Shopify vs WooCommerce

Choosing between Shopify and WooCommerce comes down to one trade-off: Shopify is a rented platform that handles hosting, security and checkout for a monthly fee, while WooCommerce is free software on your own WordPress site where all maintenance is yours. Which one fits depends on your team, your catalogue and how much technology you want to manage yourself.

Full disclosure first: Zalm Partners mostly builds Shopify stores, and that inevitably colours our view. Which is why this page also states exactly when we think WooCommerce is the better pick. A comparison that always lands on the same answer is not a comparison but a sales page.

With Shopify you rent a closed system. Updates, servers, security and checkout are the platform's concern; you manage products, content and settings. That boundary is also the limitation: what Shopify does not allow cannot be done, and your data lives inside their environment.

WooCommerce is open source and runs on your own WordPress installation. Everything can be modified, down to the database structure, and nobody can take it away from you. The price of that freedom is responsibility: hosting, updates, backups, security and the interplay of all your plugins belong to you, week after week.

WooCommerce is strong when your store must be deeply woven into a WordPress site that already exists and runs well, when you have highly specific custom requirements that push against Shopify's boundaries, or when someone on your team demonstrably keeps up with WordPress maintenance and enjoys it.

Shopify fits nearly every other small and mid-sized business situation: you want to sell, not become a system administrator. For teams without an in-house developer the calculation is rarely close, because every hour of WooCommerce maintenance comes straight out of the hours for buying, marketing and customers. What such a project looks like with us is described under Shopify development.

The licence price misleads. WooCommerce is free to download; Shopify charges a monthly fee per plan plus transaction costs depending on your payment setup. But the comparison that matters is the total bill over a few years, and that bill has more lines.

• Shopify: subscription, any paid apps and the theme
• WooCommerce: hosting, premium plugins, SSL and backup provisions
• Both: development cost for design and custom work
• The difference: WooCommerce adds ongoing maintenance hours, Shopify does not

We deliberately name no amounts here, because they differ per store and shift every year. The structure of the bill does not shift: WooCommerce looks cheap at the till and is paid for in hours, Shopify looks pricier per month and is largely done at that point. In a proposal we run both routes for your specific case.

This is where the two platforms drift apart once the launch confetti settles. Of the WooCommerce stores offered to us for takeover, a sizeable share runs on plugins that have not been updated in over a year, often because an update once broke the checkout and nobody dared touch it again. Such a store still sells, but it stands exposed.

That is not a flaw of WooCommerce itself; it is what happens when open source is left without a caretaker. On Shopify the question simply does not exist, because the platform updates itself. So the choice is also an organisational one: who is responsible for the technology a year from now, and will that person still be there?

An advice call about your platform choice costs nothing and commits you to nothing. We look at your catalogue, your team and your plans, and tell you which platform we would pick if it were our store, including the arguments for doing the opposite. If you then choose WooCommerce, we will happily point you to a party that excels at it.

If you run WooCommerce today and Shopify is pulling, first read how we migrate a web shop to Shopify: the cost of switching is driven by your product count, integrations and custom work, not by the platform itself. Still weighing the whole field? Start with our overview of ecommerce website development.