Our store builder recommendations for you

✅ Our recommendation: Squarespace

Squarespace is an extremely easy platform to start selling gated content with. This is thanks to its dedicated features for doing so, Squarespace Courses and Squarespace Membership Sites, which are available on any plan — even the platform’s entry-level $25/mo ‘Basic’ plan.

Squarespace Courses lets you design, sell and promote professional online courses (involving a mix of text, video and downloadable content) and Squarespace Membership Sites allows you to put your content behind a robust paywall.

In addition to letting you sell digital content like this, Squarespace also provides a wide range of general website building and ecommerce features and is an excellent all-round solution for new merchants.

Key alternatives to consider

Shopify

Shopify also lets you create membership sites and sell online courses. However you’ll usually need to invest in a third-party app to do so — the process of getting a gated-content business of the ground isn’t as seamless as Squarespace’s.

On the plus side, Shopify lets you sell your content in multiple currencies — something not yet facilitated by Squarespace — and its selling features in general are considerably more powerful.

WordPress

There is a huge range of plugins for WordPress available that let you sell gated content and courses (for example, LearnDash, MemberPress and WooCommerce Memberships). Some of these provide considerably more powerful features than those provided by Squarespace.

The downside is that such plugins tend to involve more configuration and come with a steeper learning curve (as does WordPress in general)

You can learn more about Squarespace vs WordPress here.

Kajabi

Kajabi is an all-in-one platform designed to help creators and entrepreneurs build, market, and sell digital products such as online courses, membership sites, coaching programs, and podcasts. It offers a comprehensive suite of tools, including website building, email marketing, payment processing, and analytics, all integrated into a single user-friendly interface.

Unlike Squarespace, which is more of a ‘general’ website building platform, Kajabi is a specialized platform for selling online content, so you can expect very strong features for doing so. There is a big drawback to consider however, and that’s cost: the cheapest Kajabi plan costs a not-insignificant $89 per month, and premium plans can cost as much as $399/mo.