In Wix, you get more options when it comes to forms. The free Wix forms app gives you quite a few different types of forms to choose from, including contact forms, job application forms and subscriptions — and quite a few templates too, meaning you have more flexibility over form design than in Squarespace (in Squarespace, you can’t vary form design, unless you want to add your own CSS to your site and style them yourself).
Wix also allows you to install a variety of different form apps which provide more functionality. The popular Form Builder Plus app, for example, provides you with the option to create conditional rules, customize autoresponse emails, add file attachments and more. You will have to pay to access this functionality, however.
To gain this sort of functionality in Squarespace, you can use a third-party form builder app like Jotform or Wufoo, and install it using a HTML block (again, this involves an additional fee).
Overall, I’d say Wix is a slightly better bet for customisable forms — but there’s not a huge amount in it.
Data capture
Once you’ve created a form in Squarespace or Wix, you’ll need to choose where to send the data it captures to.
In Squarespace, you can send your data to
- Squarespace Email Campaigns (Squarespace’s built-in email marketing tool - more on this in a moment)
- Google Sheets
- Mailchimp
- An email address
- Zapier (allowing you to hook up your forms to a variety of email marketing tools, such as Getresponse or Aweber).
In the standard Wix forms app, you can send your form contents to
- an email address or
- a spreadsheet which is viewable within the Wix interface.
If you want to hook your form up to Mailchimp you’ll need to find a (paid-for) app in the Wix app store to let you to do this.
On the data capture side then, it’s a win for Squarespace — the built-in forms allow you to get your data into more services.
Email marketing in Wix and Squarespace
Wix and Squarespace differ from several competing website building tools in that they both provide built-in email marketing functionality.
In the case of Wix, this means using its ‘ShoutOut’ tool. You get three free ShoutOuts (email broadcasts) per month to up to 5000 emails. This is actually pretty generous — not many email marketing apps provide you with this kind of free functionality — but if it is not enough for you, you can pay extra for a premium ‘ShoutOut’ add-on.
These range in cost from $4.90 to $44 per month and allow you to host lists from 10,000 to 200,000 contacts in size. These prices are reasonable — it generally costs a lot more to use standalone email marketing apps.
Point of sale functionality is not available in Squarespace, and limited in Wix — so if this is important to you, you might want to consider a more dedicated e-commerce solution like Shopify.
Example of a Squarespace template
In terms of quality, however, there is something undeniably special about the design of Squarespace templates and I’d probably give them the edge over Wix’s in the aesthetics department. In short, with Squarespace’s template offering, you’re dealing with all killer, no filler; with Wix, there’s arguably a fair amount of filler amongst the 500 templates on offer.
The other thing to remember about Wix Editor’s use of absolute positioning is that it means you are creating two sites: one for desktop, one for mobile. Although a lot of the time, the mobile version of your site that Wix Editor generates automatically for you is reasonably good, the result is not always perfect and you may find yourself having to design (or at least check) two versions of your site.
By contrast, Squarespace’s editor makes it very straightforward to align content items neatly to each other; and its fully responsive approach to template design means you are not dealing with separate versions of your site for mobile and desktop devices.
Squarespace vs Wix (2019) — Which is Best? What are the Key Differences?
