Shopify vs WooCommerce in 2026: Which Should Your Store Use?

Shopify is the better choice for most small stores in 2026. You pay a predictable monthly fee, from $29 a month billed yearly in the US, and Shopify runs the hosting and security patches for you. WooCommerce is the better choice when control matters more than convenience, for example custom product logic or a store that lives inside an existing WordPress site, and only when someone is lined up to maintain it.

The cost gap is smaller than either camp admits. We modeled a US store selling $60,000 a year over three years, and software plus fees came to $7,524 on WooCommerce and $7,664 on Shopify Basic. Card processing was the biggest line on both, at the same 2.9% + 30¢ rate. What separates them is the upkeep WooCommerce needs and Shopify includes.

All prices below are in US dollars for US merchants, checked in October 2026. Both platforms change rates often and Shopify prices by country, so confirm the live page before you commit. There are no affiliate links in this post.

What each platform costs in 2026

Shopify: plans, card rates and staff seats

Shopify sells four main plans. These are the US prices on the Shopify pricing page, where a new store gets three days free and then $1 a month for three months.

A few details matter more than the headline price. Basic includes no additional staff accounts, so the moment a second person needs their own login you move to Grow (5 staff) or Advanced (15). Premium cards cost more on every plan, 3.5% + 30¢ on Basic, and international cards add 1%. Shopify also sets prices by country, and its pricing page says plainly that pricing and payment options can differ depending on where your business is based.

On fees alone, Grow pays for itself at about $300,000 a year in sales, where its lower card rate offsets the extra $600 a year it costs over Basic on yearly billing. Advanced only beats Grow on fees above roughly $1.3 million. Below those lines, upgrade when you need staff seats or features.

The fee for skipping Shopify Payments

If you take cards through a third-party provider instead of Shopify Payments, Shopify adds its own fee on every order. Its help page on third-party transaction fees says the fee comes on top of whatever your provider charges and is worked out on the order total, tax and shipping included. Manual methods such as cash on delivery and bank deposits are exempt, and so are POS orders.

On a store selling $60,000 a year, 2% on Basic is $1,200 a year for nothing a customer ever sees. It is the first line we check in any Shopify quote. Shopify Payments only operates in certain countries, so check yours first. If it is missing where you trade, that fee belongs in every Shopify estimate you make.

WooCommerce: free plugin, paid everything else

WooCommerce itself costs nothing. The plugin on WordPress.org is open source and runs on more than 7 million sites, and it was last updated to version 11.1.2 on September 22, 2026. The money goes on everything around it.

• Hosting. You choose and pay for the server. Managed WordPress hosting from Pressable starts at $250 a year for one site and up to 30,000 visits, with backups and Jetpack Security included. Cheaper shared plans exist, and cheap hosting is a regular cause of the slow stores we audit.
• Domain and SSL. You buy a domain on either platform. The wholesale price of a .com rises from $10.26 to $10.97 a year on November 1, 2026, Domain Name Wire reports, so expect to pay a little more than that at any registrar. Shopify includes a free SSL certificate, and on WooCommerce most hosts supply one.
• Theme. Paid themes in the WooCommerce Marketplace mostly list at $49 to $79 a year, a few run to $129, and free themes exist.
• Extensions. Specialist features are paid add-ons that usually renew yearly for updates and support. Product Bundles, for example, costs $79 a year.
• Payments. WooPayments charges US stores 2.9% + $0.30 per card payment, plus 1.5% for international cards and 1% when currency conversion applies, with no monthly fee. Stripe's standard US pricing is the same 2.9% + 30¢. WooCommerce puts no platform fee on top.

The 3-year cost for a small store

Here is a worked example with every assumption visible, so you can swap in your own numbers. The store is in the US and sells $60,000 a year online, through 1,200 orders at a $50 average, all paid with domestic cards. It needs product bundles, plans are billed yearly, and the domain is left out because it costs the same on both.

The build is left out too. A designed store lands in the same $8,000 to $25,000 band from our 2026 website cost guide on either platform, and scope moves that number far more than platform choice does. The theme lines assume a $320 Shopify theme, a common price among the 1,275 paid themes in the Shopify Theme Store when we checked, and a $79-a-year WooCommerce theme.

Bundles cost nothing on Shopify because the Shopify Bundles app is free. Card processing is the largest line in every column, and at 2.9% + 30¢ it costs exactly the same on Shopify Basic and WooPayments. Over three years the two land $140 apart.

The WooCommerce column hides a cost the table can't price for you. Someone has to update WordPress, WooCommerce, the theme and every extension, then test that checkout still works. If that costs you more than about $4 a month, Shopify Basic is cheaper. If your team needs staff logins and would sit on Grow, the line moves to about $44 a month. Our guide to website maintenance costs puts most professional WordPress plans at $50 to $300 a month, which clears both lines.

Change the assumptions and the answer moves. Use a third-party payment provider on Shopify Basic and you add at least $3,600 over three years. Sell across borders and international cards cost 1% extra on Shopify and 1.5% extra on WooPayments or Stripe.

Ownership, data and lock-in

With WooCommerce you own the stack outright. The software is open source and the database sits on hosting in your name, so you can move the whole store to another host without anyone's permission. For plenty of owners, that alone settles the question.

Shopify is rented, with a decent exit. Its CSV tools export products, customers, inventory and orders. Orders and discounts are export-only, though, so order history can't be loaded back into another Shopify store by CSV. The storefront stays behind when you leave: the theme is built for Shopify, so a move means rebuilding the design, and your apps don't come with you either.

The bigger lock-in is URLs. Shopify product pages always live under /products/, while WooCommerce uses /product/ by default, so a move in either direction changes most of your addresses. Google's guide to site moves with URL changes asks for a full map of old to new URLs and server-side permanent redirects. It also warns that rankings can fluctuate while Google reprocesses the move, which takes a few weeks for a small or medium site. Budget for that work whichever way you go.

SEO differences that actually matter

URL structure

Shopify fixes its folder names. Its domain documentation lists /collections, /products and /pages as subdirectories you can't edit, so a product always reads example.com/products/blue-mug. WooCommerce lets you choose. Its permalink settings offer /product/, /shop/, /shop/category/ or a custom base, and the category and tag bases can be renamed too.

In practice, Shopify's fixed folders rarely cost rankings. They matter in migrations, where every URL changes, and for catalogs where you want the category inside the product path. For a normal store, a clear product name in the slug does the job.

robots.txt and technical control

Shopify ships a default robots.txt that keeps crawlers out of admin, cart and checkout pages. You can change it by adding a robots.txt.liquid template, but Shopify's help page on editing robots.txt calls this an unsupported customization and warns that mistakes can cost you all your traffic. Treat it as a job for someone who knows crawl rules. On WooCommerce the server is yours, so robots.txt, redirects, headers and structured data are all open to you. Either way, the basics in our technical SEO checklist apply.

Speed

Speed is where Shopify has a measurable lead. In the 2025 Web Almanac ecommerce chapter from HTTP Archive, 76% of Shopify stores passed all three Core Web Vitals on mobile, against 35% of WooCommerce stores. Desktop told the same story, at 76% and 33%. Shopify controls the hosting and the theme platform, while a WooCommerce store is only as fast as the host and plugins someone picked.

That 35% is an average across nearly a million WooCommerce sites. A lean custom theme on good hosting can pass comfortably, and a page-builder theme with 30 plugins on a $3 server will not. We covered that trade-off in custom WordPress vs page builders.

Maintenance, security and apps

On Shopify, platform security is largely off your plate. Shopify says it is certified Level 1 PCI DSS compliant, and that the certification covers your store, its shopping cart and its hosting. Platform updates happen on Shopify's side. You still own your staff accounts and any apps or code you add.

On WooCommerce, security is a maintenance schedule. Patchstack's State of WordPress Security in 2026 counted 11,334 new vulnerabilities across the WordPress ecosystem in 2025, 91% of them in plugins and only six in WordPress core. Almost half, 46%, had no fix from the developer by the time they were made public. Every extension you install is code you trust with your checkout, so keep the list short and update on a schedule.

WooCommerce costs nothing to install. Keeping it fast and safe is where the bill lives.

Both platforms run on add-ons. Shopify apps mostly bill monthly, and WooCommerce extensions mostly bill yearly. Our rule is the same on both: every add-on is a recurring cost and one more thing that can break, so it has to earn its place. When we audit a store running dozens of apps or plugins, several of them usually do the same job.

Scaling, B2B and selling abroad

Growth and traffic

Shopify scales by plan. Plus starts at $2,300 a month and adds full checkout customization, up to 200 inventory locations instead of 10, and higher API limits, and you never think about servers. WooCommerce scales through hosting and engineering. Since version 8.2, new installs store orders in dedicated database tables, called High-Performance Order Storage, designed to help bigger stores scale. Traffic spikes are still your host's problem, and your bill.

B2B and wholesale

Shopify's pricing page lists B2B tools on every plan, with up to three B2B catalogs below Plus and unlimited catalogs on Plus. On WooCommerce, wholesale pricing and B2B catalogs come from extensions such as B2B for WooCommerce at $179 a year. You get more freedom over pricing rules, and more parts to maintain.

International and multi-currency

Shopify builds international selling in. According to its localization guide, Basic, Grow and Advanced can sell in up to 20 languages and Plus in up to 30, served from subfolders like example.com/fr. Showing prices in local currencies requires Shopify Payments. WooCommerce gets multi-currency through WooPayments' multi-currency feature, which converts displayed prices and lets shoppers pick a currency, while translation needs a separate multilingual plugin.

Shopify vs WooCommerce: how to decide

Choose Shopify if

• Nobody on your team wants to own servers. Hosting and security patches are part of the fee.
• Your catalog is standard. Physical products with variants, bundles and discounts fit Shopify's model without custom code.
• You sell in person as well. Every plan covers pop-ups and events, and POS Pro adds full shop tools at $89 a month per location.
• You want predictable bills. A plan fee plus a card rate is easy to budget.

Choose WooCommerce if

• You already run WordPress. Content and store share one site and one login.
• Your product logic is unusual. Custom pricing rules and complex B2B terms are easier when you control the code.
• Ownership is a hard requirement. Your code and database sit on a host you choose, and no platform can change the terms under you.
• Maintenance is solved. A developer or care plan is already in the budget.

Run these numbers before you commit

1. Estimate a year of sales. Multiply by each card rate and add 30¢ per order. This will be your biggest cost on either platform.
2. Check Shopify Payments for your country. If it isn't available, add the third-party fee for your plan to every Shopify estimate.
3. Count the people who need logins. More than one usually means Grow, at $79 a month billed yearly.
4. List your must-have features. Price the apps or extensions for each, per year, before you look at themes.
5. Put a monthly number on WooCommerce upkeep. Compare it with the break-even above, around $4 against Basic and $44 against Grow.
6. If you are migrating, export every URL now. Plan the redirect map before the new store is built.

The platform matters less than the store

The platform decides where the bills land. It doesn't decide whether the store sells. When we rebuilt the CJ's Master Formula store, the conversion rate tripled within three months of launch, and the work behind it was product pages that answered buyers' questions, a shorter checkout, reviews placed where people decide, and bundles that lifted order value. All of those can be built on either platform.

If you are weighing the two, or thinking about moving, our web development team can run this cost model on your real numbers and tell you which one fits. Whichever you pick, you own the store, the domain and the accounts from day one.