Shopify vs WooCommerce: Which Platform Should You Choose for Your Online Store?

On a first search, the decision looks settled. WooCommerce is free and Shopify starts at $25 a month. The market seems to side with free, too. According to W3Techs, almost half of the ecommerce sites in the world (48.4% as of July 2026) run on WooCommerce.

That $0 price tag comes with fine print worth reading before you build anything. When the software costs nothing, the hosting, the security, the updates and the traffic spikes become your problem, and every one of them charges you in money or in hours. Choosing between Shopify and WooCommerce is really choosing who carries the operation of your store: the platform, or you. What follows compares them on what actually separates them, with prices and limits verified as of July 2026.

1. What does each platform actually cost?

Shopify starts at $25 a month ($19 if you pay yearly) with hosting, SSL, backups and updates included. WooCommerce charges nothing for the software, but its own pricing page estimates $25 to $350 a month in hosting alone for most stores.

On top of that hosting come the domain and the paid extensions. On the official WooCommerce marketplace they run between $29 and $299 a year each. The official subscriptions extension, for instance, costs $279 a year, and three or four extensions at those prices already put you past Shopify’s monthly bill, before counting a single maintenance hour.

The deeper difference is the shape of the bill. Shopify charges you one fixed, predictable number. WooCommerce charges you by the piece, and the total depends on how many pieces your business turns out to need, a number that tends to reveal itself once the store is already running.

2. Who takes a cut of each sale?

WooCommerce takes no cut. You pay only your payment processor’s rate, and WooPayments, its own gateway, charges 2.9% + 30¢ per card transaction in the US. Shopify takes no cut either, as long as you process with Shopify Payments. The extra fee appears when you use a third-party gateway: 2% per sale on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced.

For most US stores this ends up close to a tie, since both native gateways charge similar card rates and neither platform adds a commission on top. The two part ways when you want a specific outside processor, maybe because your industry requires it or you negotiated better rates. WooCommerce lets you plug it in without a surcharge. Shopify charges you that percentage on every sale for the privilege.

A store on Basic doing $10,000 a month through an outside gateway pays Shopify $200 in fees, eight times its subscription. If that’s your situation, that fee belongs in your budget from the very first estimate.

3. Who keeps your store running?

Shopify’s technical maintenance is done by Shopify. Servers, security patches, backups and new versions arrive on their own, without the merchant ever noticing. With WooCommerce the same work exists, except you do it, or you pay someone who does.

It’s real work. WooCommerce ships a new version roughly every five weeks and WordPress puts out several major releases a year, on top of whatever your theme and each plugin decide to update. The official documentation tells you to back up your database before every update and to test changes on a staging site before touching the live store. All of that is sound advice, and it’s still a monthly task list that somebody has to execute.

It’s Friday night, a plugin updated itself and the checkout stopped loading. On WooCommerce, the person responsible for fixing it is you. On Shopify, that kind of breakdown simply never reaches your desk.

4. What happens when a traffic spike hits?

Shopify absorbs traffic spikes for you, as part of the service. Over the latest Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend, stores on the platform sold $14.6 billion, with peaks of $5.1 million in sales per minute, according to figures Shopify itself published. No merchant upgraded a server to make that happen.

With WooCommerce, your ceiling is the hosting you signed up for. The official scaling guide recommends starting from a server with at least 2 GB of memory, adding caching and a CDN, and growing into bigger servers (or several at once) as orders climb. Those are technical decisions with a price tag, and they’re best made while the spike is still far away.

Say one of your videos goes viral and thousands of people arrive at once, or the holiday season multiplies your traffic. If you were on the budget hosting plan, the store goes down on the one day everyone’s looking at it, and surviving that day depends on server decisions you made months earlier.

5. How do their apps and plugins compare?

Both ecosystems are huge, so counting apps tells you little. Look instead at how the pieces fit together. WooCommerce inherits the WordPress universe, with thousands of free plugins plus the official marketplace, built by hundreds of different vendors. That variety has a hidden cost. Making sure each plugin is compatible with your WooCommerce version, your WordPress version and the rest of your plugins is on you, and the official docs maintain compatibility tables for exactly that reason.

On Shopify, every app from the App Store installs against the same store, gateway and checkout. There’s less freedom to bend the platform as far as you’d like, and much less friction when extending it. The loyalty program or review app you install next year will coexist with everything you already have, with nobody stitching it together by hand.

If your business needs highly custom pieces, WooCommerce’s flexibility earns its keep. If it needs standard pieces working without drama, Shopify’s model means fewer headaches.

6. What are the real limitations of each?

Shopify’s limitations are concrete, documented ceilings. A product takes up to 2,048 variants and a maximum of three options (size, color and one more, say). Advanced checkout customization is reserved for the Plus plan, which sits in a different price bracket entirely. And you never touch the server or the database. If your business needs something the platform didn’t anticipate, the platform doesn’t bend.

WooCommerce sits at the opposite extreme. It’s open source, the code is yours, and almost any requirement can be built if you pay for the development. Underneath runs WordPress, still the most capable content management system around, a real advantage if your strategy leans on publishing. In exchange, every freedom you use is one more piece to maintain, and the ceiling then comes from your server or your budget.

So, Shopify or WooCommerce?

For most stores that want to sell without operating infrastructure, Shopify is the better answer. The cost is predictable, maintenance isn’t your problem, and each new app clicks into what you already have. It’s the platform we work with most, and the one we usually recommend to businesses opening their first store or leaving an improvised setup behind.

WooCommerce is the right call if you need full control of the code or if your business lives on content as much as on sales. It also wins when your requirements simply don’t fit inside a closed platform. That said, choose WooCommerce only if you know who will maintain it, because what you save on software you’ll spend keeping the store running.

And if you haven’t gotten that far yet and are still deciding which criteria to compare with, here are the questions that shorten the platform list for you.

Want to look at which of the two fits your business, with your real numbers on the table? Get in touch and we’ll go through it together.

Frequently asked questions

Which is cheaper, Shopify or WooCommerce?

It depends on how you add it up. The WooCommerce software is free, but its own pricing page estimates $25 to $350 a month in hosting for most stores, plus paid extensions and maintenance hours. Shopify starts at $25 a month with the infrastructure included. The totals end up closer than the word "free" suggests.

Is WooCommerce really free?

The plugin is genuinely free, it's open source and costs nothing to download. What costs money is the store built on top of it. You still need hosting, a domain, paid extensions ($29 to $299 a year each on the official marketplace) and the hours of whoever keeps everything updated and running.

Does Shopify charge a fee if I use a third-party payment gateway?

Yes. On top of what your gateway charges, Shopify adds 2% per sale on the Basic plan, 1% on Grow and 0.6% on Advanced. The fee goes away if you process with Shopify Payments, which is available in the United States and around 39 other countries. If you need a specific outside gateway, work out that cost before you commit.

Which platform handles a traffic spike better?

Shopify, without you lifting a finger. Its infrastructure processed peaks of $5.1 million in sales per minute during the latest Black Friday weekend, according to the company's own data. On WooCommerce your ceiling is the server you pay for, and it's up to you to upgrade it before you need it.

Do I need to know how to code to run a WooCommerce store?

Not for day-to-day operations. But someone has to update WordPress, WooCommerce and every plugin, keep backups, test changes on a staging site and untangle incompatibilities when they show up. If that someone isn't you, budget for that help as a monthly cost.

Which one is better if my strategy depends on content and blogging?

WooCommerce runs on WordPress, still the most flexible content management system there is, and that advantage matters if publishing drives your business. Shopify's blog is good enough for most stores, though as an editorial tool it trails WordPress by a wide margin.