I chose to look for Squarespace alternatives that could host my photography blog and portfolio because the range of features provided by Squarespace made me feel like I couldn't fully express my creative vision. I tried to find a platform that would allow me to customize the interface and layout more freely.
Moreover, the price of $25 a month also felt too high considering the number of available features, particularly when compared to most alternatives to Squarespace covered below. This platform also doesn’t have a free version, as the only way to test it is to use the 14-day free trial option.
When picking the alternatives, I accounted for the following factors:
★★★★★ (5/5)
Price: Free with Creative Cloud subscription or $9.99/mo
Ideal for: Small to medium photography portfolios
Adobe Portfolio is the best alternative to Squarespace for creatives who want to share their photos, illustrations, graphic designs, or paintings with the world. It’s a portfolio-focused solution that ensures your creations are presented in a refined, stylish fashion. Sadly, Adobe Portfolio lacks the eCommerce and blogging features found in Squarespace.
This platform lets me design engaging galleries with visually appealing interactive elements. Adobe Portfolio provides customizable backgrounds, color schemes, fonts, layouts, and individual elements, including titles, links, social media icons, and webpage covers.
This solution has a live preview mode, akin to Squarespace, enabling you to instantly examine all the changes you make when creating your website. If you can be satisfied with a specialized photography portfolio that doesn’t have any advanced extra features, then you can’t go wrong with Adobe Portfolio.
★★★★☆ (4.5/5)
Price: Free (with ads) or from $17/month
Ideal for: Small to big sites
I was impressed by the diverse range of customization options provided by Wix, as this platform lets me personalize the tiniest details of my portfolio, including its layout, color scheme, and typography. Even though this free web design software has a rich feature set, it’s less intuitive to use than Squarespace.
I like Wix's huge App Market, which offers hundreds of third-party extensions sorted into different categories. It helped me expand the provided feature set with applications that cater to my specific requirements.
Since I create visual content for a living, I greatly appreciate Wix's enormous selection of pro-level photos, icons, illustrations, and vector graphics. The provided Shutterstock integration also makes it easy to get royalty-free stock assets without leaving Wix's workspace.
★★★★☆ (4/5)
Price: Free for 14 days, then from $19/month
Ideal for: Small to medium agency projects
Duda is a more feature-rich Squarespace alternative that is primarily aimed at web development companies interested in white-labeling, collaborative, and coding (JavaScript, CSS, and HTML) functionality. It's the direct opposite of Squarespace, which is known for being one of the most simplistic platforms on the market.
Both services are equipped with intuitive drag-and-drop editors, wide selections of premade templates, and integrated blogging functionality while offering website hosting services for photographers and other creatives.
Additionally, Duda comes with automated photo resizing and an integrated image editor, which should greatly appeal to photographers. I also liked the provided capability to add a sidebar and customize my site’s layout, while establishing a cohesive look for all my blog posts without installing any third-party extensions.
Another useful addition to Duda is its client management functionality, which is sorely missing in Squarespace.
★★★★☆ (4/5)
Price: 3-day free trial then from $24/month
Ideal for: Medium to big eCommerce websites
Shopify is the best eCommerce website builder, as it provides cutting-edge sales functionality, including multi-channel sales, personalized checkouts, and multi-currency support. Even though Squarespace can also be used as an eCommerce platform, it’s a lot more limited than Shopify in this regard.
Both options come with adjustable templates, drag-and-drop controls, and standard eCommerce tools, but the latter also offers in-depth analytics and performance reports. Shopify Payments have been especially handy for me to use, enabling my clients to pay in their respective currencies without being subjected to additional transaction charges.
Meanwhile, the in-depth analytical dashboard allowed me to monitor sales and client behavior to further improve my marketing strategy. Lastly, I'm a big fan of the expansive store that features more than 8000 applications to extend the available functionality, which is far superior to what Squarespace can offer.
★★★★☆ (4/5)
Price: 7-days free trial or from $10.99/month
Ideal for: Small to medium business websites
I think GoDaddy is a fantastic cheaper Squarespace alternative that offers more intuitive controls and a streamlined website design process. For instance, I easily managed to set up and launch my photography blog without having to watch any long tutorials.
I picked a set of premade options that matched my preferences, typed in the name for my website, and clicked on Finish. Squarespace provides more customization options and drag-and-drop controls but is noticeably more difficult to use.
Sadly, most GoDaddy's themes feel dated compared to Squarespace's stylish, modern templates. On the plus side, GoDaddy's has a handy InSight feature that provides useful insights and statistics that can do wonders for improving the performance of your website and stimulating its growth.
Both website builders for photographers provide reliable security features to protect your site and its content. Additionally, GoDaddy is a lot cheaper to use as long as you don’t spend too much on the available add-ons.
★★★★☆ (4/5)
Price: Free plan (without domain, 1 GB of storage) or from $4\month
Ideal for: Medium to big content-heavy websites
I think WordPress is a great free alternative to Squarespace if you’re looking for a more versatile option. It allows me to take advantage of themes, plugins, and widgets to personalize my WordPress blog as I see fit. The downside here is that WordPress has a steeper learning curve.
Other than providing a detailed site builder, WordPress lets you leverage the WooCommerce plugin to turn your site into an eCommerce platform, which I use for selling my prints and photography services. You can also take advantage of other extensions, including Yoast SEO, MonsterInsights, and WP Rocket.
I appreciate WordPress photography themes for their eye-catching, pro-quality layout and personalized galleries. Possible options include full-screen slideshows, and engaging photo hover effects, which made my portfolio look a lot more impressive.
★★★★☆ (4/5)
Price: Free (500MB storage) or from $10/month
Ideal for: Small to medium sites of any industry
Weebly is a great cheaper alternative to Squarespace if you value user-friendliness and convenient eCommerce features above everything else. It allows you to upload as many products as you want, provides protected checkout, and adjustable shipping settings. That said, if you’re more interested in robust design functionality and digital marketing tools, then you should probably stick to Squarespace.
This platform lets you pick between more than 300 third-party app integrations, helping you add all the features you need to create a portfolio. Its in-depth blog management functionality with multimedia and third-party integrations is especially handy for blogging.
Weebly comes with about 50 templates, which offer great performance but aren't as modern-looking or mobile-optimized as the ones you'll find on Squarespace. The range of customization parameters is also limited to standard elements like fonts and colors.
★★★★☆ (4/5)
Price: Free (2 pages) or from $14/month
Ideal for: Small to big websites with intricate designs
Webflow impressed me with its robust design functionality and in-depth customization parameters. I leveraged the provided visual UI to make a personalized photography blog and portfolio. I also integrated CMS and eCommerce functionality into my site to streamline content management and online sales.
This platform offers front-end customization support that you can leverage with zero coding knowledge, while professional developers can utilize HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to optimize the back end.
Squarespace also provides CMS and eCommerce tools, but they aren’t as robust. Meanwhile, Webflow allows you to choose from more than 2000 templates, even though most of them are paid. Squarespace only has 168 themes, but you don’t have to pay for any of them.
★★★★☆ (4/5)
Price: 30-day free trial or from $11.99/month
Ideal for: Small or personal sites
I think Hostinger is one of the most advanced alternatives to Squarespace, as it utilizes AI-based features to streamline the site design process.
For instance, the AI Heatmap feature allows you to monitor visitor behavior and actions, which helped me analyze their interactions. Meanwhile, the AI website editor let me customize the site by describing my taste and field.
It's about as intuitive and convenient to use as Squarespace but is available for a significantly lower price. Hostinger lacks the template diversity provided by Squarespace, but the options that are there look fantastic, whether you're trying to create a portfolio or eCommerce store.
★★★★☆ (4.5/5)
Price: Flexible pricing models
Ideal for: E-commerce businesses
I found Venturz particularly helpful in managing the different aspects of my business in one place. It stands tall for Squarespace, much more than just a website builder, with things like user authentication, custom databases, and AI-powered content creation. These features made launching and managing a professional site quite easier for me.
Yet another high point was the inbuilt CRM. While normally Squarespace is all about design and ecommerce, Venturz seems to integrate customer relationship management into the very core. I am allowed to track leads, interactions, data of customers without actually having to juggle different tools for each.
★★★★☆ (4/5)
Price: Free trial or from $25/month
Ideal for: Any-sized marketing-oriented websites
HubSpot CMS Hub provides intuitive, drag-and-drop design functionality as well as integrated SEO tools, which makes it similar to Squarespace. However, unlike its competitor, HubSpot is significantly more flexible and customizable.
It offers server-free features, versatile themes, command line support, and other tools that I used to fine-tune my photography blog. Its optimization features and generated reports allowed me to tailor the content I post according to what my visitors usually engage with.
This portfolio website builder has impressed me with its security functionality, which comes with a worldwide CDN, Web Application Firewall, and SSL encryption. The main downside of HubSpot CMS Hub is its steep learning curve, which is a lot more challenging than the website-building process offered by Squarespace.
★★★★☆ (4/5)
Price: Free (5 pages) or from $8/month
Ideal for: Simple single-page sites
Strikingly is a pleasantly intuitive alternative to Squarespace that is perfect for quickly creating single-page websites. It took me less than twenty minutes to build a portfolio page. While Squarespace is similarly convenient, it still required more time for me to master its more intricate tools and customization options. Another benefit of Strikingly is its free website hosting.
This platform offers rather basic templates with limited customization freedom, but the selection of available themes is often expanded with new, relevant offerings. You can also use Strikingly to start a blog, as it lets you make blog posts with text, photos, videos, and attached files. Sadly, here you won’t find such important features as blog templates, comment management, RSS feeds, and SEO tools.
