Compare
Sitemo vs Squarespace
Squarespace sells design you arrange yourself. Sitemo sells a finished site you adjust.
The short answer
Squarespace is a design tool, and a good one — if the arranging is the part you want to do, that is exactly what you are buying. Sitemo writes the first draft instead: the structure, the copy and the layouts come from a description of the business, and the visual editor is for the parts it got wrong.
Squarespace's reputation is earned: the templates are well-designed, the type and spacing are considered, and a careful person gets a genuinely handsome site out of it. The work you do is arranging your content inside that design.
Sitemo's bet is that most merchants do not want to arrange anything — they want a finished, specific site and the ability to change what is wrong with it. So the description does the arranging, and the editor is for the corrections.
Side by side
Sitemo and Squarespace
| Sitemo | Squarespace | |
|---|---|---|
| Where the site comes from | One description of the business; the structure, copy and layouts are generated from it. | A designer-made template you pick and then fill with your own content. source |
| Who writes the copy | Generated from your description and then editable in place. Anything invented rather than told to us is marked as a draft for you to confirm. | You do, into the template's placeholders. source |
| Taking your site elsewhere | Publishing compiles your site to real components, HTML and stylesheets, and export hands you that code to host anywhere. | Squarespace supports exporting most content as a WordPress-format XML file; the site's design and layout do not come with it. source |
| Booking | A booking form that holds the slot against the capacity you set and stops accepting once it is full, with the booking emailed to you and kept as a record. | Scheduling is available through Squarespace's own separate scheduling product. source |
Which one
Where each of them is the right answer
Choose Sitemo if
- You want the copy written for you rather than placeholder text to replace.
- You want a site about your business specifically, not a well-made template's idea of a business.
- The parts that are not pages — bookings, enquiries, the records they leave behind — matter to you.
Choose Squarespace if
- The design is the part you enjoy, and you want to sit with the spacing until it is right.
- You have the text and the photographs ready and want somewhere considered to put them.
- You would rather choose a design you can see up front than describe one and look at the result.
When to choose Squarespace instead
Choose Squarespace if the design is the point for you — if you want to sit with a template and get the spacing exactly right, and you have the content ready to pour into it.
Underneath
The difference that outlives this page
The table above describes things that can change from one release to the next. This section describes how the product is built, which changes more slowly.
A template is a design that has to fit every business equally well. That is a genuine achievement, and it is also a constraint: the same layout has to work for a restaurant, an accountant and a yoga studio, so the specifics are left to whoever fills it in.
A generated site starts from the opposite end: the sections are chosen for what you described, the copy is written about your business, and the theme — colour, type, spacing, how much things move — is data the page reads rather than a stylesheet you inherit. That is why "make it calmer" is a change you can ask for and see, instead of a project.
It also means the site can be honest about what it made up. Anything invented rather than told to us is marked as a draft for you to confirm, because a page full of plausible details about your business that you have never read is worse than an empty one.
Moving
What moving off Squarespace actually involves
Four steps, including the ones that take time or that nothing can do on your behalf.
Describe it rather than import it
Nothing comes across automatically. You describe the business — what you sell, who for, where — and the pages, copy and layouts are planned from that in a couple of minutes.
Describe the look as well
The colours, the typography and how restrained the motion is are all generated from your words, so "quiet, plenty of white space, nothing that moves" is an instruction rather than a hope. All of it is adjustable afterwards.
Bring your words and your photographs
The generated site ships with stock photography so it is finished from the first minute. Click an image to replace it, click a paragraph to rewrite it, and leave the rest.
Move the domain last
Your current site keeps running until you change the DNS record. Pages that bring in traffic are worth recreating at the same addresses rather than leaving to chance.
Questions
Moving, and staying
- Is a generated site as well designed as a Squarespace template?
- A template is a fixed design that fits every business equally; a generated site is chosen for what you described. The honest answer is that they are different trades, which is why you can see yours before deciding anything.
- Can I change the design after it is generated?
- Yes — colours, typography, spacing and the section arrangement are all editable, by clicking on the page or by asking in chat.
- Can I bring my Squarespace design across?
- Not as a file. Describe it instead — "quiet, lots of white space, one accent colour" — and then adjust the colours, the type and the spacing in the editor until it is what you wanted.
- What if I only like half of what it generates?
- That is the expected case, and the reason the editor exists. Keep the half that works, click into the rest, or ask in chat for a section to be rewritten — every AI edit is a checkpoint you can roll back.
- Do I need to decide what pages I want first?
- No. The page plan comes out of the description, and a page can be added later by asking for it, with the navigation and footer links updated across the site.