Crate vs Squarespace
Squarespace makes beautiful websites and has for a long time. Commerce is something it added to that. Crate is the other way round: the commerce is the product, and the site is one of the places it shows up.
What Squarespace is: A website builder known for its templates and design control, with a commerce layer built on top of it.
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How does Crate compare to Squarespace?
Squarespace began as a website builder and added commerce to it, which is why its design tooling is stronger than its operations tooling. Crate began as a commerce platform, which is why its operations tooling is stronger than its design tooling. If the thing you are making is mainly a beautiful site with a small shop attached, Squarespace is the more natural fit and its templates are excellent. If the thing you are making is mainly a business that needs stock counts, order states, staff permissions, a till and payouts that agree with each other, that is the half Crate is built around, and the site comes with it.
Side by side
Qualitative and stable. No prices and no fee percentages for either side, because both change without notice and a comparison table carrying a stale number is worse than no table.
| What | Crate | Squarespace |
|---|---|---|
| Where it started | As a commerce platform. The site is one surface on top of the catalog. | As a website builder. Commerce was added to it. |
| Design control | A curated set of mobile-first themes and a visual builder. Fewer choices, all of them safe on a phone. | Its strongest suit: a large template library and fine-grained layout control. |
| Stock across channels | One count, shared by the storefront, social selling and the till. | Stock is tracked for the online store. |
| Selling in chat | Built in, as a first-class order source. | Not a native channel. |
| Point of sale | Included, on the phone you already have. | Available in some markets, with its own constraints. |
| Staff and permissions | Roles, per-staff permissions and an activity trail come with the platform. | Contributor permissions are available on the site. |
| Blogging and content | A blog and pages, adequate rather than remarkable. | Genuinely good, and one of the reasons people pick it. |
Which one you actually want
Both columns are real. If the right-hand one describes you, take it: a product that does not fit you is a refund with extra steps.
Choose Crate if
- The shop is the business, not a section of the website.
- You need stock, orders and payouts to agree without you checking.
- You sell in more than one place and refuse to count stock twice.
- You do most of your admin on a phone.
Choose Squarespace if
- The site is the point and the shop is a small part of it.
- You want deep design control over every page and you enjoy using it.
- Editorial content is central to how you get found.
- You are a portfolio, a studio or a practice that sells a handful of things.
Where Crate is behind
Every comparison on this site carries this section. A page that only lists what we do better is an advert, and you already know how much to trust one of those.
Where Crate is behind: page design range. Squarespace's template library and layout control are broader and more refined than our visual builder, and their editorial and blogging tools are better than ours. We spent that budget on operations instead: stock, orders, permissions, payouts and a till that agree with each other. If the site is the product and the shop is a shelf inside it, that trade is the wrong way round for you.
About switching to Crate from Squarespace
Short answers, and none of them hedge. If yours is not here, ask us on the contact page.
Can Crate host my whole website, not just the shop?
Yes. Pages, a blog, navigation and a custom domain are all included, and the storefront is part of the same site rather than a subdomain.
Is the Crate builder as flexible as Squarespace?
No, and it is not trying to be. Crate ships a smaller set of themes that are already correct on a phone, and the builder edits sections within them.
How this comparison is kept honest
Last checked
Everything said about Squarespace here is a qualitative property of the product taken from what Squarespace publishes about itself: what kind of product it is, which channels it sells through natively, and which capabilities it ships rather than leaves to an add-on. We publish no prices, fees, percentages or counts for any competitor, including ourselves, on these pages, because those change without notice and a table carrying a stale number does more damage than no table.
Claims about Crate on this page do not go beyond what our own feature, pricing and security pages already state. Where they would, they are not made.
Product capabilities change. This page states what was accurate on the date above and nothing beyond it. If a row is out of date, we would rather hear it than rank on it.
Other comparisons
Same structure, same honesty rules, different competitor.
- Crate vs Square Online Payments-led commerce
- Crate vs BigCommerce Hosted commerce platform
- Crate vs Wix Website builder with commerce
- Crate vs WooCommerce Self-hosted open source
- Crate vs Ecwid Commerce widget for an existing site
- Crate vs Etsy Marketplace
- Crate vs Gumroad Creator checkout for digital products
- Crate vs Payhip Digital product and membership storefront
Try it before you decide.
Every plan starts with the same trial and the same full feature set. Import your catalog, take one real order, and judge it on that.
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