B12 vs Squarespace: Which Is Right For You?

This is a cleaner comparison than most, because the two platforms are good at genuinely different things and neither is pretending otherwise.

Squarespace has spent fifteen years being the place where a site looks good without you having to be a designer. B12 has spent its time on everything that happens after someone lands on the site — the enquiry, the booking, the invoice, the contract.

So the question is not which is better. It is which half of the problem you actually have.

Head to Head

Squarespace figures are indicative and change — check their current pricing before deciding. B12's prices were verified against its own pricing page in September 2026.

Design: Squarespace, Without Argument

Squarespace's templates remain the best in the mainstream builder market. The typography is considered, the spacing is right, and the result looks deliberate even when the person building it has no design training. That is a real achievement and it is why Squarespace has the reputation it does.

B12 generates a site rather than templating one, and the output reflects that: clean, modern, professional, and a bit generic. It is entirely respectable. It will not make anyone stop and look.

If your customers judge you partly on aesthetics — photographers, designers, restaurants, boutique studios, anyone selling taste — this section alone should decide it. Use Squarespace.

Business Tools: B12, and It Is Not Close

Now the other half. Take a therapist, a consultant or a small accountancy practice. The website is maybe 15% of the problem. The rest is:

• Capturing the enquiry properly, with the information you need
• Getting the appointment in the diary without six emails
• Sending an engagement letter and getting it signed
• Invoicing and actually getting paid
• Keeping in touch with past clients

B12 includes all five on the $78/mo Client Engagement plan. On Squarespace you get the website, scheduling via Acuity at additional cost, and then you go and buy an eSignature tool, an invoicing tool and an email marketing tool separately — each with its own login, its own bill and its own gap where it does not quite talk to the others.

For that kind of business the comparison is not $24 against $16. It is one subscription against five, and B12 wins it comfortably.

Speed and Maintenance

B12 goes from prompt to complete draft in about two minutes. Squarespace takes an evening or two of picking a template and moving things around — enjoyable if you like that sort of thing, an obstacle if you do not.

The bigger difference is month eighteen. Squarespace expects you to open the editor. B12 expects you to type "add a page for the new service" and let the AI agent do it. Across the client sites we maintain, the pattern is consistent: the ones that stay current are the ones where making a small change is trivial. On that specific point B12's approach looks like the better answer, though we have not run a site on it long enough to prove it.

Search

Squarespace has a modest edge, mostly from its stronger blogging tools and slightly more mature handling of meta data and redirects. If you plan to publish regularly, that edge is real.

But both are hosted platforms with the same ceiling: limited control over site architecture, schema, internal linking and page speed. Adequate for being found by name and for local terms. Not adequate for competing seriously for commercial keywords. If that is the plan, neither is the tool — see B12 vs Divi or our SEO work.

Lock-In and the Refund Difference

Neither platform lets you export the site and host it elsewhere. Both keep your pages in their own format. Leaving either means a rebuild, and you should price that in before you start rather than discovering it in year three.

One asymmetry to note: Squarespace offers a refund window on annual plans, where B12's terms say payment obligations are non-cancelable. Not a dealbreaker — it just means you judge B12 inside the $1 seven-day trial, which gives you the full product on your own domain, and set a reminder for day six.

Which Should You Choose?

If Neither Quite Fits

There is a third answer that both of these will lose to on cost and on control: build it on self-hosted WordPress, where you own the files and can move hosts whenever you like. A one-off Divi licence at $249 covers unlimited sites for life, which beats any monthly plan here over a long enough run. The trade is that you do the work and the maintenance.

Or we do it for you. We build sites you own outright, with the copy written and the search side done properly, from £995 — see the package prices.

Related Guides

• B12 review 2026 — the full verdict
• B12 pricing explained — every plan and the five-year cost
• B12 vs Wix — the other obvious comparison
• Divi vs Squarespace — if you are weighing Squarespace against owning your site
• Best AI website builders — the whole category ranked