Squarespace

No — Squarespace is American: founded in 2003 and headquartered in New York City. It serves Australia fully, with local plans from US$16/mo and support for local payment methods, but the company itself is a New York tech firm rather than an Australian one.

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It's an all-in-one website builder with the best-designed templates in the business — design, hosting, domain and commerce bundled into a single subscription. It's the go-to for portfolios, studios, restaurants, small shops and any brand where visual presentation does the selling. Since absorbing Google Domains it has also become one of the world's largest domain registrars, so you can buy and manage your domain in the same place you build the site.

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In Australia, Squarespace starts from US$16/mo for the entry Personal plan on annual billing, with Business and Commerce tiers costing more above that. There's no free plan — you get a 14-day trial instead. Annual billing works out clearly cheaper than paying month to month, so commit to a year once you've decided it's the right fit.

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No — they have different centres of gravity. Squarespace is a website builder with commerce added on, perfect for a beautiful site that also sells a handful of products. Shopify is a commerce engine with a website attached, built for serious, high-volume selling. If you're selling a dozen items alongside your content, choose Squarespace. If you're running a real store, choose Shopify.

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A few trade-offs. It gives you less freedom than Wix — the design system keeps sites polished but constrains how far you can stray from a template. The app and extension ecosystem is smaller, there's no free plan (only a 14-day trial), and its advanced ecommerce still trails Shopify on features and scale. Deeply custom layouts can also fight the built-in guardrails. The flip side is that those same constraints are exactly why Squarespace sites look so consistently good with very little effort — you're trading flexibility for near-guaranteed quality.

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It depends on what you value most. Wix wins on flexibility: total drag-and-drop freedom, a bigger app market and more raw features. Squarespace wins on design discipline: fewer templates, but far more beautiful ones that stay polished with almost no effort. If you want maximum creative control, choose Wix; if you want a gorgeous site with guardrails that stop you making a mess, choose Squarespace.

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