WooCommerce vs. Shopify: What the Sticker Price Doesn’t Tell You

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Someone deciding where to build a store usually starts with a spreadsheet: WooCommerce in one column marked “free,” Shopify in the other marked “$39/month,” and a decision that looks basically made before any real research happens. The number that actually determines which platform costs more never shows up on either pricing page — it shows up three months later, on a payment-processing statement or a stack of app subscriptions neither column accounted for.

In every WooCommerce store I’ve set up, the same pattern plays out: the plugin itself really is free, and that’s also the least useful fact in the whole decision. What actually separates the two platforms isn’t price at all — it’s who is responsible for keeping the store running. WooCommerce hands you a fully-owned, fully-yours piece of software and every maintenance task that comes with owning it. Shopify sells you a service that does that work for you, and prices accordingly as your store succeeds.

This guide prices both platforms honestly at a real order volume, using each platform’s own current pricing pages rather than a generic feature checklist. It also covers where payment processing genuinely locks you into one platform or the other, what happens to your data and design if you ever leave, and which real business situations actually favor each one. If you’ve already landed on WooCommerce, the setup mechanics are covered separately in the guide to creating a WooCommerce store in WordPress — this post is about the decision that comes before that.

Free Software vs. a Fully-Run Service

WooCommerce is a free WordPress plugin. You install it on hosting you pay for and manage yourself, and beyond the plugin itself, every cost — hosting, payment processing, extensions, security, backups — is a separate line item you choose and control individually. Shopify is a paid, fully-hosted service. One monthly bill covers hosting, uptime, security patching, and PCI compliance, and Shopify also takes a cut of every card transaction that runs through it.

Neither structure is cheaper in the abstract. Which one actually costs less depends entirely on how much revenue moves through the store and how much of the operational work you want to own yourself. At low order volume, Shopify’s flat monthly fee plus processing usually undercuts a WooCommerce stack that still needs paid extensions and a real hosting plan. At higher volume, WooCommerce’s costs stay mostly fixed while Shopify’s app spend and processing fees scale with every sale — the rest of this guide works through the real numbers for both.

What WooCommerce Actually Costs

“Free” only ever describes the plugin. A real WooCommerce store carries four separate cost categories, none of which appear on WooCommerce.com because WooCommerce.com doesn’t sell any of them.

Hosting

WooCommerce needs WordPress hosting capable of running a database-driven store, not a bare shared-hosting plan built for a brochure site. Two real options, both already covered elsewhere on this site and both genuinely used for WordPress hosting: Hostinger’s Business hosting tier is the straightforward, budget-friendly route for a store that doesn’t yet need specialised WooCommerce infrastructure, while SiteGround’s GrowBig plan adds WooCommerce-specific caching and staging that starts to matter once a store has real order volume. Real renewal pricing on either (after an introductory term) lands somewhere in the $20–$30/month range for a store-capable plan — call it $250–$350/year, not the $2.99/month headline figure that only applies to the first billing cycle.

Payment processing

WooPayments, WooCommerce’s own built-in processor, charges 2.9% + $0.30 per domestic US transaction, with no monthly fee — you only pay when a sale actually happens. International cards add 1.5%, and paying out in a different currency than the sale adds a further conversion fee on top. Stripe, PayPal, Mollie, and dozens of other gateways are available as direct alternatives with broadly comparable rates — WooCommerce doesn’t charge its own platform fee on top of whichever processor you pick, a distinction that matters more than it sounds like (more on this below).

Extensions

A real store stack — SEO, backups, security hardening, and whatever marketing/shipping extensions the store actually needs — typically runs $100–$500/year depending on how much of it is paid versus free. Some of that is genuinely optional: this site runs without a dedicated SEO plugin at all, and a number of backup/security tools have capable free tiers. A realistic mid-range estimate for a small store’s extension stack is $150–$300/year.

The real annual total

Hosting ($300) plus a mid-range extension stack ($200) comes to roughly $500/year in fixed costs, before payment processing — which scales with revenue rather than being a fixed line item. For a store doing $8,000/month ($96,000/year) across 2,400 orders at a $40 average order value, WooPayments processing on domestic cards works out to roughly 2.9% × $96,000 + $0.30 × 2,400 = $2,784 + $720 = $3,504/year. Total: around $4,000/year, most of it processing fees that any platform would also charge.

What Shopify Actually Costs

Shopify’s pricing page is more honest about the base plan cost than WooCommerce’s ecosystem is, but it still leaves out two real costs almost every store ends up carrying.

Plan tiers

As of this writing, Shopify’s own pricing page lists US tiers at Basic $39/month, Grow $105/month, and Advanced $399/month, with Plus starting from roughly $2,300/month for large or complex operations — paying annually knocks the monthly-equivalent price down by roughly 25%. One honest caveat worth naming: Shopify prices by region, not just by currency conversion. Fetching the pricing page from a European IP address returns noticeably lower euro-denominated figures (Basic at €21/month, Grow at €59/month, Advanced at €289/month) — check the plan page from your own market before budgeting off any figure in this post, including this one.

Payment processing

Shopify Payments on the US Basic plan charges 2.9% + $0.30 per online domestic card transaction — nearly identical to WooPayments’ rate — dropping slightly on Grow (2.8%) and Advanced (2.6%). International cards add roughly 1.5%. The real difference from WooCommerce shows up if you don’t use Shopify Payments: every third-party gateway (Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.net) carries an additional Shopify-imposed surcharge on top of that gateway’s own processing rate — 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced, 0.2% on Plus. WooCommerce charges no equivalent fee for choosing a non-default processor.

Apps

The plan price and processing fee are rarely the whole bill. Reviews and industry data, verified live for 2026, put typical app spend for an active store at roughly $50–$300/month depending on how much of the reviews/upsells/email-marketing/SEO stack is handled by paid apps — the rough equivalent of WooCommerce’s extension costs, just billed monthly instead of annually and, in most cases, at a noticeably higher rate for comparable functionality.

The real annual total

On Basic: $39/month × 12 = $468/year in plan fees, plus the same domestic processing math as above (2.9% × $96,000 + $0.30 × 2,400 = $3,504/year), plus a moderate app stack around $900/year. Total: roughly $4,870/year for the same store — about $800–$900 more than the WooCommerce estimate above, almost entirely down to the plan fee and app spend rather than processing, which lands at nearly the same number on both platforms at this volume.

Where Payment Processing Actually Locks You In

This is the constraint that gets the least attention in most comparisons, and it’s a real one. Shopify Payments is only available in a defined list of countries — roughly 39 as of Shopify’s own current documentation. Merchants in several major markets, including India, Brazil, Nigeria, and South Africa, don’t have the option to use it at all and are required to run a third-party gateway from day one — which means the surcharge tiers above aren’t a choice for those merchants, they’re the default cost of doing business on the platform.

WooCommerce has no equivalent split. WooPayments, Stripe, PayPal, Mollie, and a long list of regional processors all plug in as first-class options with no platform-level surcharge for picking one over another — the only fees are whatever the processor itself charges. If your business is based somewhere Shopify Payments doesn’t reach, this single difference can be worth more than the plan-price gap either way.

What Happens to Your Data and Design If You Ever Leave

WooCommerce runs on a database you fully own, on hosting you control. Exporting products, customers, and orders is a native WordPress function, and the entire store — content, design, and data together — can be moved to any other host at any time with no platform permission required.

Shopify lets you export customer and order data freely, but the store’s design and configuration live inside Shopify’s own theme system (Liquid), which has no equivalent outside Shopify — leaving the platform means rebuilding the storefront from scratch on whatever comes next, not exporting it intact. Migrating in either direction is genuinely more involved than either platform’s own marketing suggests: product data maps reasonably well between the two, but themes, custom fields, and app-specific data typically don’t transfer automatically in either direction.

When Shopify Is Actually the Better Call

Shopify is the right platform, honestly, in a specific and common set of situations:

• No appetite for managing hosting, applying WordPress/plugin updates, or handling security patching — Shopify’s monthly fee buys you out of that work entirely.
• A genuine need for one unified system across online and in-person retail, where Shopify’s built-in POS integration works out of the box rather than needing a separate plugin stack.
• Wanting the fastest possible path from zero to a working, secure storefront, with the fewest infrastructure decisions along the way.
• A team without any in-house technical capacity to troubleshoot a self-hosted platform when something breaks.

None of these are lesser reasons than “it’s cheaper” — for a solo founder whose time is worth more spent on the product than on server maintenance, paying Shopify’s premium for a fully-managed platform is a rational trade, not a mistake.

When WooCommerce Is Actually the Better Call

WooCommerce is the right call in an equally specific set of situations:

• The site already runs on WordPress — a content-driven business adding a store to existing traffic, rather than starting a store from nothing.
• Full ownership of data, design, and code matters — no platform-level restriction on what the store can look like or do.
• Revenue is high enough that a percentage-flavoured app/plan structure starts costing meaningfully more than a mostly-fixed hosting-and-extensions bill, as the worked numbers above show even at a modest $96,000/year in sales.
• Payment processing needs to work in a country or with a processor Shopify Payments doesn’t support, without an extra platform surcharge for the workaround.

The trade for all of this is real, ongoing responsibility — WooCommerce doesn’t patch itself, and a store owner who ignores updates for a year is the same story covered in the WooCommerce security setup guide: a plugin skipped once becomes three major versions behind with known vulnerabilities. Choosing WooCommerce means genuinely accepting that job, not just its lower price tag.

Common Mistakes When Comparing the Two

• Comparing sticker price only. “Free” versus “$39/month” ignores hosting, extensions, apps, and processing — the categories that actually decide the real annual cost.
• Ignoring app and extension spend. A moderately-equipped store on either platform easily adds $100–$300/month in third-party tools — leaving this out understates both platforms roughly equally, but it’s the single most commonly skipped line item in do-it-yourself comparisons.
• Assuming Shopify Payments works everywhere. Checking country eligibility before committing avoids discovering the third-party gateway surcharge after the store is already built.
• Not budgeting the time cost of self-hosting. WooCommerce’s lower dollar total isn’t free if maintaining it eats hours that would otherwise go into the product or into marketing — see the WooCommerce payments, shipping, and tax setup guide for how much real configuration work sits behind that lower bill.

Match the Platform to Your Real Constraints

At the order volume most new stores actually start at, WooCommerce and Shopify land within a few hundred dollars of each other once every real cost is counted — the platform-fee gap is smaller than most comparisons suggest, and it isn’t really the deciding factor. The decision that actually matters is upstream of the pricing pages: whether you want to own the infrastructure and the ongoing maintenance in exchange for full control and no revenue-scaled platform fee, or pay a premium to hand that job to someone else and keep your own time free. Both are legitimate answers — the mistake is picking either one off a headline price alone.