Shopify is often the benchmark against which other ecommerce platforms are measured, but that doesn't automatically make it the right choice for every seller. If you're evaluating platforms for a new store or wondering whether your current Shopify setup still represents good value, it's worth comparing the wider market.
Costs, transaction fees, customization options, and built-in functionality vary significantly from one provider to another. Below, we compare eight leading ecommerce platforms to help you find the best fit for your business.
Quick answer |
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The best Shopify alternative depends on what you sell. WooCommerce gives you the most control if you're comfortable on WordPress, BigCommerce suits scaling stores that want no added transaction fees, and Squarespace, Wix, and Webflow win on design and ease. Square and Ecwid are strong free starting points, and Checkout Page works when you want an owned checkout for digital products, subscriptions, or simple physical orders without running a full store. |
Why look for a Shopify alternative?
Shopify is a capable platform, and for many physical-product stores, it's the obvious choice: a polished admin, a huge app store, and a checkout that converts well. It isn't the right fit for everyone, though, and the reasons sellers leave tend to cluster around four points.
The first is cost. Shopify's plans run from $5 a month (Starter) to $39 (Basic), $105 (Grow), and $399 (Advanced), with Shopify Plus starting around $2,300 a month. The base plan is only part of it. Paid apps for reviews, email, upsells, and subscriptions stack on top, and a working store often costs far more than the headline number.
The second is payment fees. If you use a third-party payment gateway instead of Shopify Payments, Shopify adds a surcharge of roughly 0.2% to 2% per transaction, depending on your plan, on top of what your processor charges. For sellers who already have a processor they like, that's a recurring cost with nothing to show for it.
The third is ownership and flexibility. Shopify is a hosted, closed system. You don't control the underlying code, and moving off the platform later means a migration. Sellers who want to own their stack, customize deeply, or keep their customer data fully in hand often look for something more open. Shopify also caps each product at three options (size, color, and material, say), which frustrates sellers with highly configurable products, even after it raised the overall variant limit to around 2,000 in late 2025.
The fourth is fit. Shopify is built for stores with physical inventory. If you sell digital products, subscriptions, or event tickets, much of what you pay for goes unused, and a lighter tool can do the same job for less.
How to choose a Shopify alternative
Start with what you sell, because it rules options in or out faster than anything else. Physical products with inventory and shipping point you toward a full store builder like WooCommerce, BigCommerce, or Squarespace. Digital products, memberships, or tickets often don't need a storefront at all, which opens up simpler, cheaper tools.
From there, weigh a few things:
- Real monthly cost at your revenue, not the starting price, including the apps you'll actually need.
- Transaction fees beyond payment processing, since some platforms add a cut and others don't.
- Ownership and control versus an all-in-one system someone else maintains and updates.
- Ease versus flexibility: open platforms do more but ask more of you, while hosted builders are simpler but more boxed in.
- Scale, channels, and B2B: whether it grows with you, sells across your site, social, marketplaces, and in person, manages inventory if you carry stock, and supports wholesale if you sell B2B.
- Support and security: how much help you get when something breaks, and whether the platform handles security, PCI compliance, and uptime or leaves that to you.
These questions map cleanly onto the eight platforms below.
The 8 best Shopify alternatives compared
These are strong replacements for the main reasons sellers leave Shopify. We compared pricing and features rather than running each store under load, so treat the takes as a starting point for your own shortlist. They span four rough camps:
- Open-source (WooCommerce)
- Hosted all-in-one builders (BigCommerce, Wix, Square Online, Ecwid)
- Design-led builders (Squarespace and Webflow)
- Leaner checkout tools that skip the full storefront (Checkout Page)
Each entry covers what it costs, whether it adds a transaction fee, who it suits, and where it falls short.
1. WooCommerce: best for full control on WordPress
WooCommerce is an open-source plugin that turns a WordPress site into a store, and it's the closest thing to truly owning your shop. You control the code, the data, and the hosting, with thousands of extensions to add whatever you need, including multi-currency and multi-language support.
Pricing: the plugin is free. You pay for hosting, a domain, a theme, and any paid extensions, which, in practice, runs roughly $10 to $250 a month depending on your hosting and plugins.
Transaction fees: none from the platform. You pay only your payment processor's rate, whether that's WooPayments, Stripe, or PayPal.
Best for: sellers who are comfortable on WordPress and want full control of their store and customer data.
Watch out for: you manage hosting, updates, security, PCI compliance, and backups yourself. Match Shopify's speed and reliability, and a managed host plus premium plugins can run more per month than a Basic Shopify plan, so "free" rarely stays free.
Checkout Page take: the sellers who do best on WooCommerce treat it as infrastructure they run, not a tool they rent; if that's not you, the savings tend to evaporate.
2. BigCommerce: best for scaling with no added transaction fees
BigCommerce is a hosted platform, much like Shopify, but it doesn’t add its own transaction fee to any plan, regardless of which payment gateway you use. It leans toward growing stores, with strong native features for large catalogs, B2B, multi-currency, and multiple storefronts.
Pricing: Standard is $29 a month, Plus $79, and Pro $299 when billed annually, with custom Enterprise pricing above that. Plans auto-upgrade as your trailing 12-month sales pass $50k, $180k, and $400k.
Transaction fees: 0% added by BigCommerce on every plan. You pay only your gateway's processing rate.
Best for: scaling and higher-volume stores that want to avoid a platform surcharge as revenue grows.
Watch out for: it's heavier than a small seller needs, the revenue-based auto-upgrades can move you to a pricier plan as you grow, and it has no native subscriptions, so recurring billing means adding a third-party app.
Checkout Page take: the no-added-fee policy is the real draw, and it matters more the more you sell.
3. Squarespace: best when how it looks matters most
Squarespace is the pick when how your store looks matters as much as what it does. Its templates are polished out of the box, and commerce is built in, so a focused catalog can look professional without a designer.
Pricing: plans run from $16/month (Basic) through Core ($23), Plus ($39), and Advanced ($99), billed annually.
Transaction fees: the entry Basic plan carries a 2% Squarespace fee on sales; the Core plan and above waive it. There's also a separate fee on digital downloads (7% on Basic, dropping on higher tiers), and your payment processor charges its standard rate on every plan.
Best for: brands selling a focused catalog where presentation drives the sale.
Watch out for: heavy inventory and complex catalogs aren't its strength, you need Core or higher to drop the platform fee, and it works with only a few payment processors (Stripe, PayPal, Square, and Squarespace Payments).
Checkout Page take: great-looking by default, but confirm its commerce features cover your catalog before you commit.
4. Wix: best for beginners who want all-in-one
Wix pairs a drag-and-drop builder with ecommerce, which makes it one of the easiest ways to get a store live without help. The editor is about as beginner-friendly as they come, and you can design a whole site by dragging blocks around.
Pricing: selling requires the Core plan at $29 a month or the Business plan at $39 a month, billed annually, with higher tiers for larger stores.
Transaction fees: none beyond payment processing.
Best for: first stores and small catalogs where speed and simplicity matter most.
Watch out for: the flexibility that helps beginners can box in advanced sellers later, some inventory features lag behind dedicated commerce platforms, and Wix locks you in: there's no way to export your site and move it elsewhere, so switching later means rebuilding.
Checkout Page take: the easiest on-ramp of the full builders, but test its inventory limits if you plan to scale a product range.
5. Square Online: best if you also sell in person
Square Online is built around Square's point-of-sale system, so it fits sellers who sell products both in a shop and on a website. It grew out of Square's 2018 acquisition of the website builder Weebly, and it's strongest as an online extension of the Square POS rather than as a standalone store. Online and in-person sales sync automatically, maintaining a single inventory across both channels.
Pricing: a free plan with no monthly fee, then Plus at $49 a month and Premium at $149 a month, each per location.
Transaction fees: no platform fee, but the card rate varies by plan: 3.3% + 30¢ per online payment on the free plan (raised in January 2026), 2.9% + 30¢ on Plus, and lower on Premium.
Best for: omnichannel sellers with a physical counter and a website.
Watch out forthis: if you only sell online, you're paying for point-of-sale features you won't use, and the free plan's processing rate is on the high side.
Checkout Page take: the in-person and online sync is the reason to choose Square; without a physical counter, the case is weaker.
6. Ecwid: best for selling without rebuilding your site
Ecwid (now Ecwid by Lightspeed) is designed to bolt a store onto a site you already have, whether that's WordPress, Wix, or social channels. You can run the same store across several sites and marketplaces at once.
Pricing: a free-forever plan for a small catalog, with paid plans from $19 a month (Venture, Business, and Unlimited).
Transaction fees: none from the platform beyond your payment processor's standard rate.
Best for: sellers who don't want to rebuild on a new platform and just need a cart added to what they already have.
Watch out for: as a standalone flagship store, it's less ambitious than the dedicated builders, the bigger catalogs sit on the paid tiers, and because the store is embedded on a site you host elsewhere, you get less control over storefront SEO.
Checkout Page take: the simplest way to keep your current site and still sell, especially when a full migration isn't worth it.
7. Webflow: best for design and content-driven brands
Webflow is a design-first website builder with built-in ecommerce, giving you near-pixel-perfect control over how the site looks and reads. It suits brand and content-led sites where the store is part of a larger marketing presence.
Pricing: ecommerce plans run $29/month (Standard), $74/month (Plus), and $212/month (Advanced), billed annually.
Transaction fees: 2% on the Standard ecommerce plan, dropping to 0% on Plus and Advanced.
Best for: design-led brands and marketing-driven sites that want full visual control and built-in CMS content.
Watch out for: its commerce features are lighter than those of dedicated platforms (the Standard plan caps you at 500 products), and the 2% fee on that plan means growing stores need the Plus plan or higher. If you like Webflow's design tools but want an owned checkout, you can also pair it with Webflow and Stripe instead of its native cart.
Checkout Page take: choose Webflow for design and content first; weigh the commerce limits if products are the main event.
8. Checkout Page: best for an owned checkout without a full store
Checkout Page is a no-code checkout platform built on Stripe, for sellers who want to take payments without building and running a whole storefront. You create branded checkout pages, embeds, and forms that run on your own Stripe account, so payments flow straight to you and you stay the merchant of record.
Pricing: flat monthly plans from $29, with no per-transaction platform fee. You pay only Stripe's standard processing rate directly.
Transaction fees: none added by Checkout Page.
Best for: selling digital products, subscriptions, and event tickets, with physical orders now supported too.
Watch out for: it isn't a full store builder, so it won't run a large inventory catalog with shipping-rate rules.
Shopify alternatives at a glance
The table below lists all eight factors that usually determine it. Use it to narrow to two or three, then pull up each one's current pricing page before you choose.
Platform | Starting price (billed annually) | Added transaction fee | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
WooCommerce | Free plugin, plus hosting from about $10/mo | None from the platform | Owning your store fully on WordPress |
BigCommerce | $29/mo (Standard) | None on any plan | Scaling stores that want no added fees |
Squarespace | $16/mo (Basic), Core to waive its fee | 2% on Basic; waived from Core up | Brands where design drives the sale |
Wix | $29/mo (Core) | None beyond payment processing | Beginners who want an all-in-one builder |
Square Online | Free, paid from $49/mo | None beyond payment processing | Selling both in person and online |
Ecwid | Free, paid from $19/mo | None beyond payment processing | Adding a cart to a site you already have |
Webflow | $29/mo (Standard) | 2% on Standard; 0% on Plus and up | Design and content-driven brands |
Checkout Page | $29/mo (flat) | None from the platform | An owned checkout without a full store |
The pattern in the table: most of these platforms have dropped the added transaction fee that pushes sellers off Shopify, so the real difference comes down to what you sell and how much you want to manage yourself.
Free and cheaper Shopify alternatives
If cost is the main reason you're leaving, a few of these stand out. The free starting points are WooCommerce (the plugin is free, though you'll pay for hosting), Square Online, and Ecwid, all of which let you open a store without a monthly subscription. None is truly free once you're taking payments, since your processor still charges per transaction, but the platform itself can cost nothing to start.
How to migrate from Shopify to another platform
Switching platforms is mostly a data and SEO exercise, so it's worth planning before you move.
Three things matter most:
First, your data. You export your products, customers, and order history from Shopify, then import them into the new platform. Most alternatives offer migration tools, importers, or paid migration services, and there are apps to move larger catalogs without retyping anything.
Second, your URLs and search rankings. Your new store will use different URL structures, so map your old Shopify URLs to the new ones and set up 301 redirects. Skipping this is the most common and most costly migration mistake, because it throws away the search rankings you've already built.
Third, your storefront and integrations. Themes don't carry over, so you'll rebuild or choose a new template, and you'll reconnect payment processing, email, analytics, and any apps you rely on. Plan for a short overlap where both stores exist, so you can test checkout end-to-end before you point your domain at the new one.
None of this is a reason to stay on the wrong platform, but budget a week or two and get the redirects right.
Shopify alternatives FAQ
What is the best alternative to Shopify?
There's no single best Shopify alternative; it depends on what you sell. WooCommerce is best for full ownership, BigCommerce for scaling without additional transaction fees, and Squarespace, Wix, or Webflow for design and ease of use. If you sell digital products, subscriptions, or tickets, an owned checkout tool like Checkout Page often fits better than a full store builder.
Is there a cheaper alternative to Shopify?
Yes. WooCommerce, Square Online, and Ecwid all let you start a store with no monthly platform fee, and BigCommerce and Webflow's higher tiers remove the extra surcharge that Shopify adds to third-party gateways. Your real cost depends on apps and payment processing, so compare the total at your sales volume, not just the headline price.
What is the free version of Shopify?
Shopify doesn't have a free plan, only a short trial and a $5-a-month Starter plan for selling through links and social rather than a full store. For free starting points, consider WooCommerce’s free plugin, Square Online’s free tier, or Ecwid’s free-forever plan, all of which let you open a store without a subscription.
Is WooCommerce better than Shopify?
It depends on what you value. WooCommerce gives you more control, no platform fees, and full ownership of your code and data, but you manage hosting, updates, and security yourself. Shopify is simpler and fully managed but more closed, and it adds a surcharge on third-party gateways. Control versus convenience is the real trade.
Who are Shopify's main competitors?
Among full store builders, Shopify's main competitors are WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Squarespace, Wix, Square Online, Ecwid, and Webflow. For sellers focused on digital products, subscriptions, or tickets, lighter tools like Checkout Page also compete by skipping the full storefront and keeping platform fees lower.
