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.

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. 

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. 

And in the fast-changing era of AI, when the buyer journey is being rewritten this fast, you can be waiting on their roadmap to ship important updates that help you compete for a spot in AI product recommendations. Brands like WooCommerce on open, composable stacks build for agentic commerce today. 

For example, beauty brand grüum scaled from startup to $1M in GMV in its first year. They needed customizability that Shopify couldn’t offer to set up promotions, bundle discounts, subscriptions, and gift cards. When comparing Shopify to WooCommerce, they realized:

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. But 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.” 

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

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 → 

See the full comparison of WooCommerce and Shopify → 

About

Stacey Richter

With 20+ years in tech — including stops at Shopify, BlackBerry, and D2L — Stacey Richter now leads demand generation campaigns at WooCommerce. She's also the founder of Bare Birch Soap Company, so she's evaluated ecommerce platforms as a marketer, an insider, and a store owner.