Plone vs. Squarespace

The larger your organization, the more appropriate Plone will be. This is not to say that Plone is a worse choice for small websites, only that the minimum investment for a Plone site is certainly higher than for other platforms. If you already use Plone for your site and are looking for a redesign or an overhaul, I would only advise switching to a different platform such as WordPress or Drupal if your organization is downsizing. For any other situation, Plone is the natural choice for your growth.

We've found Squarespace perfect for quick, well-designed websites that you can literally design and launch in a day. However, if you want to get more complex with your website, including custom backend integrations or code, Squarespace presents a bit more of a challenge when it comes to what they will allow you to modify on their platform (especially using third-party integration apps).

Incentivized

• Rock-solid technology stack. The python/Zope/Plone stack is as solid as anything else out there.
• Highly customizable TTW, if needed, via the Zope Management Interface, or Diazo XSL-transform theme design.
• Good support from core developers, lots of solid add-ons which address just about any needs.
• Amazingly customizable workflow, permissions and security management.

Incentivized

• Squarespace is very easy to use, this is a super helpful thing as small business owners we have to wear many hats and being a full blown website developer doesn't need to be one of them.
• Squarespace has quick and simple plugins.
• Squarespace allows you to easily expand as you need to.

Incentivized

• Bullets and formatting sometimes make it difficult to add text to an existing paragraph. The 'code' button is useful in those cases, but only to those who know html.
• Sometimes the pages don't save correctly and you use information.
• Uploading and displaying images is a bit too much work.

• Customizing the sites can be highly UN intuitive
• Navigation for editing the sites can be difficult and frustrating
• Squarespace has different versions and it's hard to know which version you're on. You can't switch after you start making a site with one version.

Incentivized

Plone has been used for more than ten years and it already has an interesting roadmap for its future. I do not know any other open source CMS with the same story of continuous evolution and security track. Interesting new features are added at each release and new modules are created continuously

It's a great CMS tool. Easy to use and maintain. It looks great and the support is excellent.

Incentivized

Compared to the amount of Plone sites, users and customizations we have in our organization, the amount of support requests and training needed is really small.

The new user interface in Plone 6 is even better, it is super fast, has lots of different blocks for enhancing the page, has flexible layout system and is easy to extend with more features.

It's dead simple to use. There are no over complicated controls or tons of menus to screw things up. People with bad taste couldn't make an ugly website. While it may be frustrating for the pro designer to get exactly what they want, it prevents the uninitiated from making something ugly

Incentivized

Our Plone sites are very robust. We have critical systems on Plone and we have been running sites on Plone for over 20 years with very little unexpected downtime.

Plone is very intensive in its operations, and if not configured well it can be slow. However it is designed and built with speed in mind and with proper use of coding, templates and caching can perform extremely well under high loads. It is capable of scaling to very high load availability environments with no specific coding requirements.

There are not too many Plone companies in the world. But the ones who are, are high level professionals

Help is available directly from the back end and uses full sentence searching to find answers to questions others may have asked before. With a ton of articles and support questions documents, it is very likely that your question has been answered. If not each page has the ability to open a direct email to support. Each case has a number and can be followed. Responses are often quick and have links and directions clearly stated

Incentivized

I have been participating Plone training and the trainers have always been professional. Materials were good and the instructions clear

Well organized, professional training with good materials and instructions

Plone is much harder to learn then Wordpress. Development in Wordpress is learnt in day's, where development in Plone really takes years to get to the full depth. That said, once you're able to develop in Plone, is it a rock solid system, with readable code. In my experience Wordpress websites need to be updated so often, and the code feels bad organised. I have been building Wordpress websites, choosing Wordpress only when the client has almost no money. But I can never deliver the quality I want to deliver when using Wordpress. Plone does offer the possibility to deliver professional websites. As for Joomla, in the past I have done some Joomla development, but the whole CMS-paradigm could not settle in my brain. Being a web developer for over 15 years now, Joomla always felt contra-intuitive. Let alone the task of teaching this to my clients. Plone is now my only choice. It gives me a fast development-cycle, a user-friendly CMS and a rock stable and very secure system.

Squarespace if much less work than WordPress, plus hosting and security are not an issue. GoDaddy and Wix are okay, but nowhere near the flexibility or advanced feature set that you can get with Squarespace. Compared to the other products that I have used, Squarespace definitely offers more options, customization, advanced features and design options than others, for a great price.

Incentivized

Plone has no limits. We have massive sites and can run them just fine

• We thought that tapping into the user/content management tooling of Plone would be a good and useful thing, however it turned out to be a major pain to tie into those parts of Plone.
• I wish we would have built the extra functionality completely outside Plone and found a way to integrate it. It would have been much easier.

• I can see how squarespace can improve efficiency since it's so quick to build a site on there.
• For those who don't want to hook up a bunch of different stuff to their website and make it work...they most likely have whatever plug in you need and you can add it. Worst case scenario, they have developers you can hire who can make what you need.
• As your business grows you can add an online storefront to your site and make more money that way! Easy peasy!
• They have an easy system for adding special SEO words/phrases so you don't have to learn SEO at all!

Incentivized