If you want the tools and will run them yourself, Wix or Squarespace. If you want the work done for you, Bernard: £200 a year for one site, enterprise packages for a team.
The sums are below if you want them.
Squarespace vs Wix is one of the most searched questions about small-business websites. Most answers end by naming a winner. This one does not, because there isn’t one. Both are good builders. They work differently, and the right one for you depends on how you like to work and what your site has to do.
Below is who each one suits, how much design freedom each gives you, what each costs in pounds today, and two-year sums for one site and for two, with every figure shown so you can check it.
Bernard is an AI-assisted website and marketing platform for small businesses. He builds a new site or moves an existing one, keeps it fast and readable to search and AI tools, and looks after it. Once measuring is on, he reads your numbers each week and suggests what to do next, with a button that does it. On the Medium and Large plans he also plans your marketing every six weeks and drafts your posts, emails and pages. Everything lands on a draft you approve. One flat price per site.
Why the Squarespace vs Wix lists disagree
Read three “Squarespace vs Wix” articles and you may well get three different answers. The platforms have not swapped places. Each writer just cares about different things: one about design, one about price, one about how many apps you can add. Some also get paid when you sign up through their link, so be wary of a list that sounds very sure of itself.
People also want different things from the same search. A florist selling bouquets, a therapist taking bookings and a photographer showing a portfolio can all type “Squarespace vs Wix” and need different answers.
Which is best, Squarespace or Wix? It depends on you
The simplest difference is how much design freedom you get against how much is done for you.
Wix lets you drag a picture or a box of text to any spot on the page, and it stays there. If you know exactly how a page should look, you can build it that way. The price is more decisions, and a layout made on a laptop can need separate work to look right on a phone.
Squarespace starts you on a template a designer has already made, then has you add ready-made sections. It sorts out the layout for you, so it is hard to end up with a page that looks wrong on a phone. The price is that the layout you pictured is sometimes not one of the options.
Some people love Wix’s freedom and feel boxed in by Squarespace. Others find Wix too many choices and Squarespace restful. If you have tried both free trials, you probably know already which camp you are in.
What they cost today
We read both companies’ own pricing pages on 21 October 2026, in pounds. Prices are before VAT.
| Wix | Squarespace | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry plan with your own address | Light: £9 a month paid yearly (£108 a year) | Basic: £12 a month paid yearly (£144 a year) |
| Paying month by month | not shown on Wix’s plans page | Basic £16, Core £24 a month |
| First plan that takes payments | Core: £16 a month paid yearly (£192 a year) | Basic, with a 2% fee on store sales |
| Selling with no platform fee on store sales | not listed on the plans page | Core: £17 a month paid yearly (£204 a year) |
| Selling courses or memberships | not listed on the plans page | 7% fee on Basic, 5% on Core, 1% on Plus |
| Card processing | not listed on the plans page | from 2.0% + £0.25 a payment |
| Email marketing | a “marketing suite” on every paid plan, size not stated | Email Campaigns, a separate add-on priced by emails sent, unlimited contacts |
| Free web address | one year, with a new domain bought from Wix | one year, on yearly plans |
| Leaving for another host | not possible, says Wix’s own help | partial export, as a WordPress file |
Where a cell says “not listed”, the company’s own pricing page did not say on the day we read it, so ask before you buy. The full Wix workings are in Wix 2026 pricing, explained - what a Wix site really costs. The Squarespace ones are in Squarespace 2026 pricing, explained - what your renewal will actually cost.
The costs on top of the plan price
The price on the plans page is not what you end up paying. These are the extra costs.
Both show prices before VAT. If you are not VAT-registered, 20% goes on at the checkout. Wix Light’s £108 becomes £129.60. Squarespace Basic’s £144 becomes £172.80.
The free web address on both lasts one year. After that it renews at the standard rate, which neither pricing page shows. Squarespace says domains “renew at our standard rate” after the first year.
Paying monthly costs more. Squarespace Basic is £12 a month paid yearly or £16 paid monthly, which is £48 a year more for the same site before VAT. Wix says you can pay over other periods but does not show those prices on its plans page.
On Squarespace Basic, every store sale carries a 2% fee on top of card processing. Once you sell a little, that changes which plan is better value. There is more on that below.
Email marketing on Squarespace is a separate bill. Extra apps on Wix can be too. What a mailing list costs as it grows is set out in What email marketing really costs in 2026 - and why the bill grows when you do.
Then there is your own time: changing a menu, fixing a picture that has slipped on a phone, updating opening times. When it is worth paying someone else to do it is covered in Is it worth paying someone to manage your website?.
Squarespace vs Wix: two-year sums you can check
Every figure here is what a UK business that is not VAT-registered pays. Wix, Squarespace and Mailchimp all show their prices before VAT, so 20% is added to theirs. Bernard is not VAT-registered, so his price is the whole price. All prices were read on 21 October 2026.
These are comparisons of broadly similar business needs, not identical products. Some of these services include things Bernard does not do. Bernard includes planning, reading your numbers and doing the work, which these combinations do not give you without more tools or more of your own time.
A garden designer with a five-page site, an enquiry form and a mailing list, not selling anything online yet. The list is 500 people. She sends two newsletters a month and a welcome email to each new sign-up, about 1,000 to 1,100 emails a month. Every column below does the same job, so this is a like-for-like sum.
| Website plus a 500-person list, each year | Wix Light + Mailchimp | Squarespace Basic + Email Campaigns | Bernard (Nautilus Small) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Website | £129.60 | £172.80 (£230.40 paid monthly) | £200 |
| Mailing list | £217.73 | £158.40 | included |
| Each year | £347.33 | £331.20 (£388.80 with the site paid monthly) | £200 |
| Two years | £694.66 | £662.40 | £400 |
How the figures are made up:
- Squarespace Email Campaigns is priced by emails sent, with unlimited contacts. About 1,100 emails a month needs the 5,000-email tier, £11 a month paid yearly: £132, or £158.40 with VAT.
- Wix has its own email marketing, and Light includes a “Light marketing suite”, but Wix’s pages do not say how many emails that sends or what more costs. So Mailchimp Standard, the plan with automated emails, stands in: £15.12 a month for up to 500 contacts, £181.44 a year, or £217.73 with VAT.
- Bernard: email campaigns and automatic emails to your list are part of Small, with no charge per contact. Every site starts with six ready-made email templates (a short newsletter, an event or workshop, a time-limited offer and others) drawn in your site’s own colours.
With the list counted, Bernard is about £130 a year less than Squarespace and about £150 a year less than Wix with Mailchimp. Over two years that is about £260 and £295 less.
A free email tool instead. Kit (the email tool that used to be called ConvertKit) has a free plan for up to 10,000 subscribers, but it only sends plain newsletters. To send a welcome email to each new sign-up you need its paid Creator plan, which started at US$390 a year for up to 1,000 subscribers on 21 October. That is about £351 a year with VAT, at 75p to the dollar, and it brings Wix Light to about £481 a year. If a plain newsletter with no welcome email is all she needs, Kit’s free plan will do, and the bare-website sums below apply.
The same site with no mailing list.
| A bare website | Wix Light | Squarespace Basic | Bernard (Nautilus Small) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Year one | £129.60 | £172.80 paid yearly, £230.40 paid monthly | £200 paid yearly, £240 paid monthly |
| Every year after | £129.60 | £172.80 paid yearly, £230.40 paid monthly | £200 paid yearly, £240 paid monthly |
| Web address in year one | included, if bought new from Wix | included on yearly plans | not included: you pay for your own |
Neither builder has a lower first-year price on these plans, so year one and every year after are the same. Wix’s plans page shows yearly prices only. If she needs a website and nothing else, Wix Light costs less than Bernard every year, and so does Squarespace Basic paid yearly.
Left out on purpose: the web address after its free first year (neither company shows the renewal price; Bernard does not sell addresses, so it is your own cost wherever the site lives), and your own time.
Now say the same designer starts selling about £5,000 a year of planting plans online.
On Squarespace Basic, the 2% fee on £5,000 is £100 a year. That makes Basic £144 + £100 = £244 a year before VAT, against Core at £204 with no store fee. So once you sell more than about £3,000 a year, Squarespace Core costs less than Basic. (At £3,000, 2% is £60, and £144 + £60 = £204.)
| Selling £5,000 a year, each year | Wix Core | Squarespace Core | Bernard (Small plus shop) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Website, with VAT where charged | £230.40 | £244.80 | £200 + £200 shop = £400 |
| Platform fee on store sales | not listed by Wix | 0% | 0% |
| Without a mailing list | £230.40 | £244.80 | £400 |
| Add the same 500-person list | + £217.73 (Mailchimp) | + £158.40 (Email Campaigns) | included |
| With the list, before card fees | £448.13 | £403.20 | £400 |
If she sells but has no mailing list, Wix Core and Squarespace Core both cost less than Bernard’s Small plus a shop. With the list, all three are within about £50 a year of each other.
Card processing comes on top on all three: from 2.0% + £0.25 a payment on Squarespace, an amount Wix’s plans page does not list, and the payment provider’s own charge on Bernard, who takes payments into your own Stripe account.
What if she needs two websites, not one?
Say the garden designer wants a second, separate site for a side business, such as garden workshops. Neither builder sells a plan that covers two sites. Wix’s help says “Each site you want to upgrade must have its own Premium or Studio site plan.” Squarespace’s says “Each website you create is paid for separately. We don’t offer multi-site plans.” Bernard’s plans also cover one site each, at every size. A second site is a £150-a-year add-on on any plan, which you add yourself in the app.
| Two bare websites, each year | Wix Light x2 | Squarespace Basic x2 | Bernard (Small plus extra site) |
|---|---|---|---|
| First site | £129.60 | £172.80 (£230.40 paid monthly) | £200 |
| Second site | £129.60 | £172.80 (£230.40 paid monthly) | £150 |
| Each year | £259.20 | £345.60 (£460.80 paid monthly) | £350 |
| Two years | £518.40 | £691.20 | £700 |
There are no first-year deals on these plans, so every year is the same. For two bare sites, Wix Light costs about £90 a year less than Bernard, and Squarespace Basic paid yearly costs £4.40 less. Each further site adds another full plan on the builders (£129.60 on Wix Light, £172.80 on Squarespace Basic) and another £150 on Bernard. On Bernard both sites sit in one account, on one payment.
Two sites, each with its own mailing list. Now give each site its own list of 500 people, with two newsletters a month and a welcome email for each new sign-up. Wix comes to £749.09 a year: £259.20 for the two sites, plus Mailchimp Standard for 1,000 contacts, £34.02 a month, which is £408.24 a year or £489.89 with VAT. Squarespace comes to £504 if one Email Campaigns plan covers both sites: the two lists send about 2,200 emails a month, which still fits the 5,000-email tier at £158.40 a year with VAT. Squarespace’s email page does not say whether one plan can serve two sites, so check before you count on it. Bernard stays at £350. Each site keeps its own list and its own monthly sending allowance, and campaigns and automatic emails are part of both.
What Wix and Squarespace each do well
Wix suits you if you know exactly how you want the page to look, because you can build it that way. Its entry price with your own address is the lower of the two. Bookings and services come with the Core plan, which suits anyone who sells their time: coaches, tutors, salons, studios. There is also a large app market for adding things Wix has not built itself.
Squarespace templates look polished from the start, and the ready-made sections make it hard to end up with a page that looks wrong on a phone. Core lets you sell physical products, services and digital downloads with no platform fee on store sales. Email Campaigns sits inside the same account, with unlimited contacts. Core also includes a Google Workspace email address free for the first year.
Where each falls short. On both, you may well outgrow the plan you start on, and a second site means a second plan.
Where Bernard sits
Bernard hosts your site and looks after it. Updates, security and backups are part of the job. There are three ways to start. He can move your existing site off Wix or Squarespace (and most other platforms) onto lighter hosting, and the move is included with the yearly plan. You can start a new site from scratch, which gives you a one-page starter draft and then some questions about your business. Or you can copy one of your own sites as the start of another. If you are on Wix, the move details are at /move-from/wix; on Squarespace, /move-from/squarespace.
On design, Bernard has no template gallery. A moved site keeps the look it already has, and a new one is built from your own look. If you want to see a page visually first, you can design it in Claude Design and send it to your draft, one page at a time. On a computer you can drag sections, photos and product cards into a new order. There is no free-form canvas like Wix’s, and the header, menu and footer stay where they are.
His prices are flat, with no VAT added, because Bernard is not VAT-registered: Nautilus Small is £200 a year, Medium £500 and Large £1,000. A shop is £200 a year on top, and Bernard takes 0% of each sale. An extra site is £150 a year. Emailing your list is part of every plan, with no charge per contact. Medium adds social posting and scheduling.
The work carries on after the move. Reports shows which AI assistants, such as ChatGPT and Claude, have been reading your pages, and whether it was to answer someone’s question. The accessibility check re-runs itself every week.
Bernard prepares changes for your approval. Website edits stay on a draft, with a plain note on what changed, until you choose to publish them, and you can undo a change afterwards. Social posts can be scheduled to go out automatically at the time you approved. Bernard in your dashboard cannot publish at all, and a connected AI is told to publish only when you ask.
When Bernard is not the right choice:
- He is newer and smaller than Wix or Squarespace.
- If you enjoy building pages by hand, or want a large app market to try things from, Wix or Squarespace will suit you better.
- For a simple site with no selling and no mailing list, Wix Light and Squarespace Basic paid yearly both cost less every year, for one site or two, as the tables show.
- He does not sell web addresses or email accounts. Those stay where they are, in your name.
What the comparison lists leave out
How easy it is to leave. Wix’s own help says a Wix site “needs to be hosted and operated on Wix’s servers”, so leaving means building the site again somewhere else. Squarespace exports some pages and blog posts as a WordPress file, but not store pages, product blocks, style settings or custom code. That should not put you off either one, but know it before you start.
What happens after the site goes live. Wix creates and keeps up your sitemap and builds its search tools into every site, though connecting Google Search Console needs a Premium plan and your own address. Squarespace says its sites are built for clean indexing, and its SEO Report finds pages missing alt text or descriptions. Bernard re-checks the live site each time you publish: broken links, page titles and descriptions, structured data and Google’s speed test. Speed fixes he suggests are made on a draft for you to approve. On ten sites measured before and after their move, in August 2026, the average mobile speed score went from 65 to 72. Seven got faster and two got slower. None of the three can put you at the top of Google.
Whether you like using it. If you dread opening a builder, it is the wrong one for you, however well it is reviewed.
How to choose between Squarespace and Wix
- Try both. Each has a free trial. Build one page on each. Within an hour you will know which one you would rather open next month.
- Decide whether you will sell. If you will sell more than about £3,000 a year through a Squarespace site, look at Core rather than Basic. On Wix, read the checkout terms for any fee before you sign up.
- Price two years, not one. Add VAT if you are not registered. Add the web address renewal. Count any add-on you know you will need, such as email, and any second site.
- Check how you would leave. Neither builder makes it easy to take your site with you.
- If you already have a site and want the upkeep gone, that is a different question from which builder to start on. If you are starting from nothing, see how to make a website for your business. For the wider choice, see The best website builder for a small business depends on who runs it. For Squarespace against WordPress, see Squarespace vs WordPress 2026: an honest cost comparison.
See what Bernard would do with your business. Already have a website? Paste its address and he measures it up, free, and shows you the new place before you decide anything. Starting from nothing? Tell him what you are building.
Questions people ask
- Is Squarespace or Wix better for a small business?
- Neither is better for everyone. Wix lets you put things exactly where you want them and costs less to start. Squarespace has tidier ready-made designs and lets you sell with no platform fee from its Core plan. Pick the one you would be happy using for the next few years, not the one at the top of somebody’s list.
- Is Wix cheaper than Squarespace?
- At the entry level, yes. On 21 October 2026 Wix Light was £9 a month paid yearly (£108 a year) and Squarespace Basic was £12 a month paid yearly (£144 a year), both before VAT. Once you want to sell, the gap is smaller: Wix Core was £16 a month and Squarespace Core £17. Add 20% VAT if you are not VAT-registered.
- Do Wix and Squarespace charge transaction fees?
- Squarespace’s pricing page lists a 2% fee on store sales on the Basic plan and 0% on Core and above, plus card processing from 2.0% + £0.25 a payment. Wix’s plans page does not list a transaction fee, so check Wix’s own checkout terms before you sign up. On both, the card processing charge is on top of the plan.
- Can I move my site from Wix to Squarespace, or the other way?
- Not automatically. Wix’s own help says a Wix site cannot be hosted anywhere but Wix, and Squarespace exports only some of a site, as a WordPress file. Moving between them usually means building the pages again by hand. Your web address is yours either way and can be pointed at the new site.
- Which is better for email marketing, Wix or Squarespace?
- Both have it. Squarespace Email Campaigns is a separate add-on priced by how many emails you send each month, with unlimited contacts: on 21 October 2026, from £7 a month paid yearly for 500 emails, or £11 for 5,000, before VAT. Wix includes a ‘marketing suite’ on every paid plan, bigger on the bigger plans, but the plans page does not say how many emails each one sends. When you compare them, count the emails you send each month, not the contacts on your list.
- Do Wix and Squarespace prices include VAT?
- No. Both show prices before tax and add it at the checkout based on your billing address. A UK customer who is not VAT-registered pays 20% on top, so Wix Light’s £108 a year becomes £129.60 and Squarespace Basic’s £144 becomes £172.80.
- Can I run two websites on one Wix or Squarespace plan?
- No. Wix’s help says each site must have its own plan, and Squarespace’s says each website is paid for separately. On 21 October 2026 two Wix Light sites came to £259.20 a year and two Squarespace Basic sites paid yearly to £345.60, both with 20% VAT. On Bernard a second site is £150 a year on any plan, so Small with an extra site is £350 a year, with no VAT added.