The short version: Squarespace Core and Wix Core are both $29 a month billed annually, both take 0% commission, and both process cards at 2.9% plus $0.30. At that tier they cost the same to the cent. The differences are at the edges: Wix's cheapest paid plan is $17 but cannot accept payments at all, while Squarespace's cheapest is $19 and carries a 2% store transaction fee that makes it more expensive than the $29 plan above $500 a month in sales. Wix also has a permanent free plan and a 14-day money-back guarantee rather than a trial, and it charges 3.7% on American Express where Squarespace publishes a single rate.
Figures came from each company's own pages, both verified in July 2026.
Both are website builders with commerce bolted on, and both do that well. The split is in how they build.
Squarespace is opinionated. Templates are structured, the design system constrains you, and the result looks professional almost regardless of what you do. That constraint is the product: you cannot easily make it ugly.
Wix is flexible. Drag-and-drop positioning means you can put anything anywhere, which is genuinely liberating and genuinely dangerous. Wix also has far more apps and a free tier.
For a food business, the practical differences:
Same four disclosures on both.
| Squarespace | Wix | |
|---|---|---|
| Subscription | $19/mo Basic · $29/mo Core · Plus $49 · Advanced $99, billed annually | Free $0 · Light $17/mo · Core $29/mo · Business $39 · Business Elite $159, each per month on a yearly subscription paid in full |
| Free trial | 14 days free | No time-limited trial. The Free plan is permanent, and paid plans carry a 14-day money-back guarantee |
| Platform fee | 2% online store fee on Basic (7% on digital content and memberships). 0% on Core and above | $0. No Wix commission on sales, on any plan |
| Card processing | From 2.9% + $0.30 | Wix Payments US: 2.9% + $0.30 on cards, 3.7% + $0.30 on American Express |
Two things worth pulling out of that table before going further. Wix's Free plan cannot accept payments, so it is a website, not a store. And Wix's Light plan at $17 does not include eCommerce either: paid selling starts at Core, $29.
Both have one, and they fail in different ways.
Squarespace Basic at $19 does let you sell, and then charges 2% of every store sale. The $10 gap to Core disappears once 2% of your sales exceeds $10, which is $500 a month. Above that, the $29 plan is genuinely cheaper than the $19 plan:
Our breakdown of Squarespace's transaction fee covers exactly where it applies, including the 7% on digital products.
Wix Light at $17 fails differently and more cleanly: it does not sell anything. There is no transaction fee to work around because there are no transactions. If you want to take money, the entry price is $29.
So both companies' cheapest paid tier is the wrong buy for a food business, and for a food business the real comparison is $29 against $29.
Wix's version is arguably the more honest of the two. A plan that cannot take payments is obviously not a store, and you find that out before you have sold anything. Squarespace's version lets you build, launch, and sell for months before you notice that 2% has been coming off every order, because a percentage on a growing number never announces itself. If you are already on Basic and doing more than $500 a month, the upgrade is the highest-return five minutes available to you today.
Both platforms have upper tiers, and for a food business almost none of them are worth buying.
Squarespace Plus at $49 and Advanced at $99 add commerce depth: more advanced merchandising, abandoned-cart recovery, and eventually API access. The store transaction fee is already 0% at $29, so nothing above Core reduces your per-order cost. You are buying features, not a better rate.
Wix Business at $39 and Business Elite at $159 work the same way. Wix takes no commission at any tier, so the extra $10 or $130 a month buys storage, marketing tools, and developer capability rather than cheaper transactions.
That is genuinely different from Shopify and Square, where higher tiers buy a lower processing rate and there is a volume at which upgrading pays for itself. Here there is no such crossover, which makes the decision easier: stay at $29 until a specific feature is costing you money or hours. If you find yourself eyeing a $99 plan, price what a purpose-built ordering tool would cost instead, because the gap between $29 and $99 buys a lot of software elsewhere.
The money is identical, so this comes down to product decisions.
Question six catches people out. Wix's freedom comes from absolute positioning, and the cost of that is you cannot swap a design out from under your content. If you rebuild your site every couple of years, that is a real consideration.
Usually not much, but it is worth a minute of arithmetic rather than a shrug.
Wix charges 3.7% plus $0.30 on Amex against 2.9% plus $0.30 on other cards, a difference of 0.8 percentage points. On a $25 order, that is 20¢. On $1,000 a month of Amex volume, it is $8 a month, or $96 a year.
For most local food vendors, Amex is a small share of card volume, so the practical impact is tens of dollars a year. For a vendor whose customers skew toward Amex-heavy demographics, it is worth checking your actual mix rather than assuming.
Squarespace publishes a single starting rate without breaking out card types, so if Amex is meaningful to you, ask directly what it charges before treating the two as identical.
The broader lesson is worth keeping. A published rate that starts with the word "from" is a floor, not a price, and the variation sits in card type, card presence, and international cards. Two platforms advertising 2.9% can produce different monthly totals on identical sales, and the only way to know is to compare a real statement after a month of trading rather than two marketing pages.
Our look at Squarespace alternatives for food vendors covers who eventually outgrows it, and Squarespace for farmers market vendors covers the market-stall case specifically.
The tell is where you spend your evenings. If you would happily lose an hour to typography, buy Squarespace; the design ceiling is the product, and you will actually use it.
Our look at Wix alternatives for food vendors covers where it strains for local selling.
Wix wins on price at every tier that can take a payment, and its ADI setup is faster for someone who wants a site, not a project. The Amex surcharge is the one line to check against your customers.
Both are website builders. Local food selling has requirements neither was designed around, and this is where both start to hurt.
That first one is the recurring problem. A Wednesday market, a Saturday market, and porch pickup on Sunday means three schedules and three cutoffs, and on either platform you end up encoding that into product names or typing rules into an order note half your customers will not read.
If that is your week, Homegrown is $10 a month billed annually with 0% commission and 2.9% plus $0.30 processing published up front, and it handles pickup at each place you sell with its own schedule and cutoff, local delivery with a radius and a route, and sales tax calculated, filed, and remitted in all 50 states. The honest bounds: it is not a website builder. There is no template system, no blog, no scheduling module, no app market, and it does not ship nationally. If you need a designed marketing site, both platforms here do something it does not. You can run a week of real orders through it next to whatever you use now and see which part of the problem each tool is actually solving.
Worth asking honestly, because a lot of food vendors buy one out of habit.
A website builder makes sense when your business needs pages: a story, a gallery, an events list, a blog, a wholesale enquiry form. If customers decide to buy from you because of what they read and see, you are buying a website and the store is secondary.
It makes less sense when your business is transactions. If people already know what they want and just need to place an order for Saturday, the pages are decoration around a checkout, and you are paying $348 a year for a design system to solve a scheduling problem.
Most vendors sit somewhere between, which is why the common setup is a simple site plus a separate ordering tool. That is more expensive than one platform and often the right call anyway, because a marketing site and a checkout genuinely have different jobs.
Whichever way you go, settle your business name before you print anything. The USPTO's trademark basics explains how to search existing marks and what registration protects, and finding a conflict now costs a great deal less than finding one after two years of building a following. If you sell recipe cards or e-books alongside the food, note that Squarespace charges 7% on digital content on its Basic plan, and the Copyright Office's registration guidance covers what protection those files have by default.
There is a permanent Free plan, then Light at $17 a month, Core at $29, Business at $39, and Business Elite at $159, all per month on a yearly subscription paid in full. Payments require Core or above.
Basic is $19 a month billed annually, Core $29, Plus $49, and Advanced $99. The free trial is 14 days, and card processing starts at 2.9% plus $0.30 on all plans.
No. Wix takes no commission on sales on any plan. What you pay is Wix Payments processing: 2.9% plus $0.30 on cards in the US, and 3.7% plus $0.30 on American Express.
No. The Free plan cannot accept payments, and the $17 Light plan does not include eCommerce either. Selling starts at Core, $29 a month.
They tie at $29 a month with 0% commission and 2.9% plus $0.30 processing. The only real difference is Wix's higher American Express rate, which is worth about $96 a year on $1,000 a month of Amex volume.
Not if you sell more than $500 a month. Its 2% store fee exceeds the $10 saving above that point, so the $29 Core plan is genuinely cheaper. At $2,000 a month, Basic costs $360 a year more.
Squarespace, for most people, because its constraints do the design work. Wix gives you more control, which is better if you know what you want and slower if you do not.
At the tier a food business will actually buy, these two cost the same: $29 a month, no commission, 2.9% plus $0.30. Stop comparing prices and compare products.
Pick Squarespace if you want a good-looking site quickly and would rather not make design decisions. Pick Wix if you want control, a bigger app market, or the ability to build the entire thing free before paying.
Both have a cheap plan that is the wrong answer. Wix Light at $17 cannot take money at all, and Squarespace Basic at $19 costs more than Core above $500 a month in sales. If you are selling food, the entry price on either platform is $29, and the pricing pages do not put it that plainly.
