Comparing website builders: Squarespace, Wix, Shopify and more

Every page in this section compares two ways of building or buying a website. Before any of them is useful to you, one thing has to be said plainly.

The problem with platform comparisons

An agency publishing “X versus Y” usually has a direct commercial interest in the answer, because it profits from building on whichever one it recommends. Most comparisons you will find are written under exactly that pressure, and most do not say so.

That is not the position here. This site carries no affiliate links, no sponsored placements and no referral arrangement with any platform named in this section. Nobody bought a position. The full statement is at commercial relationships, and it is short because there is nothing to declare.

What that removes is the financial reason to steer you. What it does not remove is opinion: there is no neutral scoring process behind these pages, no panel and no weighted matrix — one practitioner, with views formed by which decisions turned out badly on real projects.

So each page says that before it reaches a verdict rather than after it. A disclosure that arrives once you have already read the recommendation is decoration.

What these pages can honestly offer is not impartiality. It is a consistent structure, applied the same way to both sides, with the sections that other comparisons leave out.

What each page covers, in the same order

• What the actual difference is, in one short section
• Who each one is genuinely for
• The shape of the cost: what you pay for, what recurs, what is bundled, what is extra
• Ownership and exit — what you can export, what you lose, how hard it is to leave
• Australian specifics, where they exist: GST handling, local payment methods, domestic shipping, .au domains, hosting location
• Who should choose which
• What would change the answer

The ownership and exit section is the one nobody else writes, and it is deliberately the longest part of every page. The cost of a platform is not what it charges. It is what it charges plus what it costs to leave, and the second number is invisible at purchase.

How to read any comparison, including these

Two habits are worth carrying into every one of these pages, and into anyone else’s.

First, check whether the writer has told you what they sell. If a comparison does not disclose the author’s commercial interest, that is not evidence they have none; it is evidence they did not say. Second, look for the exit section. A comparison that covers features, pricing and ease of use, and says nothing about what happens when you want to leave, has skipped the one variable that is genuinely hard to reverse. Third, treat words like “unlimited” storage or bandwidth on any website builder’s plan with scepticism — most come with an acceptable-use policy that caps it in practice, and the comparisons in this section name the actual limit where one exists rather than repeating the marketing claim.

No dollar figures here

Platform pricing changes constantly, and a stale figure is worse than none. These pages describe the shape of the cost — what is charged per month, what is charged per transaction, what is charged per extension, and which of those compound — and send you to the vendor for the current number. Whatever figure you find there, check whether it includes GST before you compare it with anything.

Zero measured AI-assistant demand

Every comparison in this section measured zero AI-assistant prompts a month for Australia on 31 July 2026, recorded in research/ai-vol-keywords.json, against real Google volume. These are pages for a person reading and weighing two options, not for an assistant extracting a summary, and they are written that way.

Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, WordPress, Webflow, GoDaddy and Hostinger, compared

Every website builder in this section is checked against at least one direct competitor: Wix against Squarespace, WordPress and Webflow; Squarespace against WordPress and Webflow; Shopify against WooCommerce, BigCommerce and Etsy for e-commerce specifically; GoDaddy against Wix and Hostinger; and WordPress itself against Joomla and Drupal for anyone considering an open-source CMS beyond it. Pricing on a website builder is usually quoted per month rather than as a one-off, and a template library is not a proxy for how hard the platform is to leave. “Unlimited” storage or bandwidth on that monthly plan is a marketing claim, not a technical one — most plans carry an acceptable-use policy that caps it in practice, and each comparison names the real limit where one exists rather than repeating the vendor’s word for it.

The website builder comparisons here

The difference between a web designer and a web developer is the one to read first if you are not yet sure which of the two you are hiring. It is the smallest by search volume and the largest by consequence.

The rest of this section is website builder comparisons: hosted website builders against each other — Squarespace versus WordPress, Wix versus Squarespace, Wix versus WordPress, GoDaddy versus Wix and Hostinger versus GoDaddy — plus the e-commerce-specific builders, Shopify versus WooCommerce, Shopify versus BigCommerce and Wix versus Shopify, and the more design-led website builders such as Webflow versus WordPress and Framer versus Webflow. Each one follows the same structure set out above.

For what any of it costs once you have chosen, read why two quotes for the same site differ. For what web design covers before you choose a platform to build it on, start with web design in Australia.