Moving from Squarespace to Showit or vice versa? Read this before you do!
Will moving between platforms give you any benefits?
Both Squarespace and Showit are amazing platforms for building beautiful and functional websites. You can be creative with Squarespace and with Showit, and launch your website in no time in Showit and in Squarespace alike.
So why is it that you would want to switch from one platform to another? Your reasons may differ. Maybe you feel like Squarespace lacks some of the freedoms Showit gives. Maybe you look at Squarespace and see a more focused all-in-one solution with built-in tools for email marketing, event management, analytics and client invoicing all available out of the box. Maybe Showit attracts your attention as a platform offering a more straightforward drag-and-drop editor with just the tools you need to build your website fast and easily manage it.
In this article we’re going to talk about the strong and the weak sides of both platforms and why you don’t actually need to move from one platform to another to achieve your goals.
Which website builder is better, Squarespace or Showit?
Since we are technically comparing apples to apples here, such comparison is indeed mostly a matter of taste and personal preference. Squarespace has drag-and-drop elements and sections powered by its Fluid Engine, allowing you much freedom in placing elements anywhere you want on the page (more or less) while also making sure it all works well on mobile. Showit boasts an even more freedom-centered engine, allowing you to put things like text, images, and even videos on the page with pixel-perfect precision.
In this round, our shout-out goes out to Showit more so than to Squarespace though. Showit is great if you really need that full control over even the minute elements in the design of your website. While Squarespace editor, although powerful and versatile too, will lock you to their column grid and is arguably more limiting.
But at the end of the day, both platforms offer website editors / builders that give you much artistic freedom, while giving you the tools to make sure it all shines on all modern platforms and screen sizes.
Email Marketing and Contact Forms on Showit vs Squarespace
Out of the box, Showit only has support for simple contact forms, which when submitted, are delivered to your email inbox as plain text emails. Squarespace, on the contrary, offers a built-in and full featured email marketing tool to manage smaller email lists and simple email marketing campaigns. Squarespace’s tools might not be as powerful or popular as tools like Mailchimp or Flodesk, but it will do its job.
With contact forms, on Squarespace you can elect to send new inquiries to your email (like with Showit), put them in a Google Spreadsheet, or connect Zapier and then send that form data to any tool Zapier connects to, making your options pretty much limitless.
So does this mean we have a clear winner here? If you are starting fresh and need to quickly launch a website to collect leads and grow your email subscribers list, then Squarespace could be your choice. But if you already have an established Showit website, consider using a third-party tool like Mailchimp or Flodesk. Using Showit’s embed block, you can easily place external forms on your website and then have an even larger level of control over what happens to each new form submit or email newsletter signup.
Blogging on Squarespace and on Showit
This one is quite particular. See, Showit relies completely on WordPress to enable the blogging functionality on any website. New Showit websites do not come with blogging enabled by default and it is something you need to request the Showit support team to enable for you. If that sounds tedious, don’t worry - the Showit support team is quick to react to messages and will do most of the heavy lifting for you.
With Squarespace, you can get to blogging right away - it’s built into every new and existing Squarespace website.
With both platforms, you get things like blog post categories, access to SEO settings for each post, authors, scheduling a blog post to publish at a certain date, and much more. With Showit though, since you get to use WordPress and can request the Showit team to install almost any WordPress plugin into your website, you have much more control over your blogging.
Again, at the end of the day, blogging alone isn’t reason enough to switch between platforms in our opinion.
Ecommerce / Product management / Client Invoicing
Squarespace is again taking the lead here, offering out-of-the-box ecommerce plus product management and fulfillment tools (albeit on certain plans). They even recently rolled out client invoicing as a new feature in their clear strive towards being a one-stop platform for most website owners’ business needs.
But don’t dismiss Showit just yet. Remember how we said Showit is intertwined with WordPress? Well, that means with the right plan you can install the WooCommerce plugin on your website and enjoy all the power and versatility this number one ecommerce solution for WordPress has to offer. Not only is it time-tested, robust, and backed by industry experts at Automattic (people behind WordPress.com, Pocket Casts and Tumblr), it can be further extended in a variety of ways to account for almost any product and sales tactic out there.
Scheduling
Squarespace comes with Acuity Scheduling (a company they own) built right in (for an additional fee), allowing you to manage your appointments and charge for paid sessions, for example. You can use scheduling blocks in your design and keep all the relevant data in one place. Again, a great solution for new websites and those already running (and used to) Squarespace and looking to add that functionality to their website.
With Showit, you would again need to rely on third-party tools, like Calendly. But guess what, you can actually have an account on Acuity Scheduling and use that on a Showit website! Again, where Squarespace wins in linking the platforms together, Showit shines in keeping things more independent, giving you more control and choice in the matter.
Analytics
This one is simple. If you don’t want to use Google Analytics or a similar external traffic measurement tool for some reason, you can rely on data gathered by Squarespace out of the box. If you plan to dig deep into your customer data and behavior patterns, then you’re going to have to go with something like Google Analytics, Mixpanel or Matomo. And those platforms (especially Google Analytics, seeing how it is pretty much the industry standard) can easily integrate with either platform.
Website Templates
If, for example, you are looking to redesign your website and want to start with a beautiful website template, or just need a brand new template-based website, we have great news for you! You can do that both on Squarespace and on Showit.
With premium Squarespace website templates, the template delivery process includes some manual work on the part of template shops though, as at the end of the day you get a new Squarespace website based on the template of your choice. You can then move all your content from the old website to the new one manually, or request that to be done for you, usually for an additional fee.
With premium Showit website templates, when you purchase a template, you get access to what’s called a Showit share key, which enables you to import that template into your Showit design library. After that you can either create a new Showit website using that template, or grab separate pages, whole sections or other elements from it and use in your existing designs.
So should I choose Squarespace over Showit or Showit over Squarespace?
As we have hopefully shown, in our opinion you shouldn’t really waste your time chasing the perfect platform. They are both great and feature-packed! And you can get most of what you need a website to do using either of the platforms.
Consider Squarespace if you want the full package in one spot and don’t mind the higher price tag for those premium plans that have it all. And give Showit a try if you want full design control, the power of WordPress and the fluidity and the independence of the platform.
And don’t forget, if you are looking for Squarespace website templates, you can browse our full collection here. And if you want to go for a Showit website template, our brand new store collection is here for you.
