Whether you’re a new creator or a seasoned pro, there’s a good chance your business needs a website. And because you’re probably already wearing many hats, it’s important to find a website builder that’s easy to use and headache-free.
Squarespace is a popular option because you can design and build a website without knowing how to code. Squarespace provides a variety of website templates, and you can also set up an online store, sell physical products, or start a blog.
But Squarespace has some limitations, and it isn’t the right fit for everyone, especially if you’re hoping to sell digital products as a big part of your business.
In this article, we’ll cover:
- Squarespace pros and cons, and who it’s best for
- 6 Squarespace alternatives for people selling digital products
- How to decide the best website tool for your business
TL;DR: If you’re looking for a tool to sell digital products, grow your audience, and build a great website, Podia is a great option. You can try Podia free for 30 days.
Squarespace pros and cons
Squarespace pros:
Squarespace is first and foremost a website builder, and it does that well. When you build a website with Squarespace, you’ll get access to several templates to jumpstart your site design. Squarespace offers specialized themes for portfolio websites, ecommerce shops, blogs, service-based businesses, and other use cases. You can also buy third-party templates if you want a different look.
If you’d like to sell products and services from your website, Squarespace supports physical products, digital products, services, and point-of-sale if you sell in a physical location. On higher-tier plans, you can get access to shipping features like shipping labels, carrier-calculated shipping, and other integrations.
Squarespace also has email features so you can grow a list. You can add email marketing to any plan, and you pay based on how many emails you send, not how many contacts you have (plans start at $12/month to send 500 emails/month).
Squarespace also owns Acuity Scheduling, and you can add a booking calendar for in-person appointments and virtual bookings to your business for an extra fee. Using Acuity starts at an extra $20/month for one bookable calendar.
Squarespace cons:
On the flip side, some customers find Squarespace websites difficult to customize if you want to branch out beyond the template you’re using. Sometimes making even small changes isn’t intuitive, and when you’re new to Squarespace, navigating between pages, elements, and style settings can be confusing and time-consuming.
While templates offer a nice starting point, many users feel that the customization options are too narrow with Squarespace. The website builder is simple for non-developers, but the catch is that you can only edit certain aspects of your site.
While it’s possible to sell digital products on Squarespace, the ecommerce tools and extensions are mainly geared toward selling physical products. The storage limits are pretty tight if you plan to sell video courses (30 minutes of video hosting on Basic, 5 hours on Core, and unlimited on Advanced), and you’ll pay transaction fees on digital product sales on all plans except for the Advanced plan.
Finally, if you’d like to use some of Squarespace’s advanced features like email marketing or scheduling, you’ll need to pay extra fees each month. Here’s a look at the Squarespace pricing plans and add-ons.
Squarespace pricing:
- Basic: $19/month ($12/month billed annually): 2% transaction fee on online store sales, 7% on digital content and memberships, 30 minutes of video hosting
- Core: $27/month ($17/month billed annually): 0% transaction fee on online store sales, 5% on digital content and memberships, 5 hours of video hosting
- Advanced: $36/month ($25/month billed annually): 0% transaction fee on online store sales and on digital content and memberships, unlimited video hosting
If you want to use Acuity, Squarespace’s booking calendar and scheduling tool, that comes with an extra cost.
- Starter: $20/month ($16/month billed annually): 1 bookable calendar, client self-scheduling, unlimited services and appointments
- Standard: $34/month ($27/month billed annually): up to 6 bookable calendars, text message reminders, memberships and subscriptions with automated billing
- Premium: $61/month ($49/month billed annually): up to 36 bookable calendars, removes "Powered by Acuity" branding, HIPAA compliance available
And if you want to use Squarespace’s email marketing tool, that also has an additional fee. Email is billed based on the number of emails you plan to send, not the number of contacts, so you might need a higher plan if you plan to send frequent messages to your audience.
- 500 emails/month tier: $12/month ($8/month billed annually)
- 5,000 emails/month tier: $20/month ($14/month billed annually)
- 10,000 emails/month tier: $28/month ($20/month billed annually)
Pricing scales up from there based on your monthly email volume, with a slider on Squarespace's pricing page going up to 500K emails a month. All tiers include unlimited contacts, marketing automations, real-time analytics, and AI email copy.
Here's how this could shake out by the numbers. Let's say you want to sell online courses and coaching. You'd need the Advanced plan for unlimited video hosting ($36/month, or $25/month billed annually), plus the Starter Acuity plan for booking ($20/month, or $16/month billed annually). Add the lowest email tier if you want to handle your own marketing too ($12/month, or $8/month billed annually).
That comes out to $68/month, or $49/month billed annually, before you've built anything.
Plus, this setup doesn’t include your online community, affiliate program, or events, so you could be looking at even more add-ons and fees.
If you’re mainly interested in building a website where you sell physical products, Squarespace can be a good fit. But if you’re hoping to lean into digital products like courses, coaching, downloads, and community memberships, it’s worth looking at some options that were built for exactly what you’re trying to do.
If you’re looking for a simpler way to build your website and sell your digital products, here are seven Squarespace alternatives that might fit the bill instead.
6 best Squarespace alternatives
1. Podia
Podia is an all-in-one platform for running your business where you can create a beautiful website that’s automatically connected to your digital products, courses, community, and email.
Podia’s website builder is easy to use, and you don’t have to know code to make your site look amazing. You can make as many web pages and blog posts as you like and even create standalone sales pages and landing pages to promote your offerings.
There are over a dozen different website sections to choose from, and within each section, you can customize the content (like title, description, button text, and what content to include) and the design (like orientation, layout, style, color, and background image). You can style each content block with just a few clicks to get a totally different look and layout.
But don’t just take our word for it. According to Podia creator and Flex Lessons founder Joseph D’Amico, “Podia makes website building so fun. I feel like I could set up a site in an afternoon, and it would look great. And there’s something to be said for how pretty it is. It’s the best-looking one by far.”
The cherry on top? Podia was built for selling digital products from day one, so you have the infrastructure you need to create a great learning experience for your customers. Your website connects to your blog, which connects to your lead magnets, which connects to your email automations, which connects to your paid community, which connects to your course library, and everything works for you behind the scenes.
Bottom line: With Podia, you can build a fantastic website, sell your work, and run your entire business using a tool that’s built just for digital product creators like you.
Podia features:
- Complete website builder with blogging and unlimited pages (including sales pages and landing pages)
- Sell courses, digital downloads, webinars, and coaching
- Full community with free and paid membership subscriptions
- Built-in email marketing, affiliate marketing, and customer messaging
- Live, virtual, and in-person events
- Website hosting included
- Free migrations
Podia pricing:
- Mover: $49/month ($42/month billed annually), 5% transaction fee: 50 products, unlimited students, 100 email subscribers, storage for 500 videos, includes your community, website, landing pages, digital products, and courses
- Shaker: $99/month ($84/month billed annually), 0% transaction fee: 150 products, unlimited students, 500 email subscribers, storage for 1,000 videos, adds affiliate marketing, upsells, 1 assistant seat, and more integrations
- Earthquaker: $179/month ($150/month billed annually), 0% transaction fee: unlimited products, unlimited students, 1,000 email subscribers, adds unlimited assistant seats and unlimited video storage
All Podia plans include a set number of email subscribers to start, and you can add on more any time as your list grows. All email plans come with unlimited email sends, newsletters, templates, automations, and segments.
Get started today with a free 30-day trial.
2. Shopify
Shopify is best known as an ecommerce platform for selling physical products, dropshipping, and selling at in-person locations, but it also comes with website tools so you can build your online store.
You can start with one of Shopify's professionally designed themes to get a storefront up quickly, or use its built-in AI tool to generate product descriptions, page content, and even a starter site based on a few prompts.
Shopify is built around physical products, so selling digital products takes an extra step. You'll need to connect the free Shopify Digital Products app, which lets you attach files or links to any product, set access limits, and send download links to customers automatically after purchase.
Shopify has an app store with thousands of apps to make your store and website function how you like. Beyond digital products, there are membership apps and course apps to give you extra features, though many come with an added cost.
Shopify features:
- Sell physical or digital products
- Full website builder with themes and an AI website assistant
- Sell courses and downloads with add-on apps
- Email and customer chat messaging
- Point of sale for in-person selling
Shopify pros:
Shopify offers several plans and price points, so you can start small and scale up as you grow. The theme library and AI builder make it fast to get a professional-looking website live, even if design isn't your strong suit.
Because there are options for selling physical products, selling in person, and offering digital products, you can customize your setup to fit almost any kind of business, and since it's so well known, there's no shortage of add-ons and apps to connect when you need more functionality.
Shopify cons:
If your website is mainly a home for digital products, courses, or a community, you’ll need to connect apps and extras to make it possible.
Shopify's website builder themes lean heavily toward product grids and storefronts rather than the kind of layouts a course or membership site needs, and digital products still feel like more of an add-on than a core feature.
Shopify also charges a transaction fee when you use a third-party payment provider instead of Shopify Payments.
Shopify pricing:
- Basic: $25/month ($22/month annual), 2% fee for third-party payment providers
- Grow: $65/month ($58/month annual), 1% fee for third-party payment providers
- Advanced: $399/month ($359/month annual), 0.6% fee for third-party payment providers
- Plus: starting at $2,300/month, 0.2% fee for third-party payment providers
3. WordPress
WordPress is one of the most popular website building tools on the internet, and there are two different ways you can use it to build a site of your own.
WordPress.org (self-hosted) is free, open-source software you download and self-host. It's powerful and highly customizable, but it's really built for developers.
You'll need to pay for your own website hosting, manage security and updates, upload a theme, and install plugins to handle things like selling products, email, and community. The software itself is free, but the total cost adds up quickly once you factor everything in.
WordPress.com (managed) is similar, but WordPress manages more of the behind-the-scenes stuff for you. You pay a monthly fee that includes your website hosting and a set amount of storage, which removes some of the technical stuff.
It’s more accessible for non-developers, but still requires plugins and integrations to make it your own.
WordPress features:
- Open source or managed options
- Build a website and blog with unlimited pages
- Virtually endless customization options
- Search engine optimization (SEO) tools to help your content rank
- Ideal for website developers and creators with coding knowledge who want lots of customization options
WordPress pros:
The biggest plus of using WordPress is how customizable it is. There are over 50,000 free and paid plugins you can use for maximum functionality, and there are seemingly endless themes to give your site a unique look and feel. Because WordPress is popular, it’s easy to find third-party resources, tutorials, and videos to help you learn the platform.
WordPress cons:
On the flip side, WordPress has a steep learning curve. You may need to hire a web developer to get everything set up, and you’ll be responsible for keeping everything updated and working correctly.
On top of that, WordPress is not an all-in-one solution. If you want to sell digital products, you’ll need to use a separate service or plugin for managing email, selling courses, creating memberships, and running your affiliate program.
Finally, even though the base software is free, you’ll need to pay for hosting, your domain, and other tools to get your website up and running. Depending on your needs, this could cost more than an all-in-one platform.
Managed WordPress.com pricing:
- Personal: $9/month, billed monthly (lower with annual, 2-year, or 3-year plans): 6GB storage, unlimited pages, posts, users, and visitors
- Premium: $18/month, billed monthly (lower with annual, 2-year, or 3-year plans): 13GB storage, accept payments on your site
- Business: $40/month, billed monthly (lower with annual, 2-year, or 3-year plans): 50GB storage, priority support, all premium themes
- Commerce: $70/month, billed monthly (lower with annual, 2-year, or 3-year plans): 50GB storage, run a full online store, premium store themes
Self-hosted WordPress pricing:
- The WordPress software is free and open-source
- You’ll pay for web hosting, domain registration, and any premium themes or plugins that you want to use
4. Wix
With Wix, you can create a storefront, blog, or business website using a drag-and-drop page builder. Set up your site quickly with templates and upgrade as needed to unlock more features.
Like Shopify, Wix comes with handy tools for selling physical products. Sell print-on-demand and dropship products, build a loyalty program, and offer gift cards for your online store.
Higher plans include online booking functionality, event and ticket management, and special tools for hotel owners, restaurants, and fitness professionals.
Wix also offers a limited free plan if you only need a simple site. Free plans have prominent Wix branding that can only be removed by upgrading to one of their premium plans.
Wix features:
- Free plan (with Wix branding)
- Drag and drop editor and website builder
- Templates and AI website page builder
- Ecommerce store for selling physical products and POS
- Sell digital files like PDFs, images, audio, and videos
- Special tools for hotel owners and restaurants
Wix pros:
Wix has a free plan, which is nice if you need a very simple website and don’t have a budget to start. You can make a website, landing pages, and a blog to grow your business.
If you sell physical products, there are native ecommerce integrations for drop shipping, gathering customer reviews, and running loyalty programs on higher-tier business plans. You can also send automated abandoned cart emails on all business plans.
Wix cons:
You can’t sell products until the Core plan, and there’s a transaction fee on all plans until you reach Business Elite. Wix is also geared more toward physical products and ecommerce than digital products. While it’s technically possible to sell a file as a digital product, there isn’t a traditional course builder or way to add a membership community to your business.
Wix pricing:
(Note, all these prices are for annual billing, and Wix doesn’t display month-to-month prices on their pricing pages)
- Free: $0/month: web hosting, drag-and-drop editor, templates
- Light: $17/month (paid annually): free domain for 1 year, 2GB storage space, light marketing suite
- Core: $29/month (paid annually) with 4% transaction fee on sales: free domain for 1 year, 50GB storage space, basic marketing suite, accept payments, basic eCommerce, scheduling and services
- Business: $39/month (paid annually) with 2% transaction fee on sales: free domain for 1 year, 100GB storage space, standard marketing suite, standard eCommerce, scheduling and services
- Business Elite: $159/month (paid annually): free domain for 1 year, unlimited storage space, advanced marketing suite, advanced eCommerce
5. Webflow
Webflow is a code-free website builder, ecommerce platform, and content management system. Webflow has powerful website design features for makers who want to start with a blank slate, but there are also lots of templates available if you need some guidance. You can even add interactive webpage elements and animations.
Through Webflow’s ecommerce tools, you can sell physical products, digital products, and services. Display unique product fields to highlight the most important information for buyers and create a customized checkout process–even if you don’t know how to code.
Webflow features:
- No coding required
- Ecommerce tools for selling products and services
- Content management system
- Interactive features like movement, animations, and scroll progress
- Native SEO tools
- Flexible templates
Webflow pros:
Webflow has a Free plan where you can build 2 static pages, add up to 50 CMS items, and use up to 1GB of bandwidth. All plans come with templates and AI tools to make your building process go faster.
If you sell products, your customers can pay through Stripe, PayPal, Apple Pay, or Google Pay.
Webflow cons:
Because Webflow offers so much flexibility, it could be overwhelming for someone who just wants to set up a simple website for their business. Having unlimited customization options isn’t always better. Additionally, you’ll need to pay for a higher-priced ecommerce plan if you want to sell physical and digital products.
Webflow website pricing:
- Starter: Free: Webflow.io domain, limited Webflow CMS, 2 static pages
- Basic: $25/month, billed monthly: custom domain, 300 static pages, 10GB bandwidth
- Premium: $39/month, billed monthly: everything in Basic, plus Webflow CMS, 50GB bandwidth
Webflow ecommerce pricing:
- Standard: $42/month with 2% transaction fee and 500 products
- Plus: $84/month with no transaction fees and 5,000 products
- Advanced: $235/month with space for 15,000 products
6. Kajabi
Kajabi is an all-in-one platform where you can sell courses, downloads, coaching, podcasts, memberships, and communities. Kajabi also lets you make your website, landing pages, and blog. Unlike Squarespace, Kajabi focuses on selling courses and products, and you can build a website to support that work. You can also use Kajabi to handle email marketing, build sales funnels, and manage affiliates.
Kajabi features:
- Sell courses, downloads, coaching, podcasts, memberships, and communities
- Website builder with themes and blog functionality
- Landing pages and sales pages
- Build sales funnels
- Email marketing and affiliate marketing tools
- No transaction fees if you use Kajabi Payments
- Mobile app for an on-the-go learning experience
Kajabi pros:
Kajabi's website builder comes with a drag-and-drop editor and a library of templates, so you can create a storefront, blog, and sales pages without connecting a bunch of separate tools.
Kajabi also lets you build sales funnels so you can help website visitors find the right products for them. Kajabi doesn't take a cut of sales made through Kajabi Payments.
Kajabi cons:
If you’re mainly looking for a website, you might end up paying for more than you need with Kajabi. It’s really catering to people who want to build and sell courses and products. That said, there are product limits on the first two plans, which could be a problem if you're building out a big catalog.
Kajabi pricing:
- Basic: $179/month ($143/month billed annually): 5 products, 1 community, up to 2,500 contacts
- Growth: $249/month ($199/month billed annually): 50 products, 1 community, up to 25,000 contacts
- Pro: $499/month ($399/month billed annually): unlimited products, 3 communities, up to 100,000 contacts
Which alternative to Squarespace is right for me?
Best alternatives to Squarespace for selling digital products:
- Podia: Sell online courses, digital downloads, webinars, events, and coaching in addition to running your website. Podia also comes with a community and memberships.
- Kajabi: You can sell online courses, downloads, community access, podcasts, coaching, and other products.
Best Squarespace alternatives for selling physical products:
- Shopify: You get tools to help fulfill orders, ship products, manage inventory, issue refunds, and track finances.
- Wix: You can print on demand, dropship products, manage inventory, and ship your items.
- Webflow: Webflow has ecommerce plans available for selling physical products on your website.
Best Squarespace alternatives for bloggers:
- Podia: Podia includes a full blogging feature with unlimited posts. Your blog is automatically connected to your products, community, and email list so you don’t have to worry about connecting a bunch of tools.
- WordPress: WordPress is an open-source content management system where you can share unlimited blog posts and pick templates and plugins to add more functionality.
- Webflow: Webflow is a content management system that comes with SEO features and hosting.
Best all-in-one alternative to Squarespace: Podia
With Podia, you can create a full website along with your blog and unlimited landing pages. It’s the best website builder for creators who want customization without the overwhelm, and for anyone who dreams of building a virtual home base for their entire creative business.
Design a beautiful website, sell your digital products, and share your story. At Podia, we’ll help you make it happen, and we can’t wait to see what you create.
Get your free 30-day trial from Podia and start building your website today.
