Squarespace vs Framer: €11 and €10 buy very different things

What the record says

Start with what each entry price actually covers, because the two figures are close enough to be misleading. Squarespace Basic is €11 a month billed annually. That is a website with a free custom domain, built-in AI tools, payments, and up to two contributors — two people who can work on it, included. Framer Basic is €10 a month for the site. Editors are separate: €20 per month for each editor who designs and edits content, €10 per month for each content editor who only updates the CMS and localisation. One person pays €10. Three designers pay €10 plus €40.

Squarespace's page opens on annual billing, and we checked that rather than assuming it — the Pay annually control carries aria-checked=true when the page loads. So the €11, €17 and €29 a visitor sees first are annual-billed monthly equivalents. Clicking Pay monthly raises them to €15, €24 and €42. If you were comparing Squarespace's opening figures against a competitor's monthly ones, you were comparing a discounted price with an undiscounted one.

The page also makes a claim that its own numbers do not support. Beneath the header it reads 'Pay annually to save up to 36%'. On Basic the saving is €132 against €180, which is 26.7%. On Core it is €204 against €288, or 29.2%. On Advanced, €348 against €504, or 31.0%. The closest of the three is five points short of the headline, and we found no website plan on the page that reaches 36%. The discount is real and worth taking; it is just not the number printed above it.

Framer's equivalent trap is not the billing period, it is the add-on stack, and it is longer than most comparisons mention. Editors at €20 and content editors at €10, each per person per month. Localisation at €20 per locale, up to 20. Convert — A/B testing and funnels — at €50 per 500,000 events. Advanced hosting, for multiple sites and custom configuration, at €200 a month. None of that is in the €10, and a site that grows into two of those lines costs more than any Squarespace plan.

Where Squarespace hides cost, it hides it as a percentage rather than a line item. Basic takes 2% of online store transactions and 7% of digital content and memberships. Core takes 0% and 5%. That six-euro-a-month step from Basic to Core pays for itself the moment you sell about €300 of product a month, which is a calculation the plan table does not do for you but is easy enough once you know the two fees exist.

On free access the two are not comparable at all. Framer lists a Free tier at €0 in the same table as its paid plans — a standing account you can build and publish on. Squarespace's entry is 14 days free and then a paid plan. If you want to try before committing anything, only one of these lets you, and for a designer evaluating a tool that difference matters more than a euro either way on the entry plan.

One thing we could not read, stated plainly rather than estimated. Framer's page carries a 'Yearly billing' control and a note that a free .com domain is included on yearly, which strongly implies an annual rate exists. That control reported no usable on-screen position in our reads and we could not actuate it, so no yearly Framer figure appears anywhere above. The €10 and €30 are the rates the page shows as it opens. If Framer's annual discount is comparable to Squarespace's, the entry comparison would narrow further — we are not going to guess at by how much.

The honest summary is that these tools are aimed at different buyers and the near-identical entry price is a coincidence. Squarespace prices a website and includes the people; Framer prices a canvas and charges for the people. Which is cheaper depends almost entirely on how many hands touch the site, and the crossover happens at the second editor.