WooCommerce vs Shopify: which works best for you in 2026?

WooCommerce is best known for being free, and Shopify for being easy. Which is right for you depends less on either headline than on what you're selling, how much store you need, and how much of the setup and upkeep you want to own.

Shopify suits sellers who want hosting, themes, payments, and support handled in one place, starting at $29/mo. WooCommerce suits those already on WordPress who want control over every piece; the plugin is free, though a real store runs $50–$120/mo once hosting and plugins are in place.

And if you're selling digital products, courses, memberships, or event tickets, you may not need a full store at all: a hosted checkout on your own site is the third option most comparisons skip. That's what Checkout Page does, so we'll be clear about where a full store is the right call and where it's overkill.

Below: 2026 pricing in full, ease of use, customization, payments, and when neither platform is the answer.

Quick summary

• Shopify is the faster, lower-maintenance choice: a fully managed store (with hosting, security, and updates handled) that you can launch in under an hour, in exchange for less control over design and checkout. It starts with a 3-day free trial, then $1/month for the first three months.
• WooCommerce is a free WordPress plugin, so it suits people already on WordPress who want full control over every aspect. The plugin is free, but a serious store realistically runs $50–$120/mo once hosting, paid plugins, and setup time are counted.
• Payments cost about the same on both (roughly 2.9% + 30¢), until you bring your own gateway, where Shopify adds 0.5–2% on top and WooCommerce adds nothing.
• If you're selling digital products, courses, memberships, or event tickets rather than running a full storefront, you may not need either: a hosted checkout like Checkout Page sits on your existing site from $24/mo (billed annually) with no platform fees on top of Stripe.

WooCommerce vs Shopify at a glance

Use the table to decide which platform fits before you read the details.

Shopify wins on speed and low maintenance, WooCommerce on control and avoiding platform fees, and a hosted checkout when you don't need a full store at all.

How WooCommerce and Shopify compare

The sections below go through each platform dimension by dimension, from what each costs to how it handles payments, apps, and the operational basics. Start with whichever matters most to you.

What WooCommerce and Shopify cost in 2026

Most comparisons quote $0 for WooCommerce and $29/mo for Shopify and stop there. The real numbers, once hosting, plugins, apps, and gateway fees are in, look different.

Shopify pricing. Shopify publishes four standard plans, with yearly billing rates below (paying yearly saves up to 25% compared to monthly). New stores get a 3-day free trial, no card required, then $1/month for the first three months on any standard plan.

• Basic, $29/mo (or $39/mo if you pay monthly). Card rates 2.9% + 30¢ via Shopify Payments. 2% fee if you use a third-party payment gateway.
• Grow, $79/mo. Card rates 2.7% + 30¢. Lower third-party gateway fee.
• Advanced, $299/mo. Card rates 2.5% + 30¢. Custom report builder, lower fees.
• Plus, from $2,300/mo (3-year term). Custom card rates. The only tier that lets you fully customize the checkout.

Shopify's headline price doesn't include the apps most stores end up adding. A small store running an email tool, a review app, a subscription app, and a translation app can easily add $100–$200/mo on top of the plan price, so $29 isn't the all-in number.

Pricing verified on shopify.com/pricing, 2026-06-24.

WooCommerce pricing. The WooCommerce plugin is free. That number gets cited a lot. What it doesn't include:

The WooCommerce plugin is free. That number gets cited a lot. What it doesn't include:

• Hosting. Shared hosting starts around $5–$10/mo (Bluehost, Hostinger). Managed WordPress hosting suited to ecommerce is closer to $30–$60/mo (SiteGround GrowBig, Kinsta starter, WP Engine). After year-one promo rates expire, the going rate sits in that managed range.
• A domain. $10–$20/yr, often free for the first year with hosting.
• An ecommerce theme. $0–$130/yr. Free themes exist, but most paid stores end up on Astra Pro, Flatsome, or Storefront with a child theme.
• Plugins. WooCommerce is plugin-driven. A real store often runs a payments plugin (Stripe or WooPayments, free), a subscriptions plugin (Woo Subscriptions, $239/yr), an SEO plugin (Yoast Premium, $99/yr), a backup plugin (UpdraftPlus Premium, $70/yr), and a security plugin (Wordfence Premium, $119/yr). Plugin sprawl is the cost most comparisons ignore.
• Payment fees. WooPayments charges 2.9% + 30¢ for US cards, in line with Shopify Payments. Using Stripe directly is the same headline rate. The savings versus Shopify show up if you use a non-Shopify gateway, because there's no platform fee on top.

A realistic 2026 monthly cost for a serious WooCommerce store, including amortized annual plugins and managed hosting, is $50–$120/mo. The "free" framing only works if you treat your own time and the security risk of shared hosting as worth nothing.

Sample-merchant comparison. Three personas, 2026 pricing, no vendor bias. The table shows roughly what each seller pays once the real costs are in.

For small full-catalog stores, WooCommerce can be cheaper if you're already comfortable with WordPress. For solo and creator personas, Shopify is competitive on raw cost and saves real setup time, and a hosted checkout is cheaper than either if the catalog is small enough.

Ease of use and setup time

Bottom line: Shopify is the clear winner here. You can launch in under an hour; WooCommerce takes a day to a weekend.

Shopify: live in under an hour. Sign up, pick a theme, add products, and you're selling. Payments work out of the box with Shopify Payments, hosting and SSL are handled, and updates happen without you noticing.

WooCommerce: a day to a weekend. Because it's WordPress first, you pick a host, install WordPress and the WooCommerce plugin, configure a theme, set up payments, add the plugins you need, and learn the admin. Longer if you've never used WordPress.

Two qualifiers:

• Already on WordPress? Most of the setup disappears. You know the admin and have the host, so adding WooCommerce is one plugin install and a setup wizard.
• Shopify's ease costs you control. Theme structure is constrained, and the checkout is locked unless you're on Plus.

Pick by speed vs control: non-technical and want to ship today, Shopify. Comfortable on WordPress and want something specific, WooCommerce. Don't need a full store at all? See the "when neither" section below.

Customization and control

Bottom line: WooCommerce gives you total control; Shopify gives you enough for most stores without the upkeep.

WooCommerce: full control. You get the entire WordPress filesystem: edit any file, write a plugin, fork a theme, hook into any action or filter, and ship features no vendor offers. The 60,000+ free plugins in the WordPress directory cover almost any case.

Shopify: enough for most. You customize themes in Liquid (its templating language) and extend through the App Store (8,000+ apps). That covers most stores. For unusual needs (a complex pricing model, a multi-step quote flow, a custom returns workflow), you end up stacking several apps to approximate a single solution.

Three specifics tend to decide it:

• Checkout editing. Locked on Shopify Basic, Grow, and Advanced; full customization needs Shopify Plus ($2,300/mo). On WooCommerce, the checkout is a template you can edit.
• Code ownership. WooCommerce code lives on your host, and your repo if you want one. Shopify code lives in Shopify, so leaving later raises a data-portability question.
• Themes. Shopify ships 1,000+ themes (24 free; paid ones priced roughly $100–$500, mostly well-maintained). WooCommerce has about 100 official plugins, plus the larger WordPress directory where quality ranges from polished to abandoned. A non-developer can build a good-looking Shopify store from the library alone; a WooCommerce store often needs a child theme, a page builder, or developer time.

Reality check: if you won't use these advantages, they aren't advantages. A solo seller on stock themes and stock apps gets nothing from WooCommerce's depth and pays for it in setup and maintenance time.

Payments and checkout

Bottom line: Card rates are nearly identical, and both processors run on Stripe. The real difference is the fee Shopify charges when you use your own gateway.

Both platforms have a first-party processor built on Stripe: Shopify Payments has been powered by Stripe since 2013, and WooPayments is built in partnership with Stripe.

Shopify Payments: 2.9% + 30¢ on Basic, 2.7% on Grow, 2.5% on Advanced, no extra platform fee. Use a third-party gateway instead (Stripe directly, PayPal, Square), and Shopify adds 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, or 0.5% on Advanced on top of that gateway's fee. This applies to non-US sellers (Shopify Payments isn’t available everywhere) and to anyone set on a specific processor.

WooCommerce: WooPayments is free on US cards at 2.9% + 30¢, with no platform fee. Stripe, PayPal, or any other gateway works the same way: a free plugin, and you pay only the gateway's rate.

So who's cheaper? If you'd use Stripe directly anyway (for the developer experience, or because you already use Stripe Billing), Shopify's 0.5–2% third-party fee makes WooCommerce cheaper. If you're happy with Shopify Payments or WooPayments, the headline rate is identical, and the choice comes down to features rather than payment cost.

On checkout conversion: Shopify's checkout is fast and well-designed, but you can barely change it without Plus. WooCommerce is more customizable, though the out-of-the-box version usually needs theme work to convert as well. For what you actually pay on Stripe, see our guide to Stripe processing fees.

Apps, plugins, and ecosystem

Bottom line: WooCommerce has far more add-ons; Shopify has fewer but better-vetted ones. Either way, the real cost is sprawl.

WooCommerce: 60,000+ free WordPress plugins, plus paid extensions. The breadth is real, and so is the quality range, since anyone can publish and not all are maintained or secure.

Shopify: 8,000+ apps in the App Store, reviewed, sandboxed, and audited. Smaller catalog, tighter curation. The trade-off: almost every app is paid, and a real store runs five to ten.

Two patterns to watch:

• Plugin sprawl (WooCommerce). Add subscriptions, memberships, reviews, SEO, backups, security, caching, and email, and you're easily at 15+ plugins. Each is one more thing that can break on a WordPress update and one more annual renewal, often exceeding the all-in Shopify cost for the same features.
• App sprawl (Shopify). More visible, because every app is a monthly line item. Five $20 apps are $100/mo on top of your plan, every month.

New in 2026: Shopify has added AI across plans, including Shopify Magic (AI product descriptions and image edits), Sidekick (an in-admin assistant), and a push toward “agentic storefronts” (products surfacing in ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity). Whether that drives real revenue for a small store is a separate question. Shopify ships these on the assumption that stores stay put; WooCommerce, being open-source, leaves new features to plugin authors.

SEO, security, shipping, support, and marketing

Pricing and customization aren't the only questions a full-store buyer asks. Here's how WooCommerce and Shopify compare on five more points, with the third-option lens pulled together at the end.

SEO and site speed

Both platforms can rank. Shopify ships with sensible defaults (clean URLs, automatic sitemaps, canonical tags, schema markup, mobile-optimized themes) and tends to be fast out of the box because it controls the stack. WooCommerce gives you more granular control (custom schema, custom caching, Yoast or RankMath) and runs on WordPress, still the strongest CMS for blog-driven SEO. Shopify's defaults work without effort; WooCommerce's ceiling is higher if you do the work.

Security and PCI compliance

Shopify is PCI DSS Level 1 certified at the platform level, includes SSL on every plan, runs fraud analysis through Shopify Payments, and patches security without involving you. WooCommerce shifts most of that onto you: a PCI-compliant host, your own SSL, security plugins you choose and pay for (Wordfence, Sucuri, Jetpack), and keeping WordPress core and every plugin up to date. For a full-catalog store with card data flowing through it, that's ongoing work.

Shipping

Shopify has built-in shipping on every plan: discounted labels through Shopify Shipping (US, Canada, UK, and selected regions), live carrier rates from USPS, UPS, DHL, and FedEx, plus international shipping, local pickup, and delivery estimates. WooCommerce covers the basics built in (flat rate, free shipping, shipping zones), and the plugin ecosystem handles any carrier, though configuring it takes more time. For physical-goods sellers, this category alone is often the tiebreaker.

Customer support

Shopify offers 24/7 live chat and email on every plan, phone callbacks on higher tiers, and dedicated account management on Plus, with a deep Help Center, Academy, and partner network. WooCommerce, being open-source, has no central support line: you rely on your host's support, the WordPress.org forums, the official docs, paid plugin vendors, and the agency-and-freelancer community. A solo seller who'd panic if the store broke at 2 am is better served by Shopify; a WordPress-comfortable seller who'd rather message a developer is fine on WooCommerce.

Marketing tools

Shopify ships with Shopify Email (10,000 free emails per month, then $1 per 1,000), built-in analytics, native social-channel selling (Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Amazon, Google), and a Marketing tab that ties it together. WooCommerce hands marketing to plugins: Mailchimp, Klaviyo, or MailPoet for email; Google Analytics or MonsterInsights for reporting; Yoast for SEO; social plugins per network. Pick well, and you get best-in-class tools in each category; pick badly, and you get a maintenance tax.

Where the third option fits in

The same pattern repeats across all five: Shopify does the work for you and gets you a solid result by default, while WooCommerce gives you more control if you take responsibility for the result. If you're building a full store, all five matter. If you fit the third-option pattern (one product, one course, one membership on a site you already have), the checkout layer handles payments, subscriptions, and customer email, the host site handles SEO, and card data never touches the host, so PCI scoping shrinks.

WooCommerce vs Shopify for digital sellers and small subscriptions

For sellers with a handful of digital products, a single course, or a small subscription, either platform would likely be overkill.

Both also do significantly more than this case needs. A platform built for a thousand-SKU store with shipping, inventory, multi-currency markets, POS hardware, and B2B pricing carries a lot of weight you're not using when you're selling a $200 course or a $20/mo membership.

Shopify's digital-products experience is fine: you mark a product as digital, disable shipping, and deliver via email. It works, but you're still paying for and configuring a full store admin. WooCommerce has good digital-product plugins (the official Woo Subscriptions plugin runs $239/yr; the free WooCommerce core handles one-off digital products), but you're still maintaining a WordPress site and a checkout flow that was designed for physical-goods sellers first.

The full-platform overhead doesn't help conversion on a single-product page; it sometimes hurts conversion with extra fields, slower load times, and more clicks to checkout. And the recurring cost of a full platform, even at Shopify Basic, adds up over years for someone who could ship the same product faster with a checkout embedded on their existing site. If that fits you, the section below is for you. If you do need a full store, both platforms are good answers.

When neither WooCommerce nor Shopify is the right fit

The third option is for a narrower group. You probably don't need a full ecommerce platform if:

• You sell digital products, courses, downloads, or event tickets.
• You run subscriptions or memberships (Checkout Page handles unlimited ones, plus payment plans and free or paid trials).
• You already have a site you like (Framer, Webflow, plain WordPress, Notion, Carrd, Ghost) and don't want to migrate or run two platforms.
• You don't need a full browsable storefront (catalog pages, categories, search) or in-person POS hardware.
• You'd rather embed a checkout in ten minutes than configure a store admin you won't use.

If that's you, the third option is a hosted payment page: a checkout that sits on your existing site and handles payments, subscriptions, shipping, multiple currencies, order bumps and one-click upsells, a white-label customer portal, and email confirmations. There's no store admin to maintain because there's no store, just a checkout you embed where it needs to go.

Because it's Stripe-native, you're not adding a second processor, only a layer on the Stripe account you'd use anyway. We see this most often with sellers on a Framer site with a hosted checkout, or course creators on plain WordPress who don't want WooCommerce's weight.

That's what Checkout Page does, from $24/mo (annual) with no platform fees on top of Stripe and about ten minutes to set up.

It scales to unlimited products, subscriptions, and event tickets, so it isn't only for one-off sales. It still isn't a Shopify or WooCommerce alternative, though: a store that needs a browsable catalog and in-person POS belongs on one of them. The third option is for sellers who'd otherwise overbuild, and selling digital products from your own site is the practical next step if it fits.

How to choose between WooCommerce and Shopify

The five questions below cover most cases. Answer them in order, and the platform tends to answer itself.

A five-question decision framework

1. Do you need a full catalog (more than ~20 products, inventory tracking, or POS)? Yes: Shopify or WooCommerce, continue. No: skip to question 5.
2. Are you already on WordPress and comfortable with the admin? Yes: WooCommerce is the natural fit. No: continue.
3. Do you want to spend zero time on hosting, updates, and security? Yes: Shopify. No: WooCommerce is still on the table.
4. Will you use a non-Shopify Payments gateway (Stripe directly, PayPal-only, or regional processors)? Yes: WooCommerce avoids Shopify's 0.5–2% third-party fee. No: either platform works, so pick on ease versus control.
5. Are you selling a small number of digital products, courses, or subscriptions on an existing site? Yes: a hosted checkout on your own site is the third option, and neither full platform is required. No: re-read question 1, because you probably do need a full store.

Edge cases (B2B, wholesale, enterprise) sit above this framework. Both Shopify Plus and a custom WooCommerce build are valid, and the choice usually comes down to in-house dev capacity.

Where each platform wins

Shopify wins for non-technical solo sellers who want everything managed, stores that want a polished out-of-box checkout without development, sellers who want POS hardware and online sales unified, and anyone who values speed-to-launch over deep customization.

WooCommerce wins for developers and teams who want code-level control, stores already running on WordPress, sellers who refuse the Shopify third-party gateway fee, and niche cases the plugin ecosystem covers better on WordPress (membership sites, complex pricing, very custom flows).

Neither wins for sellers who don't need a store admin at all, which is the third option above.

Switching between WooCommerce and Shopify

Going from Shopify to WooCommerce is mostly a data migration: products export cleanly via CSV, while customers and orders usually move with a migration tool, app, or the API rather than WooCommerce's core importer. Either way, you'll lose theme work and app-specific data, and customer passwords don't transfer.

Going from WooCommerce to Shopify is more involved because the WordPress side is so customizable. Cart2Cart-style migration tools work for standard setups, but custom plugins, custom post types, and content tied to WordPress (blog, pages, custom layouts) often require a separate migration plan.

Going to a hosted checkout is a different exercise: you keep your site and route the checkout to a new layer. If you already run your own Stripe account, subscriptions and saved cards stay put; moving them from a platform's processor account to yours needs the processor's support. It's an often-overlooked path and can be the right one for sellers who no longer need everything a full platform provides.

WooCommerce vs Shopify FAQ

Is WooCommerce really free, or are there hidden costs?

The WooCommerce plugin is free, but the realistic all-in cost is closer to $50–$120/mo once you add managed WordPress hosting, an ecommerce theme, the plugins most real stores need, and a domain. The "free" framing only holds on cheap shared hosting if you treat your own setup and maintenance time as worth nothing.

Which has lower transaction fees, WooCommerce or Shopify?

The card rates are nearly identical: Shopify Payments and WooPayments both charge 2.9% + 30¢ for US cards on the entry tiers. The difference shows up with a third-party gateway. Shopify adds an extra 0.5–2% depending on the plan, while WooCommerce charges no platform fee on top of your gateway's own rate.

Is WooCommerce or Shopify better for a small business?

For non-technical small businesses that want to launch fast, Shopify offers hosting, security, and support. For small businesses already on WordPress or with a developer on hand, WooCommerce, because the control and lower platform fees pay off. For one-product or few-product businesses on their own site, neither, since a hosted checkout does the job.

Which is better for SEO, WooCommerce or Shopify?

Both can rank. WooCommerce has a slight ceiling advantage because it runs on WordPress, the strongest content-first CMS and the obvious choice if blogging drives your acquisition. Shopify has a slight floor advantage because its defaults (clean URLs, sitemaps, schema, and fast mobile themes) work out of the box. Most stores lose ranking on thin content, not the platform.