Shopify vs Squarespace vs Wix (2026): The Honest Comparison

The short answer

If you're building an ecommerce-first business that you expect to scale past six figures, use Shopify. If you're an artist, author, or service professional who sells a handful of products as a side to your main work, Squarespace is often a better fit. Wix sits in the middle and is the best choice when budget is tight and you want the most design flexibility for the price.

The three platforms overlap more than they did three years ago. The differences now are less about features and more about fit.

Pricing (2026)

| Plan | Shopify | Squarespace Commerce | Wix Business | |---|---|---|---| | Entry | £25/mo (Basic) | £30/mo (Business) | £25/mo (Business Basic) | | Mid | £65/mo (Shopify) | £37/mo (Commerce Basic) | £35/mo (Business Unlimited) | | Top | £340/mo (Advanced) | £52/mo (Commerce Advanced) | £45/mo (Business VIP) | | Transaction fee | 2% (0% with Shopify Payments) | 0% on Commerce plans | 0% on Business plans | | Domain | Free first year | Free first year | Free first year |

At the entry level, all three are within £5 of each other. The meaningful cost difference is Shopify's transaction fee if you don't use Shopify Payments, which can be a dealbreaker for stores using alternative processors. Squarespace and Wix charge no transaction fee on paid plans at any tier.

Checkout conversion

This is where Shopify's lead is still material in 2026. Shopify's Shop Pay — its one-tap checkout — has the largest logged-in user base of any ecommerce checkout in the world, which means a meaningful percentage of your customers will see a pre-filled checkout from the first visit. Industry data consistently shows Shop Pay converting 5-15% higher than generic checkouts on the same store.

Squarespace and Wix both have competent checkouts but no equivalent cross-merchant identity layer. On a £100k/year store, that 5-10% conversion delta is real money — which is why Shopify still dominates at scale even when the upfront price is higher.

Verdict: Shopify wins if conversion rate matters to your business, which it does for any store past the hobby stage.

App ecosystem

Shopify's app store has ~8,000 apps covering every conceivable workflow: email marketing, reviews, upsells, subscriptions, shipping, accounting. Squarespace has a few hundred extensions. Wix has something in between but weighted toward design rather than commerce.

If you're going to need anything beyond basic ecommerce — subscriptions, bundles, advanced loyalty, headless storefronts, POS integration — Shopify is the only realistic option. If your store is simple ("10 products, one-time purchases, basic email capture"), the app ecosystem is irrelevant.

Verdict: Shopify wins decisively for anything complex. Tie for simple stores.

Design flexibility

Traditionally Wix's strength, and it remains so. Wix's editor is fully drag-and-drop, pixel-level, no coding. You can build something that looks custom in hours.

Squarespace has a more structured editor — grids, sections, blocks. You lose some flexibility but gain a consistent, polished look that's hard to mess up. Their templates are industry-leading for portfolio-and-shop hybrids.

Shopify themes are template-driven and require some Liquid-template editing to go beyond surface-level customization. Their theme store is excellent, but "fully custom" on Shopify usually means hiring a developer.

Verdict: Wix for raw flexibility. Squarespace for polished-out-of-the-box. Shopify for commerce-first polish.

SEO

All three handle basic on-page SEO adequately — editable meta titles, descriptions, alt text, clean URLs. The differences:

Shopify has the fastest default page speeds in 2026 after their Hydrogen and edge-rendering improvements. Their URLs have a quirky /products/ and /collections/ path structure that's not a problem but can feel dated.
Squarespace ships excellent structured data by default — recipe sites, service sites, and portfolio sites get more schema markup automatically than on either competitor.
Wix was historically weak on SEO but has largely closed the gap. In 2026, it's perfectly adequate for most sites.

Verdict: Shopify has a small edge on speed; Squarespace on structured data; Wix is fine.

Payment processing

All three offer their own payments: Shopify Payments, Squarespace Payments (built on Stripe), and Wix Payments. Rates are broadly similar — around 1.5% + 20p for UK/EU cards. All three also let you connect Stripe or PayPal.

Shopify Payments is the only one that waives the platform's transaction fee. On Squarespace and Wix, the transaction fee is already zero on paid plans regardless of processor.

Verdict: Washing out — all three are competent. Shopify's "use our processor or pay 2% extra" is the most aggressive stance.

Multi-currency and international

Shopify Markets (built into every plan) lets you sell in 150+ currencies, set per-country pricing, translate content, and handle duties collection. This is best-in-class for international sellers.
Squarespace supports multi-currency only on the Advanced Commerce plan and in a more limited way (auto-conversion at checkout, no per-market pricing).
Wix has basic multi-currency on Business plans but lags on translation workflow.

Verdict: Shopify wins decisively if you sell internationally, which most new stores should plan for.

Content and blog

Every serious ecommerce store needs a blog for SEO. How well do they handle editorial?

Squarespace has the best native blog editor of the three. Clean, fast, well-structured. Good enough that many content-first businesses use Squarespace even when they don't need ecommerce.
Shopify's blog is functional but feels bolted-on. Fine for a dozen articles a year; painful for a content-heavy site with 200+ posts.
Wix's blog sits between the two.

Verdict: Squarespace for content-first businesses.

Customer support

Shopify — 24/7 live chat and email support. Response times are typically under an hour for live chat. Their help docs are industry-leading.
Squarespace — 24/7 email support; live chat is more limited. Their help docs are good but smaller in scope.
Wix — 24/7 phone and live chat support across all plans. Surprisingly strong, often overlooked.

Verdict: Effectively a tie. All three have good support in 2026.

When each platform wins

Pick Shopify if:

You're building an ecommerce business as your primary focus
You expect to scale past £10k/month in revenue within 12 months
You sell internationally or plan to
You need advanced commerce features (subscriptions, bundles, B2B, POS)
Conversion rate matters more than upfront cost

Pick Squarespace if:

You're a creator, artist, coach, or service professional who also sells a few products
Your website is ~50% content and ~50% commerce
Design polish matters more than raw flexibility
You want one tool for everything and are willing to accept ecommerce limits

Pick Wix if:

Budget is tight and you want the most design flexibility for the price
You want fine-grained visual control without writing code
You're not sure yet what your business will be (Wix's flexibility is genuine insurance against pivoting)
Your store will stay small and you don't need a huge app ecosystem

The migration question

A common worry: "Will I regret picking X in two years?"

Shopify to anything else: painful. You lose your apps, your theme, your URL structure.
Squarespace to Shopify: manageable. CSV product export, theme rebuild, 1-2 week project.
Wix to Shopify: painful. Wix doesn't expose many exports cleanly; expect manual work.

If you genuinely might outgrow the platform, start on Shopify. The upfront cost is the cheapest form of insurance against a painful re-platform later.

The bottom line

For a commerce-first business that you expect to scale, Shopify is still the correct choice in 2026. The Shop Pay conversion advantage, international features, and app ecosystem compound over time in ways the alternatives can't match.

For a side-project or hybrid content/commerce site, Squarespace is frequently the better choice — less powerful but much more pleasant to live in day-to-day.

Wix remains the best budget choice and the most flexible canvas if you want total design control.

All three offer free trials. The 30 minutes it takes to click through each one's onboarding will tell you more than any comparison article — including this one.

StealsAndFinds earns a commission if you sign up through our links. We only cover platforms we've used for real projects. This comparison was written by a team member who has run stores on all three over the past 8 years.