Art.industries vs Squarespace

Where Squarespace fits

Squarespace is the right tool when you need a polished five-page site: artist roster, exhibition press, about, contact, and maybe a small Commerce section for fixed-price prints or books. Templates, hosting, and custom domains are mature. For a studio or gallery that accepts maintaining inventory in a spreadsheet or back-office system separately, it can work, until show season scales past hand-built product pages.

Where artists, studios, and galleries pick Art.industries over Squarespace alone

Teams on Squarespace plus a back-office tool maintain two catalogues. Art.industries Website Studio reads live inventory, artist pages, exhibitions, and availability update when you mark a work sold. Deals run through viewing rooms and Stripe invoicing; commerce runs through storefront checkout on the same records, including print-on-demand on Advanced. Core is free for the operational loop; Advanced is $30/month per workspace.

Four tools, or one record

Most art businesses run archival software for inventory, a site builder for their public face, a commerce platform for checkout, and Eventbrite (or similar) for opening RSVPs and ticket sales. Four systems means four copies of price, availability, edition counts, and guest lists.

Art.industries unifies archival depth, website publishing, storefront commerce, and events and ticketing on one live record—no Eventbrite embed or spreadsheet reconciliation after every opening. The sections below compare a specific product on deals, commerce, and collector experience, not which single dimension they happen to excel at.

Simple tiers: pay for what you use, subscription only

Art.industries has three workspace plans (Core, Advanced, and Max), not a stack of paid modules. Inventory, CRM, viewing rooms, pipeline, consignments, Website Studio, storefront checkout, email campaigns, and events are included in the tier you pick. You are not buying a Gallery Management module, a Marketing module, and a Website module separately, and you are not stacking Shopify-style apps so inventory talks to the cart.

You pay for what you use: start on free Core for the full deals stack; upgrade to Advanced when you need public commerce on your domain; choose Max when unlimited capacity is simpler than counting seats. Optional capacity applies only when you outgrow included works, workspace members, artists, or email sends, spelled out in the pricing simulator, not buried in a renewal call.

We do not take a percentage of your sales or add a platform fee on top of Stripe. Invoices and storefront checkout run on your Stripe account; funds settle to you. Your bill from us is the subscription fee for the tier you chose; nothing else on each transaction.

Deals and commerce: what each platform actually covers

Art businesses sell in two modes that most software conflates. Deals are coordinated private sales, viewing rooms, holds, negotiated offers, consignor splits, deposits, and invoices. Commerce is self-serve public checkout for editions, books, and multiples at fixed prices.

Art.industries runs both modes on shared inventory records: mark a work room-only, storefront-eligible, or both; either path updates availability when a sale closes. Many competitors skew toward one mode, deal-focused CRMs handle private sales but force a second catalogue for the website; Shopify-style tools handle commerce but miss holds, consignments, and confidential rooms.

Use the matrix below to see which side each product actually covers, not which checkout widget they advertise.

When Squarespace is enough, and when it is not

Squarespace alone is enough if your only job is publishing: a portfolio, a fair booth landing page, or a small shop where every SKU is a simple product variant you update by hand.

It is not enough when you also run private viewing rooms, consignor settlements, numbered editions with live availability, or a CRM tied to who opened which work. Those workflows need inventory semantics Squarespace was never built to hold, and you end up duplicating every price change across systems.

Migrating from Squarespace

Export works and contacts to CSV (or pull from the spreadsheet you were syncing manually), import into Art.industries with the validation preview, and rebuild public pages in Website Studio from the same catalogue. Keep Squarespace live until one exhibition proves artist pages, sold states, and consignment statements agree. Many teams move deals to Core first while the old site stays up for a few weeks.

Collector portals: one home instead of forwarded links

Collectors usually receive one-off links, a viewing room grant, an invoice payment email, a Stripe checkout URL, each minted and forwarded by staff. Art.industries gives every collector contact a branded client portal on one share link: open invoices with PDF download, pay balances and installments through your Stripe account, revisit shared viewing rooms, review owned works and shop orders, and open diligence documents, scoped to that contact only.

Many art-business CRMs stop at emailing payment links. Some sell a separate collector product (Artlogic Collector is a distinct module). The Collector client portal row in the matrix below shows who ships a persistent, self-service collector home inside the same workspace as invoicing and rooms.