Shopify vs Squarespace: Real Costs, Fees and Fit

Shopify wins when products are the business. Squarespace wins when the website is the business and the shop is a side door. Almost every other difference follows from that, including the fees, the design work and how hard it is to leave later.

We build Shopify stores and WordPress sites, and we do not sell Squarespace builds, so this comparison has no commission riding on it. Below are both platforms’ current US prices, the fee math at a real sales level, what the first year costs once the build is included, and a table that matches each type of business to a platform.

One question settles most of it: how much do you sell?

Count the orders you expect in a normal month. Under roughly twenty, selling is a feature and the website is the product, which is Squarespace territory. Past fifty, order handling, stock, shipping rules and returns become daily work, and that is what Shopify is designed around.

The grey band in between is where owners get stuck, and where the fee structure decides it rather than the feature list. That is the part most comparisons skip, so it gets its own section below.

Current US prices for both platforms

Both companies advertise the yearly price and bill the higher monthly rate if you want to stay flexible. The gap is worth knowing before you commit to twelve months: Squarespace Core costs $10 a month more on monthly billing, and Shopify Basic costs $10 a month more.

US published prices	Squarespace	Shopify
Entry plan, billed yearly	Basic $19 a month	Basic $29 a month
Entry plan, billed monthly	Basic $25 a month	Basic $39 a month
Next plans, billed yearly	Core $29, Plus $49, Advanced $99	Grow $79, Advanced $299
Next plans, billed monthly	Core $39, Plus $65, Advanced $139	Grow $105, Advanced $399
Largest published plan	Advanced $99 a month yearly	Plus from $2,300 a month
Platform fee on store orders	2% on Basic, none from Core up	None with Shopify Payments; 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced with another provider
Online card rate, entry plan	From 2.9% + $0.30	2.9% + 30¢
Lower card rates higher up	2.5% + $0.30 on Advanced	2.7% on Grow, 2.5% on Advanced, 2.25% on Plus
In-person card rate	Not listed on the pricing page	2.6% + 10¢ on Basic, down to 2.3% on Plus
Team access on the entry plan	2 contributors	Owner only; 5 staff accounts on Grow
Free trial	14 days	3 days, then $1 a month for 3 months

Sources: the US Squarespace pricing page as captured on November 11, 2026 and the US Shopify pricing page as captured on November 13, 2026, both read on November 14, 2026 through the Internet Archive so the figures are the US ones rather than a local currency. Prices are before tax and change often.

Two details in that table cost people money. Squarespace sells a $19 plan that can take orders, which makes it look like the cheapest way to open a shop. And Shopify’s entry plan has no staff accounts at all, so a second person helping with orders means the $79 Grow plan.

The 2% that decides which Squarespace plan you need

Squarespace Basic adds a 2% fee to every online store order, charged on top of the card rate. Core and the plans above it drop that fee. Since Core costs $10 a month more on yearly billing, the sum is short: $10 divided by 2% is $500. Sell more than $500 a month through the store and Core is the cheaper plan, not the dearer one.

Put real numbers against it. Take a small brand doing $4,000 a month in online sales at an average order of $50, which is 80 orders.

$4,000 a month in online orders	Plan	Platform fee	Card fees	Monthly total
Squarespace Basic	$19	$80	$140	$239
Squarespace Core	$29	None	$140	$169
Shopify Basic, Shopify Payments	$29	None	$140	$169
Shopify Basic, outside payment provider	$29	$80	Your provider’s rate	$109 plus your provider’s rate

Card fees here are 2.9% of $4,000 plus 30¢ on each of the 80 orders. At this size Squarespace Core and Shopify Basic cost exactly the same to run, which is the honest headline: at the entry level this is not a price decision. It becomes one much higher up, where Shopify’s card rate falls on each plan and Squarespace’s does not until Advanced at $99 a month. We worked that upgrade point through in our Shopify and Wix comparison, and the same arithmetic applies here.

One more line to read before you pick a payment provider: Shopify charges 2% on Basic for orders taken through anything other than Shopify Payments. If you already have a merchant account you like, that fee belongs in your comparison.

What Squarespace does better

Squarespace is a design tool first. The templates are genuinely good, the editor keeps a non-designer inside the lines, and a studio, clinic, restaurant or consultancy can publish a site that looks considered without hiring anyone. For a business where the website’s job is to explain and persuade, that matters more than any commerce feature.

It is also fine at light selling. A photographer selling prints, a bakery taking pre-orders or a trainer selling a downloadable plan does not need a shop platform. Core includes unlimited contributors, automated taxes and shipping, and a free year of Google Workspace email, and no part of that list is a compromise at twenty orders a month.

If you are weighing Squarespace against a self-hosted site rather than a shop platform, the trade-offs are different again, and we set them out in Squarespace vs WordPress.

What Shopify does better

Everything that happens after someone clicks buy. Stock counts that hold up across channels, shipping rules by weight and region, discount logic, abandoned-cart recovery, returns, and an app store deep enough that most requests have an answer you can install rather than build.

The card rates fall as you grow, in-person selling uses the same stock, and the published ladder runs all the way to Plus at $2,300 a month without changing platform. Shopify also now sells a $0 a month Agentic plan that lists your products in AI shopping channels and charges only when something sells, which is new ground that no other builder matches yet.

From our projects: the question we ask before quoting a store is what share of next year’s revenue runs through the checkout. Under a quarter, the money is better spent on the pages that win the enquiry. Over half, every hour spent on order handling is worth more than an hour spent on the homepage, and that is the point where a dedicated commerce platform repays itself.

The first year, with the build included

Plan prices are the small number. What a finished store costs to put together is the big one, and neither pricing page mentions it.

First year	Squarespace Core	Shopify Basic
Platform, billed yearly	$348	$348
Who builds it	You, or a freelance designer	You, or a developer
A finished store from us	We do not build Squarespace sites	Small Store $499, up to 30 products, 7–10 days
Bigger catalog	—	Growing Store $899, up to 150 products
Paid apps and plugins	Add-ons billed by Squarespace or the vendor	Billed by the app, often $10–$50 a month each
First-year total, entry route	$348 plus your own time	$847 with the store built for you

Our published prices are the same for everyone and the Shopify subscription is paid by you directly, so the account and the contract stay in your name. If the catalog is large or you need several currencies, the Custom Store plan starts at $1,790. For a store you own outright with no platform fee at all, WooCommerce starts at $549, and our guide to e-commerce website costs compares the three routes over a longer period.

Leaving later is where the two platforms differ most

Both are closed platforms, so neither site can simply be moved to a new host. What you can take out is not the same, though, and the difference is bigger than anything on the pricing pages.

Shopify exports products, customers and orders as CSV files, which import cleanly into other platforms. Squarespace exports a single WordPress-format XML file, and its own export guide lists what does not come with it: store pages, product blocks, album and portfolio pages, more than one blog page, video and audio blocks, drafts, style settings and custom CSS. Products come out separately as a CSV from the Commerce inventory panel.

In practice that means a Squarespace site is rebuilt rather than moved, which is worth knowing on the day you choose it rather than three years later. We set out the full list of what survives that move, and what does not, in our guide to migrating from Squarespace to WordPress. Our platform migration service starts at $349 for up to 30 pages, including a 301 redirect from every old address so the rankings follow the content.

A decision table by type of business

If this is you	Start with	Why
Studio, clinic or consultancy, no products	Squarespace Basic	Nothing passes through a checkout, so the store fee never applies
Selling under $500 a month	Squarespace Basic	The 2% costs less than the upgrade to Core
Selling $500 to about $5,000 a month	Squarespace Core or Shopify Basic	Identical running cost; pick on whether design or order handling is the daily job
A product brand growing past 50 orders a month	Shopify Basic	Stock, shipping and returns stop being manual work
Two or more people working on orders	Shopify Grow	Basic has no staff accounts
Wholesale, several currencies or a large catalog	Shopify Advanced, or WooCommerce	Lower card rates and real catalog tools, or full ownership with no platform fee
You want to own the software outright	WordPress with WooCommerce	No platform fee, no plan ladder, and the site can move hosts

Catalog depth is usually what pushes a growing brand off a builder. The multi-brand store we built for an industrial tool company needed structured product data across several brands, which is the kind of requirement a template shop cannot absorb.

What neither platform decides for you

Search visibility is not a platform choice. Both produce clean, indexable pages, both let you edit titles and descriptions, and in both cases the work that moves rankings is the same: pages that answer a real search, product descriptions nobody else has, and a site people link to. Our Shopify SEO checklist covers the parts the platform handles and the parts it leaves to you.

Nor does the platform decide whether the store sells. Photography, delivery promises, returns policy and the speed of your replies do more for conversion than any plan upgrade on either side.

Still weighing the two?

Send us the product count, the orders you expect in a normal month and whether anyone else needs access. We will tell you which platform we would put you on, including when the answer is to stay where you are. Attors Technologies builds and maintains online stores for businesses in the US, UK and Europe, with every price published and a fixed written quote before any work starts.

Get a fixed quote for your store, or compare the plans on our pricing page first.