When comparing Pelican vs Squarespace, the Slant community recommends Pelican for most people. In the question“What are the best solutions for a personal blog?” Pelican is ranked 3rd while Squarespace is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose Pelican is:
All code is available on GitHub.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Open source
All code is available on GitHub.
Pro Active community
Pro Uses a versatile, powerful and easy to use templating engine
Uses Jinja.
Pro Code syntax highlighting
Uses Pygments for code highlighting.
Pro Support for unique templates per page
Adds flexibility to create variety of websites.
Pro Content can be written in multiple formats
Supports reStructuredText, Markdown, or AsciiDoc formats.
Pro Import your existing blog from many sources
Pro Customisable Themes and support for Plugins
Makes it flexible to cater to creation of variety of websites in addition to blogs.
Pro Multilingual
Easily handles multiple languages, like EN, FR, etc.
Pro Quite fast even for sites with thousands of posts
Can spin up an build sites with thousands of articles in a matter of seconds even on very old computers.
Pro Easy to customize & update
Squarespace's WYSIWYG tools are intuitive and support drag & drop functionality allowing you to change existing layout or add an article quickly.
Pro Responsive templates
Squarespace templates offer an optimal viewing experience depending on the width of the browser window so they will work and look great both on desktop and mobile devices.
Pro Lots of flexibility
Squarspace allows complete creative control over how you want your website to look and function. It can be a complete website.
Pro Extensive styling options
Pro Detailed real-time metrics
Squarspace offers detailed metrics, that can also easily be accessed from your phone via an iOS app.
Pro Attention to detail
Squarespace has a bunch of small nice-to-haves that make it a pleasure to use, like automatically getting a screengrab when adding a video so that the site doesn't load the whole video before the user has clicked on it, or a sign-up process that's sane among other things.
Pro Lots of good example projects
Squarespace offers a great selection of highly polished templates across a variety of categories and styles.
Pro Great support
Squarespace promises to answer all question within an hour.
Cons
Con Theme inheritance doesn't seem to be a priority
There have been endless discussions for years but theme inheritance still doesn't seem to be a thing. You can "inherit" from the simple theme so you don't have to have all the required files in your theme, but that's as far as it goes.
Con Not as powerful as other more popular site generators
Con A little bit slower than some of its competitors
Con Dependent on a third-party host
This is dependent on a third-party host, instead of creating a site that you can deploy on your own server.