Squarespace is one of the most popular site builders today. Apart from offering tools for building websites, it includes e-commerce features as well. Since it’s not exclusively an e-commerce platform, it would hardly stack up against the likes of Shopify. Still, if your requirements are not very advanced, you can build a decent online store on this platform.
Yola is a site builder that’s probably not that well-known but has actually been active continuously since 2007. Much like Squarespace, it also provides tools for building an online store. Yola’s recent revamp has brought it more in line with contemporary web development and design practices, making it a more attractive choice.
Both Squarespace and Yola offer free hosting and security in addition to the many convenient tools for building and advancing your online presence. So, if you’re looking for a site builder with e-commerce functionality, you might want to consider these two as well.
In this Squarespace vs. Yola comparison, we’ll explore both web platforms, learn about their differences, and see which performs well in different contexts. Let’s get to it.
| At a glance: | ||
| Squarespace | Yola | |
| Pricing |
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| Editors |
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| Integrations |
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Table of Contents
Pricing Plans
Squarespace
The Squarespace pricing system consists of four regular pricing plans and a custom enterprise-level plan. In addition to this, there’s a 14-day free trial that lets you gain some hands-on experience and familiarize yourself with the platform.
Personal Plan
The Personal plan is the cheapest at only $23/month. It includes the following features:
- Unlimited bandwidth and storage
- Around-the-clock email support as well as live chat support, available Monday–Friday from 4 a.m. to 8 p.m. EST
- Ability to give two contributors access to your site
- Access to the official Squarespace third-party extensions
- SEO tools
Business Plan
The Business plan comes next at $33/month. Some of the added perks of this plan are:
- Unlimited contributors
- Even more integration options
- Professional Google email
- CSS and JS customization
- Advanced analytics
- E-commerce functionality (unlimited products, shipping tools, inventory management, gift cards, ability to accept donations, etc.)
One downside to the added e-commerce tools is the 3% transaction fee for any sale you make.
Basic Commerce Plan
The Basic Commerce plan costs $35/month. With this plan, Squarespace allows you to focus on your e-commerce business thanks to features like:
- The Square Point-of-Sale system (available only for US merchants)
- Customer accounts
- Ability to sell on Instagram
- More advanced analytics
Unlike the Business plan, you don’t pay transaction fees with the Basic Commerce plan.
Advanced Commerce Plan
The Advanced Commerce plan costs $65/month. These are some of the unique features of this plan:
- Abandoned cart recovery
- Ability to sell subscriptions
- Advanced discount options
Enterprise Plan
Lastly, there’s the Enterprise plan that’s fully customizable and flexible based on your needs. Pricing is available upon request, so you’ll have to talk to the sales team. It’s designed perfectly to meet the ever-changing needs and requirements of large companies.
Squarespace customers have a choice regarding payment timing with the regular pricing plans. The incentive to choose an annual subscription is up to a 30% discount. It’s the more economical option, but the tradeoff is that you need to pay the whole sum for a year in advance.
Maybe you won't find thousands of features at Squarespace, but it offers more than enough for highly affordable prices. This is undoubtedly one of the reasons why it is one of the most popular web platforms in a highly competitive market niche.
Yola
The Yola pricing system is structured differently. It includes four website plans and four online store add-ons. The online store add-ons can’t be used on their own without a website plan. So, if you want to have an online store, you’ll need to pay for both a site plan and an online store add-on.
Just like Squarespace, Yola offers two billing options: monthly and yearly. Here, we’ll show only the monthly fees, but keep in mind that, as always, the annual subscriptions come with a discount and an additional benefit. In the case that you select a yearly subscription, you’ll also receive a free custom domain for a year.
Free Plan
Many users would be glad to learn that Yola offers a free website plan. There are certain limitations to it – low storage space and inability to connect a custom domain name – but there are also some upsides, like the following:
- Up to two fully responsive websites
- SEO-friendly design
- Two site backups
Bronze Plan
The Bronze plan costs $9.45/month. Some of the advantages of this pricing plan are:
- Up to five websites
- Up to 1,000 pages
- Ability to use a custom domain
- Premium email support 24/7
- Analytics tools
The one thing you need to take into account when considering this pricing plan is that there’s not much storage space. Apart from the highest-tier Gold plan, all pricing plans include storage space limitations.
With the Bronze plan, you get 2 GB of storage. Clearly, this shows that this pricing plan is suitable primarily for small websites.
Silver Plan
The monthly fee for the Silver plan is $18.95/month. With this plan, Yola customers get access to the following features:
- Up to 25 websites
- 5 GB of storage space
- Removal of Yola branding
- Ability to add code to your pages for customization
Gold Plan
The Gold plan costs $35.45/month. Its most important features are:
- Unlimited storage space
- Automatic SEO monitoring (allows you to improve your search engine rankings and attract more visitors to your site)
Yola Online Store Add-Ons
To get the e-commerce features you need to run an online store and fully unlock Yola, you’ll need some of Yola’s Online Store Add-ons. These will allow you to sell products, maintain a catalog of products, develop marketing strategies, and deal with shipping and tax.
Overall, Yola offers more in this regard, as well as more pricing options than Squarespace. However, there’s a tradeoff – a higher overall price tag, as the add-ons are paid for separately – on top of your chosen Website plan.
Here are their prices:
Free Add-On
Like the Yola website plans, the online store add-ons include a free add-on as well. The following are some of the features it includes:
- Sale of up to three products
- Multichannel selling (Facebook and Google Shopping)
- Product variants (size, color, etc.)
- Shipment tracking in real-time
- Customizable email notifications
- Invoice printing
- PayPal, Square, and offline payments
Basic Add-On
The monthly fee for the Basic add-on is $15. It’s a significant improvement compared to the Free add-on. Some of the notable features of the Basic add-on are:
- Sale of up to 100 products
- Up to 10,000 categories
- Gift cards
- Inventory tracking
- Sales of digital products like music, videos, and e-books
- Yola Android and iOS apps (to manage your store on the go)
- Over 30 payment methods
Professional Add-On
The Professional add-on costs $35/month. As its name suggests, it’s for users who want to take their e-commerce business to the next level. The following are some noteworthy features this add-on includes:
- Sale of up to 2,500 products
- More channels, such as Amazon, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger
- Automated email marketing
- Ability to offer discounts
- Abandoned cart recovery
- Multilingual store
- Automatic tax calculations
- Order management
Unlimited Add-On
The Unlimited add-on at $99/month is a bit pricey compared to what we’re used to seeing in Yola. Some of the most prominent tools it includes are:
- Sale of up to 70,000 products
- Point-of-Sale system
Editors
Squarespace
Squarespace strives for simplicity and ease of use. In that spirit, it offers a simple, clean, and intuitive editor. This is how clear and simple it looks when you enter the edit mode and hover your mouse over the homepage:
There’s nothing superfluous here; you see only the necessary things. It’s only when you start clicking different parts that you see all the available options.
For instance, when you click Add Section, it shows you all types of sections that you can add to your page, which include:
- Headlines
- A gallery
- Individual images
- Any text you want
- Video
- A contact form
- Products
- A donations element
- A calendar
- A logo wall
- A pricing list
When you click a plus icon, you see a menu of elements you can add to your page: button, spacer, map, markdown, code block, chart, social links, different integrations, and a search filter.
Editing a section or an element inside a section is the same as in any other visual editor – just click the part you want to customize and start tweaking.
In case you want to experiment with the site styles, just click the brush icon in the upper right corner, and it’ll show you a menu with new possibilities.
You can play with different color palettes, edit the existing ones, add animations like fade and slide, try out different fonts, and even modify the button styles. You can also get a preview of how all your changes look on a mobile device by clicking the phone icon to the left of the brush icon.
When you’ve finished customizing, just click Done. This will then show you your site along with a new menu with even more options.
Building an online store is the same experience as building a regular website, and you use the same editor.
It’s really something to see how Squarespace manages to incorporate the two opposites – simplicity and a good deal of customization options. On top of this, everything is intuitive and easy to understand and do.
The Squarespace editor is an excellent solution for anyone who’s searching for a modern, simple, yet powerful WYSIWYG editor.
Yola
Similar to Squarespace, Yola’s Sitebuilder+ editor is definitely one of the easiest-to-use and simplest site/store builders on the market. It’s very easy to understand how to create and edit new pages and how to customize your whole website in almost no time.
The Yola editor is clean and intuitive. This is how it looks when you open your site in it:
Since the Yola editor is the same type of editor as Squarespace’s, most things work the same. You can add new content blocks by clicking the plus symbols and edit the different parts of your site pages by clicking on the sections.
Yola offers a wide array of blocks that you can add through the editor. On the left side of the following image, you can see part of the list:
When you click the hamburger icon in the upper left corner, the editor shows you another set of options, not all of which are directly related to your site styles and functionalities:
When it comes to the look of your site, the Yola editor lets you:
- Modify a block’s layout and appearance, including the color scheme, title, buttons, spacing, and alignment.
- Duplicate, cut, copy, relocate, or remove a block.
- Choose from various color palettes and fonts.
- Enable animations.
- Set a click action.
- Change headings.
- Add and customize an address through Google Maps.
In terms of customization options, Yola does not provide as much choice as Squarespace. However, if you’re searching for extreme simplicity, or if you don’t want to spend too much time tinkering with things on your website, this can be a blessing.
Creating an online store with Yola is a bit of a different experience. It’s not a difficult task, but building an online store is a little more complex than building a regular website with Yola.
Building a Store With Yola
This is the dashboard when you start building an online store with Yola:
If you click on any of the options in the left-side menu, you’ll see more options. All of them help you set up your store and get it up and running as soon as possible. You can add things and customize different aspects of your store here as well.
The interface looks different from what you see when you’re inside the website editor. For instance, this is how it looks when you’re editing the design of your store:
Yola does provide you with a range of store customization options, including customizing the look of your store, connecting various payment methods and processors, taking care of shipping and pickup, setting up multichannel selling, and managing marketing.
Integrations
Squarespace
Squarespace has a separate Squarespace extensions page where users can find and integrate third-party apps into their site. There are not that many extensions (a little over 30), but the list includes some notable names like Mailchimp, QuickBooks, and Easyship.
The extensions are categorized into four categories:
- Shipping and fulfillment
- Finance
- Inventory and products
- Sales and marketing extensions
However, there are many other compatible apps that you can integrate through other means, like embed codes. It would be impossible to list the complete range of Squarespace integrations here, but you can find a comprehensive list in the Squarespace documentation.
Yola
Integrations are not one of Yola’s strong suits. There isn’t a separate integrations page or anything that resembles an app store. You really need to dig deeper in different places of your site editor and dashboard to find out what third-party apps can be integrated with Yola.
The only place where you find the word “Integrations” is in your site Settings. Click the hamburger menu, click Settings, then click Integrations, and you’ll see this:
However, Google Webmaster and Google Analytics are not the only available integrations. You can also use:
- Google Maps services
- Facebook, Instagram, Google Shopping, and Amazon (to sell your products)
- Facebook Messenger (to communicate with your clients as well as offer product recommendations and upsells)
- PayPal, Square, and 30+ other payment processing options
Another way of integrating Yola with other software is by the use of embed codes. Embed codes are usually short lines of code that you paste into your Yola site in order to extend its functionality. To illustrate how important this integration method is, we’ll give you one example.
Yola lacks a blogging option, which is one of the most common targets of user criticism. This criticism is definitely valid, considering how important a blog can be in drawing more traffic to your site and converting leads.
However, thanks to the embed code method, you can integrate Yola with DropInBlog easily and quickly. DropInBlog is a refined blogging solution that enables you to create a blog on Yola in a few easy steps. So, using an embed code, you can extend Yola and make your website far more sophisticated and powerful.
Who Are Squarespace and Yola For?
Squarespace
As reported by a study of more than 850,000 companies that use Squarespace, small companies outnumber medium and large companies by a wide margin. Customer reviews on websites like G2 and Capterra also confirm that the majority of the users whose online business presence is powered by Squarespace are small business owners.
It’s most likely that the reasonable pricing offered by Squarespace is a big drawcard for small business owners or those just starting out.
Yola
Yola, too, belongs to the group of site and store builders that cater primarily to small business owners. Yola's prices, dedication to simplicity, and ease of use are most likely why it’s so popular with small businesses.
FAQs
Which is more customizable, Squarespace or Yola?
Both platforms allow you to add customizable code to fine-tune the look and feel of your website. While Yola has improved its editor over the years, the Squarespace editor beats it by a whisker.
Squarespace provides a neat, simple, and yet very powerful editor. In addition to what the editor can do, you’ll also find a far greater variety of integrations if you feel something is missing.
Which is more suitable for a small business, Squarespace or Yola?
They are both popular with small businesses. However, the cost is generally a deciding factor for small business owners. Yola offers cheaper website plans, but in order to get e-commerce functionality, you’ll need to pay for an add-on. That then brings the total cost closer to what you’d pay for Squarespace.
Considering value for money, features, and functionality, the Squarespace Business plan packs a lot of punch for a reasonable price. We feel this makes it the better choice for a small business.
Final Thoughts
This Squarespace vs. Yola review showed that, despite belonging to the same category of web platforms, Squarespace and Yola are very different. Our experience of using Squarespace was nothing like our experience with Yola. Yes, you can perform virtually the same operations in the same way in both platforms’ editors. However, the overall impressions after using the platforms are quite different.
In saying that, Squarespace is cheaper, and it seems like they’ve found a pretty good balance between the number and quality of tools and the prices. This balance makes it very appealing to a variety of users.
To make the best decision, our recommendation is to try them both. Subscribe to the Yola Free plan and add-on, and see what it’s like to build a site on this platform. Then you can take advantage of the 14-day free trial that Squarespace offers and see how it works.
Do your research, check out what they offer, and see if either of them is the right choice for building your online presence.