Wix vs Squarespace: which builder do you pick?

Wix vs Squarespace: if you build the site yourself and your team works in a language other than English, Wix is the easier pick, because its editor and account come in many languages, Dutch among them. Squarespace is slightly cheaper per month and has polished templates, but you work in an English-first editor. Neither lets you take the site itself to another platform later, and that is worth knowing before you start.

What Wix and Squarespace cost per month in euro

Seen from Belgium, Wix lists four paid plans on a yearly subscription: Light at 14 euro a month, Core at 25, Business at 34 and Business Elite at 149, all before tax. Wix adds VAT based on your billing address and charges none when you enter a valid EU VAT number.

Squarespace shows both ways of paying. Basic costs 12 euro a month paid yearly and 17 euro paid monthly. Core costs 18 or 24 euro, Plus 32 or 42 and Advanced 69 or 79, before tax. On the same page Squarespace also shows a price with estimated VAT: 14.52 euro for Basic.

For a plain business site you compare Wix Light at 14 euro with Squarespace Basic at 12: 24 euro a year apart. To sell or take payments you compare Wix Core at 25 with Squarespace Core at 18, because Basic charges 2% on every sale. Both include a domain for the first year on a yearly plan. The full three-year bill for Wix, with email and apps, is in Wix pricing.

Every plan before and after VAT

Without a valid EU VAT number you pay VAT on top, at the rate of your country; at 21% the ladder looks like this per month, billed yearly:

Over one and three years Squarespace wins on price, as the chart above shows: 72 euro for a plain site, 252 euro for a selling site. Pay Squarespace monthly and Basic costs 204 euro a year instead of 144. For a business selling in Belgium, two things weigh more: Wix's editor in local languages and Bancontact. For a store, compare Wix vs Shopify instead.

Working in your own language

Wix runs its editor and your account in many languages, and its template gallery has local versions: the Dutch one lists templates for a plumber, a hair salon or an electrician next to English ones. A Dutch-speaking team in Antwerp or Amsterdam can build without switching to English.

Squarespace has no Dutch editor. The site you publish can be in Dutch, but you build it in English and translate the sample text of your template yourself. If your team reads English easily, that costs little. If the person updating the site does not, it costs time every week.

Taking payments from European customers

Both take cards. Squarespace Payments charges 2% plus 0.25 euro on Basic and Core and supports iDEAL at 0.29 euro. Wix Payments charges 1.9% plus 0.30 euro for cards and supports iDEAL and Bancontact. Squarespace does not accept Bancontact at all, not through its own payments and not through Stripe. Selling to Belgian customers, that alone can decide it; how the fees add up for a real store is in Wix vs Shopify.

What you lose when you move later

Wix does not let your site leave: you can export your products as a CSV file of up to 5,000 rows, and you rebuild the design, pages and text elsewhere. Squarespace gives you a WordPress export file with your regular pages, one blog, text and images. Products, most other page types, extra blogs, audio, video and your whole design stay behind, and a site still on its trial cannot export.

If that lock-in matters, choose a site that exists as plain files. A custom static site is a set of pages you can move to any host in any country. We build those from Ghent, Belgium, for businesses anywhere in Europe.

Before you pick: three questions

1. In which language will you build and get help? If not English, Wix makes daily work easier.
2. How will customers pay? Card only works on both; Bancontact only on Wix among the two.
3. Will you want to leave later? Neither takes your site along. If that matters, plan a portable site from the start; what moving involves is in moving a website to a new host.

Which builder for which situation

A restaurant needs more than a menu page; what exactly is in restaurant website.

Pitfalls with a site builder

• The renewalBoth renew your yearly plan automatically; put the date in your calendar.
• A domain that is not yoursRegister your domain in your own name.
• Template text left behindRead every page for sample copy before you publish.
• Growth without a planA builder is fast for ten pages and slow for a hundred, and in several languages each page is a new one to maintain. Whether you even need a site first is in do I need a website.