hey everybody welcome back to the channel in this video I will be comparing Squarespace to Weebly and this is a really interesting comparison because these two platforms are both very similar on the surface and if you just made your choice randomly or only looking at price or something like that then in a couple months once you have your website built you might realize that one of them is missing a feature that the other one has and you'll wish you saw a video like this one to help you better decide which one's actually the best one for you to choose to build your website so with that being said these are admittedly very similar in many aspects but there are some fundamental differences so in this video I want to break you down into six different categories I want to talk about customized ability and apps so when you're designing your website that's kind of the fundamental one of the most important features when you're looking to build a website is going to be what you can actually do with it how expansive it is what it's going to look like the aesthetics the the ease of use and things like that then I'll talk about pricing I'll talk about e-commerce so if you're looking to sell that's an interesting category that you should know about I'll talk about blogs so pretty much any company that is building a website may want to consider looking for some organic traffic with blogs then I'll talk about SEO which talking about organic traffic there optimizing your website for search is also very very important and then lastly I'll talk about some additional features that these have with that being said let's start off with number one customizability now these both have a really similar setup where unlike something like Wix where you kind of just drag and drop anywhere you want on the entire screen this one's these are a little bit more curated and admittedly they both use a very similar structure where it's the strip layout so they have little sections going down the website with Weebly even though it's not as free form as Wix it's still pretty much drag and drop it's just a little bit more curated so you'll click an element drag it over and you can drop it above below to the left or to the right of another element on the screen whereas Squarespace is a little bit less drag-and-drop and more of you'll just choose a section that you want and that strip is going to have a specific layout so just choose whatever layout you want and then within that layout you can edit each individual element and because of that they both have a really good optimized mobile website that really requires almost no effort at all so you'll just put all everything in there and then look at it on your phone and it should look fine that's that's kind of the benefit of having it not a purely drag-and-drop as we saw with Wix no something that's different though is the App Store now being able to customize these websites and add apps is a really big plus that I found with websites like Wix is a good one Weebly is another one here they have about 350 apps so you can choose you can use on your website and these could be different things that ad you know it's miscellaneous features to your to your website and I'm not gonna really go through many of them because there are just so many of them out there but you can have some really cool things now so you can't necessarily get apps on Squarespace but what they do have is what they call extensions and so these are just third-party pieces of code that go in and can do different things on your website now talking about the aesthetics and the design side of these website builders this is where Squarespace starts to pull ahead a little bit that they have somewhere on the order of about 100 different templates you can choose from whereas Weebly is a little bit more limited with just 40-ish templates that you can choose from so 40 is still a decent amount but I find that having 100 is really the sweet spot a good amount of templates to have and they're categorized in like 10 to 15 different categories so you can go down and say I'm trying to build an online store or a blog about my restaurant or something like that and you can easily find categories to really narrow down what the best theme is for you and I found the Squarespace themes definitely tend to look a little bit better I think that they're really really professionally made and they are also very customizable so once you choose one of the templates with Squarespace you can then go in and modify anything you want to make them look really really good so the Squarespace editor definitely feels a little bit more professional and so it could be a little bit trickier to learn when you first get started whereas Weebly is a little bit more on the amateur side and your website will still look good but I just think it's a it's a slightly more professional with Squarespace now I did say that Squarespace is slightly harder to learn when you're getting started and while that is true I actually did make a tutorial on both of these individually so if you want to build a website with either one of these at the end of this video go down and check out the links in the description and I'll link out to those full tutorials so once you choose it should be very easy for you to follow along and understand exactly how to build with either of these so in conclusion category number one I think it's kind of a tie here where you have Squarespace has better designs I think your website will look bad will feel more professional but Weebly has those extra apps in there that can add some extra functionality to your website so the next category number two is pricing and this one is a little bit more stratified so we have Squarespace has four different options and none of these are free which means that you have you know four different tiers and depending on if you choose monthly or annual plans or you know two-year plans the pricing would change but looking at annual plans it ranges anywhere from $12 a month to $40 a month which I think honestly is not that expensive it's definitely more expensive than some other ones but Squarespace has a tendency to throw some extra things in there you can get a gmail with it you can get things like that that you may otherwise be paying for elsewhere maybe your domain for example and so is it a fair price it's slightly more expensive but in the grand scheme of it for a business I really don't think it's that expensive but if you're just getting started off and you're looking to make like a wedding website or a website for just like a project and personal portfolio it may be worth it to save some money and go with Weebly we believe has three plans which are much cheaper they range from $6 to $26 per month and again same thing with if you're looking at monthly or annual or whatever but they do also have a free one and the free one of course is very limited so you won't have your own domain I mean you kind of will but it's gonna be like Mike Weebly comm slash my first web site or something something very unprofessional then on top of that you'll have some Weebly ads on there and you'll be limited in many other regards but it's still if you're looking to do like a project or just get your feet wet and learn how to make a website it's nice you can do it for free there as well so both of them do have very different pricing I'll link those down and below as well but this one is also kind of a tie I would say that we bleed kind of has an edge here because they're cheaper but Squarespace does throw in some extra things with their plans so the next category number three is ecommerce and of course these do both work very well if you're trying to sell physical products digital products like vouchers stuff like that you can have discounts on either of these you can have shipping management abandoned cart recovery stuff like that there's a lot of different options with these and the first kind of subtle difference is kind of recently so Squarespace used to be significantly better than Weebly we both kind of fell behind on this one until they partnered with square and now they have a slightly better our situation or payments are more accepted with square of course being that they partnered with them then both do work with square so you can accept payments from credit cards and PayPal and stuff like that so it really shouldn't be a problem when you're trying to sell things and accept payments with these but the real fundamental difference in e-commerce here is that Squarespace integrates directly with social media so if you're looking to sell things on Instagram you can actually do it directly through Instagram with Squarespace and that's a really nice thing especially now and more and more people are trying to market on social media so if you have an Instagram page it could be very beneficial for you to choose Squarespace when you're comparing these two platforms here category number four is blogging so if you're looking to create a blog on your website it's definitely very important that you're able to make many blogs make them accessible through navigation I mean have many contributors if you have a team of people writing and make sure each blog is very customizable with where you have images and links and stuff like that and honestly both of these do a very good job with that Squarespace has really been known for their blogging they're definitely very good with that but Weebly of course has very similar features to Squarespace so a very similar editor when you're trying to lay out what your blog is going to look like Weebly has excellent navigation where you can have sub sub sub pages you can kind of keep making pages go sub pages of another one so navigation should be very easy with Weebly and Squarespace of course like I said because they're known for blogs it just works very well on there as well and both of them do allow multi multiple contributors multiple authors so if you have a team of people writing that also should not be a problem you can assign different roles to different editors on your team and different people with their own accounts on Squarespace or on Weebly so in this one again I think it's definitely a tie they're both very good at blogging so it's just a matter of what you're looking to do now of course if you're looking to make a very very large blog if you're trying to make something like a like a New York Times kind of thing like a news website then maybe I would recommend looking at WordPress instead but when you're getting started off for a small blog or if you're like a restaurant you just want to write you know a handful of articles every now and then about your restaurant then maybe that would make sense that you could use something like this category number five is search engine optimization or SEO this is something that you see a lot of people talking about if they're looking to rank higher in Google you definitely want to know how to do this and for the most part you can kind of look up tutorials and do things on your own but the actual tools within these are very similar and you find that it's just a matter of different terms that they use on Squarespace vs Weebly so once you can you know click on a little question mark next to it and you understand what each term is it should make sense and you can really optimize your website with either one of these we believe does have some apps that you can use for SEO if you go to their App Store but of course Squarespace has everything pretty much right in there anyway so this one is a tie maybe you'd give a slight edge to Weebly on this one but again I don't think it's going to be make or break when you're trying to rank on Google for either one of your websites here so number six then additional features that these have and now both of them do allow you to get custom email addresses through Gmail or G suite so you can have your domain you can have like Mike at Michael Bryan mediacom or something like that then we also have Weebly has this really cool thing called Weebly promote which allows you to run an email campaign similar to what we see with MailChimp but it's through Weebly you will be paying for that a little bit extra I think it's like ten dollars a month or something but it could be a powerful tool if you want to integrate that with your website start collecting emails and then market through your email campaign there then on top of that Weebly also has a pretty nice multi tier navigation where I mean again you can do that with Squarespace as well but having that just very easy to drag things over and you can have like a sub sub page very easily so that all of your navigation works very seamlessly through everything and I just find that's really easy to use on there and then lastly another additional feature of Weebly is that it I find it's very easy to integrate Google Adsense so if you were trying to run ads on your website and you want to have just a little banner somewhere in the middle and have ads show up there you don't really care what the ads are then Google is going to put ads there and you'll be making some money when people click on that it's going to be maybe a couple cents at first but it could grow into a couple of dollars a couple hundred dollars from your website as you start to get larger so Squarespace on the other hand doesn't really have as many of those features but I find that they focus less on quantity and more on quality so everything you do with Squarespace is not necessarily all these fringe additional features but what they do have definitely works very well so you can be confident that you won't really run into problems with Squarespace it's very robust and everything I have ever needed the zoo with Squarespace it pretty much is easy enough to do within their website builders so like I said guys if you want to see more about either of these go down check out below we will have a blog article that'll link out and show you some more in-depth stuff that I talked about in this video or if you already made your decision which one's best for you go down and click on the link for the tutorial to actually go to the next step and build your website so as always guys I hope this video helped you if you enjoyed it please remember to Like and subscribe thank you all for watching I'll see you next time