Webflow vs Squarespace

Webflow and Squarespace both put a full website, blog and store under one subscription, but they charge for growth in almost opposite ways. Webflow’s price is a starting point that a real, trafficked site usually pays more than; Squarespace’s price is close to the whole story, because most of what would normally push a bill up on another platform is simply unlimited here. Every plan, add-on and billing rule below comes from Webflow’s and Squarespace’s own pricing pages.

Where does Webflow actually win?

Webflow wins on control. Its visual canvas gives near-code-level layout freedom: custom code on Basic and Premium, code components on Premium, and Webflow Cloud for hosting a small app, with 15 apps and 2 million requests a month on Premium at $39 a month. Squarespace’s editor works in sections and blocks; you can restyle what’s there, but you don’t get that lower-level control. Its plan lineup also fits people building sites for others: the Agency Workspace, $42 a month, bundles unlimited staging sites and three free client seats per site, and the Freelancer Workspace, $24 a month, does the same with one free client seat. Squarespace has no equivalent Workspace built for multiple clients; every site is its own separate account and bill. Refunds are more forgiving on Webflow’s side too: any new Site or Workspace purchase, monthly or annual, is refundable within 14 days, where Squarespace’s window only opens on a new annual plan.

Where does Squarespace actually win?

Squarespace wins on predictability and reach. Every current plan, Basic through Advanced, allows up to 1,000 pages and unlimited bandwidth, so a traffic spike alone never raises the bill the way it can on Webflow. Team size works the same way: Core, Plus and Advanced include unlimited contributors for $39 a month, with no per-seat fee ever, where Webflow keeps charging $19 a month for every extra Limited seat. Selling costs less too: a store on Squarespace reaches a 0% online-store transaction fee at that same Core price, while the equivalent jump on Webflow, from Ecommerce Standard’s 2% fee to Ecommerce Plus’s 0%, costs $84 a month. Squarespace also prices digital products, courses and memberships on their own ladder, stepping from 7% on Basic to 0% on Advanced at $139 a month; Webflow’s plans list no equivalent digital-product fee, only the Ecommerce fee built for a shipped catalog. For a business with no in-house designer, that combination matters more day to day than Webflow’s extra control.

What actually drives the bill as a site grows?

The three real bills above make the pattern obvious. A solo site costs $39 a month on Webflow and $25 a month on Squarespace. Move to a small team and Webflow rises to $167 while Squarespace holds at $39 a month; by the growing-team size, Webflow reaches $732 against Squarespace’s flat $39 a month. Most comparisons blame that gap on per-seat pricing, but seats are a minor part of it: in the growing-team bill, seven Limited seats add $133 of the total, while the bandwidth add-on needed for an estimated 250,000 monthly visits adds $560 on its own. Webflow’s Premium plan includes only 50 GB of bandwidth a month; past that, a site is bumped into a metered add-on tier, and Webflow only publishes a page-view range, not a fixed per-visit figure, so the right tier is an estimate, not a guarantee. Squarespace sidesteps the problem entirely: bandwidth is unlimited on every plan, so none of its bills above move as traffic climbs from 10,000 to 250,000 visits a month; only a bigger team or a push for lower fees would raise it.

What does selling something cost on each one?

Both tools take a cut beyond whatever a shopper’s card issuer already charges. Webflow’s Ecommerce Standard plan, $42 a month, adds a 2% transaction fee on top of whatever Stripe or PayPal already charges to process the sale. Ecommerce Plus, $84 a month, and Ecommerce Advanced both drop that fee to 0%. Squarespace runs its own processor, Squarespace Payments, and publishes its rate directly: 2.9% plus 30 cents per domestic US card on Basic and Core, improving to 2.7% on Plus and 2.5% on Advanced, plus a separate 2% Squarespace transaction fee on Basic that falls to 0% from Core up, applying even when a sale runs through Stripe or PayPal instead. Selling anything that isn’t a physical product tells a different story: Squarespace prices digital content and memberships on their own ladder, from 7% on Basic down to 0% on Advanced at $139 a month, while Webflow lists no equivalent fee at all; its Ecommerce tiers are built around a shipped product catalog, capped at 500 items on Standard and 15,000 on Advanced.

What happens if you want to switch later?

Neither platform is self-hosted, so leaving either one means rebuilding somewhere else, not flipping a switch. Webflow gives you a documented way out: a paid Workspace plan, Core and up, can export a site’s HTML and CSS, and CMS content exports one Collection at a time, though forms and any server-side logic stop working the moment you leave. Squarespace’s own help center, in the pages checked for this record, does not describe an equivalent export path, so moving a Squarespace site elsewhere in practice means rebuilding the design and re-entering content by hand. That gap matters most for a site with a lot of CMS content: a blog with hundreds of posts is real work to move off either platform, but at least Webflow’s side has a documented, if manual, route. Billing doesn’t lock you in either direction: both bill month to month by default, and switching to annual billing only extends the term already chosen, not a multi-year contract. The one real exception is Webflow’s Team platform plan, $2,500 a month, which requires an annual contract with no monthly option; nothing on Squarespace’s plan list requires a term commitment.

Where most advice gets this wrong

Most comparisons frame this as design freedom versus ease of use, and stop there. That’s true as far as it goes, but it hides a more practical difference: how close each vendor’s sticker price sits to what a real site actually pays. Squarespace’s sticker price is close to the real one, because every current plan carries unlimited bandwidth: Core costs $39 a month whether the site gets 500 visits or 500,000. Webflow’s sticker price is a starting point, not an answer: Premium’s $39 a month covers only 50 GB of bandwidth, Webflow only publishes a page-view range, not a fixed per-visit figure, and a site over its limit for two months running gets bumped to a higher, non-refundable tier automatically. Comparing these two tools on sticker price alone really means comparing Squarespace’s real bill against Webflow’s minimum bill, and the two only match if the Webflow site barely gets any traffic. Anyone picking Webflow for a site expected to grow should budget for a bandwidth add-on from day one, not treat it as a surprise later, and track actual usage with Webflow’s own Analyze add-on, which starts at $12 a month, rather than guessing.

Who do the “neither” verdicts actually apply to?

Two of the picks above deserve a sentence of their own. A business built around a real product catalog, the shopify-store persona in the verdicts, is better served by neither tool here: Webflow’s Ecommerce plans cap out at 500 to 15,000 items with a fee on the entry tier, and Squarespace’s store is a feature bundled into a site plan, not a dedicated ecommerce back office. That business should look at Shopify instead, or the Shopify page already on this site. Course creators land on Squarespace only in a narrow sense: it prices digital-content sales on a published, falling fee scale, which is real and useful, but neither tool has cohort scheduling, drip content or a community feature the way a dedicated course platform does, so read that pick as the cheaper place to sell a download or a video course, not a course platform. Everyone else in the verdicts, agencies, local-service businesses, freelancers and SaaS startups, is choosing between two real website builders that both do the core job well; the deciding factor is whether the business already has, or wants to hire, someone comfortable in Webflow’s visual canvas.