Open-source alternatives to Squarespace and Wix

At a glance

Open-source alternatives to Squarespace and Wix compared
Tool	Licence	Self-hosting difficulty	Who it suits	Strengths
WordPress	GPL-2.0-or-later	Easy to moderate: needs PHP 8.3 or newer with MariaDB or MySQL, then regular updates	Most small business websites, especially brochure sites with a blog	Runs on ordinary web hosting, huge choice of themes and plugins, easy to find help, can take a Squarespace export
Ghost	MIT	Moderate: an Ubuntu server with at least 1 GB of memory, plus Mailgun for newsletters	Writers and businesses built around a blog, newsletter or paid membership	Publishing and newsletters in one tool, paid subscriptions, built-in Squarespace importer

WordPress: GPL-2.0-or-later. Licence checked 31 October 2026.
Ghost: MIT. Licence checked 31 October 2026.

Squarespace and Wix are honest products. Squarespace Core is £17 a month on an annual plan, which is £204 a year, and that buys you hosting, templates and no technical fuss. If you just need a tidy site for your business, there's a good chance that's money well spent.

So why look elsewhere? It's usually not the price. It's the feeling that you're renting. Wix says plainly in its help pages that a Wix site can't be moved to another host, because it needs Wix's own systems to run. You own the content, but not in a form you can pick up and take away. Squarespace will export some of your content, but a lot gets left behind.

WordPress and Ghost are both free software, so you can move them to any host you like.

WordPress

WordPress is the default answer here, and for good reason. It's a free publishing system that nearly any web host can run.

It runs on ordinary hosting. The recommended setup is PHP 8.3 or newer with MariaDB 10.11 or MySQL 8, plus HTTPS.
A huge choice of themes and plugins, for bookings, forms, shops, memberships and more.
Plenty of people can help. You won't be stuck with one supplier, which is the whole point.
A route from Squarespace. Squarespace's export is an XML file formatted for WordPress.

That export has real limits, mind. It leaves out store pages, any blog after the first, drafts, style settings, custom CSS and several other things, and images may not carry across to a self-hosted site. Treat it as a head start. The design gets rebuilt regardless.

The downside to all that choice is that every plugin is one more thing to update and one more possible way in. A neglected WordPress site is a target. You have to look after it, or pay someone who will.

Ghost

Ghost is much narrower, and that's its appeal. It's a publishing tool for blogs and newsletters, under the MIT licence.

Newsletters built in. Your posts and your email list live in one place.
Paid memberships. You can charge subscribers. On its paid hosted plans Ghost takes no fee of its own, though payment processors still charge theirs.
A built-in Squarespace importer that brings across posts and pages and turns categories into tags. You may need to add redirects for old links.

Running it yourself takes more than ordinary web hosting. Ghost strongly recommends an Ubuntu server, with at least 1 GB of memory. Newsletters need a Mailgun account, as Ghost only supports Mailgun for bulk mail, so that's a separate bill.

You can also pay Ghost to host it, from $18 a month billed yearly for up to 1,000 members, or $29 if you want paid subscriptions. Because it's open source, you can still move later.

I wouldn't use Ghost for a normal brochure site, or for a shop full of products. That's not what it's for.

What it costs

Squarespace and Wix

Squarespace Basic: £12 a month, billed annually (£16 billed monthly), with a 2% fee on online store sales. Checked 31 October 2026 (source).
Squarespace Core: £17 a month, billed annually (£24 billed monthly), with no fee on online store sales. Checked 31 October 2026 (source).
Wix: Prices vary by country. See the Wix plans page for your price.

Self-hosted, run for you

No per-user fees. Adding people doesn't add licence costs.
Setup: a one-off fee to set it up and move your data across.
Hosting and care: a fixed monthly fee covering every app on your server.
I'll quote once I know what you need.

Paid tool prices exclude VAT unless stated.

The UK angle

Hosting location rarely matters much for a small business website. Squarespace and Wix are fine for most firms, and I wouldn't switch just to get your site onto a UK server.

The bit that does matter is what your site collects. Contact forms, bookings and newsletter sign-ups are all personal data, wherever they're hosted. You need a privacy notice that says where they go, and that doesn't change when you move.

The real gain is ownership. With WordPress or Ghost you can take a full copy of your site, including its database, and hand it to another host or developer. That's handy if a supplier lets you down, or just puts up its prices.

Honest drawbacks

Updates are your job. The core, theme and plugins all need keeping current. This is the big one.
No single support line. With WordPress you've got a host, plus each plugin's author.
More to go wrong. Drag-and-drop editors keep you inside the lines. WordPress happily lets you break things.
Moving isn't one click. Neither Squarespace nor Wix gives you a complete copy. Wix sites have to be rebuilt.
Backups are on you. Set them up on day one, and test them.

Which one?

My pick is WordPress. It suits the widest range of small business sites, and if your developer disappears you can find another by lunchtime. The main drawback is the upkeep: skip the updates and you've got a security problem.

Ghost is the realistic alternative if your site is really a blog or newsletter. If you just want a simple site and hate the idea of maintenance, staying put is a fair call.

Need it built or customised?

If you need something a theme won't do, such as a booking system or a link to your other software, the team at Dev Partners can build it for you.