Shopify vs WooCommerce: which should you build on?

Shopify Grow costs $49 a month on annual billing. WooCommerce costs nothing. Then WooCommerce’s own pricing page puts hosting at $25 to $350 a month and each extension at $29 to $299 a year, checked 21 September 2026. That is the whole argument in three numbers, and the third one is the part most comparisons skip.

Which one, for whom. Choose Shopify if you want a managed platform and will pay a monthly fee to buy back engineering time. Choose WooCommerce if you want full control of the code and the payment stack, and you already run your own hosting, updates and security. For most growing brands, Shopify wins on the cost of running the store.

Who this is for. Founders picking a platform before they commit budget, and operators on one wondering whether the other is cheaper.

Who this is not for. Teams comparing two hosted platforms, which is a different trade: that one is in Shopify vs BigCommerce. Publishers whose store is a side door on a large WordPress site should stay where they are.

Autonomous Technologies builds and runs the systems behind Shopify stores, for ecommerce founders and the operators who are accountable for the store after launch. We build and migrate on Shopify, so treat that as the bias it is. Every figure below links to the vendor page it came from. Our migrations and replatforming work is where these sums get tested.

Two definitions first, because this is not a like-for-like comparison. Shopify is a hosted store platform. Shopify runs the servers, the checkout and the card-security paperwork, and bills you monthly. WooCommerce is a free store plugin for WordPress. You supply the hosting, the WordPress install, the paid add-ons and the people who patch all three.

What the two platforms actually cost in 2026

Shopify publishes its plans openly. On annual billing in USD, Shopify’s pricing page shows Basic at $19 a month, Grow at $49 and Advanced at $299. Paying monthly raises those to $25, $65 and $399. Shopify Plus starts at $2,300 a month on a three-year term, or $2,500 on a one-year term.

A payment gateway is the service that takes the card payment, such as Stripe or PayPal. Shopify adds a fee when you use a gateway other than its own. The pricing page lists 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus. Shopify waives it on Shopify Payments, Shop Pay, Shop Pay Installments and PayPal Express (Shopify’s fees documentation).

WooCommerce’s pricing page is honest about the parts that are not free. The plugin is free with no monthly subscription. Hosting runs $25 to $350 a month for most stores. Extensions run $29 to $299 a year each. WooPayments, its own card service, runs about 2.50% to 2.90% plus 30 cents a sale. It also states “0% revenue share”.

So “WooCommerce is free” and “Shopify is expensive” are both true and both useless. Software cost favours WooCommerce at high revenue on an outside gateway. The cost of people favours Shopify almost everywhere else.

Where each platform breaks at scale

Both platforms run large stores. They break in different places, and where they break should decide your choice.

Selling to trade buyers. B2B means selling to shops, dealers and distributors rather than the public. Most articles still say Shopify B2B needs Plus. That stopped being true. Shopify’s B2B plan features page puts companies, company locations, net terms, payment reminders, ACH payments, saved cards, PO numbers and draft orders on Basic, Grow and Advanced too. Net terms means the buyer pays 30 or 60 days after the invoice. ACH is a US bank transfer. A PO number is the purchase order code the buyer’s finance team needs. The cap is specific: “you can assign up to 3 active catalogs across all your B2B markets” below Plus. WooCommerce has no B2B layer. You build it from add-ons. See B2B and wholesale on Shopify.

Changing the checkout. This is Shopify’s hardest line. The Checkout Branding API and custom checkout flows are Plus only. Below Plus you configure the checkout, you do not rewrite it. WooCommerce has no such line. The checkout is code on your own server. That freedom is also why WooCommerce checkouts break after updates, and why nobody else is on the hook when they do.

Speed. Shopify serves the storefront from its own servers, so a slow store is usually the theme and the apps. WooCommerce speed rests on the host, the plugin count and the database. All of that can be fixed. Fixing it is your job.

Security and card rules. This is the cleanest split in the comparison. PCI DSS is the card industry rule set every store taking card details has to meet. Shopify says it is “certified Level 1 PCI DSS compliant” and that this “extends by default to all stores powered by Shopify” (Shopify PCI compliance). WooCommerce sets out the opposite deal. “PCI DSS compliance is ultimately the responsibility of the store owner”, and “The core WooCommerce plugin is not PCI certified” (WooCommerce PCI DSS documentation).

That means a version floor somebody has to hold. WooCommerce’s server requirements ask for WordPress 6.9 or later, PHP 8.3 or later, MySQL 8.0 or MariaDB 10.6 or later, a 256 MB memory limit and HTTPS. Somebody keeps that true every quarter, for as long as the store is live.

Where WooCommerce is the better answer

A comparison that never picks the other side is a pitch. Four cases where we would tell you to stay on WooCommerce, or move to it.

Content-led sites, where the writing brings people in. If the store hangs off a publishing arm, a course library or a membership, WordPress is the better content system. Rebuilding all that to save upkeep hours is usually a bad trade.

Payment maths at volume. Run seven figures through a gateway on rates you struck yourself, and the Shopify surcharge is a real annual number. WooCommerce charges nothing for using your own processor.

Checkout rules Shopify will not let you touch below Plus. If the business truly needs a rewritten checkout and Plus is not in the budget, WooCommerce hands you the file.

A WordPress team already on the payroll. The staffing cost that sinks most WooCommerce comparisons is already paid, and the sums change completely.

Where this breaks: switching is a project, not an export

Shopify names WooCommerce among its supported sources and documents five routes in its migration guide: the Store Migration app, CSV files, third-party migration apps, Shopify Partners and custom API work. Products and customers move by CSV or app. Historical orders, gift cards, blogs and pages need an app or the API. Sequence matters. Products must exist before customers, and customers before historical orders, or the records do not link.

Two details reliably surprise people. Customer passwords do not come across. Shopify states that “Because passwords are encrypted, only customer records are imported to Shopify” (Shopify migration checklist). Every customer signs in again, and somebody writes that email. And a WordPress URL structure rarely maps cleanly onto Shopify’s, so the redirect map is a piece of work in its own right.

In either direction the test is the same. Can the store still take money, do orders still reach the systems behind them, and do the old addresses still land somewhere correct. That last one is measurement work, and it has to keep holding after launch: the signup tracking we merged has run in the client’s live code for 142 days, 17 April to 6 September 2026. Our Shopify migration checklist carries the acceptance tests we run before a cutover.

How we would decide

Write down two numbers before you read another comparison. The first is your annual order value multiplied by the Shopify surcharge on the plan you would buy, or zero if you would use Shopify Payments. The second is the hours a month somebody spends on hosting, updates, plugin conflicts, backups and PCI, multiplied by what that hour costs you.

Whichever number is larger decides the platform. For most brands under enterprise scale it is the second. We say no to Shopify when the store hangs off a serious content operation, when payment economics favour an owned stack, or when a WordPress team is already funded.