Squarespace vs. Mailchimp

Mailchimp vs Squarespace at a glance

The basics

Though they offer many of the same functions, Mailchimp and Squarespace are built to fulfill different marketing goals.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp was initially designed to be an email marketing tool for small businesses. Today, we’ve grown to be an all-in-one Marketing Platform that offers everything from email marketing and A/B testing to landing pages and postcards. We also make it easy to get a custom domain name and build your own website without any coding knowledge.

Mailchimp has an average user rating of 4.3 out of 5, with over 10,000 customer reviews on G2’s website. G2 also named us a Fall 2020 Leader in email marketing and marketing automation categories. (Source: G2.com)

Squarespace

Squarespace began as a tool for folks who wanted to create sleek, professional-looking websites for their business. Its website builder is easy to use and offers a convenient way for companies to set up a new site or online business.

But while Squarespace has expanded to offer additional functionality to users—like email marketing, for instance—their suite of features is limited compared to a marketing platform like Mailchimp. That means if you need more comprehensive marketing capabilities, you might have to turn to an outside service.

What you should know before building a website for your business

Before you jump into creating a website for your business, consider the tools you’ll need to make it a success. At a minimum, the platform you use should have an easy-to-use website editor, built-in marketing features, and integrations for the other apps and services that your business relies on every day.

While both Squarespace and Mailchimp meet these basic requirements, the functions and user experience have significant differences. Before you start building your website, be sure you know how the two platforms stack up.

Website building

Squarespace might be a more familiar name to folks who are looking for websites, but that doesn’t mean you should count Mailchimp out if you’re looking to create a new online home for your business.

Our free website builder gives you the power to quickly and easily create beautiful websites, even if you’re still in the early stages of starting your online business. You can also create a landing page, a survey form, or just a digital “coming soon” placeholder for your site with our drag-and-drop editor.

Similar to Squarespace, you can also connect an existing domain name to your Mailchimp website, claim a new domain, or reserve your domain until the site is ready to publish.

Squarespace’s site builder uses a drag-and-drop editor, too, and offers both simple templates for people who are new to web design and plenty of customization options for those with coding experience. They also offer a logo maker, password protection capabilities, and mobile editing through their app.

Both platforms offer powerful website-building capabilities, but our website builder functionality is available in all Mailchimp accounts, even users on our Free plan. While Squarespace does offer a free trial period, once it expires, users will need to choose between one of four paid plans, ranging from $12 per month to $40 per month, when billed annually.

E-commerce features

For businesses looking to bolster their online retail capabilities, both platforms offer impressive e-commerce functionality.

One of Squarespace’s defining features is its easy-to-use, well-designed page templates. Their pre-built e-commerce templates help business owners set up an online business easily, complete with product descriptions and checkout functionality. They’ve got options for businesses that sell products, services, and subscriptions, and they allow users to manage inventory and track and calculate shipping costs.

With Mailchimp, you can take your business online and start selling right away. So if you have a new product or limited-edition item, you can simply add a Stripe buy button to your website and be ready to sell in minutes. Lots of folks have found success with our e-commerce tools, too. We helped drive over 12 million orders for users from Black Friday and Cyber Monday events in 2019. Small businesses also saw over $3.5 billion in revenue as a direct result of their campaigns with Mailchimp.

Mailchimp connects with the apps and web services that businesses use every day, including most of the major e-commerce platforms like WooCommerce, BigCommerce, or Shopify (via Shopsync integration).

What really sets Mailchimp apart, however, are our analytics and Marketing CRM tools. Once customers make a purchase, you can use our powerful data gathering and email marketing tools to keep them engaged. We give you everything you need to create a remarketing campaign targeting folks who visit your site, send a friendly welcome email to new customers, or recommend other products your customers might be interested in.

Integrations

When it comes to e-commerce, the integrations you use are just as important as the website itself. The right plugins make it easier for customers to buy your stuff—and more convenient for you to manage and fulfill those orders, too.

Mailchimp integrates with 250+ different apps and web services, like Square, Shopify, Magento, and many more. That means if you already have an online business, you can keep using your existing e-commerce systems even if you upgrade to a brand new site. And if you’ve got a brick-and-mortar store, Mailchimp can seamlessly integrate with your point of sale system, too.

Squarespace, on the other hand, only offers about 60 third-party integrations and less than 20 extensions. That said, you can still use apps like Disqus so visitors can add comments to your site or connect with social media sites like Instagram and Facebook. Squarespace users with a store also have the option to accept payments via Square, Stripe, and PayPal.

Mailchimp’s small business marketing tools vs. Squarespace

Small businesses need more than just a good website to succeed—they need access to marketing tools that help them promote their website, products, and services, too. Fortunately, both Squarespace and Mailchimp offer digital e-commerce marketing tools so small businesses can expand their reach.

Here are some of the most prominent features and tools offered by each platform.

Email marketing

Email marketing is a cornerstone of any modern marketing campaign, with some research showing that it can offer an ROI of about $51 for every dollar spent to some businesses that use it. And while both platforms offer at least some email marketing functionality, Mailchimp largely beats out Squarespace when it comes to versatility.

From a design perspective, Mailchimp and Squarespace both have templates that can be used to create mobile-friendly, branded emails that look clean and professional. And, no matter which platform you choose, you’ll have access to a drag-and-drop editor and a robust content studio where you can store all of your images and logos to access anytime you need them.

In each platform, you’ll find templated email layouts that mirror the design of your website, so you can keep your branding consistent across multiple touchpoints. Email editing is simple and streamlined in both Mailchimp and Squarespace, too, with clearly-designated options for adding buttons, images, or headings to your emails.

Because Squarespace’s email marketing capabilities are newer, however, they don’t currently offer some of the key email marketing features that Mailchimp does, like A/B testing and customer surveys.

Another caveat to Squarespace’s email marketing service: it’s offered as an extra charge on top of your existing website plan. Pricing for email marketing plans at Squarespace ranges from $7/month to $68/month billed monthly, depending on the features you’re looking for.

And while Squarespace only lets you send 500 emails each month on their $7/month email marketing plan, Mailchimp allows you to send up to 10,000 emails each month (and have up to 2,000 contacts) at absolutely no cost.

Automations

Automations allow you to send the right people the right message at exactly the right time, making email marketing easier, and helping you retain customers who might be in danger of dropping off your radar.

Mailchimp makes automations approachable to give you an always on presence, which in turn helps you market smarter, engage with your customers, and frees up headspace to focus on areas of your business that need your attention. In our Customer Journey builder, you can visually map and customize journeys to trigger specific events for every path your customers travel in an intuitive and easy-to-use interface and understand how they interact throughout their journey. Features such as drag-and-drop or modifying actions and pre-built customer journeys combine simplicity with functionality to help you build confidence in the accuracy and efficacy of these tools in increasing your automated marketing capacity. All the while, you maintain control in curating and customizing the journey the way that best keeps you connected and close to your customers, messaging them when they want to hear from you without feeling overwhelmed.

All Mailchimp users—even those on a Free plan—have access to powerful pre-built automations, like welcome emails for new customers, abandoned cart reminders to folks who visit your online store but don’t complete their purchase, re-engagement emails for customers who’ve been away for a while, access to test the customer journey builder, and more. And when you upgrade to our Standard plan (starting at $14.99/month), you’ll unlock the ability to build customized, multi-step automation that are triggered by specific events or behaviors.

Squarespace’s offerings are limited to two types of email automation: subscriber activity and commerce (abandoned cart). To take advantage of these features, however, you’ll need to upgrade to their Core plan, which starts at $14/month.

Digital ads

Mailchimp users can run digital ads through Facebook, Instagram, and Google’s ad network to reach a wide selection of people. Once a new potential customer has visited your site, you can even retarget them as they browse the web to keep them coming back.

Squarespace allows you to post to your business’s social media accounts—including Pinterest and Instagram product posts. They also offer third-party integrations for Google retargeting ads and Facebook ads. Squarespace provides site performance data and can show you how much traffic came to your website via social media, but unlike Mailchimp, they don’t provide specific social media metrics.

Analytics

Real-time analytics features give you the data you need to target your audience effectively. Mailchimp allows you to view all of your marketing campaign data—including growth, engagement, and revenue reports—in one convenient place, so you’ll always know exactly how you’re doing.

Squarespace provides users with feedback on their customers as well. They provide statistics like click rates and conversions, and they’ll show you where most of your site traffic is coming from. They also offer activity logs that let you see how people are navigating through your site, which can help you find dead spots.

Squarespace has excellent analytics functionality for their websites (available for Website Business plan level and above), but they provide less data for their other marketing offerings. Mailchimp offers robust analytics for customer data across more channels.

Why use Mailchimp to build your business website?

Squarespace offers impressive tools for small business owners looking to build their own site, but it has significant gaps in functionality when it comes to providing additional marketing channels and analytics beyond the website. Where Squarespace sometimes falls short, Mailchimp can step in.

Both Mailchimp and Squarespace allow you to design sleek, professional websites, but with Mailchimp, you’ll get more powerful e-commerce marketing tools across more channels.

For many businesses, designing a website or a product landing page is only the beginning. With Mailchimp’s all-in-one Marketing Platform, you can also sell your items online, advertise your business or products across Google’s ad network and social channels like Facebook and Instagram. While Squarespace allows you to publish content from your website to your social channels, you will need to leverage 3rd party integrations (or extensions) to run retargeting and social media ads.

There’s no cost to create and publish a website when you create a Mailchimp account and sign up for our Free plan, and if you’re interested in more advanced marketing features—like retargeting ads or multistep automations—you can upgrade to our Standard Plan which starts at $14.99/month. And with Mailchimp, you can manage all of your marketing campaigns in one place; all while monitoring your performance and tracking analytics data in real-time, so you’ll know what’s working and what isn’t.

Mailchimp also offers a wider array of integrations than Squarespace, which means more flexibility for your business. You can connect your Mailchimp account with many of the tools you’re already using to run your business, and then use your website to sell physical products, subscriptions, or services. And if you already have a Shopify store, you can also connect your Shopify store to your Mailchimp account via our ShopSync integration.

Overall, Mailchimp provides more features, more customization, and more robust data analytics than Squarespace, not to mention a larger suite of marketing tools. Plus, you get it all for less money when you choose Mailchimp’s Free or Essentials plan over Squarespace’s lowest tiered Personal plan.

Ready to learn what Mailchimp can do for you? Sign up today and test our marketing platform out for yourself.

More comparisons

• HubSpot vs. Mailchimp
• GoDaddy vs. Mailchimp
• Shopify vs. Mailchimp
• Constant Contact vs. Mailchimp
• Klaviyo vs. Mailchimp
• Sendinblue vs. Mailchimp
• Free Marketing Tools
• How the Best Free Website Builders Compare to Mailchimp