Shopify vs WooCommerce

If you want to start selling quickly and never think about servers, choose Shopify. Hosting, security, updates and a fast, trusted checkout are included in a monthly plan, and a team can run the store without a developer on call.

If your business already runs on WordPress, if content and SEO bring most of your customers, or if your catalogue needs logic no hosted platform allows, choose WooCommerce. The software is free and open source, you own the code and the data, and any developer can extend it.

The deciding question is rarely a feature. It is who will maintain the store in two years: Shopify sells you peace of mind, WooCommerce gives you freedom that someone has to look after.

Shopify is a hosted e-commerce platform: you pay a monthly plan, and everything technical is handled for you. Hosting, SSL, security patches, payment compliance and the checkout itself are Shopify’s job. You pick a theme, add your products, connect a payment method and start selling, online, in person with Shopify POS, or across marketplaces and social channels from the same admin.

What makes Shopify strong is its ecosystem. The Shopify App Store lists more than 21,000 apps, Shop Pay gives returning shoppers a one-tap checkout, and Shopify ships more than 150 updates twice a year through its Editions. Its AI assistant, Sidekick, lives inside the admin, and its Agentic Storefronts let products be discovered and bought inside AI chats.

The trade-off is control. You work within Shopify’s structure, its checkout and its URL patterns, and many features come from paid apps that add up month after month.

WooCommerce is a free, open-source e-commerce plugin for WordPress, part of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. It turns a WordPress site into a store: products, cart, checkout, orders, taxes and shipping, inside the same admin as your pages and blog posts. WooCommerce says it powers more than 4 million stores.

The software costs nothing and takes no share of your revenue. You choose your host, your payment provider, your theme and your extensions, and you can change any of them later. Because it is WordPress, the content side is as strong as it gets, and any PHP developer can adapt the code to an unusual catalogue, a pricing rule or a back-office integration.

The trade-off is responsibility. Hosting, performance, backups, security updates and compatibility between WordPress, WooCommerce, your theme and a dozen plugins are yours to manage, or your agency’s.

Twelve criteria we look at on every e-commerce project. The last column says which platform has the edge, from our experience on client stores.

Shopify’s official US prices in November 2026: Basic costs $29 a month billed yearly ($39 billed monthly), Grow $79 ($105), Advanced $299 ($399), and Shopify Plus starts at $2,300 a month on a three-year term ($2,500 on a one-year term). Shopify sets a price per currency: in the euro zone, the same plans cost €24, €69 and €289 a month billed yearly, and Plus starts at €2,100. New stores get a short free trial, followed at the time of writing by an introductory offer of $1 a month for three months.

WooCommerce itself is free, with no subscription and no revenue share. What you pay for is everything around it. WooCommerce’s own estimate puts hosting at $25 to $350 a month for most stores, and paid extensions at $29 to $299 a year each. Popular official extensions show the order of magnitude: Subscriptions is listed at $279 a year, Bookings at $249 and Product Bundles at $79. Add a premium theme if you use one, and the time someone spends keeping the whole stack up to date.

The headline price favours WooCommerce. The total cost depends on what you would otherwise pay in Shopify apps, and on how much maintenance you buy in for WooCommerce.

On a growing store, payment fees quickly outweigh the subscription. Shopify’s logic is simple: use Shopify Payments and you pay only the card rate, which falls as you move up the plans. In the United States, online card payments cost 2.9% + 30¢ on Basic, 2.7% on Grow, 2.5% on Advanced and 2.25% on Plus, plus the fixed 30¢ (in the euro zone, from 2.1% + €0.30 on Basic down to 1.3% on Plus). Use another payment provider instead and Shopify adds its own transaction fee on top of that provider’s: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus. Since May 2025, that fee also applies to orders paid with gift cards or store credit on new stores. Shopify Payments is not available in every country, which matters if you sell from outside its supported markets.

WooCommerce charges no platform fee at all, whatever provider you choose. Its own service, WooPayments, has no monthly fee: in the United States it costs 2.9% + $0.30 per domestic card, plus 1.5% for international cards and 1% for currency conversion. In France it costs 1.5% + €0.25 for a domestic card, with surcharges for cards issued outside Europe and for currency conversion. You can also connect Stripe, PayPal, Mollie or your bank’s gateway directly and negotiate your rates.

In practice, the gap is small if you accept Shopify Payments, and real if you need a specific provider. A business that must keep its own acquirer, or sells in a country without Shopify Payments, should run the numbers on its volume before choosing.

Shopify is built so that a merchant can open a store alone. Sign up, choose a theme, add products, set shipping and taxes, connect payments: the admin guides each step, and the mobile app lets you follow orders anywhere. Nothing needs installing, and updates arrive without you noticing. For a team whose job is products, stock and marketing, that is the main argument.

WooCommerce asks for more at the start. You need a host, a WordPress installation, a theme compatible with WooCommerce, then extensions for what the core does not cover. A setup wizard helps, and managed WordPress hosts simplify a lot of it, but someone still makes technical choices. Once the store is built, daily use is comfortable for anyone who knows WordPress.

The real difference shows up over time. On Shopify, maintenance is the platform’s job. On WooCommerce, WordPress, WooCommerce, the theme and each plugin update on their own schedules, and an update can break a checkout or a template. Staging, backups and testing before each update are not optional on a store that sells every day. We see stores that run beautifully for years on WooCommerce, and they always have someone in charge of that routine.

Shopify themes are polished and made for selling: product pages, collections, filters and cart drawers work well out of the box, and the theme editor lets you rearrange sections without code. Going further means editing the theme in Liquid, Shopify’s template language, or building apps. The checkout is the one area where Shopify keeps a tight frame: you can brand it and extend it, but deep changes are reserved for Shopify Plus.

WooCommerce inherits everything WordPress can do. Thousands of themes, page builders and the block editor give a lot of freedom, and since the code is open, a developer can change any template, any step of the checkout or any email. That freedom is a strength for unusual projects, and a risk when a site piles up page builders and plugins that slow it down.

For a brand where the site has to look and feel unique, we often separate the two jobs: Shopify runs the commerce, and the storefront is built on a custom front end that talks to Shopify through its APIs. That gives design freedom without giving up Shopify’s checkout.

Both platforms can rank well. The difference is how much control you have, and how good the content side is.

Shopify covers the essentials cleanly: editable titles and meta descriptions, automatic sitemaps, canonical tags, structured data in most modern themes and a redirect manager. Its limits are structural. URLs follow fixed patterns, with products under /products/, collections under /collections/ and pages under /pages/, and you cannot remove those prefixes. The built-in blog is simple, which is fine for news and short guides but limited for a content-led strategy.

WooCommerce gives full control. You choose the URL structure, add an SEO plugin for fine-grained metadata and schema, and use all of WordPress for editorial content: categories, authors, related posts, landing pages. For a store where guides, comparisons and articles bring most of the traffic, that is a real advantage. The condition is performance: a slow WooCommerce site loses what its flexibility gains, so hosting, caching and a lean theme matter as much as the plugins.

Our reading: for a catalogue-led store, Shopify’s SEO is more than enough. For a store that grows through content, WooCommerce, or Shopify paired with a dedicated content site, does better.

Shopify runs every store on its own infrastructure, with a global CDN, SSL and payment security included. Traffic peaks such as a product drop or Black Friday are Shopify’s problem, not yours. Speed then depends mostly on the theme and on the apps you add, since each app can inject its own scripts into the storefront. Keeping the app list short is the best performance habit on Shopify.

WooCommerce performance is whatever your hosting and setup make it. On good managed hosting with caching, a lean theme and a reasonable number of plugins, a WooCommerce store is fast. On cheap shared hosting with a heavy page builder, it is not, and the cart and checkout pages are harder to cache than a blog. Security follows the same logic: WooCommerce itself is maintained and patched, but a site is only as safe as its least-updated plugin, and PCI compliance depends on your payment setup.

If no one on your side wants to own hosting, monitoring and security, Shopify removes a whole category of risk. If you have that skill, WooCommerce lets you tune the stack exactly to your traffic.

Shopify scales by plan. Higher plans lower your card rates, add staff accounts (none on Basic, 5 on Grow, 15 on Advanced, unlimited on Plus) and reporting. Up to 10 inventory locations are included on Basic, Grow and Advanced, and 200 on Plus. Shopify Markets handles multiple countries, currencies and languages from one store, and Shopify POS connects physical shops to the same stock. Shopify Plus, from $2,300 a month (€2,100 in the euro zone), adds a fully customisable checkout, unlimited B2B catalogues, expansion stores and priority support: it is the platform many large brands use.

WooCommerce scales by architecture. With the right hosting, database tuning and a developer, it handles large catalogues and high volumes, and its open code makes complex B2B rules, ERP connections or custom pricing possible without waiting for a platform to support them. Multilingual and multi-currency stores rely on dedicated plugins. The cost of growth is engineering time rather than a higher plan.

Both go far. The question is whether you prefer to pay for growth in plan fees or in technical work.

Shopify has made AI part of the platform. Sidekick, its assistant built into the admin, helps write product content, analyse sales and automate tasks. More important for the next few years, Shopify pushes products into AI conversations: its Agentic Storefronts let shoppers discover and buy from Shopify stores in channels such as ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity. Shopify even offers an Agentic plan with no monthly fee, for merchants who want to sell in AI chats without a Shopify online store, paying only card rates.

WooCommerce takes the open route. There is no single built-in assistant; AI comes from WordPress plugins, your hosting provider or your own integrations, with the model of your choice. That is flexible, and it lets a developer connect a store to any AI tool, but it is your job to assemble and maintain.

If being sold through AI assistants matters to you soon, Shopify is ahead today, with the work already done at platform level.

For a small business starting to sell online, Shopify is usually the safer start. You launch in days, nothing breaks when you are busy, and the monthly cost is predictable. WooCommerce makes sense for a small business that already has a WordPress site with traffic, and someone who can maintain it.

For a content-led brand, a publisher or a store that sells through guides and expertise, WooCommerce keeps commerce and content in one place, with the best editorial tools on the market. For a fast-growing direct-to-consumer brand, with drops, ads and retail, Shopify’s checkout, POS and ecosystem are hard to beat.

For dropshipping and print on demand, most tools are built for Shopify first. For B2B with complex rules, either can work: Shopify Plus for a standard B2B experience at scale, WooCommerce when the rules are unusual and you want to code them.

What we recommend when a client asks, and why. We build brand sites in Webflow, Framer and Next.js with Payload, and integrate Shopify when a project sells online. We do not resell either platform, so our advice follows the project.

Most migrations we see go from WooCommerce to Shopify, usually because maintenance has become a burden. Shopify publishes an official guide for it. Products and customers can be imported with CSV files or a migration app; historical orders need an app or the API, and Shopify advises importing products first, then customers, then orders, so that everything links correctly. Turn off order notifications during the import, or your staff will receive one email per historical order.

The opposite move exists too. WooCommerce offers a Shopify migration tool with a guided wizard that brings over products with their variations, customers, historical orders, coupons, pages, blog posts, shipping zones and tax rates, and can generate 301 redirects from the old Shopify URLs.

In both directions, SEO continuity is the part to get right. URL structures differ, so every product, collection, page and article URL that has traffic or backlinks needs a 301 redirect to its new address. Shopify lets you import redirects from a CSV file. Customer passwords never carry over between platforms: plan an email inviting customers to reactivate their accounts.

A quick summary of where each platform is strong and where it holds you back. The full details are in our Shopify and WooCommerce reviews.

Pick Shopify if you want to focus on selling: products, marketing and customers, with hosting, security, checkout and peaks handled for you. Pick WooCommerce if WordPress is already your home, if content drives your sales, or if you need control that a hosted platform cannot give, and you have someone to maintain it.

Neither is the better platform in general. Shopify is the better default for most merchants, because its costs are predictable and its maintenance is someone else’s job. WooCommerce is the better tool for teams that value ownership and flexibility and are ready to pay for them in time. And when the brand site matters as much as the store, the strongest setup is often Shopify behind a custom front end.

Prices, fees and features were checked on the official pages below on 11 November 2026. Shopify’s pricing page shows the currency of the visitor’s country, so its US dollar prices and card rates were confirmed on Shopify’s own US pages and articles listed below.