october vs Squarespace
Thinking of swapping Squarespace for the open-source october? Here’s the honest trade-off.
11k PHP ⊘ Proprietary today
What you give up vs Squarespace
- Core product switched to a paid commercial license; the open-source v1 branch receives limited updates
- Plugin ecosystem has shrunk since the license change, with fewer actively maintained free plugins
- No official managed hosting; users must provision their own PHP/MySQL server
- Headless/API mode is less mature than dedicated headless CMSes like Contentful
What you gain
- • Full data ownership — self-host october on your own infrastructure.
- • No per-seat SaaS bill (Squarespace: monthly fees and a closed platform).
- • Open-source code you can audit and extend (⊘ Proprietary).