Best Shopify Alternatives In 2026

Compare the best Shopify alternatives in 2026 on published pricing, transaction fees and features, from free open source carts to flat fee creator storefronts.

Merchants go looking at Shopify alternatives for three reasons: the monthly plan cost, the fees layered on top of it, and the app subscriptions needed to make the store do what the business actually requires. Shopify is a strong product, but it is not the cheapest way to sell, not the easiest way to sell a PDF, and not the only hosted cart with a serious feature set behind it.

Every price and fee below comes from the vendor’s own pricing page in September 2026, and where a platform publishes no figure that is said plainly rather than guessed. If budget is the deciding factor, our roundup of top budget friendly eCommerce platforms is a useful companion read.

Shopify Alternatives At A Glance

Use this table as a shortlist filter. Pricing is the lowest published plan that lets you sell, and the fee column is the platform’s own cut, not the card processor’s. The best Shopify alternatives are usually the ones whose fee model matches how you sell.

Platform	Best For	Pricing From	Transaction Fee
BigCommerce	Catalog heavy and B2B stores	$29 a month billed annually	No platform fee, 2.0% to 0.6% on open payment providers
WooCommerce	Stores built on WordPress	Free plugin, you pay for hosting	None from WooCommerce, processor rates apply
Sellfy	Creators selling downloads, subscriptions and merch	$22 a month	0% on all plans
Squarespace Commerce	Design led brand sites	Not published in page markup, check pricing page	2% on the entry plan, 0% on Core and above
Wix Stores	Non technical owners who want drag and drop	$29.77 a month on the Core plan, annual billing	No commission published, Wix Payments 2.9% plus $0.30 in the US
Square Online	Retail and food businesses with a counter	Free	None, processing 3.3% plus 30 cents free, 2.9% plus 30 cents paid
Ecwid by Lightspeed	Adding a cart to a site you already own	$5 a month	$0 charged per sale by Ecwid
Big Cartel	Artists and small independent makers	Free for up to five products	None, Stripe or PayPal rates apply
Webflow Ecommerce	Designers who want full layout control	$29 a month billed annually	2% on Standard, 0% on Plus and Advanced
PrestaShop	Self hosted stores in Europe	Free download, or hosted from 24 euros a month	None published on the hosted offer
Shift4Shop	US merchants happy to use Shift4 Payments	Free on the End-to-End plan, or $29 a month	No additional transaction fees
Volusion	Stores that want plans scoped by revenue	$35 a month	None published, extra fees off preferred gateways

Best Shopify Alternative Options In 2026

1. BigCommerce — Enterprise Features In The Box, With A Sales Based Plan Ladder

BigCommerce is a hosted platform aimed at merchants whose catalog has outgrown a simple storefront. Multi storefront, faceted search and a native B2B module ship as part of the product rather than as separate app subscriptions, which is why established retailers shortlist it. It suits businesses with complex product data, several sales channels or a wholesale arm.

Published pricing runs Core at $29 a month billed annually or $39 month to month, Growth at $79 annually or $105 monthly, and Scale at $299 annually or $399 monthly. Performance is custom, described as starting at $1,499 per month billed annually. BigCommerce offers a 15 day free trial with no credit card required.

There is no classic percentage cut on every order. Instead BigCommerce bills a monthly fee on orders processed through open payment providers, calculated on the GMV attributed to those providers at the order level: 2.0% on Core, 1.0% on Growth, 0.6% on Scale, and none under contracted Performance terms. Choosing a preferred provider avoids it.

The limitation is the plan ladder. Core is capped at $30K trailing GMV and auto upgrades to Growth when you pass it, Growth is capped at $100K and auto upgrades to Scale, and Scale adds 0.9% on GMV above its cap. The $29 headline is a starting price for a small store, not a settled cost for a growing one.

2. WooCommerce — Free Open Source Cart That Turns Any WordPress Site Into A Store

WooCommerce describes itself as the free, open source ecommerce platform for WordPress, and that sentence is the whole pitch. If your content, blog and SEO footprint already live in WordPress, adding a store means installing a plugin rather than rebuilding the site somewhere else. It is the most flexible option here because you own the database and the theme, and because the extension ecosystem covers subscriptions, bookings, memberships and wholesale.

The plugin itself costs nothing to download and use, and WooCommerce takes no platform cut of your sales. The company frames the model plainly: you choose where to invest your budget from there. In practice that budget goes to hosting, a theme, and extensions bought a la carte, so a real WooCommerce store is rarely free even though the software is. Payment processing through WooPayments is quoted at roughly 2.50% to 2.90% plus 30 cents per transaction.

The trade off is operational. Nobody patches the site for you, nobody guarantees an update will not break a plugin, and performance at scale depends on the hosting you buy. A store doing serious volume needs a managed WordPress host or someone technical on call. If that is a job you would rather not own, a hosted platform costs more per month and saves you the maintenance.

3. Sellfy — Flat Monthly Fee, 0% Transaction Fees And Print On Demand Built In

Sellfy is an all in one creator storefront rather than a general purpose cart. One subscription covers digital downloads, subscription products, physical goods and built in print on demand, which suits a creator whose income mixes an ebook, a membership and a merch line. Email marketing is included on every plan, and Business and Premium add product upselling, cart abandonment and affiliate marketing.

Pricing is published as Starter at $22 a month, discounted from a regular $29, and Business at $59 a month, discounted from a regular $79, with a Premium tier above that and a 25% saving on yearly billing. A 14 day free trial is offered. Sellfy states 0% transaction fees across every plan, so the subscription is the platform cost and card processing is the only other cut.

Print on demand is fulfilled by partner facilities, with orders routed to the nearest of eleven fulfillment centers and more than a hundred product types available. Nothing prints until a customer buys, so there is no stock to pre pay for.

The real constraint is the annual sales allowance on each plan: Starter covers up to $10k in sales per year, Business up to $50k and Premium up to $200k, so a store that grows past its allowance moves up a tier. Storefront customization is also lighter than a themed Shopify build.

4. Squarespace Commerce — Template Quality First, With Zero Commerce Fees Above The Entry Plan

Squarespace is the option people pick when the site has to look expensive on day one. Selling is built into every website plan rather than sold as a separate commerce product, so unlimited products, invoices, proposals, courses and memberships are available across the tiers. For a brand where photography carries the sale, it is a stronger starting point than most carts.

Squarespace is mid transition on plan naming. On the lineup now rolling out, Basic carries a 2% commerce transaction fee and Core, Plus and Advanced carry 0%. On the older lineup, Business is 3% and both Commerce plans are 0%. Digital content and member sites are charged separately: 7% on Basic, 5% on Core, 1% on Plus and 0% on Advanced, with 9% on all other plans unless you hold a Digital Products plan. A 14 day free trial runs with no credit card required.

Plan prices are not printed in the page markup a comparison can read, so check the current monthly and annual figures on the Squarespace pricing page before you budget.

The limitation is fee stacking on the cheap tier. Sell digital goods on an entry plan and you pay both a commerce fee and a digital content fee, which erodes margin faster than a flat subscription elsewhere.

5. Wix Stores — Drag And Drop Building With No Commission On Sales

Wix is the most forgiving builder here. The editor is genuinely drag and drop, the template library is large, and a non technical owner can have a presentable store live in an afternoon. You can build for free, but Wix is explicit that once you are ready to accept payments you have to upgrade to a premium plan.

Published premium plans are Light at $17.77 a month, Core at $29.77, Business at $39.77 and Business Elite at $159.77, on yearly billing. Wix positions its ecommerce plans as ranging from $29 a month for basic ecommerce up to $159 a month for advanced capabilities, which puts Core at the entry point for a real store. A 14 day money back guarantee applies to a first premium upgrade.

Wix publishes no separate commission on store sales. What you pay per order is the processing rate, quoted for US credit and debit cards excluding American Express at 2.9% of the transaction amount plus 0.30 USD.

The catch is that the cheapest headline price is not the store price. Light is a website plan, and the store features that make the platform worth using sit on Core and above, so budget from $29.77 a month rather than $17.77. Heavy catalogs and complex product options are also where Wix starts to feel less comfortable than a purpose built cart.

6. Square Online — A Genuinely Free Store That Shares One Catalog With Square Point Of Sale

Square Online exists to put a website in front of a business that already takes money over a counter. Inventory, items and customers live in the same Square account as the point of sale, so a cafe, salon or shop can sell online without running a second catalog or reconciling two systems at the end of the week. That single catalog is the reason to choose it over a general cart.

Pricing is unusually simple. Square Free is $0 a month with an online processing rate of 3.3% plus 30 cents. Square Plus is $30 a month and Square Premium is $99 a month, both with an online rate of 2.9% plus 30 cents and both offering a 30 day free trial. Businesses processing over $250,000 annually can ask about custom pricing. There is no separate platform commission on top of processing.

The design ceiling is the trade off. Square Online is a competent site builder rather than an expressive one, and a brand that wants a distinctive storefront will hit its limits faster than on Squarespace or Webflow. The other constraint is structural: the platform assumes Square is your processor, so you are choosing a payments relationship as much as a website. For an existing Square merchant that is a feature, and for anyone else a commitment worth pricing first.

7. Ecwid by Lightspeed — A Cart You Bolt Onto The Site You Already Have

Ecwid, which now trades as Ecwid by Lightspeed, solves a specific problem: you already have a website you like and do not want to rebuild it to start selling. The store embeds into an existing page, and the same catalog runs across a site, social channels and marketplaces. For a business whose site is fine but whose checkout does not exist, that is a smaller project than a migration.

Published plans are Starter at $5 a month for up to 10 products, Venture at $35 monthly or $29 billed annually for up to 100 products plus e-goods, Business at $65 monthly or $49 annually for up to 2,500 products, and Unlimited at $149 monthly for unlimited products. Annual billing saves 16% on the upper tiers. Ecwid’s own pricing table lists fees charged per sale by Ecwid as $0 across all four plans, so the subscription is the platform cost.

Two limitations matter. Product caps bite early: 10 products on Starter is a very short catalog, and a useful ceiling means the Business plan. And because Ecwid is a widget rather than a full platform, your storefront depends on the site hosting it, inheriting whatever performance and SEO problems that site already has.

8. Big Cartel — Free For Five Products, No Platform Cut, Built For Artists

Big Cartel has spent years pointing at one audience and ignoring the rest: artists, bands, printmakers, jewelry makers and small independent labels. It calls itself free, easy online stores for artists and small businesses, and the product is deliberately narrow. There is no sprawling app marketplace and no B2B module, which is precisely why a maker with fifteen products finds it easier to run than a full cart.

Plans are Gold, which is free and covers up to 5 products, Platinum at $15.00 a month or $144 a year for up to 50 products, and Diamond at $30.00 a month or $288 a year for up to 500 products. Annual billing takes 20% off, and Platinum comes with 7 days free.

On fees, Big Cartel is unambiguous: it does not charge transaction fees on your orders, and it does not hold your funds or deduct processing fees. Payments run through Stripe or PayPal, and Big Cartel quotes typical US rates of 2.9% plus $0.30 for Stripe and 3.49% plus $0.49 for PayPal, noting these can change.

The ceiling is the point and also the problem. A 500 product cap on the top plan rules out a growing catalog, and the feature set stops short of what a scaling brand eventually wants.

9. Webflow Ecommerce — Visual Control Over Every Element, With 0% Fees From The Plus Plan

Webflow is for people who find template builders constraining and hand coding slow. The visual canvas maps to real CSS, so a designer can build layouts, interactions and a CMS driven catalog without asking a developer for each change. For a brand whose storefront is part of the marketing, that control is worth paying for.

Site plans are published as a free Starter, Basic at $15 a month billed annually or $18 monthly, and Premium at $25 annually or $31 monthly. Ecommerce plans sit alongside them: Standard at $29 a month billed annually or $35 monthly, Plus at $74 annually or $89 monthly, and an Advanced tier above that. Prices are per site and exclude tax.

Fees are stated per ecommerce tier. Standard carries a 2% transaction fee, while Plus and Advanced are both listed at 0%. The real comparison is therefore less about the $29 entry price and more about the point where 2% costs more than the upgrade, which arrives sooner than most stores expect.

The limitation is the learning curve. Webflow rewards someone who understands the box model and CSS layout, and frustrates anyone who wants to drag a block and move on. Its ecommerce ecosystem is smaller than the hosted giants, so requirements such as deep B2B pricing rules need custom work rather than an app install.

10. PrestaShop — Open Source Download Or A Managed Store From 24 Euros A Month

PrestaShop is a long running open source cart with a large European merchant base and a module marketplace to match. It offers two routes. Classic lets you download the source code for free and install your store from scratch, giving you the same ownership WooCommerce does without tying the store to WordPress. Hosted hands the technical side to PrestaShop and gives you a ready to use store.

The Hosted offer is published at 29 euros excluding VAT per month with the option to cancel anytime, or 24 euros excluding VAT per month billed as 290 euros annually, a saving PrestaShop puts at 17%. A 14 day trial is offered; payment details are taken at signup and you are charged at the end of the trial period. No transaction fee or commission is published for the hosted offer.

The considerations are practical rather than hidden. Self hosting means you own updates, security patches and module compatibility, real work once a store has traffic. The hosted plan is priced in euros excluding VAT, so a US merchant should convert and add tax before comparing it with a dollar plan. The module marketplace is deep but uneven, and paid modules add up the way apps do elsewhere.

11. Shift4Shop — Unlimited Products From $29, Or Free For US Merchants On Shift4 Payments

Shift4Shop is a turnkey hosted ecommerce solution with an all in one feature set: a website builder, product and order management, and customer marketing tools in a single account. Its distinguishing move is refusing to meter your catalog. Every published plan lists unlimited products, unlimited bandwidth and unlimited orders, which is unusual at these prices.

Published plans are Basic Store at $29.00 a month with 2 staff users, Plus Store at $79.00 with 5 staff users and Pro Store at $229.00 with 15 staff users. All three are listed with no additional transaction fees. Alongside them sits the End-to-End eCommerce plan, published at free per month for US merchants, with unlimited products, bandwidth, orders and staff users, and a pre-approved credit card rate of 2.9% plus $0.30.

The free plan is the headline and also the catch. It is open to US merchants only, and it works because processing runs through Shift4 Payments, so the platform is funded by your card volume rather than a subscription. That is a fair trade if the rate suits your average order value, and a poor one if you already have a better processing deal or sell outside the US. Check the rate against your current merchant agreement before switching.

12. Volusion — Plans Scoped By Annual Revenue Rather Than Feature Tiers

Volusion is one of the older hosted carts still trading, and it structures its plans around how much you sell rather than which features you unlock. That makes budgeting predictable for a store with a known revenue band, and it means a small merchant is not paying for capacity built for someone much larger.

Published plans are Personal at $35 a month, allowing up to $50K GMV, 100 products and 1 staff account; Professional at $79 a month, allowing up to $100k GMV, 5,000 products and 5 staff accounts; and Business at $299 a month, allowing up to $400k GMV, unlimited products and 15 staff accounts. Above those sits Prime, priced based on GMV with unlimited everything and a conversation with sales.

Volusion publishes no platform transaction fee. It does carry a caveat worth reading closely: additional fees may apply if you are not on a preferred payment gateway or use additional services. Anyone keeping an existing processor should get that priced in writing first.

The limitations are the caps themselves. A 100 product ceiling on the entry plan is tight for anything with variants, and a hard GMV band means a good quarter pushes you into a higher plan. The platform also feels dated next to newer builders, so weigh the admin experience first.

How To Choose A Shopify Alternative

What Will You Actually Pay Once Transaction Fees Are Added?

The monthly plan price is the least useful number in this comparison. Work out your expected monthly revenue, apply the platform’s cut and add card processing, because that total decides the best ecommerce platform for your situation. A 2% platform fee on $20,000 of monthly sales is $400, which dwarfs almost every subscription here. Flat fee platforms look expensive next to a free plan until you run that arithmetic. Run the numbers at today’s volume and again at next year’s.

Do You Need A Full Site Builder Or Just A Checkout?

If you already have a site you are happy with, replacing it to gain a cart is wasted effort. An embeddable store keeps your existing pages, URLs and rankings and adds selling underneath them. If you are starting from nothing, a builder that produces the marketing site and the store together saves running two systems. Be honest about which you are, because the wrong answer costs a rebuild rather than a subscription.

Are You Selling Digital Products, Physical Goods Or Both?

Most carts were built for physical inventory and treat downloads as an afterthought, with file delivery, license keys and refund handling bolted on through plugins. Creator focused platforms invert that. If downloads, subscriptions or memberships are most of your revenue, start with a platform that treats them as first class, and check the fee charged on digital content rather than the headline commerce rate. Our guide to the best platforms to sell digital products goes deeper on that split.

How Many Products And How Much Revenue Will The Plan Allow?

Caps are the most commonly missed detail here. Some platforms cap products, some cap annual sales, and some upgrade your plan when you cross a threshold. Big Cartel stops at 500 products, Ecwid’s cheapest tier at 10, Volusion scopes plans by GMV band and BigCommerce auto upgrades when trailing GMV passes the cap. None are hidden, but all change your real annual cost. Find the cap before the price.

Who Maintains The Software?

Open source gives you ownership and takes back your evenings. WooCommerce and PrestaShop hand you the code, the database and the freedom to change anything, along with updates, backups, security patches and the plugin conflict that appears at midnight. Hosted platforms take that away and charge for it. Neither is better in the abstract; the right one depends on whether you have technical help and what downtime costs you.

How Do The Main Shopify Competitors Compare On Payments And Lock In?

Payments are where the strongest Shopify competitors differ most. Some are processor neutral, some charge more for bringing your own gateway, and some are effectively payment companies giving away software, which is why a free plan can exist at all. Ask two questions of any shortlist: can I use my preferred processor, and what does it cost if I do. A platform funded by your card volume is not a bad deal, but it is harder to leave once payouts, disputes and reporting all run through it.

Which Alternatives To Shopify Suit A Team Without A Developer?

Skill level should filter your shortlist before price does. The most approachable alternatives to Shopify are the hosted builders, with a guided setup flow and support included. The most demanding are the open source carts and the visual design tools, which reward specific skills and punish their absence. If you have neither a designer nor a developer, pay for the hosted product and spend your time selling. For custom build work, a specialist partner from our list of top Shopify development agencies can advise on migration either way.

Conclusion

There is no single winner, because these platforms are not competing for the same merchant. A WordPress publisher adding a shop, a cafe extending its counter online, an artist with a small run of prints and a wholesaler with a complex catalog all need different things, and each has a better fit above than one hosted plan.

Work in this order. Decide whether you need a site or a checkout, decide who maintains the software, then model annual cost at your real revenue with the platform’s fee applied. That last step reorders most shortlists, because the cheapest monthly plan is rarely the cheapest year. Creators selling a mix of downloads, subscriptions and merch should look hardest at the flat fee options, where the platform takes nothing per sale.

With a shortlist in hand, take the free trials seriously and load real products, images and a checkout test into each one. If your comparison is narrower, our roundup of Gumroad alternatives cover the creator end of the market in more detail.