WooCommerce vs Shopify

WooCommerce vs Shopify: free software you run, or a platform someone else runs for you

WooCommerce suits businesses that already live in WordPress, publish a lot of content, and have a developer (or the skills) to keep a self-hosted store patched and fast. Shopify suits businesses that would rather spend their time selling than maintaining software, want a checkout that converts without tuning, and expect to add channels, in-person sales or wholesale as they grow. The software cost of WooCommerce is zero, but the running cost is not, and on a like-for-like store the monthly totals are closer than most comparisons suggest.

A disclosure before we start: we are a Shopify Plus Partner, and most of our work is moving stores onto Shopify. We have tried to keep this comparison fair, including the cases where WooCommerce is the right answer or where staying put makes more sense.

At a glance

Comparison point	WooCommerce	Shopify
Pricing	Core plugin is free; you pay for hosting (Woo quotes $25 to $350 a month for most stores), a domain, a theme and extensions ($29 to $299 a year each)	Basic $39, Grow $105, Advanced $399 a month, or $29, $79 and $299 billed annually; Plus from $2,300 a month
Transaction fees	No platform fee; you pay only your payment processor	None with Shopify Payments; 2%, 1% or 0.6% on Basic, Grow and Advanced (0.2% on Plus) if you use a third-party gateway
Hosting and maintenance	Yours: hosting, backups, WordPress, WooCommerce and plugin updates, security	Included and managed by Shopify, including checkout and PCI compliance
Ease of use	Familiar if you know WordPress; more settings, more moving parts	One admin built around selling; quicker to learn
Design and themes	Any WordPress theme or block theme, full code access	Theme Store themes (free and paid) edited in Liquid and the theme editor
Apps and extensions	Woo Marketplace plus thousands of WordPress plugins	Shopify App Store; apps are hosted and update themselves
SEO and content	WordPress is the stronger publishing platform; full URL control	Solid SEO basics, simpler blog, fixed URL prefixes
Speed	Depends on your host, theme, plugins and caching	Global CDN and managed infrastructure; theme and apps still matter
Payments	WooPayments at 2.9% + 30 cents in the US, or Stripe, PayPal and many others	Shopify Payments from 2.9% + 30 cents on Basic, lower on higher plans; Shop Pay built in
B2B	Through paid extensions	Native on all plans; non-Plus plans limited to 3 catalogs
POS	Free Woo POS in the mobile app, tablets only, with limits; or third-party POS plugins	POS Lite free; POS Pro $89 per location per month
Scalability	Scales with your hosting and engineering budget	Shopify handles traffic peaks; Plus for high volume
Ownership and control	You own the code, the server and the database	You own your data and can export it, but Shopify controls the platform
Support	Woo support for WooPayments and Marketplace purchases; hosts and plugin authors for the rest	Shopify support around the clock for the platform; app developers for their apps

Prices checked September 2026, US pricing.

Pricing and total cost of ownership

WooCommerce is free, open-source software, and WooCommerce itself takes no revenue share. To run a store you also need hosting, a domain, an SSL certificate (many hosts include one), a theme, and usually several paid extensions. WooCommerce’s own pricing page puts hosting at $25 to $350 a month for most stores and extensions at $29 to $299 a year each. Premium themes are usually a one-time or annual purchase. The line most budgets leave out is maintenance: someone has to apply updates, test that nothing broke, and fix it when something does. That is either your time or a developer’s invoice.

Shopify’s pricing is simpler. Basic is $39 a month, Grow $105 and Advanced $399, or $29, $79 and $299 a month on annual billing. Plus starts at $2,300 a month. Hosting, security, the checkout and the software updates are all included. Most Shopify stores still pay for a few apps, so budget for those too.

A worked monthly example

Take a store selling $20,000 a month across 500 online orders (a $40 average order), with a handful of paid add-ons. These are illustrative assumptions, not quotes.

Monthly cost	WooCommerce	Shopify Basic (annual)	Shopify Grow (annual)
Platform	$0	$29	$79
Hosting	$25 to $100 (managed WooCommerce hosting)	Included	Included
Extensions or apps	About $40 (five extensions averaging about $100 a year)	About $40	About $40
Card processing	$730 (WooPayments, 2.9% + 30 cents)	$730 (2.9% + 30 cents)	$690 (2.7% + 30 cents)
Maintenance	Variable: your time or a developer’s hours for updates and fixes	Minimal	Minimal
Approximate total	$795 to $870, plus maintenance	About $799	About $809

Two things stand out. First, card processing dwarfs the software cost on both platforms, and at this volume WooPayments and Shopify Basic charge the same US online rate. Second, Grow’s lower card rate pays for most of its higher subscription: every one percentage point of card fees is $200 a month at $20,000 in sales, so on Shopify the right plan depends on your volume. WooCommerce’s real advantage shows when you already have hosting and in-house skills; its real risk is the maintenance line, which is small in a quiet month and large in the month a plugin update breaks checkout.

On a $20 sale, Shopify Basic with Shopify Payments takes 88 cents in card fees (2.9% plus 30 cents) and nothing more. WooPayments takes the same 88 cents on a domestic card, plus 1.5% for international cards and 1% for currency conversion.

Ease of use and maintenance

If your team already edits WordPress every day, WooCommerce will feel familiar: products are another post type, and orders, customers and settings sit in the same dashboard as your pages. The trade-off is the number of places a problem can come from. A WooCommerce store is WordPress core, WooCommerce, a theme, often a page builder, and often dozens of plugins, each updated on its own schedule by a different author. The updates that go wrong tend to show up at checkout, where they cost sales.

Security follows the same pattern. WordPress core is well maintained, but the plugin ecosystem is large and uneven, and an abandoned or vulnerable plugin is the most common way a WordPress site gets into trouble. On a self-hosted store, patching, backups, malware scanning, PHP upgrades and your share of PCI compliance sit with you and your host. Good managed WooCommerce hosts take on a lot of this, and we would not run a serious WooCommerce store without one, but someone still has to test updates before they reach customers.

Shopify removes that layer. There is nothing to update on the platform, apps are hosted by their developers, and Shopify, a PCI DSS Level 1 service provider, runs the checkout. The admin is narrower than WordPress, which is a limitation if you want to bend it.

Design and themes

WooCommerce works with almost any WordPress theme, block themes and the site editor, or page builders such as Elementor. You have full access to the template files and the database, so a developer can build anything the budget allows.

Shopify themes come from the Shopify Theme Store, including free themes such as Horizon and Dawn, and are edited through a visual theme editor with sections and blocks. Developers work in Liquid, and every theme on the Theme Store has to meet Shopify’s performance and quality rules. You have less freedom than on WordPress, but most stores never hit the ceiling. Design never migrates between the two platforms: moving means a new theme, not a converted one.

Apps and extensions

WooCommerce has the official Woo Marketplace and, beyond it, the whole WordPress plugin directory. For almost any need there is a plugin, often several, and many are free. The costs are compatibility and support: each plugin has its own author, update cycle and quality level, and conflicts between them are a common source of bugs.

Shopify’s App Store is smaller but more controlled. Apps run on their developers’ infrastructure, install without touching your server, and are removed cleanly in most cases. Many apps are subscription priced, so a long app list can add up; we audit that list on every build. Some things WooCommerce handles with a plugin, such as product options that change the price, need an app on Shopify, because Shopify caps a product at 3 options and 2,048 variants.

SEO and content

This is where WooCommerce has its clearest advantage, and we will not pretend otherwise. WordPress is the best general-purpose publishing platform available. You get categories and tags, custom post types, custom fields, reusable blocks, revisions, editorial roles, mature SEO plugins such as Rank Math and Yoast, and complete control over URL structure. If content drives your traffic, that matters.

Shopify covers the SEO basics well: editable titles and meta descriptions, automatic canonical tags, a generated sitemap and robots.txt, structured data in most modern themes, and a fast CDN. Its blog is where the limits show:

• Fixed URL prefixes. Products live under /products/, collections under /collections/, pages under /pages/ and posts under /blogs/blog-name/. You cannot remove those prefixes.
• No categories. A store can have several blogs and tag its posts, but there is no category hierarchy.
• A simpler editor. No block library to match WordPress, no custom post types, and basic comments.
• Fewer SEO tools in the core. Advanced schema, internal-link suggestions and bulk SEO editing come from apps.

For most stores that publish a few articles a month, Shopify’s blog is enough, and the SEO results come from the content, not the engine. For a publisher that happens to sell products, it may not be.

The middle path: WordPress for content, Shopify for commerce

You do not have to choose one platform for everything. Three setups we see work:

• A shop subdomain. Keep WordPress on the main domain for content and run Shopify on shop.yourdomain.com, with a matched header and footer. It is the simplest split, but the two sites need consistent navigation and cross-domain analytics.
• Shopify’s Buy Button. The Buy Button sales channel, included on all Shopify plans, embeds products and a cart in WordPress posts and pages, with checkout handled by Shopify. It works well for a modest catalog sold from content.
• Headless with the Storefront API. A developer builds the storefront on WordPress or a JavaScript framework and pulls products, carts and checkout from Shopify’s Storefront API. Shopify’s own route is Hydrogen, its React framework, with Oxygen hosting. This gives the most control and costs the most to build and maintain.

WooCommerce can go headless too, through its REST API, the Store API and the community WooGraphQL project, but then you are running a headless front end and a self-hosted back end.

Performance

A WooCommerce store is as fast as its hosting, theme, plugins and caching make it. A well-built store on good hosting can be very fast. The catch is that carts, checkout and logged-in pages cannot be fully cached, so they lean on the server, and each plugin adds work. Speed on WooCommerce is something you engineer and keep engineering.

Shopify runs every store on its own infrastructure behind a global CDN, and handles traffic spikes such as Black Friday without you resizing a server. Theme weight and app scripts still decide how fast a page feels, so a Shopify store can be slow too, but the infrastructure half of the problem is gone.

Payments and checkout

WooCommerce lets you choose almost any payment processor. WooPayments, its own option, charges 2.9% + 30 cents for US online cards, plus 1.5% for international cards and 1% for currency conversion, with no monthly fee for online payments and $15 per dispute. WooCommerce charges nothing extra when you use Stripe, PayPal or another gateway instead. The checkout itself is yours to configure, which also means it is yours to test after every update.

Shopify Payments charges 2.9% + 30 cents on Basic, 2.7% on Grow, 2.5% on Advanced and 2.25% on Plus. If you use a third-party gateway, Shopify adds 2%, 1%, 0.6% or 0.2% by plan, which is the main reason most US merchants use Shopify Payments. What you get in return is Shopify’s checkout, which Shopify maintains, and Shop Pay, which remembers returning buyers across Shopify stores. Shopify’s checkout is less customizable than a WooCommerce checkout outside Plus, and that is a fair point against it.

Selling in person and B2B

In person. WooCommerce now includes a free POS in the Woo mobile app, but it runs only on tablets, needs WooPayments or Stripe and a supported card reader ($5 per active reader per month), needs a live internet connection, and does not yet support multiple locations, receipt printers or cash drawers. Third-party POS plugins fill the gaps at extra cost. Shopify POS Lite is free on every plan, and POS Pro, at $89 per location per month, adds staff roles, advanced inventory, retail reports and exchanges. Shopify POS shares one inventory and customer list with the online store without a sync plugin.

B2B. WooCommerce handles wholesale through paid extensions for role-based pricing, tiered pricing and quote requests. That works, and it is flexible, but it is another set of plugins to maintain. Shopify’s B2B features (company accounts, catalogs, payment terms and a wholesale checkout) run natively on all plans, with non-Plus plans limited to 3 catalogs. If you need live carrier rates at checkout, remember that third-party carrier-calculated shipping needs Advanced or Plus, or Grow on annual billing.

Scale

WooCommerce can run very large stores, and some do, but scale on WooCommerce is an engineering project: dedicated hosting, database tuning, object caching, a search service, and a team that understands them. Order volume and catalog size both push on the database. Shopify moves that work to Shopify: the same platform handles a ten-order store and a store with a flash sale, and Plus adds checkout extensibility, more automation and higher API limits when you need them.

When WooCommerce is the better choice

• Content is your main growth channel, and you need WordPress’s editor, taxonomy and URL control.
• You already run WordPress well, with good hosting and a developer on hand.
• You need to own and modify the code, the database and the server, for technical or regulatory reasons.
• Your catalog or checkout needs a data model Shopify will not give you, such as many options per product without an app.
• Your sales are modest and your time is cheap, so a free platform plus a few extensions is genuinely the lowest cost.
• Your current WooCommerce store is fast, secure and stable. If it is working, switching is not automatically an improvement.

When Shopify is the better choice

• Plugin updates, conflicts or security worries take time you would rather spend on the business.
• Checkout reliability and conversion matter more to you than checkout customization.
• You sell in person, or plan to, and want one inventory without a sync plugin.
• You need B2B pricing and wholesale accounts without stacking extensions.
• You expect traffic spikes and do not want to manage servers for them.
• You want to add sales channels such as marketplaces and social selling from one admin.
• You do not have, or no longer want to pay for, a WordPress developer.

What switching actually involves

We have moved many stores off WooCommerce. The data side is well understood; the surprises are usually in what the plugins were quietly doing.

• Moves cleanly: simple products, most variable products, categories (as collections), customers with addresses, and order history with dates, line items, taxes and totals.
• Needs redesign: variable products with more than 3 attributes or more than 2,048 combinations, and product add-ons that change the price. Shopify has no native price modifier on a non-variant option, so those become variants, add-on products or an options app.
• Plugins do not move. Every active plugin has to be matched to a Shopify feature or app, or dropped. We list them all during the audit, because the one nobody remembers (a shipping rule, a tax tweak, a wholesale discount) is the one customers notice.
• Passwords do not move. WordPress and Shopify hash passwords differently, so customers are invited to activate their Shopify accounts.
• Subscriptions need planning. Moving active WooCommerce Subscriptions depends on the payment processor and the target subscription app, and it is scoped separately.
• Content needs cleanup. Shortcodes, page-builder markup and images in the WordPress media library do not render on Shopify, so descriptions, pages and posts are cleaned and images are rehosted.
• URLs change, and this is where SEO is won or lost. WooCommerce’s /product/ and /product-category/ paths, dated blog permalinks and any custom structures all need 301 redirects to Shopify’s /products/, /collections/ and /blogs/ paths. Skipping or mapping them loosely is the most common cause of a traffic drop after launch.
• Reviews export from WooCommerce and import into a Shopify review app, keeping dates and ratings.

If your WordPress site also carries a large blog, decide early whether content moves to Shopify or stays in WordPress using one of the middle-path setups above. Realistically, a smaller store takes six to eight weeks from audit to launch, and larger or more customized stores take longer. Our WooCommerce to Shopify migration guide covers the process step by step, and the WordPress to Shopify migration guide covers moving the content side.

Cost of switching

Our managed migrations start from $2,500 for stores under 500 products and 5,000 orders ($3,500 for larger stores), and typically take six to eight weeks for smaller stores. Subscriptions, B2B and integrations are priced after the audit. Terms are 50% to begin and 50% once the store is live and you are fully satisfied with the figures. As a Shopify Plus Partner, we build in a free Shopify development store, so you pay Shopify nothing until the store launches.

You can also do it yourself. Several automated tools move WooCommerce data to Shopify, and our comparison of Shopify migration tools explains what each handles and what it leaves to you.

Frequently asked questions

If you are weighing a move, start with the migration survey, read our WooCommerce to Shopify migration guide, or see every platform we move stores from on the Shopify migration platforms page.