Squarespace vs Shopify — The Five Ceilings That Actually Decide It
On UK pricing Squarespace wins the entry point and holds it further up than most comparisons admit. The decision is not price. It is one currency, one stock pool, no B2B, 250 variants and no marketplace channels.
- At the entry point Squarespace is cheaper, and by more than the headline suggests. Core at £17/month is the first tier with no platform fee on store sales, against Shopify Basic at £19 — and both take the same 2% + 25p on a domestic card.
- Squarespace Basic at £12 still takes 2% of every store sale, which usually makes Core the real starting price for a shop.
- Five hard ceilings decide this, not price: one currency only, no multi-location stock, no B2B pricing, 250 variants per product, and no marketplace channels at all.
- Squarespace gates its commerce API behind the £79 Advanced plan. On Shopify a custom app works from £19. That is a 4× difference in the cost of integrating anything.
- Neither one reaches the resale marketplaces. Shopify’s own connector stops at Amazon, eBay and Walmart; Squarespace has no marketplace channel whatsoever.
- Cost of adding channels: FLUF Connect from £9/month. There is no free plan, but every new account gets a 7-day free trial.
On this page
- The short version
- UK pricing, exactly
- The five ceilings that actually decide it
- Where Squarespace genuinely wins
- Extensibility, and the bill that comes with it
- Shipping, tax and who is allowed to calculate what
- Taking the money
- SEO and how much URL control you get
- Selling anywhere other than your own site
- How big each one really is
- What changed in 2025 and 2026
- If you decide to move
- How to choose
- Sources and verification
The short version
Shopify’s own comparison page frames this more honestly than most third-party articles manage: Shopify specialises in e-commerce website building, while Squarespace is a website builder that has an e-commerce component. That is not a putdown, and it is the correct way to read every difference below.
If the website is the product — a studio, a photographer, a restaurant, a practice — Squarespace is very likely the better buy, and cheaper. If selling physical stock in volume is the business, you will hit a Squarespace ceiling, and the question is only how soon.
| Squarespace | Shopify | |
|---|---|---|
| UK entry price with 0% platform fee | £17/mo (Core, billed annually) | £19/mo (Basic, billed annually) |
| Domestic card rate at entry | 2.0% + £0.25 | 2% + 25p |
| Variants per product | 250 | 2,048 |
| Currencies | One, full stop | Local currencies via Markets |
| Stock locations | A single pool | 10, or 200 on Plus |
| B2B pricing | None native | Up to 3 catalogues, unlimited on Plus |
| Marketplace channels | None | Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Target Plus |
| API access for outside tools | Advanced plan, £79/mo | All plans, from £19/mo |
| Trial | 14 days | 3 days, then a promotional period |
| Templates and themes | All included | Free themes, or paid themes from about $150 |
UK pricing, exactly
Both companies geo-serve their pricing pages, and a great deal of published comparison content quotes US dollars at UK readers. These are the sterling figures as shown on 9 August 2026.
| Squarespace (billed annually) | Per month | Store transaction fee |
|---|---|---|
| Basic | £12 | 2% |
| Core | £17 | 0% |
| Plus | £29 | 0% |
| Advanced | £79 | 0% |
| Shopify (billed annually) | Per month | Fee if you do not use Shopify Payments |
|---|---|---|
| Basic | £19 | 2% |
| Grow | £49 | 1% |
| Advanced | £259 | 0.6% |
| Plus | from £1,800 | 0.2% |
Sources: Squarespace pricing, Shopify UK pricing, and Squarespace’s transaction fees and payment processing rates.
Three things fall out of those tables that most comparisons miss.
Squarespace Basic is not really a shop plan. It can sell unlimited products — that is genuinely new, since the old Personal plan could not sell at all — but it takes 2% of every store sale on top of card processing. On £2,000 of monthly sales that 2% is £40, which dwarfs the £5 you saved by not being on Core. Core is the honest entry price for a store.
Card rates converge and then cross. Squarespace and Shopify both charge 2% + 25p at entry level. Squarespace Plus at £29 buys a 1.7% rate; on Shopify the same 1.7% costs £49 on Grow. So on card rate alone Squarespace stays ahead for longer than you would expect. What Shopify’s £49 actually buys is staff accounts, channels and the app ecosystem, not a better rate.
Shopify’s third-party transaction fee is a lock-in mechanism. If you use any processor other than Shopify Payments you pay 2% on Basic, on top of whatever your processor charges. Squarespace applies its store transaction fee regardless of processor, so the comparison is less lopsided than it first appears — but Shopify’s penalty scales down as you climb, and Squarespace’s disappears entirely at Core.
The five ceilings that actually decide it
Price differences here are small enough to be noise. Capability differences are not, and four of these five are absolute rather than a matter of degree.
One currency. Squarespace’s own commerce documentation is unambiguous: a store can accept only one currency at a time. If you sell to buyers in more than one country and want them to check out in their own money, that is not a limitation you work around — it is the end of the conversation. Shopify offers local currencies on every plan through Markets.
One stock pool. Squarespace’s inventory management documents a single pool of stock with no concept of locations. If you have a shop and a stockroom, or two shops, there is no native way to model it. Shopify gives you ten inventory locations on its standard plans and two hundred on Plus. We should be careful here: Squarespace does not publish a statement saying multi-location is unsupported, so this is an inference from the absence of any documentation for it — verify in the product before you make a decision that depends on it.
No B2B pricing. Squarespace’s answer to wholesale is to invoice the client manually. Shopify supports up to three B2B catalogues with their own price lists on standard plans.
250 variants. Squarespace allows six options and 250 variant combinations per product. Shopify raised its own limit from 100 to 2,048 in October 2025. For most sellers 250 is plenty; for anyone selling made-to-order or heavily configured goods it is a wall.
No marketplace channels. This one gets its own section below, because it is the difference that matters most to anyone whose growth plan involves selling somewhere other than their own website.
Where Squarespace genuinely wins
A fair comparison has to be specific about this, because Squarespace is not simply a weaker Shopify.
Design, without a developer. Squarespace’s Fluid Engine is a real drag-and-drop editor available in block sections across every page type, and every template is included on every plan. Shopify’s editor is section-based within a theme, and anything the theme does not already do means writing Liquid. Shopify’s paid themes start around $150 and run past $400.
Service businesses are first-class. Invoicing, proposals, scheduling through Acuity, courses, memberships, paywalled content and donations are native. On Shopify most of that is an app, and each app is a monthly line item.
A 14-day trial with no card, against Shopify’s three days followed by a promotional rate.
SEO you cannot break. Sitemaps, static URLs, redirects across connected domains and structured data are all generated automatically and cannot be edited. That is a genuine loss of control, and also a genuine protection for anyone who does not want to think about it.
One quote captures the trade-off better than any feature table. A merchant who had migrated a business from one to the other put it this way on Reddit: “If you put two brand-new users in front of both platforms, I think they’d find Squarespace more immediately intuitive. It’s just so beautifully simple to use, and I appreciate simple tools.” The same person also noted that “Squarespace forces you to pick one currency to sell in”, and that migrating “was a lot more work than I expected” (r/shopify).
Extensibility, and the bill that comes with it
Shopify’s App Store advertises over 16,000 apps. Squarespace’s extensions directory listed 48 when we counted it on 9 August 2026. That ratio is the extensibility story, and it genuinely cuts both ways.
On Shopify, any gap has an answer, and the answer has a monthly price. Merchants are vocal about where that ends up. One posted in August 2026: “At this point, I’m spending well over $1,000/month just on apps. Every time I need a new feature, it’s another $20, $50, $100, or even more per month. Before you know it, your app bill is higher than some people’s rent.” Another in the same thread reported roughly $1,300 a month on Plus — while a third, running several seven-figure stores, said their app spend was $50 to $100 a month (r/shopify). Both experiences are real; the variance is the point.
On Shopify’s own forum, a partner of fifteen years wrote: “When I first started almost every app was free. … Now apps want to be your partner like in ‘Goodfellas.’ They want a percentage of your business.” (Shopify Community).
On Squarespace the equivalent problem is simply that the gap stays open. There is no app to buy.
Shipping, tax and who is allowed to calculate what
Shipping is where Squarespace’s plan gating becomes most consequential, and it is almost never covered in comparisons.
Carrier-calculated shipping — showing the buyer a live rate from a courier rather than a flat rate you invented — is available on Squarespace only from Core upward in the UK, and using your own carrier account requires Advanced at £79 a month. There is a further restriction that matters enormously for anyone selling abroad: Squarespace states that carrier-calculated shipping cannot be used for cross-border parcels. So an international seller on Squarespace is quoting flat rates by region, and absorbing the difference whenever the parcel is heavier or further than the rate assumed.
Shopify gates third-party carrier-calculated shipping too, to Advanced and Plus, with Grow able to unlock it by paying annually or accepting a surcharge. The difference is that Shopify’s version works across borders, and that its Markets feature is designed around selling internationally in the first place.
On tax, both automate calculation. Squarespace charges for it as a percentage of the order — 0.15% capped at under a pound on Basic, falling to 0.05% on Advanced — which is a small but real per-order cost that does not exist on Shopify’s side of the comparison.
Worth noting for fairness: abandoned-checkout recovery is available on all four Squarespace plans and all Shopify plans. Squarespace’s version is a single automatic email sent 24 hours after abandonment, editable in subject and body, rather than a multi-step sequence — but the capability is genuinely there rather than being an upsell, and subscriptions, gift cards, customer accounts, reviews and donations are on every Squarespace plan too.
Taking the money
Squarespace Payments is Squarespace’s own processor, and its plan tiers buy you better card rates: 2.0% + £0.25 on Basic and Core, 1.7% on Plus, 1.5% on Advanced. Business and corporate cards are charged at 3.0% on every plan, American Express at 3%, international cards carry an extra 1%, and currency conversion another 2%. Klarna is priced separately.
The constraint to check first is availability: Squarespace Payments operates in thirteen countries — the UK, the US, Canada, Ireland and much of western Europe. You can use Stripe, PayPal or Square instead, but Squarespace’s own store transaction fee still applies on Basic regardless of who processes the payment, so switching processor does not escape it.
Shopify inverts this. Its card rates improve with plan in the same way, but using any processor other than Shopify Payments adds a third-party transaction fee of 2% on Basic, falling to 0.6% on Advanced. That fee is charged on top of whatever your alternative processor takes, which in practice makes leaving Shopify Payments expensive enough that most merchants do not.
The net effect for a UK seller at entry level is close to a wash on rate, and quite different in freedom: on Squarespace you may bring your own processor without penalty, but you cannot escape the platform fee on Basic; on Shopify the platform fee disappears entirely if you use Shopify Payments, and bites if you do not.
SEO and how much URL control you get
Both platforms constrain your URLs, in different places.
| Squarespace | Shopify | |
|---|---|---|
| robots.txt | Shared and not editable | Editable via the theme, but explicitly unsupported |
| Structured data | Automatic, and cannot be edited or removed | Comes from the theme, so editable and inconsistent |
| Product URLs | Always /store-page/p/slug; the p/ cannot be removed |
Always under /products/, which cannot be redirected away |
| Moving a product | Changes its URL and clears its categories | Handle stays stable |
The Squarespace product-URL rule catches people during migrations and reorganisations, because moving a product between store pages silently changes its address and drops its categorisation. Shopify’s rigid /products/ path is less dangerous day to day but makes any information-architecture change into a redirect exercise.
Selling anywhere other than your own site
This is where the two platforms stop being comparable, and it is the section most comparisons skip entirely.
Shopify ships native sales channels for Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Google, Amazon and more, and its Marketplace Connect app adds Amazon, eBay, Walmart and Target Plus. Marketplace order sync is included up to 50 orders a month, then charged at 1% capped at £99/month.
Squarespace has, effectively, none. Its Facebook and Instagram integration is a one-way advertising sync, and Squarespace states plainly that it does not support Meta’s required checkout URL — so it is a product feed for ads, not a selling channel. Its Google Shopping integration requires Core or above and that you be located in the United States with your site language set to English (United States), which makes it unusable for a UK seller. There is no Amazon channel, no eBay channel, no marketplace channel of any kind. Multichannel exists only through third-party extensions, which Squarespace’s own support policy places outside its scope of support.
Then there is the gating that follows from it. Squarespace’s Products, Inventory and Orders APIs need the Advanced plan to generate a key — £79 a month. On Shopify a custom app works from Basic at £19. If your plan involves connecting anything external, Squarespace costs four times as much before the external thing has cost you a penny.
And the honest caveat that applies to both: neither platform natively reaches Depop, Vinted, Grailed, Poshmark, Facebook Marketplace or Mercari. Shopify’s connector stops at the big general marketplaces. If your growth plan runs through resale audiences, the store platform is not the thing that gets you there — which is the gap FLUF Connect exists to fill, from either platform, at £9/month.
How big each one really is
Comparing these two on size is where published articles most often mislead, because the obvious numbers measure different things.
Shopify reported gross merchandise volume of $115.6bn for the quarter ended 30 June 2026, up 32%, on revenue of $3.58bn. Squarespace stopped publishing results after Permira took it private in October 2024; its last reported annual GMV was $6.2bn for 2023. So Shopify’s quarterly merchandise volume is roughly nineteen times Squarespace’s last reported annual figure.
Site counts point the other way and should be handled carefully. BuiltWith records more live Squarespace sites than Shopify sites — but prints its own warning that Squarespace is over-represented because its detection is too generic, and its e-commerce tags tell a different story: in the top million sites, Shopify and Shopify Plus together are detected on roughly 87,000 against about 2,400 for Squarespace’s cart. W3Techs puts Shopify at 5.3% of all websites and 31.2% of all e-commerce systems, and Squarespace at 2.5% of all websites — with Squarespace absent from the e-commerce list altogether.
The resolution is simple: Squarespace has a very large base of brochure sites, and a much smaller base of serious shops. Both platforms’ numbers are true; they answer different questions.
One more caution, because it is the easiest mistake to make. Squarespace and Shopify have wildly different Trustpilot scores, and the comparison is meaningless — Squarespace’s profile is claimed and actively solicits its own customers, while Shopify’s is dominated by shoppers complaining about individual stores rather than by merchants. Anyone citing those two numbers side by side is comparing different populations.
What changed in 2025 and 2026
The trajectories diverged sharply, and this is a useful signal about where each company’s attention is.
Squarespace rebuilt its lineup. Personal, Business and Commerce were replaced by Basic, Core, Plus and Advanced, announced in February 2025; as of February 2026 you can no longer sign up for the old plans. Existing customers can stay on a legacy plan, but the door is one-way — change your billing plan or cycle and you cannot go back. Legacy plans can still be repriced at renewal, and sellers have reported steep increases through 2026.
Squarespace raised US prices, but not UK ones. Between February and May 2026 US annual pricing moved up by roughly 19% to 26% on Basic, Core and Plus. UK prices were unchanged over the same window. We could find no Squarespace announcement of the increase, so treat it as observed rather than announced.
Shopify held list prices flat. Archived captures show £19, £49 and £259 unchanged across 2025 and 2026. The only lineup change was renaming the middle tier from “Shopify” to “Grow” in April 2025 at the same price.
Both have pushed hard into AI. Squarespace’s Refresh 2025 introduced its Beacon assistant, an AI visibility scanner and various composers; Shopify’s Winter ’26 and Spring ’26 editions were built around agentic storefronts — selling inside AI assistants — and a structured product catalogue to feed them.
If you decide to move
Migration is usually underestimated, in both directions, and the platforms are candid about why.
Squarespace’s own guide to moving from Shopify states that you can import products and contacts by CSV, and that it is not possible to import your previous site’s layout, design, fonts or other content. Going the other way, Shopify’s help centre has migration guides for Etsy, WooCommerce and eBay — but none for Squarespace, so it is a CSV exercise with the usual traps: a strict header format, a 15MB file ceiling, and the well-documented hazard that sorting the CSV in a spreadsheet can detach your product images.
The part that actually costs money is URLs. Squarespace products live at /store-page/p/slug and Shopify’s at /products/handle, so every product needs a 301. As one seller put it: “Biggest thing for a smooth migration: don’t forget to set up 301 redirects from your old Squarespace URLs to the new Shopify ones. Otherwise, you risk losing whatever SEO juice you’ve already built.” (r/ecommerce). Squarespace’s own SEO guidance is unusually honest about this, noting that changing URL structure can affect rankings whatever platform you move to.
How to choose
| Choose Squarespace if | Choose Shopify if |
|---|---|
| The website is the product — portfolio, studio, restaurant, agency | Selling physical stock is the business, not a sideline |
| You sell services, bookings, courses or memberships more than stock | You need multi-currency, multi-location stock or B2B pricing |
| Catalogue under a couple of hundred products, one currency, one country | You sell internationally, or across marketplaces as well as your own site |
| You want design control without hiring a developer | You will want apps, and accept that the app bill is real |
| You would otherwise buy Shopify Basic: Core is £17 against £19, same card rate | You need more than 250 variants, or real POS hardware |
The honest middle case: a UK seller doing a few thousand pounds a month on a small catalogue is genuinely better served by Squarespace Core than by Shopify Basic — until they need a second currency, a second stockroom, or a marketplace. At that point the ceiling arrives all at once, and the migration cost arrives with it. It is worth deciding in advance which of those three is likeliest, because that single answer settles the choice.
Sources and verification
Prices and limits were read from the platforms’ own pages on 9 August 2026. Both companies geo-serve pricing and Squarespace runs pricing experiments, so the figures you see may differ — check before committing.
- Squarespace pricing — UK plan prices and the full comparison table
- Squarespace transaction fees and processing rates
- Selling on the Basic, Core, Plus and Advanced plans
- Squarespace Commerce FAQ — the single-currency limit
- Squarespace product variants — six options, 250 combinations
- Squarespace inventory management
- Squarespace carrier-calculated shipping — plan gating and the cross-border restriction
- Squarespace abandoned checkout recovery
- Shopify third-party carrier-calculated shipping
- Squarespace Facebook and Instagram sync — advertising only, no checkout
- Squarespace Google Shopping — US-only requirement
- Squarespace Commerce API permissions — Advanced plan requirement
- Squarespace SEO — locked structured data
- Squarespace URL slugs — the enforced
p/segment - Squarespace legacy billing plans — the one-way door
- Squarespace plans explained — the February 2025 restructure
- Moving from Shopify to Squarespace
- Shopify UK pricing — plan prices, card rates, third-party fees
- Shopify’s own comparison page
- Shopify variant limit raised to 2,048
- Shopify Marketplace Connect
- Shopify product CSV import — limits and hazards
- Shopify Q2 2026 results
- W3Techs, Shopify and W3Techs, Squarespace
- BuiltWith e-commerce trends
Not stated here because it could not be verified: a comparative page-speed or Core Web Vitals figure, current merchant counts for either company, and G2 or Capterra ratings. Squarespace has published no subscription figure since June 2024 and Shopify none since 2021.
Related guides
Frequently Asked Questions
At entry level, yes, though by less than the headline prices suggest. Squarespace Basic is £12 a month billed annually but takes 2% of every store sale, so the real starting point for a shop is Core at £17. That compares with Shopify Basic at £19, and both charge the same 2% + 25p on a domestic card. Squarespace stays ahead further up too: its Plus plan at £29 buys a 1.7% card rate that costs £49 on Shopify Grow.
No. Squarespace's commerce documentation states that a store can accept only one currency at a time, and there is no workaround within the platform. Shopify offers local currencies on every plan through Markets. If you sell to buyers in more than one country and want them checking out in their own money, this single limitation settles the choice on its own.
There is no documented support for it — inventory is managed as a single pool, with no concept of locations. Shopify provides ten inventory locations on its standard plans and two hundred on Plus. Be aware that Squarespace does not publish a statement saying multi-location is unsupported, so this is an inference drawn from the absence of any documentation, and it is worth checking inside the product before you make a decision that depends on it.
Not natively. Squarespace has no marketplace sales channel of any kind. Its Facebook and Instagram integration is a one-way advertising feed and Squarespace states it does not support Meta's required checkout URL, and its Google Shopping integration requires you to be located in the United States with your site language set to English (United States), which rules out UK sellers. Shopify by contrast ships native channels and adds Amazon, eBay, Walmart and Target Plus through Marketplace Connect.
This is one of the sharpest differences. Squarespace requires the Advanced plan at £79 a month before you can generate an API key for its Products, Inventory and Orders APIs. On Shopify a custom app works from Basic at £19 a month, with fuller data access from Grow. So integrating anything external costs roughly four times as much on Squarespace before the tool itself has cost you anything.
Squarespace allows six options and up to 250 variant combinations per product. Shopify raised its limit from 100 to 2,048 for all merchants in October 2025. For most sellers 250 is comfortably enough, but for made-to-order or heavily configured products it becomes a hard wall with no way around it.
It depends entirely on what you need, and merchant experiences vary enormously. Shopify advertises over 16,000 apps against roughly 48 Squarespace extensions, so on Shopify almost any gap has an answer — with a monthly price attached. Some merchants report spending well over $1,000 a month on apps; others running seven-figure stores report $50 to $100. The risk is real but not inevitable. On Squarespace the equivalent problem is that the gap simply stays open, because there is no app to buy.
Neither is clearly better; they constrain you in different places. Squarespace generates sitemaps, structured data and redirects automatically and does not let you edit any of them, including robots.txt — less control, but also less to break. Shopify lets you edit robots.txt through the theme while stating that incorrect use can lose all your traffic and that support cannot help. Squarespace forces a p/ segment into every product URL and changes that URL if you move a product between store pages, which also clears its categories. Shopify fixes products under /products/, which cannot be redirected away.
Squarespace replaced Personal, Business and Commerce with Basic, Core, Plus and Advanced from February 2025, and closed signups to the old plans in February 2026. Existing customers can remain on a legacy plan but cannot return to one once they change plan or billing cycle. US prices rose roughly 19% to 26% between February and May 2026, though UK prices were unchanged and we found no announcement of the increase. Shopify held its list prices flat across both years, renaming only its middle tier from Shopify to Grow in April 2025.
Not from either one natively. Shopify's marketplace connector stops at Amazon, eBay, Walmart and Target Plus, and Squarespace has no marketplace channel at all. That gap is what FLUF Connect fills: it reads your catalogue from either platform and lists it onto the resale and classifieds channels neither store platform reaches, keeping stock in step so a sale in one place takes the item down elsewhere. Plans start at £9 a month with a 7-day free trial, and there is no free plan.