Best Musician & Band Website Builder 2026: Bandzoogle vs Squarespace vs Wix, at This Year's Prices

For a band, Bandzoogle is still the pick, and this year it is easier to say so with confidence: we read its pricing page first-hand on 9 Oct 2026, so the numbers below are the vendor's own rather than tracker estimates. Lite costs $9.16 a month billed annually, Standard $14.16 and Pro $18.33, with no commission taken on anything you sell. Choose it if you gig, sell merch or need a press kit a booker can open in one click. Skip it if your act is mostly a visual brand and the site is really a portfolio with a play button; that is Squarespace's ground, and we price it honestly below.

One correction before the ticket. Earlier editions of this guide, and most band-website roundups still ranking today, quote Bandzoogle at $8.29 to $16.63 a month. Those figures are out of date. Every price on this page was read on the vendor's own US pricing page on 9 Oct 2026, and the plan gates come from the same table.

What a musician site actually needs

Strip a band website down to the jobs that earn money or bookings and there are five. Everything else is decoration, and decoration is where most build hours go missing.

• Music that plays on a phone, without sending the listener off to another app first.
• A show calendar with dates, venues and ticket links, kept current, because promoters check it before they confirm.
• An EPK: short and long bios, approved photos, a stage plot and press quotes behind one link.
• A store for downloads, merch and, for touring acts, tickets, at a margin a marketplace does not shave.
• A mailing list, the only audience you keep if a platform changes its rules.

A generic builder can do every one of these with enough apps and patience. The question this guide answers is what each option costs once all five are switched on, and which plan quietly leaves one of them out.

Bandzoogle 2026 plans: what Lite, Standard and Pro let you sell

Bandzoogle sells three website plans, and the difference between them is less about features than about what the store is allowed to sell. Here is the whole ladder as its pricing page showed it on 9 Oct 2026.

Three gates decide the plan for most acts. The first is merch: Lite cannot sell it, full stop, so a band that brings shirts to shows starts on Standard. The second is the catalogue. Ten tracks is one album and a single, which is fine for a new project and tight for anyone with a back catalogue; Standard's 50 tracks covers most working bands. The third is tickets, which only Pro sells. If you route ticketing through the venue or a ticketing service anyway, Pro's extra $4.17 a month buys you little beyond unlimited pages and advanced analytics.

Two smaller plans sit beside the ladder. The EPK plan, $6.37 a month annual, is a single-page press kit with a player, a tour calendar and a contact form, a sensible holding page for a project that is not selling yet. Merch Table Lite, at the same $6.37, is a 0%-commission store for up to five products without a website, useful if your site lives somewhere else. Every website plan includes a custom domain at no charge and you can move it elsewhere after 60 days; paying annually works out to two free months, and every plan has a 14-day trial. If the ladder fits your act, start the Bandzoogle trial on Standard and drop to Lite only if you truly sell nothing physical.

Bandzoogle vs Squarespace: design vs music tools

Squarespace is the only option here that beats Bandzoogle on looks, and for some artists that settles it. Its templates handle large photography, video headers and type better than anything in the band-specific field, which matters when the act's identity is as visual as it is sonic. As of 9 Oct 2026, Basic costs $19 a month and Core $29 on annual billing, or $25 and $39 billed monthly.

What you give up is the music plumbing. There is no band-specific EPK template, the show calendar is a general events page, and the player is an embed you manage yourself. Basic also keeps 2% of every online-store sale as a transaction fee, a cut that falls to 0% on Core. If you sell memberships or courses through Squarespace's Digital Content tools, that separate fee is 7% on Basic and 5% on Core, so a paid fan club on a cheap plan carries a heavier platform cut than the shirts do. Bandzoogle's subscriptions, by contrast, are included on all three website plans at its standard 0% commission.

The fair summary: Squarespace sells design and charges for it, both in plan price and, on Basic, in store fees. For an image-led artist who sells little, Squarespace Core is worth the extra; for a band whose site exists to move merch and fill rooms, it is the dearer way to do a narrower job.

Bandzoogle vs Wix and Hostinger: the cheaper routes and what they miss

Wix and Hostinger come up in every band-website thread as the budget alternatives, and one of them really is cheap. The other is not, once you need it to sell.

Wix Light, $17 a month if paid yearly, accepts no online payments at all; the plans page lists accepting payments only from Core, at $29. So the moment your Wix site needs to sell a download, the comparison is $29 against Bandzoogle Lite's $9.16, or Standard's $14.16 once merch is involved, and you still have to assemble the player, the gig list and the press kit from general-purpose parts. Wix makes sense for a musician who also runs a teaching studio or a session business and wants bookings in the same place; Wix handles that kind of mixed site well.

Hostinger is the genuinely cheap route. Its Unlimited plan, the first tier with ecommerce, works out to $3.99 a month when you pay $191.52 for 48 months up front, and it renews at $16.99 a month. Hostinger advertises 0% transaction fees, so a store there loses only card processing. The catch is twofold: the low price is a four-year commitment that renews at more than four times the intro rate, and nothing on it is built for musicians. If your only goal is the lowest possible bill for a simple site with a shop, Hostinger wins year one; by year five, at $203.88 a year, it is dearer than Bandzoogle Standard.

What it really costs per year (annual vs monthly billing)

Annual billing is where every builder on this page hides its headline price, and the gap to monthly billing is not trivial. Bandzoogle Standard costs $169.92 a year paid annually and $204 paid monthly, a $34.08 difference. Squarespace Basic is $228 against $300, and Core $348 against $468. Wix shows only yearly prices on its US plans page, so we compare it on that basis.

Here is what a working year looks like for a band that sells about $3,000 of merch across 60 orders of $50, with card processing at the standard US 2.9% plus 30 cents. Processing on that volume is $87 in percentage fees plus $18 in per-order fees, $105 in all, on every option below.

• Bandzoogle Standard: $169.92 plan plus $105 processing, about $274.92 for the year, with nothing taken as commission.
• Squarespace Basic: $228 plus the 2% store fee of $60 plus $105, about $393.
• Squarespace Core: $348 plus $105, about $453, with no store fee.
• Hostinger Unlimited: about $152.88 in an intro year (a quarter of the $191.52 prepay plus $105), rising to about $308.88 in a renewal year.

On those numbers Bandzoogle is the cheapest option that comes with music tools, and Hostinger is cheaper only while the prepay lasts. The plan price, not the fee, is what separates them, which is why the next section is shorter than most guides make it.

Fees on merch and music: per $100 sale

Every comparison of band website builders talks about commission, and almost none does the arithmetic. On a single $100 card sale, Bandzoogle keeps nothing and the card processor keeps $3.20. Squarespace Core and Hostinger Unlimited also charge no platform fee, so they lose the same $3.20. Squarespace Basic adds its 2% store fee, for $5.20 in total. Lite cannot make the sale at all, because it has no merch store.

The lesson is not that commission is irrelevant; it is that among these builders it only bites on Squarespace Basic. A $2 difference per $100 is $60 on our $3,000 year. Real money for a small act, about the same as the $58.08 a year between Bandzoogle Standard and Squarespace Basic's subscription, and far smaller than what a marketplace takes. Choose the plan for its tools and its yearly price first, then check the fee.

Free band website options and their catches

People search for a free band website builder more than almost any other variant of this question, so here is the plain answer: none of the music specialists has a free plan. Bandzoogle offers a 14-day trial, after which the cheapest way to stay online is the $6.37 EPK plan. The free options are generic, and each has a catch.

• Wix Free costs $0 with no card needed, but there is no custom domain and no online payments until a paid plan; payments start on Core at $29 a month.
• A link-in-bio page is free and quick, and it is someone else's page with your name on it. It ranks for the platform rather than for the band.
• Weebly, which some older band guides still recommend, has been winding down outside the US. Its own notice said sites in the affected countries would be unpublished on 27 Sep 2026 and that account login ends on 26 Dec 2026. The US is not on that list, but this is not a platform to start a new site on.

For a band with no budget at all, the honest route is a free trial now and the EPK plan or Lite the week the first gig is booked. A website that disappears when the trial ends is worse than a one-page press kit that stays.

Mistakes musicians make

• Buying Lite to sell shirts. Lite's store sells downloads only. Merch starts on Standard.
• Quoting last year's prices in the budget. Bandzoogle's annual rates rose to $9.16, $14.16 and $18.33; plan with today's numbers.
• Letting the mailing list hit the cap. Lite stops at 100 subscribers and Standard at 1,000; upgrade before a tour announcement, not after it bounces.
• Sending the EPK as a shared folder. Permissions break and files move. One page, always current, is what bookers open.
• Signing a four-year prepay for the intro price without checking what the renewal rate does to year five.

Every other trade we file gets the same treatment: one pick, priced to the plan, with the catch stated. The full register is on the best website builder by industry board.