If you’re in the market for a website builder, you’ve probably heard of Squarespace and Showit. They are two popular site builders with the tools you need to get your website online fast. But, which one is the right solution for your online business?
Showit is a drag-and-drop website builder that’s custom-made to provide users with creative freedom to build professional websites without having to learn code.
Squarespace has created a name for itself as an all-in-one website platform with everything you need to create a business website, blog, portfolio, or eCommerce store.
At first glance, it seems like an impossible choice, but once you know more about each platform’s features and functionality, you’ll be able to choose the best solution for you.
I’ve spent over seven hours researching and reviewing the two platforms to make your decision easier. Read on as we look at all the different features, including ease of use, design and customization, eCommerce capabilities, blogging functionality, support, pricing, and more.
If you’d like to learn more about Squarespace, check out my Squarespace review.
1. Ease of Use
The user-friendliness of a website builder dictates the degree of technical skill required to build and maintain your site. It goes without saying that you need a website builder that simplifies all the processes to make your work easier.
Let’s see how Showit and Squarespace compare in this regard.
Showit:
Showit is designed to make it as easy as possible for you to build your dream website without having to acquire technical, web wizardry skills. It comes with beautiful, modern, and professional templates so you don’t have to create your site from scratch – unless you want to.
Simply pick a template, and use the drag-and-drop editor to customize elements like colors, fonts, and styles. This way, you’ll be able to design and create a website that matches your brand without the need to deal with pesky code.
The platform’s developers continue to find ways to simplify the user interface so that building your website becomes a faster and infinitely more enjoyable experience.
All designs come mobile-optimized straight out of the box so your site looks great on mobile devices. You can further customize the mobile version of your site using the page editor, something that you cannot do with Squarespace.
On Squarespace, the mobile layout is determined by the template you choose. Although this may be ideal for those without the tech/design experience, it can be limiting for others, and it can result in a less-than-ideal mobile experience for users.
Summary of Showit’s Ease of Use Features:
- Free migrations from Squarespace and WordPress
- Easy drag-and-drop builder ideal for beginners
- Beautiful, expertly-made website templates
- Full customization capabilities for truly unique websites
- Mobile-optimized sites by default
Squarespace:
Squarespace’s website builder is designed for users without a coding background. It has a simple drag-and-drop editor that is really easy to use and gives you the freedom to create unique designs.
Thanks to the pre-made templates, you’ll be able to create really elegant and professional website designs even with zero technical knowledge.
In comparison to Showit’s editor, the Squarespace editor is slightly easier to understand and it offers intuitive design options. You can choose from a range of pre-built templates, all of which are designed to be visually appealing, mobile responsive, and fully customizable.
Click on any page element to customize everything from colors and fonts to styles and layouts so you can create a one-of-a-kind design that matches your brand.
The editor makes it easy for you to build a website that revolves around breath-taking visuals and stylish designs, such as a fashion store, restaurant website, or professional portfolio website.
Website hosting is included with your Squarespace subscription, which means you don’t have to worry about setting up (and paying for) a separate hosting account for your new website. You can also link a custom domain and add a professional email address to your new site.
Summary of Squarespace’s Ease of Use Features:
- Dozens of elegant, professional website templates are available
- Simple, no-code website builder ideal for beginners
- Build mobile-responsive websites, blogs, and eCommerce stores
- Link a custom domain and professional email address
- Free hosting with each Squarespace subscription
Winner: Squarespace
Showit has a simple yet powerful drag-and-drop site builder designed to help creators like you brand your business effectively. But, with regard to ease of use, Squarespace is the winner.
It’s much easier to use compared to Showit and being an all-in-one platform, it comes with all the tools you need built right in, whereas, on Showit, you have to use plugins for a lot of the website’s functionality, which often presents real challenges for beginners.
2. Design and Customization
Most site builders come with cookie-cutter templates, and you need to be able to either create your own designs or fully customize the templates to transform them into something unique. For that, you need robust design and customization features that are easy to figure out.
Here’s what creative entrepreneurs get with each of these popular site builders.
Showit:
Showit has a wide range of completely customizable and clean website templates to give your website the “wow” factor. You can choose from various template categories, including blogs, coaching, consulting, podcasts, photography, and more.
All the templates are mobile-responsive and infinitely customizable. The drag-and-drop editor lets you customize fonts, layouts, images, blog posts, and anything else you want. You can rotate elements, insert galleries, and even play with animations – all with no code required.
This allows you to build your website exactly how you dream it so you can reflect your own unique brand and personality.
Most of the design templates are ready to go straight out of the box, making it possible to have your website up and running in just hours or days, as opposed to weeks or months.
Additionally, Showit integrates with a range of other tools like Shopify and MemberPress to seamlessly bring together all the tools you love. In fact, you can merge Showit and WordPress for unbridled website creation freedom.
Summary of Showit’s Design and Customization Features:
- Impressive range of beautiful, clean website templates
- High-level design customization with a short learning curve
- Wide range of third-party integrations and plugins
- Simple drag-and-drop editor for easy customization
- Advanced design features, including code-free animations
Squarespace:
On Squarespace, you’ll find a few dozen templates to give you a head start when building your new website. Although low in quantity, the templates are high in quality, making Squarespace one of the best builders for creating modern, stylish, and responsive websites that look great on mobile.
Choose any template and customize it fully to match your needs. The simple drag-and-drop editor makes it possible to build your own sites even if you have zero design or web development experience.
Squarespace also allows you to add custom CSS and JavaScript to your website, although this requires some advanced technical knowledge.
Summary of Squarespace’s Design and Customization Features:
- AI assistance for exceptional design
- Modern, clean Squarespace website designs
- Fully responsive, 100% customizable templates
- Free library of stock images and videos
- Simple, beginner-friendly drag-and-drop editor
Winner: Showit
Although Squarespace has a lot going for it in terms of design and customization, Showit is the winner here because it makes it easy for you to drag and drop text and images exactly where you want on the page without being restricted by a pre-determined grid. Squarespace has a similar editor which is unstructured, but it’s still less flexible than the one on Showit.
Also, Squarespace does not allow you to customize the mobile version of your site. Rather, the mobile layout is dictated by the template you choose. On Showit, you can make as many edits to the mobile version as you want, even to the point of having a mobile site that looks completely different from your desktop version.
3. eCommerce Capabilities
Both Squarespace and Showit make eCommerce possible. However, they offer a vastly different set of eCommerce features, as well as additional plugins for advanced functionality. Let’s take a look at which one will better serve your eCommerce needs.
Showit:
To set up a store on your Showit website, you first have to choose a shopping cart platform. There are plenty of options, including WooCommerce, Shopify, and ThriveCart. Integration is easy, and in a few clicks, you’ll be able to start adding products to your shopping cart platform.
Your next step is to choose a payment processor from options like PayPal, Stripe, and others. Connect this to your shopping cart by following the steps outlined on your dashboard. Once done, you’ll be able to integrate your shopping cart into your Showit site to start selling your products right away.
If you need additional help, the website has lots of in-depth guides and how-to videos on how to set up your store on Showit. The support team is also available around the clock to offer assistance.
If you need more functionality on your site, there are additional apps that you can integrate with your Showit website, including calendars, membership sites, online course platforms, email providers, and more. Virtually all these tools integrate easily either through WordPress plugins or HTML embeds.
The bottom line is that you can use any plugin to create and manage your online store on Showit. You can even do this for free if you only have a few items to sell by integrating an eCommerce solution like Big Cartel.
Summary of Showit’s eCommerce Capabilities:
- Simple online store templates available
- Easy integrations for shopping cart
- In-depth documentation on how to build a store on Showit
- One-click integrations for calendars and membership sites
- HTML embeds available
Squarespace:
Squarespace has a lot of professional online store templates that you can use. Most of the Squarespace eCommerce templates come with built-in sales and marketing features so you don’t have to add them yourself.
For instance, some templates come with customizable pop-ups to encourage users to take a specific action, such as signing up for a newsletter or clicking a link. Other templates are designed to showcase your products in the most effective way possible to help you get higher conversions.
In the Analytics tab on your dashboard, you’ll find analytics features to provide you with options to track things like sales, traffic, abandoned carts, and various other important metrics for your eCommerce businesses.
Another important factor when it comes to building successful eCommerce stores is security. Squarespace performs maintenance regularly and works to defend against cyber attacks. Each Squarespace-built online store gets an SSL certificate, and there are various other security measures in place to ensure the safety of your website and customer data.
Summary of Squarespace’s eCommerce Capabilities:
- High-quality digital storefront templates
- 0% transaction fees on the Basic Commerce plan
- Abandoned cart recovery tool
- Industry-leading web store infrastructure and security
- Automatically collect user data without third-party integration
Winner: Squarespace
Squarespace has native eCommerce tools to sell physical and digital products, services, and subscriptions. Showit doesn’t come with built-in eCommerce tools, but you can integrate your favorite selling platform, such as Shopify Lite or WooCommerce.
Having the convenience of an all-in-one tool makes Squarespace ideal for a lot of users. However, for those who want total creative control over their eCommerce website, it might be better to opt for Showit together with a third-party eCommerce platform.
4. Blogging Tools
Both Showit and Squarespace allow you to add a blog to your site. But, for those who are serious about their blogging journey, it’s worth considering the types of blogging tools that are available to you on each platform.
Showit:
Showit has simple blogging tools that you can use to set up a basic blog. However, you can also integrate WordPress if you want to build a content-heavy site. This will make it a lot easier for you to create, edit, publish, and schedule your posts.
With the Showit-WordPress blog integration, you’ll get access to advanced blogging tools, as well as plugins that you can use to further expand your blog’s functionality.
The entire blog setup process is easy and intuitive, but Showit goes a step further by providing you with support to set up your blog. Simply log a request to the support team, and someone will help you get it done in a timely way so you can start blogging like a boss.
One drawback of using Showit is that you have to upgrade to the higher-priced plan (Showit and Basic Starter Blog) if you want to start a new blog. Also, there are limitations on the number of blog posts and traffic you can have on your blog, and if you exceed that number, you’ll have to upgrade to a more expensive plan.
Summary of Showit’s Blogging Tools:
- WordPress integration for easy blog management
- Assisted blog setup from the Showit support team
- Access advanced plugins and integrations on WordPress
- Blogging plan comes with pre-installed plugins
- Easily migrate blog posts to your new Showit website
Squarespace:
Squarespace comes with a wide range of blogging-specific templates to choose from. These are stylish, modern, and well-optimized to ensure your blog has a good chance of ranking online.
Setting up your blog is as easy as clicking a button. You can create blog posts, save them as drafts, post them right away, or schedule them for later publishing. Add category data and tags to your blog articles, and enable or disable comments on individual pages. You can also leverage advanced integrations to search-optimize your blog posts.
The social media integration on Squarespace enables you to automatically share your blog posts with your social media audience or send new posts to your readers as email campaigns. These are just some of the built-in tools designed to save you time and effort when marketing your blog.
Squarespace also facilitates collaboration by allowing you to add multiple authors to your website, and you can add podcasts as one of your content offerings.
To further customize your blog, you get access to advanced features like code injection which you can use to add HTML and scripts to enhance specific parts of your blog.
Summary of Squarespace’s Blogging Tools:
- Add podcast episodes to your blog
- 30+ blog-specific templates available
- Add multiple authors for easy content management
- Easily share blog posts via social media and email
- Code injection feature for advanced customization
Winner: Squarespace
The winner here is clear. Squarespace comes with robust blogging functionality built right into the platform. There’s no need to integrate a third-party tool, as is the case with Showit, and you can manage all your content from the same place you manage every other aspect of your online business.
5. Search Engine Optimization Tools
Now that we’ve got the blogging features out of the way, let’s take a look at the process of implementing SEO on each platform to give you an idea of how easy it will be to rank your new website.
Showit:
Search engine optimization on Showit is the same as any other website builder. Once you set up your website, you get options to optimize your content and pages. Showit provides you with all the tools to ensure that your site is set up to perform well in search engines.
For example, Showit automatically puts all your text, images, and other content on your website into HTML files. This is the standard system used to tag text, images, fonts, colors, and hyperlinks. It allows search engines to easily locate, crawl, and index all your content.
Compared to Squarespace, Showit is a lot more SEO-friendly. In addition to being able to easily optimize your blog posts, you can also optimize individual pages which is a huge part of a successful content marketing and SEO strategy.
Showit gives you full control over your copy and page details to make it easier for you to get higher placement in search results for your unique content. Also, all Showit websites are mobile-friendly by default which is another huge plus for SEO.
Summary of Showit’s Search Engine Optimization Tools:
- Built-in SEO features to optimize website and pages
- Easy integrations for advanced SEO optimizations
- User-friendly SEO process for blog posts
- Get full control over your content and page details
- Mobile responsive websites for enhanced SEO
Squarespace:
Squarespace comes with a range of built-in SEO features to help you build your website the right way, including clean URLs, built-in mobile optimization, SSL security, and a range of other SEO settings to help you hit the ground ranking.
Squarespace’s SEO tools are extremely simple to use, which makes it easy for you to improve your online visibility whether you are a beginner or an experienced user.
You can customize your website and pages for SEO, and integrate Google Analytics And Google Search Console for more advanced search optimization insights.
With these tools, you’ll be able to easily track leads and monitor your website’s SEO performance from your dashboard.
Squarespace also has advanced SEO tools that you can leverage to optimize your website for search. You’ll find all the SEO page settings available on your dashboard, from page titles and descriptions to image settings, site maps, and automatic markups.
You can also access the platform’s analytics tools on your dashboard to help you track your website traffic so you can see how your SEO efforts are working.
Summary of Squarespace’s SEO Features:
- Built-in mobile optimization
- Social image-sharing control
- Built-in SEO features for pages and items
- Settings to hide pages from search engines
- Google search console integration for valuable visitor data
Winner: Tie
Both platforms have a lot to offer with regard to SEO. You’ll get tools and features to help your website rank on Google search results. You can edit meta-titles and page descriptions, use alt tags for images, and verify with Google Search Console.
Both site builders have great loading speed which is also important for SEO, and the interfaces of both platforms are intuitive which makes it easy for you to optimize your website even with the most basic knowledge of SEO best practices.
6. Community and Support
As a website creator, you know that sometimes things happen during the site-building process that are completely out of your control. In such a case, you want the assurance that your site builder will provide you with prompt and knowledgeable support. Let’s see how these two builders stack up.
Showit:
Showit has a friendly customer support team that’s always available to help you build and run your site. You can get in touch with support via chat by simply clicking the chat support bubble in the app, on the Showit site, or in Help Docs.
The site also has a well-curated Help Center filled with helpful documents, videos, and webinars.
Showit support is available Monday through Friday from 7 AM to 7 PM MST. There’s limited coverage on weekends, But if your site is experiencing an outage, you can get in touch with support immediately by sending an email to [email protected].
Additionally, you can get assistance from a Showit-certified and vetted web designer if you’d rather not go the DIY route. Choose from over 60+ website designers who will create your entire custom website for you. This is the perfect option for someone who wants to work on their business, rather than the back-end of their website.
Squarespace:
Squarespace users get 24/7 support through dedicated email support and live chat support. Whenever you need assistance during setup or if you need help managing your website, you can contact support and you’ll receive immediate help.
There are also detailed articles, how-tos, and video tutorials in the website’s knowledge base. You can browse through these to help you find tips and tricks on how to build and maintain your website.
Squarespace also offers free live webinar sessions and you can join the platform’s community forum to connect with other Squarespace users and partners.
Winner: Tie
Showit’s chat support team is rated high in the industry, as evidenced by the countless customer reviews online. You’ll get the help you need from a knowledgeable support agent. Squarespace doesn’t disappoint in the customer support area, either. Whenever you contact support, you get a timely and helpful response from the customer support team.
7. Pricing
Pricing should never be your only consideration when choosing a site builder, but it’s still worth taking a closer look at the different plans and features to ensure that you don’t end up paying for tools you don’t need.
Showit:
Showit offers a free 14-day trial to test out the platform. No credit card is required, and once the trial expires, you can choose to upgrade to one of the premium plans which are as follows.
- Showit Plan: $19/Month: This plan is ideal for anyone who doesn’t need a blog. It includes the Showit website builder and comes with a built-in SSL certificate to secure your site. You get web hosting with 20GB of media storage, and the platform provides regular site backups (every 10 minutes) which are stored for 7 days.
- Showit and Basic Starter Blog: $24/Month: This plan is ideal if you want to start a new blog. It includes everything in the Showit plan and comes with pre-installed plugins including Yoast SEO, Anti-Spam, and Contact Form 7. You can have up to 10,000 blog visits each month, and you get daily blog backups kept for 30 days.
- Showit and Advanced Blog: $34/Month: This plan is the best choice if you intend to migrate blogs from Squarespace or WordPress, or if you want custom WordPress plugins. It has everything in the Basic Starter Blog plan, as well as unlimited WordPress users, and up to 25,000 visitors to your blog each month. You also get extended functionality for your blog, including eCommerce and WordPress plugins.
Showit also has high-traffic plans available on request. High-bandwidth plan subscriptions start from $64/month. All Showit plans include visual web design tools, a built-in content management system, 24/7 infrastructure monitoring, and continuous automatic backups so you never lose your site content.
Squarespace:
Squarespace has four growth-focused plans to choose from. They are as follows:
- Free Trial: $0/Month: You can sign up for a free trial to test out the platform’s core features. No credit card is required, and you can publish a website on a subdomain. However, this free trial has limited features, which is why it’s a good idea to upgrade to one of the premium plans if you want to build a professional website.
- Personal Plan: $16/Month: If you opt for the annual website plan, you get a free custom domain for the year. This plan also comes with SSL security, unlimited bandwidth, and built-in SEO features for website visibility.
- Business Plan: $23/Month: The “Business” plan includes everything in the “Personal” plan + unlimited contributors, professional email, premium integrations, and promotional banners and pop-ups. You also get access to Squarespace Video Studio App to help you create and share engaging videos.
- Basic eCommerce: $27/Month: The Basic eCommerce plan has everything in the “Business” plan. It also comes with 0% transaction fees. Just note that your payment processor might still apply its own transaction fees. This plan also includes product reviews, customer accounts, products on Instagram, and point-of-sale which allows you to sell in person using the Commerce app.
- Advanced Commerce: $49/Month: The Advanced Commerce plan has everything in the “Basic eCommerce” plan + abandoned cart recovery features, and the ability to sell subscriptions. You also get advanced discounts, advanced shipping, and commerce APIs.
Winner: Squarespace
Squarespace offers a free trial to test out the platform risk-free. Its plans are less expensive and offer more value compared to Showit.
Final Thoughts
This guide has outlined all the important differences between Showit and Squarespace to give you a clear picture of which website builder is right for you.
If you’re still not sure which one to choose, here are my recommendations:
Choose Showit if: You want a site builder that will let you have your site up and running in the quickest amount of time, and with the least hassle. Showit functions best for service-based businesses and is perfect for both the experienced website designer and design-challenged user.
It not only comes with free website templates that will make creative business owners stand out, but everything is easily customizable using a point-and-click editor which gives you complete design freedom.
Choose Squarespace if: You want to build a website or eCommerce store without having to integrate any third-party tools. Squarespace is an all-in-one site builder that requires no graphic design or website-building skills. You can choose a template and swap out the pre-loaded content for your own to create your own website, blog, portfolio, or store in record time.
You can also take a look at my other Squarespace comparisons: