Contentive vs Squarespace and Wix for agencies

Squarespace and Wix are aimed at a person building their own website. Contentive is aimed at an agency building a website for somebody else. Most of the differences fall out of that one sentence, and if you're the first kind of person you should stop reading and go use Squarespace.

What they're better at

Time to a decent-looking site, with nobody technical involved. Squarespace's templates are genuinely well designed, and a small business owner can have something respectable online in a weekend without hiring anyone. Wix has enormous breadth — an app for almost every small-business need: booking, restaurant menus, a shop, all in one account. Both handle hosting, certificates, domains, email and support without you thinking about any of it. Both are cheaper than Contentive for one site.

They also have something we don't: a customer can leave you and keep running their site alone. That's a real virtue, and for a certain kind of client it's the right answer.

The gap shows up when the agency owns the design

On Squarespace and Wix, the design and the content live in the same editor. That's intentional — one person owns both. When an agency builds the site and a client runs it, that merger becomes the problem: to change the opening hours, the client opens the tool that can also change the type scale, the section layout and the colour palette.

You can be careful. You can hand over with a walkthrough and a document. But you've given a design tool to someone who wanted a content tool, and the design will drift.

Contentive separates the two at the model level. You define the content types and the sections a page can be composed from, and the client's editor is generated from that model. There's no extra tile to add to the layout, because the model doesn't have one. Adding testimonials, posts, locations and team members is unlimited; changing the grid isn't possible.

White-labelling and the client relationship

On Squarespace and Wix the client logs into Squarespace or Wix. Their billing, their branding, their support. You're an intermediary on someone else's account, and the platform's marketing sits in front of your client permanently.

Contentive is built around an agency owning the account: one subscription, many client workspaces, each client invited only to their own with a role you choose. Structure permissions and content permissions are separate capabilities, so a client can publish without ever seeing the content model. A fully white-labelled Studio is an enterprise arrangement rather than something on the standard plan — worth saying plainly, because it's the thing agencies ask about first.

Where the content goes afterwards

Squarespace and Wix content lives inside Squarespace and Wix, rendered by them. That's simple and it works, right up until the client asks for the same content somewhere else — a second site, a screen in the shop, a mobile app. Then it's copy-paste and two places to maintain.

Contentive's content sits behind a GraphQL API generated from your model, with a typed client library. The rendered site is a Liquid theme you write once and reuse; the same content can feed anything else later without being duplicated.

Cost, honestly

For a single small site, Squarespace is cheaper. Contentive is £39/mo including three live sites, then £10.99/mo per additional live site, with unlimited workspaces and unlimited seats. That's only good value at agency volume — around three live client sites is where it starts making sense, and below that it doesn't.

Inviting your client never costs you anything, which is the part that matters when you're running twenty of these.

What you give up

You need someone who can write a template. There's no app store with a plugin for every request. We're early and small — if you want a platform with a decade of hardening and a large support organisation behind it, that's Squarespace, not us.

The honest summary

If your client wants to build and run their own site and might not keep working with you, Squarespace or Wix is the correct recommendation and you should make it.

If you're building the site, you own the design, and the client's job is to keep the content current — that's a different shape of problem, and it's the one we built for.