Ecommerce

Shopify vs WooCommerce: Full Comparison

Published October 7, 2026

Shopify and WooCommerce are not two versions of the same product. One sells you an operated store; the other hands you the software and leaves the operating to you. The pricing pages barely hint at how different the two commitments are.

Most Shopify versus WooCommerce comparisons line up the monthly prices and declare WooCommerce cheaper because its core is free. That is true and almost useless. The platform fee is the smallest part of what either choice costs you, and the two products are not really competing on price. They are competing on who does the work.

Shopify sells an operated store. You pay a monthly fee and the hosting, the checkout, the security patching and the compliance paperwork are somebody else’s problem. WooCommerce gives you the software and leaves the operating to you, which is why its own pricing page talks about hosting providers and extensions rather than plans. Read both pricing pages next to each other and the difference in what is being sold is more obvious than any difference in the figures.

At a Glance

Shopify is a hosted commerce platform. Plans run from Basic at $29/mo paid yearly through Grow at $79/mo and Advanced at $299/mo, with Plus starting at $2,300/mo for larger businesses. Paying monthly instead of yearly costs more at every level: Basic becomes $39/mo, Grow $105/mo and Advanced $399/mo. The plan you are on also sets your card rates and your penalty for using an outside payment provider.

WooCommerce is the open-source commerce plugin for WordPress. The core carries a $0 platform fee and a 0% revenue share. What you actually pay is hosting, which Woo puts at $25 – $350/month for most stores, and extensions at $29 – $299/year each. Payments cost whatever your processor charges, with WooPayments at approximately 2.50-2.90% + 30¢ per transaction and no extra fee for bringing your own gateway.

That structural difference is the whole comparison. One bill is predictable and inclusive. The other is lower at the base and entirely dependent on choices you make.

Pricing Comparison

The row that decides most arguments is the third-party transaction fee. On Shopify Basic, choosing a payment provider other than Shopify Payments costs 2% of the transaction on top of whatever that provider charges. In India, where merchants often have reasons to prefer a local gateway, that 2% is not a rounding error on a store doing real volume. The fee falls as you move up the plans, which is a polite way of saying the platform charges you either way.

The row that decides the rest is hosting. “Free core plus $25 hosting” beats Shopify Basic on paper. But $25/month hosting and a store you expect to survive a campaign are not always the same thing, and the upper end of Woo’s own range, $350/month, is more than Shopify Advanced. Woo’s pricing page is unusually honest about this: it says hosting scales with traffic and performance needs, and leaves the number to you.

One more figure worth noting before the plan comparison gets simplified in your head: Shopify’s POS Pro add-on is $89/mo per location. For a brand with three shops, that is a second subscription roughly the size of the first.

When to Choose Shopify

Choose Shopify when the constraint is people, not money.

A store that needs to be live this month, run by a founder or a two-person team with no developer, is a Shopify store. Hosting, the TLS certificate, PCI compliance and uptime are included. Shopify states it is certified Level 1 PCI DSS compliant and that stores on the platform are PCI compliant by default, which removes a category of work that most small merchants are not equipped to do and would not enjoy discovering they had skipped.

The checkout is the other reason. Shopify maintains it, improves it, and claims it converts 15% better on average than other platforms. Whether that figure holds for your store is unknowable in advance, but the direction is defensible: a checkout used by millions of merchants gets more optimisation attention than one built once for a single site.

Retail is the clearest case. If you sell in a shop as well as online, Shopify’s point of sale is in the box for casual selling and POS Pro at $89/mo per location covers staff permissions, in-store inventory and in-store pickup. WooCommerce has no first-party answer here, and stitching one together is a project rather than a setting.

The honest limits: your catalogue has to fit Shopify’s shape. Up to 2,048 variants per product and a maximum of 3 option types is generous for apparel and tight for anything configurable. And if you sell across many countries, note that Basic includes 3 markets with no way to add more, while Advanced charges $59/month per market after the first 3.

When to Choose WooCommerce

Choose WooCommerce when the constraint is the product or the margin, and you have someone who can build.

The margin case is arithmetic. Woo charges a 0% revenue share and no platform fee, so your costs follow your infrastructure rather than your sales. Shopify’s plan ladder does the opposite by design, and the step from Advanced at $299/mo to Plus starting at $2,300/mo is where many growing brands first look seriously at leaving. If you are approaching that step, model both options properly rather than assuming the migration is the expensive option.

The product case is about limits. Unlimited variants and unlimited option types matter if you sell something that is assembled rather than picked: engraved goods, made-to-measure items, equipment with dependent options. Shopify’s variant ceiling is the sort of constraint you discover halfway through building the catalogue.

Payments are the third case. Woo adds no fee for a third-party processor, lets several gateways run at once, and leaves you free to negotiate rates directly as volume grows. For a store with a subscription product this compounds: WooCommerce Subscriptions handles recurring billing with no platform cut, where the same job on a hosted platform usually means an app that takes a percentage.

And if the business already runs on WordPress, Woo keeps content and commerce in one place. The blog that brings traffic and the store that converts it share a CMS, a template system and a login, which is a smaller advantage than the marketing suggests and a real one for teams who publish often.

Where They’re Genuinely Different

The deepest difference is where risk sits. On Shopify, platform risk is theirs and pricing risk is yours: they keep the store up, and they can change what a plan costs or includes. On WooCommerce, pricing risk is largely yours to control and operational risk is entirely yours to carry. A slow page, a failed update, an unpatched plugin and a lapsed backup are all your store’s problem.

The second difference is the shape of the bill. Shopify is one line item that covers almost everything. WooCommerce is a host, a set of extensions, a processor and, usually, somebody’s time. Woo’s own pricing page leans into this by comparing total cost of ownership rather than monthly fees, and includes worked examples where development and maintenance dwarf the software: in the sample it publishes for a luxury brand, initial development is the largest first-year cost by a wide margin. That is the part teams forget to budget.

The third is upgrade pressure. Shopify’s plans bundle unrelated things together, so you move up for one feature and pay for ten. Checkout customisation is limited until Plus. Full data access for custom apps starts at Grow. Market fees change by plan. WooCommerce has no tiers to climb, which means no artificial upgrade and also no safety net telling you when your setup has outgrown itself.

A practical note on migration, since it usually comes up once a store is already running: moving products and customers between the two is routine, but moving a checkout, a subscription base or any custom logic is not. Both platforms are easier to leave early than late, which argues for taking the choice seriously now rather than treating it as reversible.

The Honest Verdict

If you are starting out, selling a conventional catalogue, and the person reading this is also the person who would have to fix a broken server, use Shopify. Basic at $29/mo paid yearly buys you a store and the removal of an entire class of work. The platform fee is the price of not having that work, and for most small merchants it is cheap.

If you already run WordPress, or you have a developer on call, or your products do not fit inside Shopify’s variant and option limits, use WooCommerce. The $0 platform fee and 0% revenue share are real, and they matter more the larger you get.

The decision point in the middle is sharper than either vendor admits. Work out your annual Shopify cost including the plan, the card rates and the third-party transaction fee at your actual volume, then work out your Woo cost including hosting, the extensions you would need and an honest estimate of the hours somebody will spend maintaining it. If the second number is lower and you have the person, WooCommerce wins. If it is lower only because you have valued that person’s time at zero, it does not.