Squarespace vs Shopify: UK Prices, Fees and Which to Choose

Squarespace and Shopify both let you build an online shop without hiring a developer, and both cost less than £30 a month to start. The difference is what each is built around. Squarespace is a website builder that can sell. Shopify is a shop that comes with a website. This guide compares them on real UK prices, fees, design, selling features and lock in, with a worked example of what each costs at £2,000 a month in sales.

Squarespace vs Shopify: the short answer

Choose Squarespace if you are mainly a service business, creative or small brand selling a modest range of products, and the look of the site matters as much as the shop. Choose Shopify if products are the business: a larger catalogue, stock across several places, selling on social channels as well as your site, or plans to grow the shop seriously. If you want to own the site outright and avoid monthly platform fees, look at neither and read our Shopify vs WooCommerce comparison instead.

What is the main difference between Squarespace and Shopify?

Squarespace started as a website builder, and selling was added to it. Its strength is polished templates for portfolios, service businesses and small brands, with a shop as one part of the site. Shopify started as ecommerce software, and the website exists to sell. Its strength is everything around the order: products, stock, checkout, shipping and a very large library of add-on apps. Both are hosted platforms, which means you rent the software and the hosting for a monthly fee rather than owning the site.

How much do Squarespace and Shopify cost in the UK?

These are the prices on each company’s UK pricing page when we checked them on 19 October 2026. Both offer a discount for paying a year upfront. Check at checkout whether VAT is added, and expect introductory offers to change.

A few details sit outside the table. Squarespace charges a separate fee on digital content and memberships (7% on Basic, 5% on Core, 1% on Plus, none on Advanced), and premium cards cost 3.0% + 25p on every plan. Shopify also lists a Starter plan for selling through social media and messaging, and Shopify Plus for large businesses from £1,800 a month. Squarespace offers a 14 day free trial. Shopify offers three days free, then £1 a month for three months.

What does each cost at £2,000 a month in sales?

Here is a simple worked example: 40 orders a month at £50 each, paid by standard UK cards, on yearly billing, using each platform’s own payments.

Two things stand out. First, the cheapest Squarespace plan is the most expensive way to sell, because its 2% fee on sales soon outweighs the lower subscription. Once you take regular orders, Core is the sensible starting point. Second, at this size Squarespace Core and Shopify Basic cost almost the same. The real difference in running cost comes from what you add on top: many Shopify shops install a few paid apps, and those are usually monthly subscriptions. Paid themes on either platform are an extra one off cost.

For what a professionally built shop costs instead, see our guide to ecommerce website costs.

Which is better for design?

Squarespace, for most small businesses. Its templates are known for clean layouts and strong image handling, and it is hard to make a Squarespace site look messy. That makes it a good fit for photographers, makers, salons, cafés and anyone whose product sells on looks.

Shopify’s design is built around product pages and the path to checkout. Its theme store lists 24 free themes and well over a thousand paid ones. Shopify sites can look excellent, but getting there more often means a paid theme, some apps and some time.

Which is better for selling products?

Shopify, once selling is the main job. It handles larger catalogues, product variants, stock, shipping rules, discount codes and abandoned basket emails as core features, and every plan can connect to thousands of apps for subscriptions, reviews, wholesale pricing, bundles and more. Its Starter plan is aimed at selling through social media and messaging, which shows where its focus lies.

Squarespace lets every plan sell an unlimited number of products and services, and covers the basics well. It suits a shop of tens of products far better than a shop of thousands. If you sell services, memberships or digital content alongside products, Squarespace keeps it all in one tidy site.

Whichever you choose, the checkout details matter more than the platform. When we audited one live online shop this year, we found a checkout with no email field, a free delivery bar promising free delivery on an empty basket, and no option to collect. Our online shop audit findings list every fault and how each one cost sales.

Which is easier to use?

Both are designed for business owners, not developers. Squarespace is simpler if your site is mostly pages with a shop attached, because everything happens in one visual editor. Shopify is simpler if your day is mostly orders, because the admin is built around them, and its mobile app lets you manage products and dispatch from your phone. Day to day, you will spend your time in the part of the platform that matches your business.

Which is better for SEO?

Neither has a meaningful built in advantage. Both let you edit page titles, descriptions and web addresses, both create a sitemap, and both are fast enough when the site is set up sensibly. What decides rankings is the same on either: useful product and category descriptions, clear page titles, good photos with descriptive alt text, and a site that loads quickly on a phone. Our guide to SEO web design explains what matters at the build stage.

Can you move away from Squarespace or Shopify later?

Partly. You can export your products, customers and orders from both, so your data comes with you. The design and the site itself do not, because both are hosted platforms and the template belongs to them. Moving later means rebuilding the site somewhere else and redirecting every old web address so you keep your search rankings. Our website migration checklist covers how to do that safely.

We moved a Canterbury watch dealer off a hosted platform this year onto a site the business owns, keeping its existing web address. It now takes orders through Stripe, PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Pay. You can read how that project went.

Squarespace vs Shopify at a glance

What we recommend

If you want to run the shop yourself, start small and keep monthly costs predictable, both are good choices, and the short answer at the top of this page will point you to the right one. If you want a site you own outright, built around how your customers actually buy, with no platform fee on your sales beyond the standard card charges, that is what we build, on WordPress. Our Squarespace vs WordPress and Wix vs WordPress vs Squarespace guides compare that route in more detail.

How we put this together

Prices, fees and trial terms come from Squarespace’s and Shopify’s own UK pricing pages, checked on 19 October 2026, and both change from time to time. The worked example is our own arithmetic from those figures. The audit findings and the watch dealer project are our own work, and we are an agency that builds on WordPress, so weigh our recommendation with that in mind.

The short version

Squarespace is the better website with a shop attached. Shopify is the better shop with a website attached. At small volumes they cost about the same, as long as you avoid Squarespace’s Basic plan for regular selling. If neither feels right, tell us what you sell and how and we will tell you plainly which route fits.

Sources

• Squarespace pricing (UK): plan prices, online store fees, card rates and trial, checked 19 October 2026.
• Shopify pricing (UK): plan prices, Shopify Payments rates, third party provider fees and trial, checked 19 October 2026.
• Shopify Theme Store: number of free and paid themes.