Elementor vs Squarespace
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Both sides assessedElementor compared with Squarespace
Squarespace is one flat bill with zero maintenance and a site live in a weekend, at roughly $276 a year per site with no export path. Elementor costs $59 a year plus hosting and gives you far more design control, deeper SEO tooling, and a site you actually own. Take Squarespace if you want it handled; take Elementor if the idea of renting your website bothers you.
Squarespace compared with Elementor
Elementor on WordPress costs $59 a year against Squarespace's roughly $276, and gives you ownership, portability, and the entire plugin ecosystem. It also gives you hosting bills, updates, security, and plugin conflicts. Squarespace is the right answer for anyone who does not want a technical relationship with their website; Elementor is right for anyone who does.
Choose Elementor if
Freelancers, small agencies, and small businesses who want visual design control and full ownership of their website, are comfortable with hosting and updates, and need the economics to work across several sites rather than one.
Choose Squarespace if
Small businesses, restaurants, studios, consultants, photographers, and creative professionals who need a credible, good-looking site with a blog, a booking flow, or a small store, want one predictable bill, and have no interest in maintaining anything.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Elementor | Squarespace |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Landing Pages | Landing Pages |
| Starting price | $0 for the free core plugin, then $59 per year for Elementor Pro on one site (free plan available) | About $16 per month billed annually (Basic) (14 days trial) |
| Pricing model | Annual licence for the Elementor Pro plugin priced by number of site activations, on top of a free core plugin; hosting is supplied by the customer, with optional Elementor Hosting and Elementor One bundles sold separately. | Flat per-site subscription across four tiers, billed annually or monthly, with transaction fees on commerce that decrease as the tier increases. |
| Free plan | The core Elementor plugin is free forever with around 40 widgets, the visual editor, and responsive editing, on unlimited sites; it excludes Theme Builder, forms, popups, dynamic content, and WooCommerce widgets. | No |
| Free trial | No trial on Pro; the free core plugin serves as the evaluation path, and Pro carries a 30-day money-back guarantee | 14 days, no credit card required |
| Best for | Freelancers, small agencies, and small businesses who want visual design control and full ownership of their website, are comfortable with hosting and updates, and need the economics to work across several sites rather than one. | Small businesses, restaurants, studios, consultants, photographers, and creative professionals who need a credible, good-looking site with a blog, a booking flow, or a small store, want one predictable bill, and have no interest in maintaining anything. |
| Setup time | A page built within an hour once WordPress is running. Getting WordPress running on decent hosting with a theme, caching, backups, and an SEO plugin configured is the real work and takes a day for someone who has done it before, longer for someone who has not. | A working site in a weekend and a polished one in a week. Choosing a template and rewriting the placeholder copy is most of the work; the technical setup, domain, and SSL are automatic. |
| Learning curve | The editor is easy and the stack is not. Elementor itself is learnable in an afternoon, but the surrounding decisions about hosting, theme choice, caching configuration, image optimization, security, and which of six competing plugins to use are where new users lose weeks. This is the opposite of Webflow, where the tool is hard and the platform is handled. | Low. The section-and-block model is intuitive for anyone who has used a document editor, and the site-wide style panel prevents most of the ways a non-designer normally ruins a site. The only real learning is Fluid Engine's separate mobile layout, which trips people up briefly. |
| Platforms | WordPress plugin (self-hosted WordPress on any compliant host), Elementor Hosting as a managed option, Browser-based editing on desktop | Browser-based editor, Squarespace-hosted publishing with CDN and automatic SSL, iOS and Android apps for content and commerce management |
| Compliance | GDPR tooling via the plugin and the WordPress ecosystem, Compliance posture otherwise depends on your chosen host, Accessibility tooling available through Elementor One | GDPR with a DPA available, CCPA, PCI DSS compliance handled by Squarespace for commerce |
| Founded | 2016 | 2003 |
| Headquarters | Ramat Gan, Israel | New York, New York, United States |
| Ownership | Venture-backed, privately held | PE-owned (Permira), taken private in 2024 |
Strengths and limitations
Elementor
Strengths
- You own the site outright. It is WordPress files and a database on your hosting, movable between hosts, exportable, and impossible for a vendor to switch off or reprice out from under you.
- The pricing is transformative for anyone with more than one site: $199 a year covers twenty-five site activations, which is less than a single Webflow site plan costs annually.
- Theme Builder means the entire site is designed visually including headers, footers, blog templates, archives, and 404 pages, not just page bodies.
- Dynamic content binding and Loop Builder give a real CMS-driven design layer on top of WordPress custom post types, enabling directories and catalogues that most builders at this price cannot express.
Limitations
- You are signing up for maintenance. WordPress core updates, plugin updates, PHP version changes, backups, and security are your problem, and plugin conflicts are a recurring rather than hypothetical failure.
- The advertised price is not the total cost. Hosting is the hidden line item, and cheap hosting produces a slow site that will make you blame Elementor for a problem you bought.
- Performance is not automatic. A default Elementor build carries more DOM nodes and CSS than a static builder, and passing Core Web Vitals requires caching, image optimization, and restraint with widgets.
- No native A/B testing at any tier, so conversion testing means a separate plugin or an external tool.
Squarespace
Strengths
- The most complete bundle in the category: site, blog, store, scheduling, forms, domain, and hosting under one predictable subscription with no bandwidth meter and no seat charges.
- Templates and defaults are good enough that a non-designer produces a professional-looking result, which is the actual job for most small businesses.
- Fluid Engine gives separate desktop and mobile layouts, so the phone view is designed deliberately rather than reflowed and hoped for.
- Technical SEO fundamentals are covered properly: per-page meta tags, social images, automatic sitemaps, built-in schema for products and articles, and a genuine 301 redirect panel.
Limitations
- No native A/B testing of any kind, at any price. For anyone running paid traffic that they intend to optimize, this is disqualifying on its own.
- Layout control has a hard ceiling. Professional designers hit it quickly and end up fighting the grid rather than working with it.
- Basic's transaction fees are a trap, and the plan also lacks code injection, which means no custom CSS, no third-party tags added by hand, and no custom structured data.
- Mobile page speed is middling. Squarespace ships noticeably more platform JavaScript than static-output builders, and Core Web Vitals on mobile are frequently the weak spot.
Pricing compared
Elementor
Annual licence for the Elementor Pro plugin priced by number of site activations, on top of a free core plugin; hosting is supplied by the customer, with optional Elementor Hosting and Elementor One bundles sold separately.
- Free plugin$0
- Essential$59
- Advanced$99
- Expert$199
- Agency$399
On raw capability per dollar, nothing in this category is close. Essential at $59 a year buys visual design control, a Theme Builder covering the whole site, a form builder with CRM integrations, and a popup builder, features that Unbounce and Leadpages charge more for in a single month. The Expert tier at $199 for twenty-five sites is roughly what Webflow charges for eight months of one Premium site plan. The catch is that Elementor sells you a tool, not an outcome. You still have to buy hosting, keep WordPress patched, resolve plugin conflicts, and do performance work that a hosted builder does for you. Priced honestly against that labour, Elementor is excellent value for someone who builds websites and merely adequate value for someone who wants to own one and never think about it.
Squarespace
Flat per-site subscription across four tiers, billed annually or monthly, with transaction fees on commerce that decrease as the tier increases.
- BasicAbout $16
- CoreAbout $23
- PlusAbout $39
- AdvancedAbout $99
Core at roughly $23 a month is one of the better bundles in small business software, because the honest comparison is not against a cheaper builder but against separately buying hosting, a template, a blog CMS, a form tool, a scheduling tool, and a store. Doing that costs more and takes longer, and the pieces do not match visually. Where the value degrades is at the edges: Basic is a false economy once you touch commerce or want custom code, Advanced only pays for itself at real transaction volume, and Email Campaigns being a separate bill undercuts the all-in-one promise. Buy Core, ignore Basic, and treat the higher tiers as a commerce decision rather than a website decision.
Editorial verdict on each
Elementor
Elementor is the only product in this category that sells you a tool rather than a tenancy, and that difference is worth taking seriously. For $59 a year on one site or $199 across twenty-five, you get visual design control, a Theme Builder covering the whole site, a form builder and popup builder that nobody meters, and the deepest SEO tooling available anywhere here via the WordPress ecosystem. Cancel the licence and your site stays online. No hosted builder can say that, and for a freelancer or a small business that resents renting its own website, it is a decisive advantage. What you are accepting in exchange is a maintenance relationship: hosting to procure, updates to apply, plugin conflicts to untangle, security to keep current, and performance work to do that Framer and Webflow would have handled for you. If that sounds like a fair trade, Elementor is the best value in this entire category. If it sounds like a job you did not ask for, buy Squarespace and stop thinking about it.
Read the full Elementor profileSquarespace
Squarespace is the safe answer, and being the safe answer is a legitimate product strategy. For the overwhelming majority of small businesses that need a credible website with a blog, a contact form, maybe a booking flow and a small store, Core at roughly $23 a month is a complete solution that will be live in a weekend and require no maintenance thereafter. Buy it with two things clear in your head. There is no A/B testing at any price, so if the site exists to convert paid traffic you are shopping in the wrong category. And there is no export, so the design you build is rented for as long as you pay. If those are acceptable, Squarespace is the least regretted purchase in this category. If you want ownership, take Elementor. If you want design control, take Webflow or Framer. If you want to test, take Unbounce.
Read the full Squarespace profileElementor profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Squarespace last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.