Wix vs Shopify: which is better in 2026?

The quick verdict

Pick Shopify if your website is mainly a store. It is built for products, orders, inventory and checkout, it publishes clear card rates, and it grows with you into staff accounts and in-person selling.

Pick Wix if your website is mainly about your business, with a small shop or bookings on the side. It has a free plan to try first, thousands of templates, and a drag-and-drop editor built with beginners in mind.

Side by side

Wix lists yearly prices only on its plans page. Month-to-month prices appear only at checkout, and Wix also sells 2- and 3-year terms at bigger discounts it does not publish. Shopify’s yearly and monthly prices are both on its pricing page.

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

Cost over 3 years

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

The example site: about 10 pages and a blog, a .com domain, one business email address, and $2,000 a month in online sales from 50 orders. That is $72,000 in sales and 1,800 orders over three years. Both plans are billed yearly.

On Wix we use Core, the cheapest plan that accepts online payments. On Shopify we use Basic with Shopify Payments.

How we got these numbers:

• Domain. Wix includes a free domain for the first year on yearly plans. Neither company publishes its .com renewal price on the pages we used, so we use Namecheap’s listed .com prices as a stand-in: $18.48 a year to renew and $11.28 for a first year. Shopify’s free-domain offer is not confirmed, so we count all three years there.
• Email. Neither includes email. We budget Google Workspace Business Starter at Google’s listed $7.00 per user per month on the annual plan, or $84 a year. See email hosting if this is new to you.
• Card processing. Shopify Payments charges 2.9% + 30 cents per online sale on Basic: $2,088 in percentage fees plus $540 in per-order fees. We could not confirm Wix Payments’ US card rate, or whether Wix adds any platform fee, from Wix’s plans page. Check both at checkout before you decide.

Before card fees, the two are about $11 apart. If Wix’s US card rate turned out to match Shopify’s, the totals would stay that close. So the real cost question comes down to the card rate you are offered and the apps you add.

What the table leaves out

• Apps. Both have app stores, and many apps charge a monthly fee. Neither company publishes a typical spend. Each paid app adds its monthly price times 36.
• A bigger Wix plan. Wix Core comes with “basic” eCommerce. If you need the “standard” eCommerce features on Business ($39 a month billed yearly), the plan line rises to $1,404 and the subtotal to $1,692.96.
• Shopify with another payment provider. If you use a third-party payment gateway instead of Shopify Payments, Shopify adds 2% on Basic. On our example that is another $1,440, on top of the provider’s own fees.
• Tax. Wix says its listed prices exclude tax, which depends on your billing address.

Run your own numbers with the website cost calculator.

Design and ease of use

Wix is built for beginners. You pick from thousands of templates and drag elements where you want them. You can also start from a single prompt with Wix’s AI website builder, then edit the result by hand.

Plans differ in storage and team size. Light has 2 GB of storage and 2 site collaborators. Core has 50 GB and 5 collaborators, Business has 100 GB and 10, and Business Elite has unlimited storage and 100 collaborators.

Shopify’s design comes from themes in the Shopify Theme Store, which has free and paid options. Themes are written in Liquid, Shopify’s template language, and the code can be edited. Layout changes beyond what a theme allows usually need a developer.

The biggest difference is the dashboard. Wix’s editor is about pages and layout, with business tools added on. Shopify’s admin is about running a store: products, orders, inventory, customers and discounts. Note that Shopify Basic has no staff accounts, so only the owner can log in.

Store, blog and SEO

Store

Shopify is the more complete store. Its 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. Staff accounts go from none on Basic to 5 on Grow, 15 on Advanced and unlimited on Plus.

Wix’s store comes in three levels: basic eCommerce on Core, standard on Business and advanced on Business Elite. Core and Business also include scheduling, which makes Wix a good fit for businesses that sell appointments as well as products. Wix says Wix Payments supports more than 80 payment options worldwide. The free and Light plans cannot take online payments at all.

Blog

Wix has a built-in blog plus CMS collections, which are simple databases for things like team members, listings or recipes. Shopify includes a blog and pages, but they are there to support the store.

SEO

Both give you the standard SEO controls, such as page titles and descriptions. Shopify adds SEO fields on every product and URL redirects in the admin. Neither platform will rank a site by itself. Your content and reputation do that.

AI features

Wix is betting big on AI site building. Wix Harmony, launched January 21, 2026, mixes vibe coding (describing what you want in plain words and letting AI build it) with Wix’s visual editor. Inside Harmony, an AI agent called Aria understands natural language and the context of your whole site. Harmony rolled out in English first. Wix also offers Wixel, an AI design tool for creating content.

Shopify’s AI is aimed at running the store. 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. Updates from December 2025 to February 2026 added a fullscreen mode, payments and site-speed data, and the ability to create customers and companies.

Leaving later

Shopify scores 5 out of 10 and Wix scores 3. Neither lets you take the whole site with you.

Wix says your site must run on Wix’s servers, and its help center says the site cannot be exported to another host. Blog posts cannot be exported to other platforms either. You can export CMS collection content one collection at a time, and products to CSV, up to 5,000 rows per file. Digital products cannot be exported. We could not confirm how orders and contacts export.

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 first. Themes download as a ZIP of Liquid files, but they only run on Shopify.

On both, keep the domain under your control. Registering it with an outside domain registrar and connecting it to the builder means the address stays yours whatever you decide later. Our guide to leaving your website builder covers the steps.

Pick Wix if…

• Your site is mostly about your services, and products or bookings are part of it, not all of it.
• You want a free plan to build and test before you pay.
• You want an AI tool to draft the site, then edit it visually.
• You sell appointments as well as products and want scheduling in the same dashboard.
• You are fine staying on Wix long term, since the site cannot move to another host.

Pick Shopify if…

• Selling products is the main point of the website.
• You want published card rates and no extra fee when you use Shopify Payments.
• You sell in person as well as online.
• You expect to add staff, inventory locations and apps as you grow.
• You want your products, customers and orders to leave with you if you ever switch.

Neither? Look at these

• Squarespace pairs polished templates with a store that charges 0% store fees from Core ($29 a month billed yearly). See Squarespace vs Shopify.
• Self-hosted WordPress scores 10/10 on exit because you own every file and the database. It takes more setup and upkeep. We build on WordPress every week; our Wix vs WordPress comparison lays out the trade-offs.
• Hostinger’s AI builder is much cheaper up front and charges no sales commission, but its prices need a 48-month prepay. See Hostinger vs Wix.

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