I’ve Tested and Reviewed BigCommerce vs Square Online

BigCommerce vs Square Online: Which platform is right for you?

If you’re looking for an ultra-scalable platform with advanced inventory management tools, a range of AI features, and lots of options for website customization, BigCommerce is better. However, Square Online offers a more straightforward solution for beginners.

So, how do you make the right choice?

After putting both platforms to the test, I’ve created this comprehensive comparison guide, to help you make the best choice for your business.

BigCommerce vs Square Online: Quick Verdict, Pros and Cons

Ultimately, BigCommerce is definitely the more powerful platform. It has stronger website design tools, more integrations with countless apps, fantastic inventory management tools, and a great selection of AI capabilities.

However, I do think Square Online is a good pick for smaller companies who want a cost-effective, and simple way to start selling online (as well as in-store).

Square Online Pros and Cons

Pros:

• Great free forever plan for beginners
• Omnichannel product and inventory management
• Straightforward interface
• Great sales dashboards and reports
• Some generative AI capabilities
• Affordable payment processing rates

Cons:

• Limited design and theme customization tools
• Lacking scalability for large companies
• Basic marketing features

BigCommerce Pros and Cons

Pros:

• Great selection of AI tools (BigAI)
• Fantastic range of integrations and plugins
• Excellent omnichannel selling capabilities
• Better theme customization options
• Great scalability for larger companies
• Excellent inventory and order management

Cons:

• Revenue caps on every plan
• High learning curve for some users
• Pricing can be quite expensive

Pricing and Fees

Let’s start with how much you’ll spend to use BigCommerce and Square Online. First, Square offers a very generous forever free plan to users, with absolutely no limits on how much you can sell. You can use this plan to sell online in-store (with Square POS), and on social media.

The biggest downside is the free plan comes with Square’s highest credit card processing rates, and it doesn’t offer a custom domain for your site. You’ll also have advertising from Square on your website. Paid plans start at $29 per month, with slightly lower processing fees, professional themes, subscriptions, and a free domain for 1 year.

There’s also a Premium plan for $79 per month, with even better payment processing rates, real-time delivery rates, and no in-house delivery fees.

BigCommerce doesn’t have a free plan, but it does offer a 14-day free trial. The pricing for the four plans is similar to Shopify, but there are sales caps on most options. BigCommerce Standard ($39 per month) caps your sales at $50k per year. BigCommerce Plus ($105 per month) caps sales at $180k, BigCommerce Pro ($399 per month) caps sales at $400k, and the Enterprise plan (custom pricing) removes sales caps completely.

The good news is that BigCommerce doesn’t charge transaction fees on any plans, and most features are included on every plan, including omnichannel selling, and real-time shipping quotes.

The Core Features of BigCommerce vs Square Online

When testing the two platforms, I did notice that BigCommerce has a lot more functionality overall than Square Online, but they do have some overlapping features. Let’s look at some of the main capabilities of the platforms side-by-side.

Website Building and Design

In the past, Square Online didn’t offer a lot of website building features, there weren’t any “themes” to experiment with – you just got a basic online store. This is still the case with the free plan, but if you upgrade to a premium plan, you can now access professional themes.

Still, these themes are pretty basic, and there aren’t many ways to customize them. You can create mega menus, scrolling marquees, banners, and buttons. You can also adjust website colors, images, and fonts, but you’ll still be left with a relatively straightforward website.

BigCommerce gives you a lot more freedom from a design perspective. There are more themes to choose from (although some are quite similar). You can also dive into the coding of your themes and make granular changes to your website’s performance, if you have the technical knowledge.

However, while BigCommerce’s themes and design tools are better in my opinion, I also found them a lot harder to master than Square Online’s tools. If you’re looking for simplicity, Square is definitely the better choice, but if you want more freedom to customize, go with BigCommerce.

MORE: Best BigCommerce Themes

Ecommerce and Selling Features

Both BigCommerce and Square Online have some great features for online selling. They both support omnichannel selling, through social media channels. You can even use Square POS to sell in-person, or integrate BigCommerce with a POS system (it doesn’t have its own).

Square still keeps things a little basic with its sales capabilities, however. Most of the advanced selling features, like verification pages, are restricted to paid plans.

Plus, you’ll have a hard time managing large and complex inventories with Square. The good news is you can sell unlimited products, and create variants of each product.

Square Online also tracks all of your orders and inventory automatically. There’s even the option to sell digital products and subscriptions on some plans, and you can integrate a barcode scanner.

BigCommerce offers all of the functionality of Square Online, plus some extras. Although your revenue will be capped on certain plans, you can still sell unlimited products. Plus, you get more than 65 payment processing options.

Since BigCommerce has a partnership with PayPal, you can even access preferred rates for credit card transactions.

BigCommerce also has some of the best inventory management capabilities I’ve seen, particularly if you have a large and complicated product portfolio. Additionally, BigCommerce makes it easy to integrate your store with various fulfillment and logistics apps.

Marketing Tools and Analytics

I don’t think Square Online or BigCommerce are the best options out there for marketing, but BigCommerce definitely has an edge. You get some great SEO features, allowing you to adjust various aspects of your site to boost your ranking. There’s an integrated blog, and options to create gift cards, vouchers, sales banners, and more.

You also get a lot of great reporting tools with BigCommerce, covering everything from customer behavior to product purchasing trends, inventory, finances, and more. Plus, the BigAI toolkit (more on that in a minute), includes solutions for predictive analytics that help you to understand the full value of your customers over time.

On the other hand, Square Online does offer some basic SEO capabilities, such as 301 redirect options, and the ability to adjust item titles and permalinks. There’s no automatic sitemap generator, and the blogging capabilities are pretty basic too.

The email marketing features on both platforms are pretty basic, allowing you to send simple emails to your customers, but offering much functionality for advanced drip campaigns.

On the plus side, you do get some excellent reporting tools with Square, ensuring you can get a behind-the-scenes look at your sales, market trends, and customers, across channels.

Square also supports banners and carousels, custom voucher codes, gift cards, and online reviews to help boost your online presence. It’s a close call, but I think BigCommerce’s ability to integrate with more advanced marketing tools makes it a better choice overall.

AI Capabilities, Integrations, and Apps

From an AI perspective, both Square Online and BigCommerce offer some similar capabilities. They both allow users to use generative AI to create product descriptions and other content for their websites in seconds. BigCommerce’s “BigAI” toolkit is more advanced, though.

You can use this toolkit to add AI chatbots to your store to improve customer experiences, enable AI-powered search, and unlock predictive analytics. You can even use a Google Retail AI integration to show personalized product recommendations to each customer.

Speaking of integrations, BigCommerce gives you a lot more freedom to scale your store. While it doesn’t offer as many “add-ons” as Shopify, there are still dozens of apps to choose from in BigCommerce’s marketplace. You can connect your store with a host of marketing, analytics, accounting, design, and customer service tools.

Square’s integrations are extremely limited. Although there are a lot of integrations out there for Square’s payment processor, Square Online only has around 9 apps available, and there’s very little you can do to scale your store, or add new functionality.

Ease of Use and Customer Support

Finally, we come to an area where Square Online has the edge in my opinion. There’s no denying that Square is much easier to use for beginners.

While BigCommerce has become a lot more intuitive over the years, Square Online makes it extremely easy to set up and manage your store, regardless of whether you have any technical knowledge or experience.

Square even guides you through the setup process with a checklist, gives you tooltips as you move through your dashboard, and offers access to a ton of different articles and videos to help you. BigCommerce has it’s own great range of blogs, guides, videos, and tutorials, but it still takes quite a while to figure out how to use all of the features on the platform.

I personally think BigCommerce could still do more to make its platform more intuitive for beginners, as you can spend quite a lot of time making tweaks within the interface.

If you need support from BigCommerce, however, you can reach out to the team through 24/7 live chat, email, and phone support. Square Online also supports chat, email and phone support, and has a great community forum for beginners. Some support options aren’t available on a 24/7 basis, however, such as phone support.

BigCommerce vs Square Online: The Verdict

Ultimately, both BigCommerce and Square Online have their pros and cons to consider. Square Online is the more straightforward option, which I think would be ideal for smaller businesses who want to keep operational costs low.

BigCommerce is the more advanced platform, with a lot more features, functionality, design tools, integrations, and AI features. However, it does have a much higher learning curve.