Squarespace vs WordPress

Over the last few years, companies are shifting from traditional marketing to digital media marketing as it is more effective in gaining new customers. Companies are establishing their digital presence on different platforms including social media, blogging sites etc. Each and every company has created their own websites to provide information to potential customers, making websites or web applications is a complex and time-consuming task which requires coding skills. Hence to solve this problem, many organizations have provided website building and content management platforms which make it easy to create web applications. Two such platforms are WordPress and Squarespace which provides different services to build websites and web applications for personal or commercial use.

Squarespace can be understood as a website building company founded by Anthony Casalena in 2004. It is an American company which provides its software as a service. It has a large number of pre-designed templates which can be used for making interactive websites. It also provides hosting services along with domain names and other features. It is used due to its drag and drop capabilities.

Advantages of Squarespace

• It comes with drag and drop features which makes it very easy to use.
• The loading time of this platform is very low so it is a quick platform.
• It provides immediate customer support.
• It has good back end managing features which provide good control of functionalities.

Disadvantages of Squarespace

• It does not have any free plan like some other platforms such as Wix or Drupal.
• It is not an open-source platform.
• It does not have advanced marketing and SEO tools.

WordPress can be understood as a content management system which was built by Matt Mullenweg in 2003. It is built using the PHP programming language. The development credit for this platform goes to WordPress Foundation. It is a free and open-source platform which was initially released in May 2003 and a stable version was released in 2022. It has a special feature of customizable plugins for building web applications. It uses HTML, CSS and JavaScript for building interactive web applications. It uses MySQL as its database for storing data.

Advantages of WordPress

• It provides a simple interface which is very easy to use.
• No coding knowledge is required to build a website.
• It supports a large number of plugins to provide advanced functionalities.
• It is highly flexible and provides a vast range of features for designing interactive web applications.
• A large number of free themes are available to use.

Disadvantages of WordPress

• It has high maintenance.
• It is difficult to understand SEO and performance tracking functionalities.

Below is a table of differentiation between WordPress and Squarespace:

	Squarespace	WordPress
1.	It is a website building company which provides software as a service.	It is a content management platform for building websites and web applications.
2.	It was founded by Anthony Casalena in New York.	It was founded by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little.
3.	Its subscription plan starts at just $16 per month.	Building applications is free of cost only hosting services are paid.
4.	It has dedicated support and backup options for its customers	It does not provide any support for its customers.
5.	It is not an open-source platform.	It is an open-source platform.
6.	Customization of themes is easier and straight forward	Customization of themes is complicated.
7.	SEO tools are simple but easy to use.	It comes with better SEO tools but these are tough to understand.
8.	It is less popular as compared to WordPress.	It is more popular and has a large customer base.
9.	No prior technical knowledge is needed to use this platform.	The user need to know the coding to use WordPress.
10.	It has wide range of in-built features covering all the areas. Also, new features are regularly updated.	It has a small range of in-built features and and rely on third party plugins for extra functionality.
11.	It is a good choice for blogging as it has many templates and tools but still lacks when compared with WordPress.	It is best for blogging as it has wide range of plugins and built-in features available.
12.	The maintenance of the platform is taken care by the platform itself.	It requires frequent maintenance and the user is responsible for maintaining all the aspects of the website.
13.	All the security is managed for the user.	The user is responsible for managing the security of the website.