Nova vs Squarespace: Two Different Ways to Get a Polished Site
This comparison is written by Nova, so it's worth reading as Nova's own take rather than a neutral third-party review. Squarespace has built its reputation on design, its templates are consistently among the most polished in the industry, which is a big part of why it's popular with photographers, artists, and other visually-driven businesses. If you want fine-grained control over a specific visual style and don't mind spending time in the editor to get it right, Squarespace's template quality is a genuine strength.
Nova approaches the same goal, a good-looking, working website, from a different starting point. You describe the site you want, Nova proposes features through AI-generated previews, you pick a style, and it generates a complete site with a live preview, without you needing to select a template and manually rebuild it around your content. That's less hands-on design control than Squarespace offers, but considerably less time spent per site, since there's no template-to-content rework step.
The honest tradeoff: if design control down to the pixel matters to you, and you're willing to spend the time in an editor to get there, Squarespace's template system gives you more room to do that manually. If you'd rather describe what you want and get a working result to react to and adjust, Nova's approach removes a step Squarespace still requires. Neither is objectively better across the board, they're built around different amounts of hands-on control versus speed.
FAQ
Yes, Squarespace has introduced its own AI-assisted building tools in recent versions, alongside its traditional template system.
Both can produce strong portfolio sites; Squarespace gives more manual design control if you want to fine-tune every detail, while Nova gets you a working draft faster from a description. Nova's guide on building a portfolio site with AI covers that use case specifically.
No, there's no direct import; you'd describe your site fresh to Nova to generate a new version of it.
See how Nova builds your site from a description, then decide if that fits better than starting from a template.