WooCommerce vs Shopify is still the first decision most new online stores face in 2026, and it is also the question many established stores reopen when costs, traffic or team size change. Both platforms run millions of stores, both can sell physical products, digital goods and subscriptions, and both have large ecosystems of add-ons and service providers. The difference is in who runs the infrastructure, how you pay, and how much control you keep.
Here is the short answer. WooCommerce fits merchants who already use WordPress, publish a lot of content, need unusual product or checkout logic, or want to own every line of code and every row of data. Shopify fits merchants who want a hosted store that works on day one, predictable monthly pricing, and a platform team that handles security, updates and uptime for them. If you are asking “is WooCommerce better than Shopify,” the honest reply is that it depends on your team, not on the software.
This Shopify vs WooCommerce comparison uses pricing and fee figures checked on Shopify’s and WooCommerce’s own pages in October 2026. Older comparisons still quote Shopify plans that no longer exist at those prices, so if you are reading a WooCommerce or Shopify guide from 2024, treat its numbers with caution. Below you will find a side by side table, a breakdown of real costs, and practical guidance on choosing, hiring and migrating.
WooCommerce vs Shopify At A Glance
Factor
WooCommerce
Shopify
Cost to start
Core plugin is free; you pay for hosting, a domain and any paid extensions
Basic plan $29 per month billed yearly, or $39 billed monthly; 3-day free trial
Hosting
Self-hosted on a provider you choose and manage
Included and managed by Shopify
Transaction fees
No platform fee; you pay only your payment processor
None with Shopify Payments; 2%, 1%, 0.6% or 0.2% with third-party providers, depending on plan
Payments
WooPayments at 2.9% + $0.30 for US cards, or almost any other gateway
Shopify Payments online from 2.9% + 30¢ (Basic) to 2.5% + 30¢ (Advanced)
Apps and extensions
Over 1,000 in the WooCommerce Marketplace, plus the wider WordPress plugin directory
Over 16,000 in the Shopify App Store
Themes
Any WooCommerce-compatible WordPress theme, free or paid
800+ free and paid themes in the Shopify Theme Store
Ownership and portability
Open source; you own the code, the database and the server
Hosted platform; your data is exportable, but the store runs on Shopify’s infrastructure
SEO control
Full control of URLs, templates, schema and server settings
Solid defaults with a fixed URL structure and less server-level control
B2B
Through extensions or custom development
Built in on every plan; 3 B2B catalogs on Basic to Advanced, unlimited on Plus
Support
Community forums for the free core; support included with paid marketplace extensions; your host and developers
Live chat on Basic and Grow, enhanced live chat on Advanced, priority support on Plus
Best for
Content-heavy stores, custom builds, teams with developer access
Fast launches, lean teams, merchants who want a managed platform
What Is The Difference Between WooCommerce And Shopify?
The core difference is architecture. WooCommerce is an open source plugin that turns a WordPress website into a store. You install it on WordPress, which you host yourself on a server or managed hosting plan you choose. The plugin is free to download from WordPress.org, where it lists more than 7 million active installations, and WooCommerce describes the arrangement plainly: you own your site, code and data, and there are no monthly platform fees.
Shopify is a hosted software as a service (SaaS) platform. You sign up, choose a plan, pick a theme and start adding products. Shopify runs the servers, the checkout, the security patches and the core updates. You pay a monthly subscription and, depending on how you take payments, card processing fees or third-party transaction fees.
That single difference explains most of what follows. With WooCommerce, you gain flexibility and ownership, and you take on responsibility for hosting, updates, compatibility and security. With Shopify, you hand that responsibility to the platform and accept its rules about checkout, URL structure, app permissions and pricing. Neither model is better in the abstract. A five-person brand with no developer and a launch date next month will usually find Shopify easier. A publisher with years of WordPress content and an in-house developer will often find WooCommerce cheaper and more natural.
It also helps to know what each platform is not. WooCommerce is not a website builder with a support desk behind it; the quality of your store depends heavily on your host, theme and developers. Shopify is not an open platform where you can change anything; its checkout and core behavior are controlled by Shopify, and some deeper changes are only possible on Shopify Plus or through the APIs.
WooCommerce vs Shopify Pricing In 2026
Pricing is where most WooCommerce vs Shopify comparisons go wrong, because the two platforms charge in completely different ways. Shopify publishes a subscription price. WooCommerce is free at its core, so the real cost sits in hosting, extensions and labor. Comparing a Shopify plan price with “free” tells you very little.
What WooCommerce Really Costs
The WooCommerce plugin costs nothing. WooCommerce says so on its own site, and the WordPress.org listing confirms the core platform is free with optional paid upgrades. Your fixed costs come from four places.
Hosting. You need a WordPress host. Prices range widely, from inexpensive shared plans to managed WooCommerce hosting with staging, backups and caching built in. Busy stores should budget for managed hosting rather than the cheapest shared plan, because WooCommerce pages such as cart, checkout and account cannot be fully cached and put real load on the server.
Extensions. Many features that Shopify includes or offers through free apps are paid extensions in WooCommerce. Official extensions are sold as annual subscriptions. On WooCommerce.com today, WooCommerce Subscriptions costs $279 per year and WooCommerce Bookings costs $249 per year, each with product updates, customer support and a 30-day money-back guarantee. There is no monthly option for those two; you renew yearly to keep updates and support.
Theme. You can run WooCommerce on a free WordPress theme or buy a premium one. Some themes add their own page builders and feature sets, which affects performance and future maintenance.
Development and maintenance. This is the cost most merchants underestimate. Someone needs to apply updates to WordPress, WooCommerce, the theme and every plugin, test that they still work together, and fix anything that breaks. That can be you, a freelancer, or an agency on a monthly care plan.
What Shopify Really Costs
Shopify’s 2026 plans, as listed on its pricing page for the US, are:
Basic: $29 per month billed yearly, or $39 per month billed monthly
Grow: $79 per month billed yearly, or $105 per month billed monthly
Advanced: $299 per month billed yearly, or $399 per month billed monthly
Plus: starting at $2,300 per month on a 3-year term, or $2,500 per month on a 1-year term
New stores get a 3-day free trial with no credit card required, followed by a promotional rate of $1 per month for 3 months on eligible plans. Plan tiers differ in card rates, third-party transaction fees, staff accounts (Grow includes up to 5, Advanced up to 15, Plus unlimited) and inventory locations (10 on Basic to Advanced, 200 on Plus). Shopify lists the same core reporting and international selling tools, including Shopify Markets, translation and local currency pricing, across all four plans.
On top of the plan, most Shopify stores pay for apps. Some are free, including Shopify’s own Subscriptions app, but many charge monthly. A store running several paid apps for reviews, upsells, search, loyalty and email can see its app bill rival or exceed its plan price. Premium themes are a one-time purchase; examples in the Shopify Theme Store currently range from about $100 to $400.
Total Cost Of Ownership: Which Is Cheaper?
For a small store with a simple catalog, Shopify Basic and a well-configured WooCommerce store on decent hosting often land in a similar monthly range once you count everything. WooCommerce can be cheaper if you already have WordPress skills in house and do not need many paid extensions. Shopify can be cheaper if the alternative is paying a developer every month to keep a WooCommerce site updated and secure.
The gap widens as stores grow, and in different directions. On Shopify, fees scale with revenue and plan tier: moving from Basic to Advanced on monthly billing takes the plan from $39 to $399 per month, though lower card rates on Advanced can offset part of that at high volume. On WooCommerce, platform costs do not scale with revenue at all, but hosting, performance work and development do scale with traffic and complexity.
A useful exercise is to list the features you need, price them on both platforms (plan plus apps on Shopify; hosting plus extensions plus maintenance hours on WooCommerce), then add payment costs at your expected monthly sales. That number, not the sticker price, is the one to compare.
Payments And Transaction Fees
Payments are where the two platforms differ most in practice. WooCommerce does not take a cut of your sales. Its own processor, WooPayments, uses pay-as-you-go pricing with no setup fees or monthly fees for online payments. For US merchants, WooCommerce’s fee documentation lists 2.9% + $0.30 per domestic card transaction, an extra 1% for international cards, an extra 2% when currency conversion is needed, and a $15 dispute fee. WooCommerce notes that exact fees vary by customer location, currency and payment method. You are also free to use almost any other gateway through an extension, which matters if you have negotiated rates or need a regional processor. Our guide to the best WooCommerce payment gateways covers those options in detail.
Shopify charges no transaction fee when you use Shopify Payments, where available. Its online card rates in the US are:
Basic: 2.9% + 30¢ online, 2.6% + 10¢ in person
Grow: 2.7% + 30¢ online, 2.5% + 10¢ in person
Advanced: 2.5% + 30¢ online, 2.4% + 10¢ in person
Plus: listed from 2.25% + 30¢ online and 2.3% + 10¢ in person, with exact rates set with Shopify’s sales team
If you use a third-party payment provider instead of Shopify Payments, Shopify adds its own transaction fee on top of whatever that provider charges: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus. This is the single most important cost detail in the comparison. A store on Basic doing $50,000 a month through a third-party processor would pay Shopify $1,000 a month in transaction fees before the processor’s own charges. Shopify also notes that local currency pricing and local payment methods through Shopify Markets require Shopify Payments.
At the entry level, the headline card rate is the same on both: WooPayments for US cards and Shopify Payments on Basic both list 2.9% + 30 cents. The real differences are flexibility (WooCommerce lets you choose freely without penalty) and scale (Shopify’s rates drop as you move up plans).
Apps, Extensions And Customization
Shopify’s App Store lists more than 16,000 apps. WooCommerce’s marketplace lists more than 1,000 extensions, but that understates the WooCommerce ecosystem, because the wider WordPress plugin directory adds a very large number of plugins that work with WooCommerce, along with thousands of commercial plugins sold directly by their developers.
The bigger difference is in what you can change. On WooCommerce, you can edit templates, add custom code through hooks and filters, build custom product types, change checkout fields, and connect to any system with access to the database and server. If a developer can write it in PHP or JavaScript, it can usually be done. The tradeoff is that every customization is something you have to maintain and test against future updates.
On Shopify, customization happens through themes (built with Shopify’s Liquid templating language), apps and Shopify’s APIs. That keeps the core platform stable and secure, and apps generally install without breaking each other the way WordPress plugins sometimes can. But there are hard limits. You cannot change how the platform works underneath, and checkout customization is more restricted below Plus. Many Shopify stores also end up with several overlapping paid apps, each adding scripts to the storefront.
Themes follow the same pattern. Shopify’s Theme Store lists more than 800 free and paid themes, all built to Shopify’s standards. WooCommerce works with any compatible WordPress theme, which gives you far more choice and far more variation in quality.
SEO And Content
Both platforms can rank well. The difference is how much you control.
WooCommerce inherits WordPress’s strengths as a content system. You get a full blogging platform, flexible page layouts, custom post types and mature SEO plugins. You control the permalink structure, canonical tags, schema markup, robots rules, sitemaps and server-level settings such as redirects and caching. For stores that rely on content marketing, buying guides or large editorial sections, that control is a real advantage.
Shopify handles the SEO basics well out of the box: editable titles and meta descriptions, automatic sitemaps, canonical tags and clean, mobile-ready themes. Its URL structure is fixed, with products under /products/, collections under /collections/ and pages under /pages/, and you cannot remove those prefixes. Its built-in blog is simpler than WordPress, so content-heavy brands sometimes add apps or a separate content system. For most product-led stores, these limits rarely decide rankings; for content-led stores, they can.
In practice, SEO results depend more on site speed, product content, internal linking and links from other sites than on the platform. A neglected WooCommerce site with dozens of plugins will usually lose to a clean Shopify store, and the reverse is also true.
Performance, Hosting And Security
With Shopify, hosting, a CDN, SSL and platform security come with every plan. You do not choose a server, configure caching or patch software. Shopify absorbs traffic spikes such as holiday sales on its own infrastructure. Your main performance levers are theme choice, image sizes and the number of apps injecting scripts into your pages.
With WooCommerce, performance and security are your responsibility, which is both a burden and an opportunity. A WooCommerce store on good managed hosting, with object caching, a CDN, a lean theme and a short plugin list, can be very fast. The same store on cheap shared hosting with a heavy page builder and 60 plugins will be slow and harder to secure. Security depends on keeping WordPress, WooCommerce, themes and plugins updated, using strong access controls, and choosing a host that handles firewalls, malware scanning and backups.
One more point for stores that take card payments: on both platforms, using a hosted payment processor (WooPayments, Shopify Payments or another tokenizing gateway) keeps raw card data off your server, which greatly reduces your compliance burden. On WooCommerce, you are still responsible for the security of the site that hosts the checkout page.
B2B, Subscriptions And Scaling
B2B. Shopify B2B is no longer limited to Plus. According to Shopify’s plan feature guide, Basic, Grow and Advanced include company accounts and locations, location-level permissions, quantity rules and price breaks, net payment terms, ACH and vaulted cards, draft orders with PO numbers, and up to 3 B2B catalogs. Plus adds unlimited catalogs, catalogs assigned directly to specific companies, and payment options such as deposits and partial payments. WooCommerce has no built-in B2B module; wholesale pricing, company accounts, quote requests and payment terms come from extensions or custom development. That makes WooCommerce more flexible for unusual B2B rules, and Shopify faster to set up for standard wholesale.
Subscriptions. Shopify offers its own free Subscriptions app, with auto-billing, customer-managed skips and pauses, and reporting, plus a range of third-party subscription apps. On WooCommerce, the official WooCommerce Subscriptions extension costs $279 per year and is one of the most established subscription tools in WordPress. Both approaches work; the Shopify app is cheaper to start, while WooCommerce Subscriptions offers deeper customization through code.
Scaling. Shopify scales by plan: higher tiers lower card rates and third-party fees, add staff accounts and locations, and Plus adds priority support, unlimited B2B catalogs and enterprise terms. WooCommerce scales by infrastructure and engineering: better hosting, database tuning, caching, search services and custom work. Large WooCommerce stores exist and run well, but they almost always have a capable technical partner behind them. If you are weighing Shopify vs WooCommerce vs BigCommerce for a larger catalog, BigCommerce sits between the two: hosted like Shopify, with no added fee for a group of integrated processors such as Stripe, PayPal and Adyen, but a percentage fee on its lower plans for gateways outside that group, and a smaller app ecosystem than Shopify.
Support And Maintenance
Shopify includes support with every plan: live chat on Basic and Grow, enhanced live chat on Advanced, and priority support on Plus. Shopify support covers the platform itself. For issues with third-party apps or theme code, you go to the app developer, theme developer or a Shopify Partner.
WooCommerce support is spread across several parties. The free core plugin is supported through community forums. Paid extensions bought on WooCommerce.com include customer support for as long as the subscription is active. Your hosting company supports the server, and many managed WooCommerce hosts help with performance and basic troubleshooting. For anything else, you rely on your own team or a developer.
Maintenance is the hidden line item. A Shopify store needs ongoing work on content, apps and theme updates, but not on the underlying platform. A WooCommerce store needs regular core, theme and plugin updates, with testing on a staging site before changes reach production. Stores that skip this work tend to accumulate conflicts, slowdowns and security risk. Budget for it from the start, whether in staff hours or a care plan.
Migrating Between WooCommerce And Shopify
Moving in either direction is common, and the most searched version is how to migrate WooCommerce to Shopify. Shopify’s own migration guide lists five routes: copying content manually, exporting CSV files and importing them, using a migration app from the Shopify App Store, hiring a Shopify Partner, or building a custom migration with the Shopify API. Products, customers, historical orders, gift cards and store credits, blog posts and pages can all be moved. Shopify recommends importing products first, then customers, then historical orders, so records link up correctly.
The step that protects your traffic is redirects. URLs change in a migration: a WooCommerce product page and a Shopify product page will rarely share the same path, because Shopify uses fixed prefixes such as /products/ and /pages/. Map every old URL that has traffic or links to its new equivalent and set up 301 redirects before you switch the domain. Also plan for customer passwords, which generally cannot be carried across, so customers will need to reset or reactivate accounts. Subscriptions with stored payment methods need special handling with your payment provider.
Moving from Shopify to WooCommerce follows the same logic in reverse: export data, import it with a migration tool or custom scripts, rebuild the theme, and redirect old URLs. In both directions, the data transfer is usually the easy part. Redirects, integrations, custom functionality and testing take most of the time.
Which Should You Choose?
If you are still asking “WooCommerce or Shopify,” the questions below usually settle it.
Choose WooCommerce If…
You already run a WordPress site with valuable content and traffic and want to add a store without rebuilding. You need custom product types, pricing logic, checkout fields or integrations that apps cannot handle. You want to use a payment processor of your choice without paying a platform transaction fee. You want full ownership of code, data and hosting, and the ability to move hosts at any time. And, importantly, you have a developer, agency or technically confident team member who will keep the site updated and secure.
Choose Shopify If…
You want to launch quickly without managing hosting, updates or security. Your team is small and focused on products, marketing and operations rather than technology. You are happy using Shopify Payments, which removes the extra transaction fee. You want built-in B2B, point of sale and international selling tools in one platform. And you value having a single company responsible for the platform’s uptime and a support channel that is included in your plan.
When Either Will Work
For a straightforward store selling a few hundred products in one or two markets, both platforms will do the job well. In that case, choose based on who will run the store day to day. If that person is comfortable with WordPress, WooCommerce will feel familiar. If not, Shopify will likely save time and support costs.
WooCommerce vs Shopify is not a contest with a single winner. WooCommerce gives you ownership, flexibility, payment freedom and the full power of WordPress for content, in exchange for running and maintaining your own stack. Shopify gives you a managed, secure platform with clear pricing, built-in B2B and strong support, in exchange for platform fees, app costs and less control over how the store works underneath.
Before deciding, price your actual feature list on both platforms, include payment costs at your expected sales volume, and be honest about who will maintain the store. That comparison will tell you more than any feature checklist. And if you choose one now and outgrow it later, migration in either direction is well documented and routinely done, as long as you plan your redirects and test carefully.
