Squarespace is the clear winner in this Squarespace vs GoDaddy comparison. Squarespace offers higher-quality design, more customization options, advanced e-commerce tools, SEO options, and social media integrations without requiring external plugins.
Live chat on weekdays (4 am-8 pm EST), 24/7 support on Twitter and email. Help center, blog, guides, and tutorials.
24/7 customer support via phone, email, and social media.
Squarespace
Squarespace makes beautiful, professional websites easy. The platform offers limitless storage, bandwidth, and eCommerce on most levels. Squarespace’s mobile app, amazing third-party connectors, and free SSL certificate make it beautiful and smart.
Squarespace is a New York-based website-building and hosting company founded by Anthony Casalena in 2004. The platform offers software for clients looking to host and build services, allowing users to leverage pre-built website templates to make and modify web pages.
It offers features for blogging, social media marketing, eCommerce, etc. Over 4 million websites and 1.9% of the top 10 million websites presently use Squarespace.
The GoDaddy Website Builder is an independent tool distinct from GoDaddy’s hosting and domain services. The builder allows you to create and publish a website without any technical knowledge or coding skills.
The GoDaddy Website Builder offers a variety of templates, along with drag-and-drop functionality for easy layout and design adjustments.
It also includes SEO features, social media integration, email marketing, and eCommerce capabilities for users looking to sell products or services online.
* The prices listed in the table reflect the annual payment option.
Squarespace Pricing Plans
Squarespace offers four pricing plans:
Personal
Business
Commerce Basic
Commerce Advanced
$16/month
$23/month
$27/month
$49/month
Squarespace’s plans cater to individual portfolios, small business sites, and advanced eCommerce needs, supporting growth from personal use to full-scale online stores.
The plans start with the Personal plan at $16/month for basic websites. The Business plan at $23/month (annually) adds eCommerce and analytics.
For more advanced eCommerce features, the Commerce Basic plan at $27/month removes transaction fees, while the Commerce Advanced plan at $49/month includes advanced shipping and discounting options.
Tip
Choose the Commerce Advanced plan for a comprehensive online store with advanced features, or opt for the Personal plan for simple, cost-effective personal or portfolio sites.
GoDaddy Website Builder Pricing Plans
GoDaddy offers three pricing plans for its website builder.
Basic
Standard
Premium
$10.99 /month
$14.99/month
$20.99 /month
The Basic plan, at $10.99/month, includes website security, custom domain connection, editing on-the-go, 24/7 support, analytics, professional email, 100 email marketing sends, and support for one social media platform.
The Standard plan, priced at $14.99/month, builds on the Basic with SEO features, 500 email marketing sends, and expands to three social media platforms.
The Premium plan, at $20.99/month, offers all Standard features plus 25,000 email marketing sends and unlimited social media platforms, catering to more demanding online presence needs.
Tip
Opt for the Premium plan if you require extensive email marketing and broad social media reach, or choose the Basic plan for a cost-effective solution to establish your online presence.
And the Winner Is Squarespace
The cheaper option isn’t always the best choice. Squarespace’s pricing plans offer more design features, customization, and advanced eCommerce capabilities, providing better value for money.
Intuitive interface, but with a learning curve due to extensive customization options.
Extremely user-friendly with a straightforward, guided approach for beginners.
Design Assistance
Limited automatic design assistance
Automated design assistance through ADI (Artificial Design Intelligence) for quick setup.
Content and Image Integration
Seamless integration with high control over layout and presentation.
Simple integration, prioritizing speed and convenience over detailed customization.
Template Flexibility
High flexibility with customizable templates
Templates are less flexible, focusing on ease of use and faster setup times.
Squarespace Ease-of-Use
Drag-and-drop editor
Squarespace provides the ability to easily modify and adjust website elements while still offering comprehensive personalization options.
This balance makes it a powerful tool for those who desire a more hands-on approach to designing their website.
Unlike GoDaddy, Squarespace provides a full control over your site’s layout and design. However, this breadth of features comes with a learning curve, especially for users new to web design.
The platform’s intuitive interface helps mitigate this, guiding users through the design process with structured templates and customizable content blocks, including text, images, and multimedia elements.
Squarespace templates and customization
Squarespace offers over 60 templates, known for their modern design, responsiveness, and adaptability across devices.
What sets Squarespace’s templates apart is not just their aesthetic appeal but also their foundation for a variety of business types, enabling users to find a design that precisely matches their vision and industry needs.
Customization option include font choices, color schemes, button styles, and layout configurations.
Users can delve into design panels for detailed modifications, adjusting everything from header layouts to footer content, ensuring that each website can be finely tuned to represent a brand or individual’s unique style and functional requirements.
GoDaddy Ease-of-Use
Drag-and-drop editor
The GoDaddy drag-and-drop editor is ideal for those with little to no web design experience.
The editor allows you to easily add, move, and modify elements on their pages. This intuitive approach reduces the complexity typically associated with web design, making it accessible for users of all skill levels.
Templates and customization
GoDaddy offers a broad selection of templates designed to cater to a wide range of business sectors and personal use.
These templates provide a solid starting point for users, though they may not offer the same level of detailed customization as Squarespace.
With these templates, users can easily adjust colors, fonts, and basic layout elements, streamlining the design process without requiring extensive knowledge of design settings.
This user-friendly approach, combined with GoDaddy’s straightforward design tools, makes it especially appealing for individuals and small businesses looking to quickly establish an online presence without the complexity often associated with web design.
And the Winner Is Squarespace
Squarespace wins due to its intuitive drag-and-drop editor and extensive customization options. With Squarespace you get more detailed and creative control over website design without sacrificing user-friendliness.
These are some of the key features and tools of Squarespace:
Squarespace Website Design
Creator Tools
Digital Marketing
Email Marketing
Analytics
SEO tools
Squarespace Extensions
Squarespace Website Design
Under this Website Design feature, you get access to the following:
Blogging Tools
Portfolio Designs
Customizable Templates
Website builder
Squarespace has some of the very best template designs on the market. There are several high-quality modern templates for customers to select from and use.
All templates translate easily to a mobile device with the drag-and-drop feature helping newcomers customize their websites as freely as possible.
Templates come in handy for creatives who want to use Squarespace to display their online store and products or photography and artwork neat but extra creative.
With a click of a button, you can turn your ideas into a reality with the perfect template.
Creator Tools
Squarespace Creator Tools are designed to empower users to build and manage their online presence effectively.
Creator tools aimed at website creation, content management, sales management, and integration with various social media platforms.
Digital Marketing
The Squarespace Digital Marketing feature has these tools and more:
Email Campaigns
Squarespace AI
Social Media Integrations
Squarespace Video Studio App
Newsletter Blocks
Banners & Promotions
Marketing Analytics
Custom Favicon
Squarespace’s digital marketing features are tailored to enhance online presence and engagement.
Email Campaigns allow for beautifully designed newsletters, aligning with your site’s aesthetic.
Squarespace AI aloows you to create cutomized AI-generated marketing copies.
Social Media Integrations enable content sharing across platforms, while the Squarespace Video Studio App assists in creating branded videos easily.
Newsletter Blocks facilitate subscription sign-ups directly on your site.
Banners & Promotions help highlight offers or important information, with Marketing Analytics providing insights into campaign performance.
Email Marketing
Squarespace offers a range of email marketing templates designed to complement the aesthetic of your Squarespace website.
These templates are customizable, allowing users to align their email campaigns with their brand identity seamlessly.
With Squarespace’s email marketing tools, users can create visually appealing emails, manage mailing lists, and track campaign performance directly within the Squarespace platform, facilitating integrated digital marketing efforts.
Analytics
Squarespace’s analytics feature will help you keep an eye on several other key indicators to see how your site is growing.
You can view your traffic, sales, and visitor geography.
Amongst the key performance metrics to track are orders, revenue, conversion rate, revenue per visit, orders, units sold, and average order volume. You can also track and gain more insight into the location with most of your visitors or customers.
All of these can help you channel your marketing efforts effectively and scale.
Squarespace Extensions
Extensions can help eCommerce businesses record more sales and meet customer needs faster. Squarespace has several extensions that users can leverage, including the finance extension.
Finance extension is a third-party tool to help users reconcile their sales transactions, file all sales taxes, properly manage accounts, and make bookkeeping effective.
Inventory and product extensions are useful extensions you can integrate into your sites. They help users manage inventory, stock levels, SKUs, and seamlessly offer new products and services to clients.
Sales and marketing are both important aspects of eCommerce, and Squarespace has an extension dedicated to promoting products across several selling channels while incentivizing customers and shoppers. There are also shipping and fulfillment extensions to help you fulfill orders on time, ship merchandise, manage returns, and keep your customers in the loop with notifications and branded tracking.
SEO tools
Squarespace’s Built-in SEO tools enable you to customize page titles and descriptions, optimize your URLs, and add alt text to images for better indexing.
Additionally, Squarespace automatically generates a sitemap and uses clean HTML markup to help search engines understand your site’s structure.
With these tools, you can also integrate with Google Search Console to monitor site performance and identify areas for improvement, supporting a comprehensive SEO strategy directly from your Squarespace dashboard.
GoDaddy Features and Tools
Below we highlight and further explain some of the most significant and key GoDaddy features.
Website Building Features
Marketing tools
Web Analytics Features
SEO Wizard
Online Appointments Features
Blog Features
Website Building Features
GoDaddy streamlines site creation with features like click-and-drag to easily adjust layouts and a backup system for peace of mind.
It offers navigational ease through drop-down menus and customizable themes to shape your site’s look.
Promotional banners, contact forms, and calls to action enhance engagement, while the upcoming members-only pages will add exclusivity.
A unified image library simplifies managing visuals across projects, making GoDaddy a comprehensive tool for building and maintaining professional websites.
Marketing tools
GoDaddy’s website builder boosts your online visibility with effective search engine optimization and Google My Business integration. It also engages customers through email marketing and social media connections, including Facebook and Instagram.
The marketing tool allows you to create personalized messages and social media posts directly from the dashboard.
Additionally, the review widget feature enables showcasing customer feedback from Google or Facebook on your site, further building trust and credibility with potential customers.
SEO Wizard
GoDaddy takes care of users’ technical SEO aspects for them. They don’t need to use custom codes or search for plugins. The platform assists users with keyword suggestions, title and meta tags, image alt text, and URL slugs.
SEO Wizard by GoDaddy is the platform’s one-stop shop for optimization. You get to answer some business-related questions, and the SEO tools will make effective technical adjustments based on your answers.
You also get access to personalized tips on the best ways to optimize your SEO strategy. In recent times, they have even added blogging functionality to the SEO Wizard, but it still has some way to go before becoming the perfect tool. One downside of this tool is that it is impossible to edit SEO settings for blogs, and you have no control over page URLs since GoDaddy auto-generated them.
And the Winner Is Squarespace
Squarespace offers all-in-one solutions for website building, marketing, and SEO, making it easy for anyone to create and grow their online presence.
Fast websites improve customer experience by keeping visitors engaged, while slow sites risk higher bounce rates as users seek faster alternatives.
Uptime refers to the time your website is available to visitors in a specific period. It is usually expressed in percentage, and an uptime of 99.999% is considered high. This means that if you’re looking for a web hosting service provider, look for the ones that offer uptime closer to 99.999%.
Squarespace Performance & Speed
While they do a respectable job, Squarespace websites aren’t the fastest websites around.
According to GTmetrix, the fastest time was 0.8 seconds in Vancouver, Canada.
The slowest time was a disappointing 8.8 seconds on the PageSpeed Insights test.
GoDaddy Website Builder Performance & Speed
A Pingdom test of San Francisco, USA showed a page load time of 0.5 seconds.
The PageSpeed insights test showed a page load time of 2 seconds.
And the Winner Is GoDaddy
GoDaddy posted better figures to show it has the edge in speed and performance compared to Squarespace, whose fastest time in Vancouver is closer to GoDaddy’s 3rd fastest time recorded in Sydney.
Squarespace has different customer support options to cater to users’ needs. You get access to email assistance 24/7, live chat, a Squarespace blog, and a comprehensive knowledge base and help center.
The first thing you’ll notice when you contact Squarespace’s customer service is a prompt to use the knowledge base. Squarespace’s knowledge base is full of insightful articles on how to do almost anything on the platform.
However, the Squarespace live chat service is only available to users from Monday to Friday and between 4 a.m; to 8 p.m every week. If the time zones aren’t comfortable for your location, you can contact Squarespace support via email. Remember that you can only contact a Squarespace customer support staff member if you own a Squarespace account.
The live chat option attends to users’ needs 24/7. Most people consider GoDaddy’s live chat disappointing, but its phone support makes up for this, with phone support available all year round and at any hour.
GoDaddy’s help center is arguably one of the best in the web hosting industry. It contains guides to help newcomers get used to the site.
GoDaddy’s help center gives you access to info about domains, account management, websites+marketing, Microsoft 365 from GoDaddy, Managed WordPress, Workspace Email, SSL Certificates, Linux Hosting, etc. There is also a search box where you can put a personalized question if you can’t find what you need help for.
GoDaddy’s tutorial videos are also available for users who are more visual learners. These videos contain hundreds of important lessons and tips to help every GoDaddy user. One great thing about these videos is that they come in high-quality resolutions with easy hacks to your needs.
GoDaddy community is another customer support advantage for GoDaddy. The community encourages users to ask other experienced GoDaddy users about their personal experiences. You can also get discussion topics, an inspirational section, announcements, events, and groups like WooCommerce users and GoDaddy pro.
GoDaddy’s support is generally superb and spot-on, but they need to add email support and a solid ticketing system. Now let’s see what Squarespace’s customer support offers users.
And the Winner Is Squarespace
Squarespace’s help center is clean and clear. It’s easy to navigate and find exactly what you’re looking for, and the absence of phone support doesn’t diminish its chances as GoDaddy lacks email, ticket, and forum support.
Advanced options for listings, categories, and variants.
Simple product listings with essential management features.
Payment Options
Supports multiple payment gateways.
Offers secure payment processing with key gateways.
Shipping Solutions
Integrated shipping tools and calculations.
Basic shipping and tax calculation tools.
Client Invoicing
Offers tools for creating and sending professional invoices.
Does not offer invoicing through the website builder.
Squarespace eCommerce Features
Squarespace’s eCommerce features include:
Ecommerce templates—offer sleek designs tailored for online sales.
Product listings and categories—enable organized displays, enhancing customer browsing experiences.
Scheduling—tools that help you automate payments to set-up reminders.
Client Invoicing—Create professional and branded invoices.
Membership sites—Offer exclusive content or products to subscribers.
Shipping & Fulfillment management—
GoDaddy Website Builder eCommerce Features
The GoDaddy Website Builder offers tools for online store creation and management. It includes features for product listings, secure payment processing, and inventory management.
Additionally, GoDaddy provides options for shipping and tax calculations, promotional tools like coupon codes, and the ability to connect with marketplaces and social media for wider product reach.
These features are designed to support businesses of all sizes in building and expanding their online sales presence.
And the Winner is Squarespace
Squarespace excels in e-commerce with its detailed product management, multiple payment gateways, integrated shipping, and invoicing, making it a superior choice for online stores.
Squarespace is a top web hosting and publishing site that helps thousands of users set up their online site yearly. You should use Squarespace if:
You are more creative and have no problem designing and creating your ideal website.
You require more aesthetic templates to assist your website to have a unique outlook compared to rivals. Squarespace has more than 110 templates that aren’t one-size-fits-all. These templates are crafted for different websites.
You don’t know much coding but need to modify your site further.
Squarespace
Squarespace makes beautiful, professional websites easy. The platform offers limitless storage, bandwidth, and eCommerce on most levels. Squarespace’s mobile app, amazing third-party connectors, and free SSL certificate make it beautiful and smart.
As I’ve mentioned, GoDaddy is the most popular domain registrar worldwide, with millions of active users. However, here’s when you should use it:
Use GoDaddy if you are new to web hosting and are looking to try out some features for a short-term website.
You can also use this provider if you require 24/7 phone support
If you want inexpensive domains, GoDaddy is the brand.
GoDaddy Website Builder
Discover honest assessments and insightful analysis of GoDaddy Website Builder to
make informed purchasing decisions. Explore reputable reviews covering popular brands providing you with
valuable clarity and confidence in your choices.
When comparing Squarespace and GoDaddy’s website builders, Squarespace offers more advanced design options and comprehensive e-commerce features, ideal for users prioritizing aesthetics and functionality.
GoDaddy, on the other hand, focuses on ease of use and quick setup, suitable for those looking for simplicity and efficient site management. Each platform caters to different needs, with Squarespace being favorable for detailed customization and GoDaddy for straightforward, fast website creation.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which is better, GoDaddy or Squarespace?
Your choice will depend partly on your needs. However, GoDaddy is cheaper than Squarespace and is preferred by people working on a budget. Although Squarespace is costly, it offers many design possibilities and amazing templates.
Can I use Squarespace with GoDaddy?
Yes! You can purchase your domain name with GoDaddy and direct it to a Squarespace site. Look at this Squarespace tutorial to know how to pull this off.
Do I own my Squarespace domain?
Yes, you own your Squarespace domain, even though Squarespace helps users register their domain names.
Who are GoDaddy and Squarespace’s main competitors?
GoDaddy and Squarespace have several other competitors in the website building space. Platforms like Weebly and Wix are good alternatives.
Can I build an ecommerce site with GoDaddy?
GoDaddy’s website builder is equipped with essential tools for creating an online store, including product listings, secure payment processing, and inventory management. It simplifies the setup process for users of all levels, offering features like shipping and tax calculations, promotional tools, and social media integration to help expand your store’s reach and streamline operations, making it a practical option for launching and managing an e-commerce website.
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