Tropic Arts vs Squarespace

Squarespace and Tropic Arts share one idea: a small business deserves a beautiful, professional website without hiring a designer. Squarespace has been making websites since 2003, is used by millions of businesses and creators, and has grown into a full business platform with a store, invoicing, scheduling and email marketing. Tropic Arts is newer and smaller. It gives you a finished, designer-made site, has AI write every page of it for your business, and builds the store, bookings, email and customer list into one console at one flat price.

We make Tropic Arts, so read this with that in mind. We've tried hard to be fair. Every detail about Squarespace below comes from Squarespace's own website and help center, checked on September 27, 2026, and we say plainly where Squarespace is the better choice. For selling, there are quite a few places where it is.

The short answer

Squarespace is the better fit if you want to place things freely on the page and add your own code, or if you need selling tools we don't have: gift cards, invoices, courses and paid content, point of sale, PayPal, Google and Instagram listings, or a site in more than one language. Its support team also answers email around the clock.

Tropic Arts is the better fit if you'd rather start from a complete, multi-page site a designer already laid out, have AI write all of it for your business, and get bookings, email newsletters and a mailbox in one flat price, with no fee from us on anything you sell. You can also change templates later and test changes on a private copy of your site first. The trade is that you work within a template's sections instead of on a free-form grid, and our selling tools are simpler.

Tropic Arts and Squarespace side by side

Prices are per month on a yearly plan, in US dollars, before tax. We checked every Squarespace detail on September 27, 2026.

Tropic Arts and Squarespace at a glance

Feature	Tropic Arts	Squarespace
A site on your own domain	$15/mo (Starter)	$19/mo (Basic)
An online store	$25/mo (Store)	$19/mo plus a 2% fee (Basic), or $29/mo (Core)
Fee on store sales	None	2% on Basic; none on Core and up
Fee on memberships and paid content	None	7% on Basic, 5% on Core, 1% on Plus
Free trial	No card, no time limit	14 days, no card
Free domain for a year	No; sold separately	Yes, with a yearly plan
Templates	60+, about 7 pages each	Hundreds
AI builds the whole site	Yes, every page's words	Yes, with images, colors and fonts
Edit by chatting with AI	Yes, on any page	Yes, rolling out to sites in waves
AI allowance	100 or 150 actions a month	Chat and writing free; credits for other AI tools
Logo design	AI logo designer, 5 sets a month	A free logo maker
Place things anywhere	No; sections you edit, reorder and recolor	Yes, drag and drop on a grid
Custom CSS and code	No	CSS on every plan; JavaScript on Core and up
Switch templates later	Yes, on a private copy first	No; restyle or start a new site
Appointment booking	Every plan; no payment at booking	Acuity Scheduling, from $16/mo extra, with payments
Email newsletters	5,000 sends a month included	From $8/mo extra; $14/mo for 5,000
Mailbox on your domain	One included	Google Workspace, free for a year on Core and up
Gift cards, invoices, abandoned-cart emails	No	Yes, every plan
Courses and members-only pages	No	Yes, every plan
Team members	Up to 25, on any plan	2 on Basic; unlimited on Core and up
Visitor stats	Built in, without cookies	Built in, using cookies
Apps and extensions	No	About 50 extensions
Site in more than one language	No	Yes, through Weglot
Sell in person	No	Yes, in the US and UK
List products on Google and Instagram	No	Yes; Google Shopping on Core and up
Payment providers	Stripe	Squarespace Payments, Stripe, PayPal
Test changes on a private copy	Yes	Only by duplicating the site as a new trial
Backups	Daily; we restore for you	No revision history; deleted pages kept 30 days
Support	Email; reply within two business days	Email around the clock; live chat on weekdays
Take your site elsewhere	Data exports only	Data exports, plus pages and one blog for WordPress

What you'll pay

Tropic Arts has two plans. Starter is $15 a month billed yearly ($180 a year), or $25 month to month, for a site that doesn't sell online. Store is $25 a month billed yearly ($300 a year), or $35 month to month, and adds the online store. Both include hosting, SSL, the AI builder and editor, the AI logo designer, bookings, 5,000 email sends a month, one mailbox on your domain and room for up to 25 people on your team. Neither has a setup fee, and we take no cut of anything you sell: payments run through your own Stripe account, so you pay Stripe's fees directly and nothing on top to us. Domains are sold separately.

Squarespace has four plans: Basic at $19 a month billed yearly ($25 month to month), Core at $29 ($39), Plus at $49 ($65) and Advanced at $99 ($139). Every plan can sell, but Basic adds a 2% fee to online sales and leaves out discount codes and automatic sales tax, so most stores will want Core. Once you sell more than $500 a month online, the fee alone costs more than the $10 difference. Memberships, courses and other paid content carry a separate fee that falls as you move up: 7% on Basic, 5% on Core, 1% on Plus and none on Advanced. Card processing through Squarespace Payments is 2.9% plus 30 cents on Basic and Core, and a little less on the plans above. A yearly plan comes with a free domain for the first year, after which a .com renews at $20 a year.

Some things we include are separate subscriptions at Squarespace. Appointment booking is Acuity Scheduling, from $16 a month billed yearly. Email Campaigns starts at $8 a month billed yearly for 500 emails, and 5,000 emails a month, the amount our plans include, costs $14. Core and up come with one Google Workspace mailbox, free for the first year and then $84 a year per user.

Here's how that adds up for a small shop that takes appointments and sends a monthly newsletter. On Tropic Arts, it's the Store plan: $300 a year. On Squarespace, it's Core ($348 a year), Acuity's Starter plan ($192) and 5,000 emails a month ($168): $708 in the first year, and $792 from the second if you keep the Google Workspace mailbox. To be fair to Squarespace, those tools do more than ours. Acuity takes payment and deposits when clients book, and Email Campaigns can send automated emails, such as a welcome email for new subscribers. For a site that doesn't sell, the gap is smaller: $15 a month against $19.

Getting your site built: templates and AI

Squarespace made its name with templates, and it has hundreds of them, all included with its plans. Its AI builder, Blueprint AI, will make the whole site for you. You describe what you're building and choose a brand personality, colors and fonts, and it produces a multi-page site, with copy and images to match. You can then keep refining by chatting with Clarkson, Squarespace's AI assistant, which can change text, images, products and site styles. Squarespace says it's rolling Clarkson out to sites in waves, so yours may not have it yet. Neither Clarkson nor Squarespace's AI writing tools use credits. Credits pay for tools such as Image Studio, which creates and restyles images. Basic includes 10 credits in total, and the plans above include 20, 40 or 120 a month, with more to buy in packs. For logos, Squarespace has a free logo maker that pairs an icon with your business name.

Tropic Arts has a smaller library of 60-plus templates, and every one was designed in-house for a particular kind of business: a plumber, a nail studio, a law firm, a winery, a veterinary hospital. Each arrives as a whole site. They average about seven pages, such as about, services and contact pages plus the legal pages, with sample content that shows what each section is for.

That's where the AI builder starts. You tell it about your business (your name, what you do, where you are, your hours and how people reach you), and it writes every page of the template for you, up to twelve of them, along with the header and footer. When it's done you're in the editor, where you can keep talking to it. Ask it to rewrite a section in a warmer voice, add a section about your warranty, or tighten the services page. Each change is a draft you preview before anything goes live, and you can publish several pages at once. The AI can also suggest a color palette and apply it across the site, and the AI logo designer sketches three logo directions from a short chat, refines the one you pick, and gives you a dark version and a favicon to go with it.

Here's the honest difference. Squarespace's AI now handles images as well as words, and ours doesn't: it writes within a template a designer has already laid out, and the template's pictures stay until you upload your own. We think starting from a designed template is a strength, because the result looks designed rather than assembled, but it does mean your site's structure starts from one of ours. Our AI is also metered where Squarespace's chat isn't. Each request counts as one AI action: the trial includes 40, Starter 100 a month and Store 150 a month, and you can buy 50 more for $10 whenever you need them.

Design freedom: where Squarespace is ahead

Squarespace's editor, Fluid Engine, lets you drag blocks anywhere on a grid, overlap them, and arrange the phone layout separately from the desktop one. You can choose from about 1,600 fonts or upload your own, and restyle the whole site with color palettes and ready-made themes. Every plan includes a CSS editor for your own styles, and on Core and up you can add JavaScript and code that runs on every page. If you like to fine-tune, it's one of the most flexible editors you'll find.

Tropic Arts works in sections. You can change any word, swap any photo, drag sections into a new order, add or remove them, recolor the whole site in a click, and choose your heading and body fonts from a list of thirty. What you can't do is place an element anywhere you like, edit the HTML or CSS, or paste in code or a widget from another service. Every template is built to look right on phones, tablets and desktops without extra work from you, and the section model is how we keep that promise. It's also a real limit. If you know you'll want to go beyond it, Squarespace is the better tool.

Squarespace gives you a beautiful canvas and the tools to arrange it. Tropic Arts gives you a finished site and AI to write it.

Changing templates later is one place where Tropic Arts is ahead. On a current Squarespace site, you can't switch templates. You can restyle it with new colors, fonts and page layouts, or start a new site and rebuild, bringing your products and domain across. On Tropic Arts, you can try any of our other templates on a private sandbox copy of your site. Your products, journal posts, locations, and matching text and images carry over, while page layouts, navigation and section colors start fresh from the new design. Pages the new template doesn't have aren't carried across, so expect a little tidying. When it looks right, you apply it to the live site. Your domain, email, payments, customers and orders stay as they were, and a backup of the old site is saved first.

Running your business from one console

On Tropic Arts, the business tools are part of the platform itself, in the same console as your site:

• Online store (Store plan). Products and inventory, categories and filters, discount codes, shipping rates, local pickup, sales tax through Stripe Tax, and orders, refunds and fulfillment.
• Digital products and subscriptions (Store plan). Downloads and license keys delivered the moment a payment clears, and memberships or subscription boxes that bill on a schedule.
• Reviews (Store plan). A few days after an order is fulfilled, the customer gets an email asking for a review, and by default reviews wait for your approval before they appear.
• Bookings (every plan). Clients request appointments on your site, you confirm them, and they appear in your Apple, Google or Outlook calendar through a calendar feed.
• Email (every paid plan). A blog, a newsletter signup, and campaigns that carry your logo, with 5,000 sends a month included.
• Customers and inbox. Everyone who buys, books or signs up lands in one customer list, and email arrives in a shared inbox. Your mailbox on your own domain is set up at inbox.yourdomain.com by default, so it can't disturb email you already have, or you can move it to the main domain.
• Your team. Invite up to 25 people to a site on any plan, each with one of five roles, from owner to view-only.

Squarespace's business tools cover more ground, and this is where it's clearly ahead. Every plan can sell gift cards, send branded invoices, email shoppers who leave items in their cart, give customers accounts to sign in to, take donations, and sell courses, videos and members-only pages. Core and up add shipping labels and carrier-calculated shipping. Its email marketing can send automated emails to segments of your list, and this month it added text-message campaigns. Acuity Scheduling is a full booking system: clients pay or leave a deposit when they book, it syncs both ways with your calendar so busy times stay blocked, and its Standard plan handles up to six calendars, such as one for each staff member. Our bookings are requests you confirm, with no payment when clients book, no separate staff calendars and a one-way feed to your calendar. Squarespace has built-in product reviews too, and more detailed team roles, with presets for store managers, email editors and scheduling staff.

The trade is in how it's packaged. Scheduling and email marketing are separate subscriptions, the fee on paid content applies until you reach Advanced, and Basic allows just two contributors, you included. With Tropic Arts, everything we offer comes in the plan price.

Selling everywhere, languages and extensions

Squarespace can also help you sell beyond your website. Its app has a point-of-sale system for selling in person in the US and UK, using Tap to Pay on your phone or, in the US, a Square card reader. It can list your products on Google Shopping on Core and up, sync your catalog to Facebook and Instagram on every plan, and, since this month, let shoppers pay in their own currency. For payments, you can use Squarespace Payments, Stripe or PayPal, with Apple Pay, Google Pay, Klarna and Afterpay among the options at checkout. About 50 extensions from other companies help with jobs such as shipping, inventory and marketplace selling, and multilingual sites are built in through Weglot, which is free for one extra language up to 2,000 words.

Tropic Arts has no app store and no plugins. What's built in is what you get, plus a short list of connections: Stripe for payments, Google Analytics and the Meta Pixel for tracking, calendar sync, maps, and verification for Google Search Console. We don't offer multilingual sites, point of sale, marketplace selling or PayPal. If your business depends on any of those, Squarespace is the better choice today, and we'd rather you know that before you start than after.

Hosting, backups, privacy and support

Both platforms handle hosting, security and updates, and both include SSL and two-factor sign-in. Both take care of the search basics too: page titles and descriptions, a sitemap, and the image that shows when someone shares your page.

Trying changes safely. On Squarespace, your edits go live when you save them. Page drafts aren't part of the four plans on its pricing page, and while you can duplicate a site to experiment, the copy is a new trial site that needs its own plan. Tropic Arts gives you sandbox copies of your site (two on Starter, five on Store), so you can rework pages on a copy and apply them to the live site when they're ready.

Backups. Squarespace doesn't keep a revision history, so there's no earlier version of a page to go back to, though you can restore pages and blog posts you've deleted in the last 30 days. Tropic Arts backs up every site daily, but there's no restore button: you ask us, and we restore it for you.

Privacy. Tropic Arts counts visits, page views, top pages, traffic sources and devices without cookies, on every plan, so your numbers don't depend on visitors accepting a banner. A cookie banner is built in for when you add Google Analytics or the Meta Pixel. Squarespace has a cookie banner too, but its analytics rely on cookies. Visitors who decline them are still counted, and Squarespace notes that this can inflate your visitor numbers: someone who declines and views ten pages counts as ten visitors.

Support. Squarespace answers email around the clock, offers live chat in English on weekdays from 4 a.m. to 8 p.m. Eastern, and has a large help center and community forum. Tropic Arts is a much smaller team. Support is by email and our contact form, we reply within two business days, and you can write to us in any of more than 75 languages. Neither of us offers phone support, but if you want a quick answer at any hour, Squarespace wins this one.

If you ever leave

Neither platform lets you pack up your design and move it to another host. Squarespace goes a little further than we do: it exports your pages and one blog as a file WordPress can import, though store pages, events and your styles stay behind, and it exports products, orders, contacts and donations as spreadsheets. Tropic Arts exports your products, customers, bookings, subscribers, reviews and form responses as spreadsheets, and your blog posts as a file you can keep. We don't export individual orders, though; the closest is a monthly sales-tax report.

Moving from Squarespace to Tropic Arts

If you do decide to switch, export everything you need before you cancel your Squarespace plan. Here's what the move involves:

• Your pages. Pick one of our templates and let the AI builder write the pages from your business details, then paste in any wording from your Squarespace site you want to keep exactly.
• Your blog. We can't import Squarespace's WordPress file, so copy across the posts you want to keep.
• Your products. Export them from Squarespace as a CSV file and import it in your console. Our importer reads titles, descriptions, SKUs, prices, stock and categories, but not product options, photos or hidden status, so finish products with variants by hand, upload photos again, and hide anything you'd hidden on Squarespace. It also reads Squarespace's "unlimited" stock as zero, so clear those cells before you import (a blank cell means stock isn't tracked), and check a few prices afterward.
• Your customers and subscribers. Export your customer list and mailing lists as CSV files and import them in your console, which reads each person's name and email address. To bring newsletter subscribers across as subscribed, add a marketing opt-in column marked yes for the people who signed up.
• Your old addresses. There's no redirect manager on Tropic Arts, so links to your old Squarespace pages and posts won't point to their new homes. If your old pages bring in a lot of search traffic, weigh that before you switch.
• Your domain. Keep it. A domain registered with Squarespace stays there after you cancel your website plan, and you connect it in your console, which shows you the DNS changes to make. You can also transfer it to another registrar, except in the 60 days after it was registered or transferred in.

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So which should you choose?

Choose Squarespace if you:

• want to design freely, down to where each block sits, or add your own code;
• sell gift cards, courses, paid content or services you invoice for;
• sell in person, on Google or Instagram, through PayPal or in more than one language;
• want clients to pay when they book, or automated email marketing;
• want support by email at any hour, or by live chat on weekdays.

Choose Tropic Arts if you:

• want a complete, designer-made site, written for your business by AI;
• want bookings, email newsletters, a mailbox and your customer list included, at one flat price;
• want no fee from us on anything you sell, whichever plan you're on;
• want to be able to change templates later, and test changes on a private copy first;
• are happy to work in sections instead of on a free-form grid.

The easiest way to decide is to try it. Every Tropic Arts site starts on a free trial, with no card and no time limit. Pick a template, let the AI write it for your business, and compare the result with anything you've built on Squarespace. You only choose a plan when you're ready to go live, and our pricing page has the details.

Squarespace changes its plans and features often, so check anything that matters to you on Squarespace's own site before you decide. If you spot something here that's out of date, tell us and we'll fix it.