But, some of these features come with an added cost. From memberships and digital products to physical items and appointments, Squarespace has features to help your business grow and maintain customer loyalty.

Ecommerce Functionality: There’s no limit to the products you can offer on a Squarespace website.

Shopify’s plans fit the budgets of most small businesses and start at just $29 per month. If you want to try Shopify before committing to a plan, you can get a 14-day, free trial. Shopify is a favored choice among small business owners not only for its ease of use and affordability, but also because it has lots of room for personalization and offers thoughtful features and metrics.

You also can integrate the Shopify Point-of-Sale (POS) Lite app or other POS systems into your brick-and-mortar stores so all your transactions run on the same software. Given Shopify’s ecommerce focus, you’ll get 24/7 support from a customer service team trained to help you maximize your online business.

Transaction Fees: Unless your customers use the Shopify Payments online payment gateway, Shopify will charge you a transaction fee every time you accept money for your goods.

Higher App Costs: Shopify has an app store with thousands of plug-ins to help you create your ideal website, but some have a steep price tag and/or subscription fees.

No Autosave Function: Shopify lacks autosave functionality so users must regularly save their work to avoid losing their changes.

If you’re not satisfied, Wix offers a 14-day, money-back guarantee on your first plan purchase. Wix is affordable and feature-rich with plans starting at $14 per month, making it the website builder of choice for a broad range of industries. It provides an intuitive website-building interface and lots of customization options, but choose carefully because not all Wix templates are compatible with each other. Wix offers plans for websites with and without ecommerce stores, making it a good fit for a wide variety of service and retail-based businesses as well as freelancers, artists, and other solo professionals. If you need the most detailed metrics, you’ll have to install and connect Google Analytics™ to your website.

More Basic Metrics: Wix’s business and ecommerce analytics aren’t as robust as those offered by some of its competitors.

If you choose to leave, you may need to use a third-party app to avoid losing valuable information during the data transfer.

Easy Entrance, Difficult Exit: Wix makes it easy to get a domain and build your website, but Wix sites don’t migrate well to other web hosting providers.

Wix continues to work on improving its speed, but this template-heavy platform still lags a bit behind its hypertext markup language (HTML)-based competitors.

Slow Loading Speeds: Many Wix users report losing web traffic due to slow page-loading speeds.

Best website builder 2020