Great question! We obviously think we’re pretty great, but here’s an honest comparison:

Both Podia and Squarespace allow you to build a stylish website for your online business. You can also use both platforms to sell digital products and manage your email, and both have blogging functionality.

To help you decide between Podia vs. Squarespace, let’s take a closer look at the details.

Podia has a user-friendly website builder

If you’re in the market for a new website builder, you’ve probably heard of Squarespace. It’s one of the most popular site builders around, and it comes with a wide selection of done-for-you templates.

But while Squarespace’s code-free editor may be easier than building an entire site from scratch, it’s not as straightforward as it seems.

Templates can be a blessing and a curse. They give you a solid starting point and they look nice, but if you want to deviate from the blocks provided, things can get tricky.

To make Squarespace easier for everyday users, a lot of customizations simply aren’t available. And the ones that are can be difficult to find since there are editing options on individual elements, pages, and a separate design dashboard.

At Podia, we took a different approach.

Our easier-than-drag-and-drop website builder includes a set of content blocks with dozens of preset layouts and custom styling options. Add images, hero sections, videos, FAQs, testimonial grids, email opt-in forms, featured products, bio sections, and CTAs — all with easy customizations so you can make your site look and feel like you.

You can change up the look of your site in just a few clicks, and all our blocks play nicely together so you can add and remove anything you want.

Your Podia website can have unlimited pages, and you can use Podia to build as many standalone sales pages and landing pages as you want. Podia has a full blogging feature with unlimited blog posts and SEO features on all plans.

Rather than trying to find a template that exactly matches what you want your website to do, Podia makes it easy to simply add the sections you want, and they’ll all look great out of the box.

And speaking of ease-of-use, you can update global styles (like your colors, fonts, and website spacing) in just a few clicks, and your colors will even populate in your courses and Podia Email editor so everything in your business looks cohesive.

“Podia makes website building so fun. I feel like I could set up a site in an afternoon, and it would look great. And if there’s something to be said for how pretty it is. It’s the best-looking one by far.”

– Joseph D’Amico, online classical piano instructor and founder of Flex Lessons

Selling physical products vs. digital products

If you’re using your website for ecommerce, the decision between Podia vs. Squarespace depends on what kinds of products you want to sell.

Podia is a better choice if you’re selling online courses, webinars, coaching, and digital downloads. Your customers can access all of their purchases and content from one sleek dashboard, and there are fewer limitations on the types of files you can sell.

Create unlimited products on all plans, bundle products together, offer upsells, and create different payment plans to accommodate your customers. You can also make time-limited products, seat limits, checkout upsells, waitlists, and presales.

Course creation is a breeze with Podia’s intuitive course builder, meaning you won’t need to use a separate learning management system or plugin.

Podia includes video hosting for up to 1,000 videos and your courses can have as many modules, lessons, quizzes, and embeds as you like. You can also enable course comments to make your content more interactive or bundle your course with Discord access for a community feature.

When it comes to marketing your products, you can set up your own affiliate program for your courses and products so that happy customers can earn a commission for promoting your work. (Ahh, the beauty of an all-in-one platform.)

On the flipside, Squarespace is a good fit for selling physical products because there are integrations for shipping, inventory management, and point of sale. It’s possible to sell digital products on Squarespace, but there are notable limitations.

Files can only be up to 300 MB, and you can only sell one file per product. You can work around this by zipping files together, but you still can’t exceed 300 MB. You can’t offer variations for digital products, nor can you sell digital items as subscriptions.

If you want to sell courses, you can do so on all plans, but you’ll only have 30 minutes of video storage. To add more videos to your course, you’ll need to pay extra for a Digital Products add-on. Squarespace also has higher transaction fees on digital product sales than Podia, and the only way to lower them is to pay for the Digital Products add-on.

Finally, Squarespace also doesn’t have affiliate marketing so if you want this feature you might need to use another platform.

Bottom line: Go with Podia if you want to sell digital goods and a full-featured online course platform. Go with Squarespace if you want to sell physical items.

Built-in email marketing tools

Both Squarespace and Podia have email marketing tools available so small business owners can manage things in one place.

With Podia, you can build your email list, offer lead magnets, create newsletters, and drip content to subscribers over time. You can choose from over a dozen email templates or create your own, and you can easily pull in your blog posts for easy sharing.

All plans come with unlimited campaigns and automations, as well as segmentation, tagging, and email analytics.

Podia’s email features are free for your first 100 subscribers, and you can upgrade to add more subscribers as you grow. No matter what email plan you’re on, you get access to all advanced features and unlimited monthly email sends.

Podia also includes live chat messaging on all plans. You can easily communicate with visitors to answer questions and give your website a personal touch.

Squarespace also has an email marketing tool with email design templates. All Squarespace email plans have unlimited subscribers, and you can send automations on the Core plan and above. There are email send limits on all plans and campaign limits on all plans except the highest price Max plan.

Squarespace does not have a built-in customer chat tool.

Podia vs. Squarespace pricing

Podia and Squarespace have very different pricing models.

With Squarespace, there are several base plans to choose from and lots of add-on plans you can pay for if you want additional features.

For example, there are three different digital product plans, three plans for scheduling appointments, and four different email marketing plans that you can add to your base plan, giving you nearly endless combinations for pricing.

It’s not easy to find the details of these prices on Squarespace’s website. (In researching this article, it took nearly an hour to track down all the different pricing upsells, and I’m not even sure I found them all.)

Here’s a look at the Squarespace pricing plans:

Squarespace website pricing:

You must have one of these plans before adding digital products, email, and scheduling.

• Personal: $25/month

• Business: $36/month

• Basic Commerce: $40/month

• Advanced Commerce: $72/month

If you want to sell digital products, you can do so on all plans, but with limited functionality. The base plans above each include 30 minutes of video storage and 9% transaction fees on sales.

If you need more storage or want to lower transaction fees, you’ll need the digital products add-on.

Digital products add-on pricing (in addition to your base plan):

• Starter: Additional $12 per month, 10 hours of video storage, 7% transaction fees

• Core: Additional $37 per month, 50 hours of video storage, 3% transaction fees

• Professional: Additional $111 per month, unlimited video storage, no transaction fees

And if you wanted email, you’d need the email add-on. All plans come with unlimited subscribers, but you’re limited in how many emails you can send and how many campaigns you can make.

• Starter: $10 per month, 3 campaigns, 500 emails per month

• Core: $20 per month, 5 campaigns, 5,000 emails per month, email automations

• Pro: $48 per month, 20 campaigns, 50,000 emails per month, email automations

• Max: $96 per month, unlimited campaigns, 250,000 emails per month, email automations

Podia, on the other hand, has a simple pricing structure. There are two paid plans and the option to add more email subscribers as your list grows.

Podia pricing:

• Mover plan: $39/month and 5% transaction fee ($33/month when paid annually): Mover includes your website, blog, landing pages, and customer messaging, plus unlimited digital products, courses, custom domains, and third-party code.

• Shaker plan: $89/month and 0% transaction fee ($75/month when paid annually): Shaker includes all the Mover features plus the option to make your own affiliate program.

You can also add Podia Email to any Podia base plan. Podia Email is free for your first 100 subscribers, and after that, the price goes up as your list grows. All plans have all email features, so you can send beautiful newsletters, run advanced automations, build campaigns, and segment/filter your audience no matter your list size.

Running an online business with Podia vs. Squarespace

Now that we’ve looked at Podia and Squarespace’s pricing and features, here’s an example of how this could work for a real business.

Let’s say you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, and you’re ready to share your ideas with the world. You set up your website and start growing your business over the course of a year.

You create three online courses with about ten hours of video content in them, and you grow your email list to 500 subscribers. You build out 5 different nurture campaigns that send people to your courses too.

If you used Squarespace, your first year in business would cost $864 (or $72 per month)

• Basic commerce plan $40/month

• Starter digital products plan + $12 per month

• Core email plan + $20 per month

If you used Podia, your first year in business could cost $576 (or $48 per month)

• Mover plan $39/month

• Email add-on +$9 month

That’s over $250 in savings, each year in business, and a much simpler platform to keep things running.

With all that extra money in your pocket, there’s no telling what you could create.

So let’s get started.

Start your free trial of Podia today.