A Squarespace alternative you can actually take with you

Almost nobody leaves Squarespace because the site looks wrong. They leave on the day they find out the site cannot come with them — the export is an .xml file pointed at WordPress, and Squarespace’s own Help Center lists what that file does not carry. Below is the other purchase: the modules a trade actually runs on, two languages, no cut of your sales, and a folder of source code with your name on it.

Storefront $49 a month, Storefront Pro $79 a month. Building and previewing cost nothing and take no card; the price starts when you publish, and there is a 7-day refund. See the full price list

The 14 rows it comes down to

Every row can be checked against the sources at the bottom of this page, and 2 of them go Squarespace’s way. A comparison where the author wins every row is an advertisement, and you would be right to discount all of it.
What you are asking about	With Naratake	With Squarespace	Who takes the row
What can leave the platform	A whole codebase. LocalSite Studio writes the site out as a Next.js project: pages, styles, components and images as source you can open, read, change and host anywhere, plus the database and back office when the site stores anything. The desktop line is bought once rather than rented, and on the browser side the source download is included on Storefront Pro.	An .xml file meant for importing into WordPress, and its Help Center says plainly that not everything will export because many features rely on their platform’s JavaScript and CSS. The list of what stays behind: store, portfolio, index, cover, album, calendar and info pages, product, video and audio blocks, drafts, page-specific headers, footers and sidebars, style settings and custom CSS. Your words and pictures leave. The site does not.	Ours
What is left if you stop paying	The exported folder. It is an ordinary Next.js project and it keeps running wherever you put it, with no Naratake account in the way. Whatever you already handed a client does not depend on us still being here.	Hosting is part of the plan, so the site ends when the plan does. The .xml keeps the writing; the design, the store and the settings are a rebuild. That rebuild quote is the reason most people are reading a page like this one.	Ours
What is inside one starting point	The number worth asking about is not 40, it is what opens. The bakery starting point is four pages: nine priced items, a custom-cake enquiry form with a photo column, and a six-image portfolio — a working site before you have typed a word, with the sections that trade actually uses already placed. Put any of 15 design styles over it and the layout is rebuilt rather than recoloured — a different set of bones, not the same page in a different colour.	A new site does arrive pre-loaded — Squarespace says every site comes with demo pages and content, and that in 7.1 all the placeholder text, images and blocks are demo content. Then it says what that content is for: per its Terms of Service, demo content is inspiration only, and it carries no license to use any sample images or content on your live site. So the demo is a picture of a finished site, and clearing it is the first job.	Ours
Changing the look without redoing the site	40 industry starting points across 15 design styles is 600 different-looking sites before anyone touches a colour — and the count is not the part that matters. This is: every one of the 15 styles rebuilds the layout instead of recolouring it. The hero composition, every page header, the type, the corner radius, the motion and the photo treatment all move together, and palettes are chosen per trade, so the same style over a bakery and over a clinic does not come out the same colour. Switching rebuilds the pages from the template and your content comes with it: the menu and prices, the reviews, the staff, the class timetable, the listings, the coupon codes and the opening hours all carry over, along with your own details — name, phone, email, address, logo, social links. What does not: the headings and body text you edited inside a block, and the photos you swapped in, go back to the template’s. A single undo puts the whole switch back. So trying a second direction costs you a click and a look, whether or not the writing has started.	Squarespace ships templates, and a new site arrives full of demo content it licenses to you as inspiration only rather than for a live site — so the first pass of writing is yours either way. What a later change of template does to the words and pictures you put in by then is a question for Squarespace’s own pages rather than ours, and it is the one to ask before a season of writing goes into a layout.	Ours
The parts that actually run a trade	Eleven of them, in the box: online ordering, table reservations, appointment booking by staff member and time slot, a class timetable, an order tracker, property listings, quote requests, a coupon banner and three menu layouts. One product, one bill, one back office that receives all of it. Where they run is a plan boundary: ordering and bookings go live on Storefront Pro, $79 a month or $758 a year; Storefront, $49 a month or $468 a year, builds and previews them.	Assembled from other people’s products. Booking is the Scheduling block, and Squarespace states you need an Acuity subscription to use it and that the Acuity subscription is separate from your site subscription. Restaurant reservations are the OpenTable block, which wants an OpenTable Restaurant ID, or the Reservations block, which is Tock. There is a Menu block for displaying a menu.	Ours
What is in the editor before you connect anything	111 components and 15 design styles, all of them in the editor on both plans, with the design styles rebuilding the layout rather than recolouring it. Nothing to connect, nothing priced per use, and nobody else’s terms of service reaching your visitors — the forms, the galleries, the menus, the booking and the back office are all the same product.	A long list of blocks in the editor — text, image, gallery, form, map, video, chart, code and more — and past that, Extensions. Squarespace is explicit that the extensions listed there are provided by third parties and not Squarespace, that their prices vary and it does not control them, and that your use of them is governed by the provider’s own terms. Putting JavaScript or an iframe in a code block is also a premium feature, listed for the Website Core plan and higher.	Ours
How far you can push one element	Dragging a block onto a page is the doorway, not the product. What is behind it: 44 style properties on any single node, each of them settable four times over — desktop, tablet, mobile, and again for hover — which is 176 adjustable points on one element. Vertical CJK text for a hanging-scroll heading, a neon glow in a colour you choose, frosted-glass backdrop blur, a two-colour gradient at the angle you set, a tilt up to 45° either way, sticky positioning, z-index, and a per-node entrance of fade, slide, zoom or blur. Per-breakpoint hover states, in a visual editor, with no CSS to write and no layout system to learn first.	Real, and drawn at the level of the site rather than the element. Squarespace sets animation once for the whole site — six styles at three speeds — with individual blocks able to override it, and adding JavaScript or an iframe to a code block is a premium feature it lists for the Website Core plan and higher.	Ours
Motion on the page	You get 29 scroll and cinematic sections that arrive finished, among them video that scrubs as you scroll, parallax, a scroll-told story, a horizontal scroller, a film strip, a cinema reel, a marquee, an image that reveals as it comes up, a scroll progress bar. A 3D hero and an animated background ship alongside them. One attribute sets the intensity for the whole site — subtle, lively, cinematic, or off altogether — across ten entrance signatures: rise, fade, slide, zoom, blur, clip, flip, letterbox, iris and swing. The words stay readable with JavaScript off, and a visitor whose system asks for less motion gets the site holding still.	A site-level setting rather than something you compose. Squarespace offers six animation styles — None, Fade, Scale, Slide, Clip and Flex — at three speeds, Slow, Medium and Fast, set once for the whole site; individual blocks can override that, and its own page notes that some content only supports the Fade style. Site-wide animations are a 7.1 feature; on 7.0 it depends on the template. Fluid Engine can pin a block while the rest of its section scrolls past.	Ours
Who takes a cut of what you sell	Not us, on any plan, on anything. No percentage of an order, a booking, a deposit, a course or a membership — the subscription is the entire bill we send. The card is charged through your own Stripe account: your keys, Stripe’s own processing rate billed by Stripe, money straight into your account. You connect Stripe once. From then on the card goes straight from your customer to your account, and the subscription stays the entire bill.	A cut that depends on what you sell and which tier you are on, on top of card processing — Squarespace says itself that processing rates are charged on every purchase while transaction fees depend on your billing plan. Its published table sets the online-store fee against each tier and gives digital content and memberships a line of their own, and we are not reprinting it here: it is theirs to change, and a copy of it would be stale before you read it. Open it on Squarespace’s pricing page, then put it beside our row — no percentage of an order, a booking, a deposit, a course or a membership, on any plan, ever.	Ours
Running the site in two languages	A checkbox, not a project. English plus Chinese or Spanish, one site, with a real language switch rendered in the navigation and both languages living in the same file. No third-party account, no word quota, no price per language, and nothing extra on either plan.	Handed to a third party. Squarespace documents the multilingual route on 7.1 as the Weglot integration, free for one language and up to 2,000 words, with the Weglot subscription separate from the site subscription — and it warns that when you pass the word limit, translations stop displaying. Some things do not translate at all: Email Campaigns, Acuity Scheduling, third-party blocks and the Member Sites login. It also states that built-in text such as the checkout page can only display in one language.	Ours
Getting at the code	Split, and the split is the answer. On the desktop line the code is the product: the export is the whole project, yours to read and edit. In the browser you get 111 components and 15 design styles rather than a CSS pane — and on Storefront Pro the source download hands you that same Next.js project to open in a real editor. A panel on a live site and a codebase you keep are two different purchases, and this row is where you choose which one you wanted.	Real, and partly gated. Code blocks are in the standard block list, but Squarespace states that adding JavaScript or an iframe to a code block is a premium feature on the Website Core plan and higher. And whatever you write runs inside their platform — you are customizing their site, not holding your own files.	Even
What it costs	Printed here rather than pointed at. The browser plans are Storefront at $49 a month or $468 a year, and Storefront Pro — the one that runs ordering and bookings on a published site and includes the source download — at $79 a month or $758 a year. No percentage on top of either. LocalSite Studio, the desktop line, is bought once instead of rented, and its figure is on the pricing page next to what the license unlocks.	Four published tiers — Basic, Core, Plus and Advanced — with the transaction fees above layered on according to which one you are on. Read the amounts on their own pricing page; we do not keep somebody else’s price list, and on this row it is their column that moves, not ours.	Even
Running an actual shop	The starting points take orders, bookings, appointments and enquiries into the site’s own database, and the card is charged through your own Stripe keys — your account, your money, no cut to us. A menu, a diary and an enquiry form is the trade this is built to run. A catalogue at that depth — stock counts, shipping rates, tax tables — is Shopify’s trade and a different product.	A finished commerce product. Selling physical goods, digital products, courses and memberships are all things Squarespace has built and priced, with the transaction fees set out on its own support pages and checkout handled end to end by one company.	Theirs
Who keeps it online	Publish to a hosted address with HTTPS handled for you, and one custom domain is included on both cloud plans — bring one you already own. Nothing to configure and nothing to renew here either. The exported project is the opposite by design, and that is the point of it: your host, your certificate, your site, with no account of ours in the way.	Its Help Center is plain about it: every plan includes bandwidth and hosting for your site and its content, fully managed. Nothing to configure, nothing to renew, one company to call when it breaks. Our cloud plans host the site and issue HTTPS for you as well, but managed hosting is the whole of what Squarespace is doing in this row.	Theirs

Everything said about Squarespace on this page was last checked on Aug 26, 2026. Plans, prices and features change without telling us — confirm them on Squarespace’s own pages before you decide anything.

What Squarespace is shaped for

Squarespace and we are built for different jobs, and it is cheaper for both of us if you work out which one is yours on this page. Any of this true, and theirs is the shape that fits.

01You are selling now — products, courses, memberships — and you want checkout, fees and the rest handled by one company instead of assembled by you.
02You never want to think about a server. Hosting, certificates, backups and the phone call at 2am belong to somebody else, and that is exactly how you like it.
03Writing CSS in a browser tab is how you work, and a code panel on the live site matters more to you than a folder of source you build locally.

When we are the better answer

Move when the site has to work on day one and still be yours in year three.

01You want the trade parts running on your own pages — ordering, reservations, appointments by staff member and time slot, a class timetable — instead of a subscription to somebody else’s scheduler embedded in yours.
02You build for clients. What you hand over at the end should be a website they own, not a seat on a platform they rent.
03You have read the export article, seen the list of what the .xml leaves behind, and worked out that leaving means rebuilding.

Plain about the fit

Who gets the most out of this

If you are running a real shop — stock counts, shipping rates, sales tax, a catalogue that changes daily — a catalogue at that depth is Shopify’s trade, which is why the row above is scored the way it is. If a marketplace of connectors is how you expect to add capability, that is a different shape of product; here everything is in the editor and in the price. What we sell instead is specific: 40 working trade sites, 111 components, 600 industry-and-style combinations to choose the look from, ordering and bookings that belong to the site, two languages, and not one percent of your sales — the card is charged through your own Stripe account, and the money lands there without passing through us. Plus a folder of source code you keep.

Questions people actually ask

Can I export my Squarespace site?

You can export an .xml file intended for WordPress. Its Help Center lists what comes with it — layout pages, one blog page and its posts, text blocks and image blocks — and what does not: store, portfolio, index, cover, album, calendar and info pages, product, video and audio blocks, drafts, page-specific headers, footers and sidebars, style settings and custom CSS. The writing survives the move. The website does not.

What exactly does LocalSite Studio export?

The whole site as a Next.js project: pages, styles, components and images as source, in a folder you can open, build and deploy yourself, plus the database and back office when the site stores anything. They are ordinary files, the code is yours to keep and change, and nothing about running the site afterwards needs a Naratake account.

Can the browser plans take orders and bookings the way Squarespace does?

On Storefront Pro, yes: ordering and bookings run on the published site, and the records land in the site’s own database and back office. On the $49 Storefront plan you can build both and preview them, but they do not go live. The card is charged through your own Stripe account either way — you save the keys, Stripe pays you, we never hold the money and we take no percentage of it. What we do not do is a catalogue with stock, shipping and tax; that is a different product and the table above says which one.

Look at what comes out before you commit to anything

Build something in the browser, turn the ordering and the bookings on, then read the code-ownership page and see what the export actually hands over. That folder is the part of this purchase nobody else on the page is selling — open it before you decide anything.

Start building See what you own

What we checked

The pages this comparison was read from, all of them on Squarespace’s own site.

Squarespace is a trademark of Squarespace, Inc. Naratake is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to Squarespace, Inc., and this page is our own comparison rather than official Squarespace material.