Squarespace vs Magpie: an in-depth comparison

Squarespace is a website builder that has added a shop, memberships, courses and email campaigns, each priced by plan or as a separate subscription. Magpie is one subscription for a small business's software, and the website editor is one of its areas beside the shop, bookings, invoicing, a newsletter and mail. Squarespace does more inside a website; Magpie does more around it.

Yes, for a business whose website is pages and a shop. Magpie builds the pages from sections, sells through Store, publishes on the Free plan, and adds the booking, invoicing and email the business was buying elsewhere.

Consider keeping Squarespace if readers comment under your posts, if you keep pages or posts for paying members, or if you want a designed template rather than one Starter design. Squarespace does each of these better than Magpie does today.

Squarespace has four plans: Basic, Core, Plus and Advanced, billed monthly or yearly, and a 14-day trial. Basic takes 2% of shop sales; paid content and memberships pay 7% on Basic, 5% on Core and 1% on Plus. Acuity Scheduling, Email Campaigns and Google Workspace inboxes are separate subscriptions. The prices are on Squarespace's pricing page.

Magpie has a Free plan and paid plans, each covering every area. Free includes 1 website, 250 newsletter subscribers and a team of 3; a paid plan includes 20 websites, 5,000 subscribers and, on the Team plan, 25 people. Magpie takes 4% of Store sales and 4% of Supporters payments. The prices are on Magpie's pricing page.

Yes, since November 2026. Add blog gives an editor website a Blog page that lists its posts, each at an address of its own. A post is a draft until you publish or schedule it, has a category, a cover picture and a summary, holds pictures and video, and is in the website's feed and sitemap. Posts have no comments, and a post is not sent to your Newsletter subscribers by itself; both are on Magpie's roadmap. Squarespace's blog has comments.

Yes, in Supporters: people join a free or paid monthly tier and read the posts kept for them, with pictures, video and polls. It is a page of its own, not pages of the website, and Magpie takes 4%. Squarespace keeps pages and posts of the site itself behind a paywall.

Yes. Courses sells a course of modules and lessons at your school, a public page at Magpie's address or your own domain. Lessons hold video, text and files, with quizzes, assignments and live sessions; students' progress is tracked, and finishers can get a certificate. A course sells at a price, in monthly payments, or with a Supporters tier. Squarespace's courses are pages of the site itself.

Yes on Basic, 2% of shop sales, and none on Core and above. Paid content and memberships pay 7%, 5% or 1% below Advanced. Card fees come on top. Magpie takes 4% of Store sales; buyers pay through your own Stripe account, and Stripe's card fees come on top.

Yes, through Acuity Scheduling, a separate subscription, which puts a booking calendar inside the site with reminders, intake forms and payment. Magpie's Meetings and Appointments are included and send confirmation emails, but the booking page is a page of its own that the website links to, and neither takes payment when someone books.

No. Saving a page makes its changes public, undo works while the page is open, and deleted pages can be restored for 30 days. Magpie keeps your changes as drafts until you publish, keeps the last 50 published versions, and restores any of them.

Only on the shop's pages: Store reports count views of the Shop, product and collection pages and say where buyers came from. The other pages count nothing unless you paste a tracking snippet into the Layout's head in Code, which runs once the website is at your own domain. Squarespace counts every visit on every plan.

Magpie for most shops: discounts, gift cards, store credit, downloads with licence keys, checkout reminders and sales reports on every plan, for 4% of each sale. Squarespace if you need subscription products, instalments on products other than a course, shipping labels bought in the shop, print-on-demand through Printful, or card payments on your phone in the United States.

Yes. A Squarespace site can link to a Magpie booking page, a Magpie form, the Newsletter's sign-up page or an invoice, and Magpie's Mail can give you email at the domain the site uses. Many businesses would start that way and move the website later, or not at all.

Partly. Squarespace exports your pages, one blog, and their text and pictures as a WordPress file, which Magpie cannot read into its editor. You make each page again in the editor or paste in its HTML, and paste each post into a new post; scheduling it for its original date publishes it at once with that date. Your domain stays where it is registered and points at Magpie with two DNS records; Magpie gets the certificate.

Yes. A domain registered with Squarespace stays registered there. You add a TXT record and an ALIAS or CNAME record, and the website shows at the domain with a certificate Magpie gets for it.

Yes. Everyone in your Magpie team can edit its websites on every plan, up to 3 people in a free team and 25 on the Team plan, and you can limit someone to the areas they need. Squarespace's Basic plan allows two contributors, Core and above have no limit.

Yes. The editor works in a phone's browser: you can add, move and style sections, change text, links and pictures, and publish. Squarespace's app edits existing text and pictures and adds blog posts, but cannot add sections.

Yes, on every plan. Code shows each page's HTML and the Layout every page shares; scripts and embeds run once the website is at your own domain. A files website serves uploaded files as they are or builds from a Git repository. Squarespace has a CSS editor and code blocks on every plan, and JavaScript and code injection on Core and above.

1 website, published at a Magpie address or at your own domain, with 50 pages, drafts and 50 kept versions. The shop, booking pages, Invoicing, the Newsletter with 250 subscribers, Forms and a team of 3. A paid plan adds email at your domain and raises the limits.