WooCommerce vs Shopify: An Honest Comparison

WooCommerce and Shopify are built on opposite models. WooCommerce is a free, open source plugin that turns a WordPress website into a store, which you host and maintain yourself. Shopify is a hosted platform you pay for monthly, which handles the hosting, security and software for you. Published market share figures vary widely depending on how stores are counted, so we have left them out; the choice comes down to how you want to spend your time and money.

We are a Shopify agency and we move stores from WooCommerce to Shopify regularly, so we are not neutral. We think saying so is more useful than pretending otherwise, and we say below exactly when WooCommerce is the better choice. Prices and policies come from each platform's own pages, checked in September 2026.

Quick Answer

For most UK stores without in house developers, Shopify is the better choice. It takes hosting, patching and card security off your hands, with Shopify's Level 1 PCI DSS certification covering every store, and its costs are predictable. WooCommerce is the better choice if you already run a content heavy WordPress site, have developers on hand, or need full control over code and data. The plugin is free, but WooCommerce's own pricing page puts hosting at $25 to $350 a month for most stores, plus $29 to $299 a year for each paid extension.

Key Takeaways

• WooCommerce is free software, but you pay for hosting, paid extensions and the time or developer support to keep everything updated and secure.
• Shopify's plans start at £19 a month billed yearly and include hosting, security and platform updates.
• WooCommerce charges no transaction fees of its own, while Shopify adds 2%, 1%, 0.6% or 0.2% by plan if you use a gateway other than Shopify Payments.
• On WooCommerce, PCI DSS compliance is the store owner's responsibility; on Shopify, it is covered by the platform's Level 1 certification.
• Plan your own backups on both: Shopify points merchants to exports and theme downloads, and WooCommerce backups depend on your host or a plugin.
• Most of our clients who migrate from WooCommerce do so to escape the daily operational stress of managing software updates, server security concerns and technical maintenance.
• WooCommerce suits content led WordPress businesses with technical support; Shopify suits most merchants who would rather spend their time selling.

Table of Contents

• WooCommerce vs Shopify at a Glance
• Running Costs: What You Actually Pay
• Who Maintains What
• Ease of Use and Setup
• Payments and Checkout
• Themes and Design
• SEO, Content and Speed
• Apps, Plugins and Extensions
• Scalability and B2B
• When WooCommerce Is the Better Choice
• When Shopify Is the Better Choice
• Moving from WooCommerce to Shopify
• Why Matters Perspective
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Final Thoughts
• Related Articles

WooCommerce vs Shopify at a Glance

Running Costs: What You Actually Pay

WooCommerce itself costs nothing, and WooCommerce says it charges no platform fees or revenue share. The costs sit around it. On its pricing page, WooCommerce estimates hosting at $25 to $350 a month for most stores, rising with traffic and performance needs, and paid extensions at $29 to $299 a year each. Add a domain, a theme, your payment provider's charges and the time needed to keep it all updated.

To show the spread, take WooCommerce's own ranges with three paid extensions. At the bottom, $25 a month of hosting and three extensions at $29 cost $387 a year, about £287. At the top, $350 a month of hosting and three extensions at $299 cost $5,097 a year, about £3,776. Pound figures are approximate, at roughly $1.35 to the pound. Neither total includes developer time, which in our experience is the cost merchants most often underestimate.

Shopify's costs are more predictable. The UK plans include hosting, security and platform updates, and paying yearly saves roughly a quarter:

Shopify Basic costs £228 a year and Grow £588 a year on yearly billing, before apps. Many Shopify apps charge monthly, so compare your real app list with the WooCommerce extensions you would need rather than the headline prices alone. Shopify Plus starts from £1,800 a month.

The biggest structural difference at scale is payments. WooCommerce takes nothing from your sales, while Shopify charges a transaction fee if you use a gateway other than Shopify Payments. On Grow, keeping an outside gateway for £300,000 of sales costs £3,000 a year in Shopify fees. Advanced cuts that to £1,800 but costs £2,520 a year more in plan fees, so it only pays for itself above about £630,000 of sales, and Grow beats Basic above about £36,000. Most merchants avoid the fee entirely by using Shopify Payments.

For a fuller breakdown of build and running costs, see our guide to how much it costs to build a Shopify store.

Who Maintains What

This is the difference that decides most comparisons, and the main reason our clients give for leaving WooCommerce. On Shopify, the platform runs the servers, patches the software and keeps the core up to date. On WooCommerce, those jobs belong to you, your host or your developer.

Card security shows the gap most clearly. Shopify says it is certified Level 1 PCI DSS compliant and that its certification extends to every store on the platform, covering the store, its cart and its hosting. WooCommerce's PCI DSS documentation says compliance is ultimately the store owner's responsibility, because the core plugin does not handle card data itself. Its checklist for store owners includes choosing a secure host, never storing card data, using SSL on checkout and account pages, keeping WordPress, WooCommerce, plugins and themes updated, and scanning the site regularly. Gateways that host the card fields, such as WooPayments, reduce that scope considerably.

Updates follow the same pattern. WordPress installs minor core releases, which is how it ships maintenance and security fixes, automatically by default. Plugin and theme updates only run automatically in special security cases, unless you switch automatic updates on for each one. Any update can clash with another plugin or your theme, which is why many WooCommerce stores pay a developer or a managed host to test and apply them.

Backups are the one job where Shopify also leaves work with you. Shopify protects its platform, but its Help Center points merchants to CSV exports and theme downloads for backing up their own store information, and many stores add a backup app. On WooCommerce, backups depend on your host or a backup plugin, so check what your hosting plan includes and how quickly you can restore.

Ease of Use and Setup

Shopify is built for merchants rather than developers. You create an account, choose a theme, add products and set up payments in a guided admin, with no software to install. For a first store, that usually means launching in days rather than weeks.

WooCommerce asks more of you at the start: choosing a host, installing WordPress and WooCommerce, picking a theme, adding a payment gateway and configuring extensions. If you already run WordPress, that is familiar ground. If you do not, it usually means hiring a developer before your first product goes live, and the WordPress admin was designed for publishing rather than selling.

Payments and Checkout

Shopify Payments is built in, charges no transaction fee and includes Shop Pay, Shopify's accelerated checkout. Shopify claims a global study shows its checkout outperforming WooCommerce by 17%. That is Shopify's own research rather than an independent benchmark, so treat it as a claim; WooCommerce, for its part, says it powers more of the top million stores by revenue than Shopify.

WooCommerce lets you choose almost any payment provider through extensions, including its own WooPayments, and takes no fee from your sales. That flexibility is a genuine advantage if you have negotiated rates with an existing provider. The trade off is that you assemble and test the checkout yourself, and every extension on the checkout page is something else to keep updated.

Both platforms support in person selling. Shopify POS is built into the platform, with POS Pro at £69 a month per location, and shares inventory and customers with your online store. On WooCommerce, in person selling depends on the extensions and payment provider you choose. If you are weighing up checkout improvements more generally, our guide to increasing Shopify conversions covers what makes the biggest difference.

Themes and Design

The Shopify Theme Store has around two dozen free themes, and most premium themes cost $250 to $500 as a one off purchase, about £185 to £370. You can install and customise a premium theme before paying, and you only pay when you publish it. Theme Store themes go through Shopify's review, which keeps quality more consistent.

WooCommerce works with thousands of WordPress themes, which gives you more choice but far more variation in quality. Some are built for ecommerce, many are not, and a theme that is not maintained can break after a WordPress or WooCommerce update. Either way, a custom design is possible: our guide to choosing the right Shopify theme explains what to look for, and our Shopify designers and Shopify developers build custom themes when a ready made one will not do.

SEO, Content and Speed

WooCommerce's biggest SEO advantage is WordPress itself. It was built for publishing, so content heavy sites that combine editorial and ecommerce are easier to run there, with mature SEO plugins and full control over URL structures. Shopify covers the essentials well: editable titles and meta descriptions, XML sitemaps, 301 redirects, image alt text, structured data through themes and apps, and an editable robots.txt. Its main constraint is fixed URL paths such as /products/ and /collections/.

Speed depends far more on the build than the platform. A well built WooCommerce store on good hosting can be fast, and a Shopify store on a heavy theme with too many apps can be slow. Across the Online Store 2.0 upgrades we have carried out, mobile PageSpeed scores rose by an average of 23 points, which shows how much the theme matters. Our article on the Shopify speed score explains what to measure, and our Shopify SEO guide covers what to fix first.

Apps, Plugins and Extensions

WooCommerce can draw on the WordPress plugin directory and the WooCommerce Marketplace, where paid extensions typically cost $29 to $299 a year and some carry an Excellence verified badge for security, compatibility and maintenance. Woo's own subscriptions tool, WooCommerce Subscriptions, is a paid annual extension. The range is enormous, but quality and upkeep vary, and in our experience conflicts between plugins are one of the most common causes of WooCommerce support work.

Shopify describes its App Store as the largest commerce ecosystem, and apps are hosted and updated by their developers rather than installed on your server. The tools we use most, such as Klaviyo for email and Recharge for subscriptions, integrate deeply with Shopify, and Shopify also offers its own free Shopify Subscriptions app. Our guide to adding subscriptions to Shopify compares the options.

Scalability and B2B

Shopify scales its infrastructure for you, so a sale or a viral moment does not mean upgrading servers, and moving between plans changes your fees and features rather than your hosting. WooCommerce can scale well, but the work is yours: better hosting, caching and database tuning as traffic grows. WooCommerce's High Performance Order Storage, the default for new stores since version 8.2 in October 2023, moves orders into dedicated database tables and helps busy stores.

Product and wholesale limits matter less than they used to. Shopify now allows 2,048 variants per product on every plan, across up to three options, while WooCommerce says it sets no fixed variant limit. Shopify B2B runs on Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus, with company accounts, catalogues, net payment terms and quantity rules on every plan. On WooCommerce, wholesale features come from extensions, which gives you choice but more to configure and maintain.

When WooCommerce Is the Better Choice

We recommend Shopify for most stores, but WooCommerce is genuinely the stronger option if:

• You already run an established, content heavy WordPress site and want to add a shop without moving platform.
• You have in house developers, or a trusted agency, comfortable with PHP, WordPress and server management.
• You need full control over your code, database and hosting, for example for regulatory or data reasons.
• You want to keep a payment provider with negotiated rates without paying a platform transaction fee.
• Your business needs custom functionality that no Shopify app or API can provide.

When Shopify Is the Better Choice

Shopify is the stronger choice for most stores, and especially if:

• You want to spend your time selling rather than maintaining hosting, updates and security.
• You do not have in house developers and do not want to depend on one for routine changes.
• You want card security handled by the platform rather than by you.
• You want predictable monthly costs, with Shopify Payments removing transaction fees.
• You sell in person as well as online and want point of sale built in.
• You plan to grow quickly and want the infrastructure to scale without your involvement.

Moving from WooCommerce to Shopify

A WooCommerce migration needs one check that many guides miss. High Performance Order Storage has been the default for new WooCommerce stores since version 8.2, so your orders may live in the new order tables, in the older WordPress posts tables, or in both with syncing switched on. Export tools behave differently in each case, which is the most common reason order exports come back empty, partial or duplicated. Check which one you use under WooCommerce, Settings, Advanced, Features before you export anything, and check any integration built on older versions of WooCommerce's REST API, which depended on the old storage.

After that, a good migration moves products, variants, images, customers and order history; maps every WooCommerce URL to its Shopify equivalent with 301 redirects; rebuilds the design; replaces plugins with Shopify features or apps; and tests checkout, tax and fulfilment before launch. Our step by step guide to migrating from WooCommerce to Shopify covers each stage, our Shopify migration checklist keeps nothing from being missed, and our guide to Shopify migration costs explains what drives the price.

Our Shopify packages are priced openly on our website, and every development project comes with a three month guarantee.

Why Matters Perspective

We are biased towards Shopify, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise. Most of our clients who migrate from WooCommerce do so to escape the daily operational stress of managing software updates, server security concerns and technical maintenance. That is the hidden cost of WooCommerce: not the software, but the attention it takes, with updates to test, conflicts to fix, security to watch and hosting to manage. That attention is better spent on products, customers and marketing.

WooCommerce is still the right platform for some of the businesses we speak to, usually content led companies with strong development support. For them, moving to Shopify would not be the right recommendation, and we say so. The same honesty applies to cost: WooCommerce can be cheaper, especially at the low end of its hosting range and for stores that want to keep an existing payment provider, but only when the maintenance is genuinely covered.

We are a Shopify Select partner with Verified Skills across development and marketing, and a Klaviyo and Recharge partner. If you are unsure which side of the line you are on, we are happy to talk it through.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is WooCommerce really free?

The WooCommerce plugin is free, but running a store is not. WooCommerce's own pricing page estimates hosting at $25 to $350 a month for most stores and paid extensions at $29 to $299 a year each, before themes, payment fees and the developer time needed for updates and security.

Is Shopify cheaper than WooCommerce?

It depends on your setup. Shopify starts at £19 a month billed yearly with hosting, security and updates included, while WooCommerce can cost less or much more depending on hosting, extensions and maintenance. In our experience, for stores without in house developers, Shopify is usually cheaper once maintenance time is counted.

Why do businesses move from WooCommerce to Shopify?

Most of our clients who migrate from WooCommerce do so to escape the daily operational stress of managing software updates, server security concerns and technical maintenance. On Shopify, hosting, platform security and core updates are handled by Shopify, which frees that time for running the business.

Which is more secure, WooCommerce or Shopify?

Shopify handles platform security for you, and its Level 1 PCI DSS certification covers every store. WooCommerce can be secure, but WooCommerce says PCI compliance is ultimately the store owner's responsibility, along with hosting security, updates and regular scans.

Is WooCommerce better than Shopify for SEO?

For content heavy sites, WordPress gives WooCommerce an edge through its publishing tools and full control over URLs. For most product led stores, both cover the essentials, and speed, content and site structure matter more than the platform.

Does Shopify charge transaction fees that WooCommerce does not?

Only if you use a gateway other than Shopify Payments. Shopify then charges 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus. WooCommerce charges no transaction fees of its own, although your payment provider still charges its rates on both platforms.

Can I move from WooCommerce to Shopify without losing SEO?

Yes, if every WooCommerce URL is redirected to its new Shopify address with a 301 redirect and your titles, descriptions and content move across intact. Check your WooCommerce order storage settings before exporting, so your order history transfers completely.

Which platform is better for a new store?

For most new stores, Shopify, because it removes the technical setup and lets you focus on products and marketing from day one. WooCommerce makes more sense when the shop is an addition to an established WordPress site with development support.

Final Thoughts

WooCommerce gives you control; Shopify gives you time. WooCommerce is free software with real costs in hosting, extensions and upkeep, and it rewards businesses with the technical support to use its flexibility. Shopify costs a predictable monthly amount and takes hosting, patching and card security off your plate.

For most merchants, that makes Shopify the better choice. The brands we see grow fastest are the ones spending their hours on products, customers and marketing rather than on their platform.

If you are weighing up a move from WooCommerce, email us at info@whymatters.co.uk and we will talk through whether Shopify fits your business, or see our Shopify packages.

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