• pay monthly or annually with a variety of plans that work for most businesses • Showit plans are more expensive than Squarespace's plans & you should be prepared to add extra costs for things like a shop (Shopify Lite) if you want it, or a good Instagram Feed plugin, etc.

Both have access to free templates, but Squarespace's templates are ALL free, whereas Showit only has a limited amount of free templates, the rest are paid (but still affordably priced).

Squarespace: while there are NO paid templates within the Squarespace platform itself, there are hundreds of designers who offer paid templates on their own website & they're easy to find in a Google search. Some are plug-and-play, others are essentially courses that teach you how to design it from scratch, and still others have a white-glove install if you don't want to DIY. Showit: There are both free & paid options in their own store, plus other designers sell Showit templates on their own websites. I've seen these range from $100 to about $1,000.

Web designers & developers can use either platform to design a completely custom website. With Squarespace you do have access to the Developer Mode; I don't believe Showit has this option.

Squarespace is more limited in the design capability and most websites use a little custom CSS on the platform. Showit sites rarely need any code at all, not including embed blocks for things like Instagram feeds, or Dubsado forms, etc.

Showit is definitely more detail-oriented & requires more intermediate-level skill than Squarespace users would need.

Adding elements is easy on both platforms. On Showit you do have to build them from scratch (such as buttons) which takes a little longer. On Squarespace you add them in one place & style them in another which can be slightly confusing for newbies.

Showit support is slower to respond than Squarespace & their support system doesn't tell you where you are in the waitlist, but their staff is excellent. Squarespace support is usually fast & excellent, and you always know where you are in the queue.

You can't buy domains through Showit's website, but they can connect your website to your domain for you, totally free!

You can't add G-Suite's branded email from within your Showit account, but you can through your Squarespace account.

SQUARESPACE: Analytics, Shop & E-Commerce, Blog, Events Calendar, Mobile responsive layouts / Mobile Responsive, Pop-Ups & Announcement Bars, Scheduling, Email Marketing (light capability), Form building SHOWIT: Blog, Mobile Responsive layouts, Pop-Ups, Announcement Bars, (light) Form building

Showit definitely wins here; their builder is much like using an Adobe app where you can style things individually for either/both Desktop or Mobile as you go. Squarespace is much more limited, design-wise, without using any code or out-of-the-box creativity.

Showit gives you a blank slate here, you can do whatever you want on it & add whatever you want. Squarespace only allows minimal styling options to what's already there.

Showit again gives you a blank slate here, so you can do whatever you like, however you like, including creating/adding your own pre-footers. Squarespace has a much more defined layout, but if you're very familiar with the platform you do have a fair amount of design options; however with 7.0 the pre-footer capability depends on which template you chose.

Many super custom Squarespace sites use a bunch of CSS which can slow down the loading speed of your website. Showit doesn't require any code for many of those same types of customizations, so their sites may load faster & you have more design freedom.

Squarespace handles Mobile Responsiveness automatically, so you end up having to design the desktop site with the mobile site response in mind. Showit allows you to control all the elements you add to your site, for both versions of the site AND whether or not those elements show up in both places (you can toggle on/off whether it shows up on mobile and/or desktop), per element, and control the styling of it, even rearranging all of the elements for each view.

Showit templates have access to all features, but some templates have stuff set up for you, such as galleries or sliders, etc. making it easier to get started right out of the gate. Squarespace templates vary wildly in 7.0 and in 7.1 many of 7.0's features are unavailable, but all the 7.1 templates have access to the same set of features.

Rated both the same, but for different reasons. Squarespace shops are easy to setup, but inefficient to use for larger shops & lack some features that are built into other e-commerce platforms. For product-based businesses, Squarespace is NOT the best option. Showit doesn't have a built-in e-commerce feature, but it works well with Shopify, which has tons of great e-commerce features. Shopify Lite (their cheapest plan) gives you a copy-and-paste line of code to embed a buy button on any page of your site & offers the more efficient shop setup & inventory control. For product-based businesses, Shopify is the BETTER solution (vs Squarespace's e-commerce). Because Shopify Lite can integrate via an embedded buy button though, you can use it with either platform.

Squarespace's blogging system is very easy to use & learn. You can design each blog the way you like, and the content is easily displayed in Summary Blocks that automatically & easily pull posts from it. Having a recent posts carousel in all or any category is easy to set up. Showit's blogging system is through Wordpress, which they can hookup for you, for free, making setup super easy. However, you have to design a single template for the "blog home page" and another for the "blog single post page" making the design for each blog post MUCH MORE RIGID and giving you less creativity. This design part is MUCH MORE TRICKY, including the creation of Recent Post carousels, etc.

Since Squarespace lacks an traditional Media Gallery, Showit wins this round. Squarespace makes Galleries easy to add to any website, but they all have limited styling, compared to Showit's options. Showit gives you free reign on this, so if you want to have a slider anywhere, with different button/title/text on each slide (& formatted the way you want), then Showit's your best bet here.

In my opinion, neither platform wins here. Squarespace does have an Events Calendar function built in, but even with all the cool features it does have (like event-share buttons & a map for the event location), the date features aren't very robust. For example, if you have the same event, at the same time, every Friday through Sunday, you'd have to create 1 event listing for each day over that weekend (x3), for every weekend you host it, –because Squarespace doesn't have the capability yet for 1 event to cover a multi-day space for only a specific time frame. You could label the event as taking place Friday through Sunday, but you'd have to choose 1 start & 1 end date, which only covers the event time for 1 of the 3 days. (It'd be listed as Fri 12p - Sun 3p, instead of Fri 12-3p, Sat 12-3p, Sun 12-3p) There are lots of great plugins for calendars, like Elfsight, which use code block or embed block and they're super simple to use. Of course you can also just design your own, but it may look a little clunky, depending on your design capabilities.

Both platforms work well with schedulers like Acuity, Calendly, or Dubsado. You can embed the scheduler directly onto the page, or link to the full page scheduler if your scheduling app has one. Acuity is deeply integrated with Squarespace, even has it's own Acuity Block, built right into the editor, so it is truly very simple to integrate with your site –which means Squarespace wins this round, by a hair.

Email marketing may be built into Squarespace's platform, but their Email Campaigns only has minimal functionality. Showit doesn't have built-in email marketing capabilities at all, BUT that means you're free to add your own forms from your email app, and because they use embed codes, that means it can be any platform: ConvertKit, MailChimp, MailerLite, FloDesk, ActiveCampaign, etc. Because Squarespace has it built it, it can be confusing to new users which to use & how to install it, so Showit wins this round because it just seems less complex, even though neither actually is complicated.

Squarespace has lots of different types of fields you can add, from check boxes (multiple answer selection), radio selections (one option only), short or long answer, text or number only answers, email, phone, date pickers, and more. One thing it does lack is an uploader, but there's a way to link Dropbox to your forms if you must have files submitted with them. Showit also has form capabilities, but the features are much more limited to input fields for things like: name, phone, email, message, how did you find me, website url, etc. –it's all basically a type freely area. No checkboxes or radio selections, because you can't dictate what shows up in that box after they've clicked it. You could possibly do a dropdown menu, but it'd be complicated to set up. So sticking to the basic text field type works best for these forms.

Squarespace gives you access to their fonts, Google fonts & Adobe fonts. Showit gives you access to upload your own custom fonts, and any Google font, but no Adobe fonts (yet; I've asked!).

Squarespace applies default hover effects to all buttons, sitewide. While you may not have much control over what that effect is (without some custom code), it's built-in & works really well & really smoothly. Showit requires you to make your own buttons, and add your own effects. There are limited choices, and you have to choose which (button rectangle or button text) gets the hover effect. You can control the color & time it takes for it to change over, but that's about it.