WooCommerce vs. Shopify: What’s the difference for a growing store

Choosing an ecommerce platform is rarely a solo decision. Your team has to balance priorities ranging from clean architecture to marketing features to total cost of ownership. This comparison is for teams evaluating the differences between WooCommerce and Shopify in the areas that matter most to the business.

​As this is Woo’s blog, our perspective on a better alternative is clear. However, we wouldn’t recommend migration for everyone. If WooCommerce is right for you, you deserve to understand the differences before deciding.

Both are well-regarded ecommerce platforms, but people like them for different reasons. Shopify is an all-in-one platform that lets you get started quickly. It chooses your hosting provider, manages server security, and enforces checkout rules. With WooCommerce, you make those decisions, giving you full control over every aspect of your site.

There are trade-offs to both. Full control means more responsibility for your team, while giving the platform control means you’re beholden to their roadmap, policies, pricing structures, and features. But here are some key differences worth considering. 

The hidden cost of growth

When businesses compare ecommerce costs, monthly platform fees usually get the most attention. But at scale, payments can have a much bigger impact on your margins. Both platforms let you process payments, but here’s what happens when you use a third-party payment processor that your vendor doesn’t own, like on Shopify.

Shopify charges an additional transaction fee on every order processed through a third-party gateway. It’s 0.6% on Advanced, 0.2% on Plus, and applies on top of whatever your processor charges. 

$250,000/month, 2,500 orders, $100 AOV, merchant has a negotiated 2.5% + $0.30 rate with their own processor.

	WooCommerce	Shopify Advanced
Plan, hosting, SSL	Pressable: $129.17/mo	$399/mo
Extensions	$62.50/mo	—
Payment processing	$7,000/moOwn gateway at 2.5% + $0.30	$7,000/moSame gateway, same rate
Third-party gateway fee	None	$1,500/mo (0.6% of $250,000)
Profit share	None	None at this volume
Total	$7,191.67/mo	$8,899/mo
Savings with WooCommerce	19%

With Shopify, you may need to upgrade to costly plans for a single feature, like checkout customization. Or you may need additional tools, apps, or higher-tier plans to support essential functionality. Furthermore, when your monthly sales exceed $800,000, you move from a monthly fee to a 0.25% revenue-based model that caps at $40,000/month on Shopify Plus.

“Shopify was taking us to the cleaners,” said Jacob Lambert, Ecommerce and Marketing Specialist at Landyachtz. “The flexibility to run our business our way wasn’t there.”

Growth shouldn’t come with strings attached. WooCommerce has no platform fees, no revenue share, and no penalty for choosing third-party payment providers. And because it’s on an open source platform, you can assemble the features and integrations you need without having to pay for a plan full of tools you never use.

Want to see what your site costs? Try out our Total Cost of Ownership calculator.

Building your stack to fit your business needs

The convenience of an all-in-one platform is worth it for some. Many busy merchants would be relieved never to have to make a hosting decision and would love that Shopify speeds up time to market. 

But Shopify’s framework also limits your ability to customize your store, improve performance, make changes outside of its built-in options, and upgrade your tech stack. That means your roadmap moves at their speed, not yours. Especially now, in the fast-changing era of AI when the buyer journey is being rewritten quickly, you can be waiting on them to ship important updates that help you compete for a spot in AI recommendations. Brands like WooCommerce on open, composable stacks build for agentic commerce today. 

When evaluating Shopify for his growing business, grüum cofounder Simon Leonard said, “We were going to have to change our business to fit into that business. We can make WooCommerce fit around our business and make it work for us.” He also loves that “the data is ours” on WooCommerce, which “gives us control over our customers rather than giving them to a third party.”

The freedom to customize

Both platforms allow you to customize your store to some degree. Shopify lets you change your store in select places, like how discounts are calculated, what shipping options appear, what the checkout page looks like, and how your site is designed. You can’t change how the underlying system behaves, because that isn’t open to anyone outside Shopify.

Many merchants feel what Shopify lets you change is enough, but ownership matters when a platform decides to change something that breaks your site. For example, in 2023, Shopify announced it was retiring the system its largest merchants used to customize checkout. So merchants had to rebuild, and stores that missed the deadline lost their customizations. 

WooCommerce runs on your own server, so you can change any part of it. It’s open source and built on WordPress, which powers ~40% of the web. This means your team can inspect and customize the source code, and access peer reviews that help find and fix vulnerabilities quickly. In fact, the global WordPress community collaborates frequently, which speeds up feature development and problem-solving.

“WooCommerce allowed us to go from something as simple as we needed in the beginning to a full-size, customizable site,” said Ryan Fertig from Dan-O’s Seasoning. “It gave us the flexibility that we wouldn’t get with Shopify or another platform.” 

Here’s a breakdown of WooCommerce vs. Shopify at a glance, but you can also view a full comparison at the link below, covering everything from pricing, fundamentals, security, and performance to features, marketing, localization, and more.

See the full comparison of WooCommerce and Shopify → 

	WooCommerce	Shopify Grow	Shopify Advanced	Shopify Plus
Platform fee What’s the monthly cost?	$0	$105	$399	$2,300+
Sales commissionWhat portion of your monthly revenue is shared with the company?	0%	0%	0%	0.25% for monthly revenue over $800K
Data ownership Do you have full control over all store data, even if you switch platforms?	Yes	Limited	Limited	Limited
Flexible hosting Can you choose the best hosting environment for your needs?	Yes	No	No	No
Composable commerce Are you allowed to hand-pick features and functionality	Yes	No	No	No
Code accessibility Can you access and customize your source code?	Yes	No	No	No
Backend access Do you have full access to the server, database, and infrastructure?	Yes	Limited	Limited	Limited
Credit card processing fees (via WooPayments and Shopify Payments)	2.90% + $0.30 in the US — varies by country	2.7% + $0.30	2.5% + $0.30	Starts at 2.5% + $0.30
Fee to use third-party payment provider	No	1%	0.6%	0.2%
Ability to create a custom, branded checkout page	Yes	No	No	Yes
Support for physical and digital products	Yes	Yes, with additional app	Yes, with additional app	Yes, with additional app
Support for subscriptions	Yes, with WooCommerce Subscriptions: $23.25/month	Yes, with the Shopify Subscriptions app	Yes, with the Shopify Subscriptions app	Yes, with the Shopify Subscriptions app
Support for bookings	Yes, WooCommerce Bookings: $20.75/month	No	No	No
Supported product variants	Unlimited	100	100	2,000
API access and endpoints	Yes	No	No	Yes
Bot protection during sales	Yes	No	No	Yes

See the full comparison of WooCommerce and Shopify → 

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