Wix vs Squarespace vs WordPress: A Straight Three-Way Comparison.

This is for someone choosing between the three most common "just build me a website" options — Wix, Squarespace, and WordPress — usually with no strong technical background and no interest in becoming one. All three can produce a perfectly good small business site. Where they actually differ is price transparency, template quality, and what happens to your work if you ever want out.

The short answer

Wix is the most transparent on price and the most flexible drag-and-drop editor of the two builders. Squarespace has, by reputation and by what we can verify about its templates, the strongest out-of-the-box design quality — but it does not publish its prices openly, so we can't put a number next to it here. WordPress is free software with by far the deepest plugin ecosystem, at the cost of you or someone you hire handling hosting and upkeep.

Side by side

Verified against each vendor's own pages, read 31 August 2026, except where marked unverifiable.

WordPress.com, the hosted version, sits between these — Personal $9/mo, Premium $18/mo, Business $40/mo, Commerce $70/mo billed monthly (wordpress.com/pricing, read 31 August 2026) — with its own plugin restrictions by tier. The fuller Wix vs WordPress breakdown, including that hosted tier, is in our Wix vs WordPress comparison.

What you pay, and what you can't verify

Wix is upfront about its numbers: $17 to $159 a month, and the plans page is explicit that these are "yearly subscriptions, paid in full." You know the bill before you sign up.

Squarespace is the odd one out here, and it's worth saying plainly rather than guessing: its pricing page puts the actual numbers behind a consent screen, so we're not quoting a figure we can't independently verify at a stable URL. If price is a deciding factor for you, go look at squarespace.com/pricing yourself before committing.

WordPress's software is free, but a real build needs hosting plus usually a page builder — Elementor, as one example, runs $49 to $399 a year and its pricing page states directly that it "does not include hosting." Add that to whatever hosting costs before comparing to the other two.

Where each one genuinely wins on design

Squarespace's templates are a real strength, not a marketing line. They're a common choice specifically among photographers and creative portfolios because the out-of-the-box look is more polished than most competitors' default templates, with less fiddling required to get there.

Wix's editor gives you more granular control if you want a layout that departs from a template, at the cost of more decisions to make yourself.

WordPress has no single design answer, because "WordPress" isn't a design — it's a foundation. A site built on a strong theme with a competent builder can look as good as anything on this list. A site assembled from mismatched free plugins usually looks like one.

What you own if you ever leave

This is where the three diverge most.

Wix doesn't publish a code-export path on its plans page. Squarespace exports your content as an .xml file meant for a WordPress import, but the design itself runs on Squarespace's own JavaScript and CSS and doesn't come with it — so what actually leaves is your words and images, not your built pages. WordPress, self-hosted, is the clean case: the code and database are yours from day one, on hosting you chose, so leaving is a migration rather than a rebuild from zero.

Which one should you pick

• Pick Wix if you want price transparency and flexible layout control, and you're comfortable paying monthly with no code to take with you later.
• Pick Squarespace if your priority is a polished, template-driven look with minimal design decisions — especially for a portfolio, photography, or creative site — and you're fine not knowing the price until you're further into checkout.
• Pick WordPress (self-hosted) if you want full code ownership and the widest plugin selection, and you have someone to handle hosting and maintenance, either yourself or through a developer.

The third option: bring what you have and own the code

There's a fourth path that isn't really a fourth builder: describing the site you want in plain language to an AI agent that writes and hosts the real code for you. Amelia's Agent is built by Houston IT Developers, the company writing this. It's free to start with no card required, and building plans start at $10 a month billed annually ($12 billed monthly) — a price you can actually see, unlike Squarespace's. You get a normal git repository from your first turn, so the code is genuinely yours, the way self-hosted WordPress code is yours, without you having to assemble the hosting and plugins by hand.

If you already have a site on any of these three, its bring-your-site tool reads the public pages and rebuilds them page for page with your own words and images as real files — see the guides for Wix, Squarespace, and WordPress. Worth conceding plainly: there's no drag-and-drop canvas and no template gallery, which is exactly what makes Squarespace appealing for a portfolio in the first place — you describe changes in chat and read back what came out. See the Wix alternative and Squarespace alternative pages for the fuller case.

Related reading: Wix vs WordPress · Squarespace vs Webflow · Website redesign & migration