way a shopkeeper expects, and stock counts are the same number in both places rather than two numbers you keep in agreement.

Squarespace’s commerce is capable but has edges you should meet before you commit rather than after. Product variants are capped at six options and 250 combinations — generous for most, restrictive for anyone selling made-to-order goods with several choices. A Squarespace store sells in a single currency, which is a hard stop for a business trading meaningfully across borders. And carrier-calculated shipping is gated to higher plans, so live postage rates are not available at the entry tier.

One more that catches integrators out: Squarespace’s Commerce API requires the Advanced plan. If you intend to connect your store to anything — a crosslisting tool, an accounting package, a fulfilment service — that is a £79-a-month prerequisite, and it is the detail most likely to change your plan maths after you have already built the site.

Limits Worth Knowing Before You Commit

Both platforms have one-way doors, and they are different ones.

On Squarespace, legacy billing plans cannot be returned to once you leave them. If you are on an older plan that suits you, moving is a decision you cannot reverse — worth knowing before an upgrade prompt tempts you.

On Square, the constraint is geographic rather than contractual: it operates in a defined list of countries, and its features are not identical in all of them. The pricing quoted above is the UK page; rates and available add-ons differ elsewhere, so read your own country’s page rather than an article’s.

Neither platform is a marketplace, which is the limit that matters most and applies equally to both. Square will not bring you customers. Neither will Squarespace. Both give you a place to send people and a way to take their money, and finding the people remains entirely your problem — which is the real argument for running a storefront alongside marketplaces rather than instead of them.

A Worked Comparison At Three Sizes

Percentages are hard to feel. Here is the same online-only business at three monthly revenues, using each platform’s own published UK rates and assuming standard UK cards, an average order of £40, and no add-ons.

Those are indicative rather than quotations — your average order value moves the fixed-pence component substantially, and a basket of £8 behaves very differently from a basket of £80. But the shape holds at any realistic input: Square’s combination of no subscription and the lowest online card rate makes it the cheaper platform for an online-only business at every size, and the gap widens as you grow rather than closing.

Which raises the obvious question: if Square is cheaper at every level, why does anyone pay for Squarespace? Because that table measures one thing, and it is not the thing most people are buying. Nobody chooses Squarespace to save money on card processing. They choose it because the site converts better, looks like a real brand, and can be built in a weekend without hiring anyone — and a two-point difference in conversion rate is worth vastly more than a half-point difference in processing.

Run the cost comparison, then ignore it if the answer to the design question is strong enough. Just make the trade knowingly.

What Else Comes In The Box

Both companies sell considerably more than a storefront, and the surrounding tools are often what actually decides a long-term choice.

Square’s surrounding products are operational, because its customer is a business that opens in the morning: point of sale and card terminals, invoicing, appointments, team management and payroll, loyalty, and marketing. The pricing page carries the ones that cost extra — Marketing from £9 a month, Loyalty from £25, Advanced Access at £20 per location, Kitchen Display at £15 per device, and Instant Transfers at 1.5% if you want the money the same day rather than waiting for the standard payout.

That last one is worth pausing on, because payout timing is a real cost that never appears in a fee comparison. A business buying stock from cash flow cares more about when the money lands than about fifteen basis points of processing, and having a same-day option — priced honestly, and optional — is a genuine advantage over platforms where the schedule is whatever it is.

Squarespace’s surrounding products are creative and marketing-shaped, because its customer is a brand: domains, email campaigns, scheduling, member areas, courses, digital downloads, and blogging that is genuinely good rather than an afterthought. If part of your business is content — a newsletter, a portfolio, a body of writing that brings people in — Squarespace treats that as a first-class citizen and Square does not treat it at all.

Note the digital-products fee in the pricing table if that is your plan: 7% on Basic, 5% on Core, 1% on Plus and 0% on Advanced. Selling courses or downloads on a Basic plan is expensive in a way that selling physical goods on it is not.

How Hard Is It To Leave?

Nobody plans for this and everybody eventually needs it, so it is worth knowing the answer before you have three years of business inside a platform.

Your product data is portable from both — that is the easy part, and it is largely what a tool like FLUF is doing when it reads either catalogue. What does not travel is everything wrapped around the products.

Leaving Squarespace means leaving the design. The template, the layout decisions, the typography — none of it exports, because it is the thing you were paying for. A migration is a rebuild, and the site that made your brand look established has to be recreated somewhere else by someone. That is the real switching cost, and it is why Squarespace customers stay for years.

Leaving Square means leaving the operational plumbing rather than the look. The website is the least of it; the till, the card terminals, the loyalty scheme your regulars are enrolled in, the payroll, the stock counts that the shop floor depends on. Square’s lock-in is not aesthetic, it is logistical, and unpicking it mid-trade is a considerably worse afternoon than rebuilding a website.

One Squarespace-specific trap already mentioned deserves repeating in this context: legacy billing plans cannot be returned to once you leave them. Upgrading away from an old plan that suits you is a decision without an undo.

You Can Also Use Both, And Some People Should

The comparison framing assumes a choice, and for a surprising number of businesses there is not one.

A maker with a studio, a market stall and a brand worth looking at has two genuinely different needs: a till that works on a Saturday, and a website that makes a stranger trust a £180 price. Square is excellent at the first and adequate at the second; Squarespace is the reverse. Running Square for in-person payments and Squarespace as the public storefront is a completely coherent setup, and it is more common than the marketing from either company would suggest.

Squarespace even supports Square as a third-party payment processor, which removes some of the friction — though third-party processors charge their own rates on top of whatever your Squarespace plan does, so check the arithmetic rather than assuming it nets out.

The cost of the hybrid is the thing you would expect: two catalogues, two stock counts, and a reconciliation job that grows with your range. That is precisely the seam a crosslisting tool sits in — reading one catalogue as the source of truth and keeping the other in step — and it is worth setting up on day one rather than after the first time you sell the same one-off twice.

Being Found Is Not Included Either Way

Both platforms will tell you they are good for SEO, and both are telling the truth in the narrow sense that neither will actively harm you. Neither will help much either, and it is worth saying plainly because it is the largest unbudgeted cost of choosing a storefront over a marketplace.

A marketplace listing inherits demand: the platform already ranks, already has the buyer, already appears for the query. A storefront starts at nothing and every visit is one you produced — through search rankings you earned over months, an audience you built somewhere else, an email list, a physical shop with a door, or paid advertising.

Squarespace’s edge here is real but indirect. Because it makes content easy and its blogging is genuinely good, the businesses on it are more likely to publish the kind of thing that earns rankings in the first place. That is a behavioural advantage rather than a technical one, and it only pays out if you actually write.

Square’s position is simpler: the online store is there to serve people who already know you, most often because they walked past your shop or bought from you at a market. Judged as a way to convert existing demand, it does the job. Judged as a way to create demand, neither platform is the answer, and any plan that depends on the storefront finding its own customers should be examined carefully before you commit stock to it.

Which One Is Right For You

Choose Square if you sell in person at all, you want no monthly commitment while you test, you value one catalogue and one stock count across till and web, or your margins make a 1.4% + 25p online rate worth more than a nicer template.

Choose Squarespace if the website is the shopfront and the brand, you need it to look genuinely good without hiring anyone, you sell digital products or services alongside physical ones, or you are already using Squarespace for the site and adding commerce to it.

Pick the plan carefully if you choose Squarespace. Basic at £12 with a 2% transaction fee is more expensive than Core at £17 with none for any store doing real volume, and Advanced at £79 is a requirement rather than a luxury if you need API access.

Do not choose either as your only channel. Both are storefronts without an audience. The businesses that do well on them treat the store as the place that keeps the margin and the customer relationship, and marketplaces as the place that produces the introductions.

What FLUF Does With Each

Both are genuinely useful as sources rather than only as destinations, and Square especially so: because it is point-of-sale first, the catalogue in a Square account is often the truest record of what a business actually has, including the things that were never listed online anywhere. Pointing FLUF at it and pushing that stock outward to marketplaces is frequently a bigger win than any comparison of card rates.

Neither needs a browser extension, and neither needs a machine left switched on. Both connect once and then run server-side, which is not true of every channel.

Pricing

FLUF Connect starts with 7 days for £1, with every feature available immediately. After that, plans start at £9/month for Starter, with no cap on how much you list. There is no free plan.

Every channel is included on every plan, and automation is included in every plan too rather than sold as an add-on — it works on the channels that support it.

Sources & Verification

• Square — UK pricing — the £0, Plus from £29 and custom Premium tiers; the online store included from £0 a month; UK processing rates of 1.75% in person, 1.4% + 25p online, 2.5% keyed and for invoices, with non-UK card surcharges; and the Marketing, Loyalty, Advanced Access, Kitchen Display, Clearpay and Instant Transfer add-on prices.
• Squarespace — pricing — UK annual-billing prices of £12 Basic, £17 Core, £29 Plus and £79 Advanced, with store and digital-product fees and card rates per tier.
• Squarespace — transaction fees and payment processing rates — 2% store fee on Basic and 0% above it; digital-product fees of 7%, 5%, 1% and 0%; UK card rates by plan; Amex, Klarna and Clearpay rates; the 3% legacy Business plan fee.
• Squarespace — adding product variants — six options and 250 combinations.
• Squarespace — Commerce FAQ — the single-currency limit.
• Squarespace — carrier-calculated shipping — plan gating for live postage rates.
• Squarespace — Commerce API authentication and permissions — the Advanced plan requirement for API access.
• Squarespace — URL slugs — the enforced /p/ segment on product URLs.
• Squarespace — legacy website billing plans — leaving a legacy plan is a one-way door.
• Permira — completion of the Squarespace acquisition (17 October 2024) — all-cash at $44.00 per share, with Squarespace delisted from the NYSE.
• Squarespace — agreement to sell Tock to American Express ($400 million), and American Express confirming completion.

Last verified 22 August 2026. Plan prices and processing rates change without notice and vary by country; the figures above are from each company’s UK pricing page. Where this page and the source disagree, the source is right.