Nowadays, having a website is a must. If you are a creative person looking to showcase your best work to the world and earn with it, then you need to build your own portfolio website
Most photographers use Adobe suite, hence Adobe portfolio is used by many photographers. But Squarespace is the #1 portfolio website builder for artists, musicians, athletes as well as photographers. It doesn’t have adobe integration, however, Squarespace has a lot of portfolio features & art store functionalities to showcase or sell your work professionally and beautifully.
Which one to choose? It depends on your requirements. let’s understand the above two portfolio website builders.
What Is Adobe Portfolio?
Adobe Portfolio is a Portfolio builder created by adobe group, their main goal is to let people showcase their best creative works and share them with their community. Adobe has integration with Photoshop, Lightroom, etc. In fact, if you have an annual adobe cloud plan you can get an adobe portfolio for free.
What Is Squarespace?
Squarespace is one of the famous website builders & highly popular in the USA. It is flexible and lets you create blogs, portfolios, business service websites, and Online stores Quickly and easily. Without any tech experience, you can create professional websites using a drag-and-drop web elements page editor. They provide beautiful templates with ease of design flexibility to create websites. Squarespace has integrations with a lot of applications to help in SEO, Marketing, Analytics, Design, etc. Huge community and support resources are available.
Quick Summary
Below are a quick summary of Squarespace and Adobe Portfolio platforms.
Adobe Portfolio
- hdhAdobe Portfolio Websites only 10+ themes.
- Adobe portfolio has various plans and their pricing range from $9.99 – $54.99
- Adobe portfolio themes can’t be customized extensively
- Adobe portfolio can’t be used for selling
- Free adobe portfolio on annual adobe creative cloud paid membership and plenty of adobe integration.
- Adobe portfolio doesn’t provide support
- No iPad or Android app.
Squarespace
- Squarespace has 40+ templates.
- Squarespace has 4 plans and the price range from ($16- $49)
- Squarespace themes can be customized extensively.
- Sell digital, Physical products, and services
- Art store and print-on-demand integrations
- Squarespace website builder provides live chat and email support.
- Squarespace has an iPad app with 15k reviews & 4.8 stars. You can create, manage and interact from iPhone, iPad & Android.
#7 Main Differences
1. Templates:
Squarespace offers over 40+ Free portfolio templates & 150+ photography and other templates, Whereas Adobe portfolio offers only 11 free themes and a lot of paid themes. Squarespace themes are flexible and can be customized extensively, adobe portfolio doesn’t provide extensive customization.
Winner: Squarespace
2. Portfolio Features:
Squarespace has better portfolio templates, gallery, and customization options than adobe portfolio.
Winner: Squarespace
3. Tools for Photographers & Artists:
Squarespace has better client management, and image protection features than the adobe portfolio.
Winner: Squarespace
4. Pricing:
Adobe Portfolio costs $9.99/month, whereas Squarespace plans start from $16/month. Users can get Adobe Portfolio free forever if they own a license from Adobe.
Winner: Adobe Portfolio
5. Photo Blogging, Portfolio News & SEO:
As Squarespace is a good CMS, it offers better blogging, and news with good SEO features, whereas Adobe portfolio provides decent features for blogging and SEO.
Winner: Squarespace
6. Online Store or Art Store
In Squarespace, you can add online store functionality to sell your art and creations, Adobe portfolio doesn’t provide eCommerce functionalities to sell online.
Winner: Squarespace
7. Support
Squarespace offers live chat and email support. Whereas adobe portfolio offers support through email tickets also their response time is not good.
Winner: Squarespace
Comparison
| Features | Adobe Portfolio | Squarespace |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Creative Cloud - Photography : $9.99/mo Creative Cloud - All Apps : 52.99$/mo (If you have annual adobe cloud plan then you can get adobe platform for Free) | Personal:$16/m($12) Business:$26/m($18) Basic Commerce:$35/m($26) Advanced Commerce:$54/m($40) (Prices in the bracket will applicable when you buy annual plan) |
| Hosting | Yes (Unlimited pages and bandwidth) | Yes (Unlimited storage and bandwidth) |
| Integrations | Yes (Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop, Adobe Stock, and Behance etc) | Yes (Adobe Fonts, Google Fonts, Unsplash ,Drop box along with marketing, design, shipping tools) |
| Themes | Yes (12 free themes) | Yes (40+ Portfolio Free Themes & 150+ other free themes) |
| SEO | Yes (Basic SEO Setting) | Yes (Advance SEO setting) |
| Domain | Yes (Buy domain or connect an existing domain) | Yes (Free domain for 1 year for annual plans) |
| Selling | No (You can sell on adobe stock if you are a adobe stock contributor) | Yes (You can sell arts as service and also as products using business plan) |
FAQ:
Set up and Ease of Use
Adobe Portfolio builder comes with inbuilt hosting and it lets you host as many pages as you want, It doesn’t provide the domain but adobe has integrations with Namecheap where you can get custom domains. You can connect your existing domain by changing the DNS of your server to the adobe IP address. You can also use the adobe subdomain to publish your site, Once setup is done, you can build your website super easily, Choose the theme you like and add your gallery and your portfolio website is done, it’s so simple.
Squarespace comes with inbuilt hosting and you get a free custom domain if you buy any of their plans annually. It offers unlimited storage & bandwidth. So you can add as many pages, content & traffic to your site. It’s also easy to build a portfolio website on Squarespace, It provides themes that can be customized with an easy drag and drop method. You can build your website in no time.
Note1: Squarespace is popular for Portfolio websites
Theme Design, Customization & Gallery
| Adobe Portfolio | Squarespace | |
| Themes | 10+ | 100+ |
| Free Themes | 10+ | 100+ |
| Mobile-Friendly | Yes | Yes |
| Theme Customization level | Basic | Good |
| Prebuilt Sections | No | Yes |
Adobe Portfolio provides 11 free themes, You can choose any theme and start customizing, Adobe has an easy layout to customize the theme, and you can easily create pages and add videos, photos, galleries, and more to it. You can create multiple pages and write content on each page, Overall it provides a decent styling layout to customize your website.
Adobe portfolio editor
Squarespace is best when it comes to design flexibility, it has over 100+ themes to choose from, You can sort out the portfolio themes to get started. Squarespace’s drag and drop customization allows you to build a store quickly, they have ready-made templates for the gallery, contact, blogs, and more. You can customize each layout for different styles and colors.
Squarespace gallery section
There are so many gallery settings available on Squarespace. For more details see the Squarespace gallery support page
Squarespace Portfolio Features
Squarespace has a lot of artist-friendly features. Its page editor & blog editor included tons of features that you can add anywhere on the page
Here are some Squarespace features with screenshots that you don’t get from Adobe Portfolio
Squarespace Screenshots
Pricing and Plans
| Adobe Portfolio | Squarespace | |
| Trial Period | 7 days | 14 days |
| Starting Pricing | $9.99/mo | $16/mo |
| Ecommerce Plans | No | $27/mo – $49/mo |
| Enterprise Pricing | No | custom pricing |
Squarespace has four basic plans
- Personal:$23/m($16)
- Business:$33/m($23)
- Basic Commerce:$36/m($27)
- Advanced Commerce:$65/m($49)
(Prices in the Bracket are applicable when you buy a year plan)
Squarespace Pricing
In Squarespace plans the personal plan is enough for building websites like (personal blogs, portfolios, personal services, etc.) In business plans, you can add eCommerce functionality to your blog and portfolios.
Adobe portfolio has two plans
Creative Cloud – Photography: $9.99/m
Creative Cloud – All Apps: $54.99/m
The difference between the above plans is the number of integrations provided in addition to creating portfolio websites. you can get it for free if you are a member of Adobe Stock contributors and adobe cloud
SEO
Adobe Portfolio allows basic SEO Settings, You can add links and Alt text to your images, and You can add meta tags to each cover page, In the Adobe portfolio settings tab, you can add meta title, meta description, and keywords for your site to improve ranking in search results.
Squarespace is really good for SEO with its advanced settings like HTML markup, automated tags, page redirects, URL customization, and more. Squarespace as it’s a CMS allows you to write content on your portfolio and optimize it for the Search engines that can make your set rank higher.
Support and Resources
| Adobe Portfolio | Squarespace | |
| ✔ | ✔ | |
| Live chat | ❌ | ✔ |
| Phone | ❌ | ❌ |
Adobe portfolio provides support through email, you can raise a ticket for an issue they will respond to you within 24-48 hours. They have blogs in 7 languages in the contact sections. They also have forums, videos, articles, and a community to resolve the queries
Adobe Portfolio Support
Squarespace has the best support as it provides support in live chat and Email to which they respond early. they have plenty of blogs, videos, forums, and workshops to solve your queries.
Squarespace Support
Apps and Integrations
| Adobe Portfolio has only 3+ integrations | Squarespace has 25+ Integrations |
Adobe portfolio has provided essential features to showcase gallery images in the best possible manner, It has inbuilt features like a gallery customizer, and image resizer to optimize your portfolio. it has integrations with Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Stock, and Behance, with these integrations you can import your work and also share it with those platforms.
Adobe Portfolio Integration
Squarespace is versatile, it has inbuilt features and also extensions for store integrations, It has extensions for all kinds of functions.
Squarespace Integration
Adobe Portfolio sites Examples
Squarespace Portfolio sites Examples
Pros and Cons: Adobe Portfolio vs Squarespace
| Adobe Portfolio Pros | Adobe Portfolio Cons |
| 1. Cheaper Plan | 1. Limited Theme Customization |
| 2. Free for Adobe Stock contributors and adobe cloud members | 2. Lack of support and integrations |
| 3. Easy to set up and Use | 3. Doesn’t include eCommerce functionality |
| Squarespace Pros | Squarespace Cons |
| 1. Excellent portfolio themes and design flexibility | 1. Bit Expensive plan |
| 2. Good platform for scalability | 2. No Adobe Lightroom Integrations |
| 3. Pull content from Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram, 500px, Bandsintown, Soundcloud, or Flickr directly into your site. | 3. Can’t sell stock images on Squarespace |
| 4. Art store, SEO, Photo blogging, special portfolio features, extensions, custom development, and good support |
Conclusion: Adobe Portfolio vs Squarespace
Use Adobe Portfolio over Squarespace,
- If you are looking for a simple and cheaper portfolio-sharing website then Adobe portfolio is better than Squarespace.
- If you are an adobe user and want to easily share and sell your art within the adobe community then adobe portfolio is best as adobe suite integration with them
Use Squarespace over Adobe Portfolio,
- If you are looking to build a personalized portfolio, a Unique brand of your work then Squarespace is better than adobe portfolio as you can customize it the way you want.
- If you are looking to provide service and sell your art to your audience then Squarespace has inbuilt tools to fulfill your expectations.
Declan Kingston mainly works around strong Data to create powerful visuals, complex graphs to make the right decision for companies. He has been working in this field for over 8 years, has a strong knowledge of eCommerce platforms and website builders. He has worked with Ethereum and Looker Data Sciences, Inc. (now part of Google Cloud).
