Shopify vs WooCommerce: which is better in 2026?

The quick verdict

Pick Shopify if you want a store that runs itself. Hosting, security, checkout and updates are Shopify’s job, you get one monthly bill, and the admin is built for products, orders and in-person sales. You trade some control for that, and Shopify adds a fee if you use another payment provider.

Pick WooCommerce if you want to own the store outright. It is a free plugin for WordPress with no platform fees, it runs on any WordPress host, and it scores 10/10 on our exit score. You trade convenience for that: you choose and pay for hosting, buy extensions for some features, and handle updates and backups.

Side by side

Shopify’s prices and card rates come from its pricing page. WooCommerce’s pricing page promises “0% revenue share” and “no platform fees,” and gives its own cost ranges for hosting, extensions and card processing.

The exit score is our 10-point measure of how much of your site you can take with you if you leave. Compare every platform on the exit scores page.

Cost over 3 years

Here is the same small online shop on both platforms over 36 months.

The example store: about 10 pages and a blog, a .com domain, one business email address, and $2,000 a month in online sales from 50 orders (an average order of $40). That is $72,000 in sales and 1,800 orders over three years. No subscriptions, bookings or memberships.

On Shopify we use Basic with Shopify Payments, billed yearly. On WooCommerce we use managed WordPress web hosting from Kinsta, whose Single 35k plan is $30 a month billed yearly. That sits inside Woo’s own $25 to $350 estimate for stores.

How we got these numbers:

• Domain. Neither includes one here, so we use Namecheap’s listed .com prices: $11.28 for the first year and $18.48 a year to renew.
• Email. Neither includes a mailbox. Google Workspace Business Starter is $7 per user a month on the annual plan, or $84 a year. WooCommerce sends order emails itself; this line is for your own inbox.
• Theme. GeneratePress Premium at $59 a year, the theme add-on we use on the WordPress sites we build. Free themes work too, which drops the WooCommerce subtotal to $1,380.24.
• Card processing. Shopify Payments charges 2.9% + 30 cents per online sale on Basic: $2,088 plus $540 in per-order fees. Woo’s pricing page cites “~2.50-2.90% + 30c per transaction” with WooPayments, so we show that range. We could not confirm WooPayments’ exact US rate table.

The takeaway: at this size the two land within a few hundred dollars of each other. Hosting choice moves the WooCommerce total more than anything else.

How hosting changes the WooCommerce total

• Cheap shared hosting. SiteGround StartUp is $2.99 a month prepaid for 12 months, then renews at $17.99 a month. That is $467.64 over three years, and it cuts the WooCommerce subtotal to $944.88. Woo’s own estimate starts at $25 a month for stores, so check the plan can handle your traffic.
• All-in hosted WooCommerce. WordPress.com Commerce is $45 a month billed yearly and includes WooCommerce, premium store themes and priority support. With its free first-year domain, the subtotal is $1,908.96, assuming today’s price holds at renewal. Woo Express, Woo’s old hosted plan, is no longer available.
• Bigger stores. At the top of Woo’s range, $350 a month, hosting alone is $12,600 over three years.

Extensions and apps

This is where the two differ most. Many WooCommerce features come as paid plugins called extensions, sold as yearly subscriptions. Woo puts typical extension prices at $29 to $299 a year each. Official examples: Subscriptions $279 a year, Bookings $249, Memberships $199 and Product Add-Ons $79. The first three together cost $727 a year, or $2,181 over three years. Stop renewing and updates and support stop.

Shopify’s App Store has thousands of apps, and many charge a monthly fee. Shopify does not publish a typical spend, so we cannot give one. Each paid app adds its monthly price times 36.

Shopify with another payment provider

If you skip Shopify Payments and use a third-party payment gateway, Shopify adds its own fee on top of the provider’s: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus. On our example that is another $1,440 on Basic. WooCommerce charges no platform fee with any gateway, including Stripe, PayPal or Square. Our transaction fees explainer covers the difference between these fees and card processing.

Want to try your own numbers? Use the website cost calculator.

Design and ease of use

Shopify is the easier start. You sign up, pick a theme from the Shopify Theme Store, add products and connect payments. Hosting, security and software updates are handled for you. Themes are written in Liquid, Shopify’s template language, and the code can be edited, but bigger design changes often need a developer.

WooCommerce works with any WordPress theme, and its cart and checkout are blocks you can place in the editor. You get full code access: PHP, CSS, JavaScript, custom extensions and a REST API. That freedom is the point, but you set up more yourself, starting with hosting.

Support on WooCommerce is split three ways. The free core relies on community forums and docs, paid official extensions include support while the subscription is active, and your host supports the server.

Store, blog and SEO

Store

Shopify’s card rates drop as you move up: 2.9% + 30 cents on Basic, 2.7% + 30 cents on Grow, 2.5% + 30 cents on Advanced and 2.25% + 30 cents on Plus. In-person rates run from 2.6% + 10 cents down to 2.3% + 10 cents, so one system covers your website and a shop counter. Staff accounts go from none on Basic to 5 on Grow and 15 on Advanced.

WooCommerce sets no limits on products or orders; your hosting decides how much it can handle. The free core covers products, cart and checkout, orders, customers, coupons, tax and shipping settings, and analytics. Subscriptions, bookings, memberships and product options need paid extensions.

Blog

WooCommerce sits inside WordPress, which W3Techs finds on 40.2% of all websites, so you get a full blog and page editor. That suits stores that win customers through guides and articles. Shopify includes a blog and pages, but they are there to support the store.

SEO

Shopify has SEO fields on every product, plus sitemaps and URL redirects in the admin. WooCommerce uses WordPress SEO: clean product and category URLs, core XML sitemaps, and plugins such as Rank Math or Yoast for schema, meta tags and redirects. Neither platform will rank a store by itself.

AI features

Shopify has the edge here. Sidekick, its AI assistant, comes with your plan, though Shopify says features and usage limits vary by plan. It helps with store design, photo editing, product copy, discounts, email campaigns, inventory alerts and reports. Recent updates added a fullscreen mode (December 2025), payments and site-speed data (January 2026) and the ability to create customers and companies (February 2026).

WooCommerce does not include a built-in AI assistant like Sidekick. If you want AI help with product copy or images, you add a WordPress plugin or use an outside tool.

Leaving later

This is the biggest gap between the two. WooCommerce scores 10 out of 10. Shopify scores 5.

Shopify exports products, customers and orders to CSV. Product images come out only as web links, and those links stop working if the store closes, so download your images before you cancel. Themes download as Liquid files, but they only run on Shopify. We found no documented one-click export for blog posts and pages.

WooCommerce keeps everything in your own WordPress database and files. Any WordPress host can run the same store, so moving is a copy, not a rebuild. The built-in exporter also writes products, variations and image links to CSV. One catch from Woo’s docs: the exporter may drop attribute values from variation names, so check the file.

On both, register your domain at a registrar you choose and you keep it. Our guide to leaving your website builder walks through the full process.

Pick Shopify if…

• You want one bill and no server, update or backup work.
• You sell in person as well as online and want one system for both.
• You want staff accounts and an AI assistant built in.
• You are happy to use Shopify Payments, which avoids the extra 0.2% to 2% fee.
• You want to launch fast without a developer.

Pick WooCommerce if…

• You already run a WordPress site and want to add a store.
• You want zero platform fees with any payment provider.
• You want to own the files and database and be able to switch hosts any time.
• Content and blog SEO drive your sales.
• You need custom checkout logic or integrations, and have a developer or the skills.

Neither? Look at these

• Squarespace suits a polished site with a small store, with 0% store fees from its Core plan at $29 a month billed yearly. See Squarespace vs Shopify.
• WordPress.com Commerce gives you WooCommerce with hosting handled, at $45 a month billed yearly. Our WordPress.com vs WordPress.org comparison explains how it differs from running WordPress yourself.

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