Shopify Vs WooCommerce: What Each Platform Costs You To Run

BLKDG builds Shopify stores and moves merchants onto the platform through our Shopify migration services, so we aren’t neutral on Shopify vs WooCommerce. Some stores still belong on WooCommerce, and moving them to Shopify would cost money without fixing anything.

The license price doesn’t settle the choice. Shopify Basic is $39 a month (opens in new tab) and the WooCommerce core plugin is free (opens in new tab), and neither figure is what a store costs to run. Choosing Shopify or WooCommerce is choosing who owns the operating work: hosting, updates, security, plugin conflicts and checkout on WooCommerce, against plan gates, app fees and payment fees on Shopify.

Shopify is the better fit for a merchant without a developer or an agency to own that work. WooCommerce is still the right answer for the store profiles in the last section.

Shopify is a hosted service you rent, and WooCommerce is a plugin you run on a WordPress site you host yourself. On Shopify the platform does the operating work and charges for it through plans and fees. On WooCommerce the software is free and the work belongs to you, or to whoever you pay to do it.

Shopify prints most of its costs on a pricing page. WooCommerce’s costs are spread across a host, a set of extension licenses and the hours someone spends keeping the store current.

Shopify’s four main plans are priced in US dollars (opens in new tab): Basic at $39 a month, Grow at $105, Advanced at $399, and Plus starting at $2,300. Paying yearly drops the first three to $29, $79 and $299 a month, which is $348, $948 and $3,588 a year. Plus has two starting prices (opens in new tab): $2,500 a month on a one-year term and $2,300 on a three-year term, or $30,000 and $27,600 a year. Higher-volume, more complex Plus stores move to a variable platform fee based on revenue and business model, and that fee is quote-only.

Card rates on Shopify Payments fall as the plan rises. The online rate for standard cards is 2.9% plus 30¢ on Basic (opens in new tab), 2.7% on Grow, 2.5% on Advanced and 2.25% on Plus, each with the same 30¢. Premium cards cost more at every tier, from 3.5% plus 30¢ on Basic to 2.95% plus 30¢ on Plus, and international cards add 1% on every plan.

The Shopify fee with no WooCommerce equivalent is the one charged when an order goes through a payment provider other than Shopify Payments: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus. It applies to every transaction processed through a third-party gateway (opens in new tab), including on stores where Shopify Payments is also active, and it’s charged on top of that processor’s own rate. PayPal transactions are exempt when Shopify Payments is the store’s primary provider.

On $500,000 a year taken through an outside processor, that fee is $10,000 on Basic, $5,000 on Grow, $3,000 on Advanced and $1,000 on Plus. Moving from Grow to Advanced costs $2,640 more a year on yearly billing and cuts the fee by 0.4 points, so the upgrade pays for itself on that fee alone above $660,000 a year in outside-processor orders. A store on Shopify Payments faces a smaller version of the same math. The 0.2-point drop in the standard card rate from Basic to Grow covers the $600 difference in yearly plan cost at $300,000 in card volume.

The plan also sets operating limits. Basic includes no additional staff accounts (opens in new tab), Grow includes 5, Advanced includes 15 and Plus is unlimited. Third-party calculated shipping rates aren’t included on Basic, are an add-on on Grow, and are included on Advanced and Plus. Shopify stores also pay for apps, and each app’s developer sets its price outside the plan.

The WooCommerce core plugin is free, with no monthly subscription and no revenue share (opens in new tab). WooCommerce also charges nothing when a store uses a payment processor other than its own WooPayments, so the store pays only that processor’s rates. That’s the clearest cost difference between WooCommerce and Shopify, and it only reaches a store that can’t or won’t use Shopify Payments.

At the entry tier the card rates match. WooPayments has no setup cost and no monthly fee (opens in new tab), and its US base rate is 2.90% plus $0.30 (opens in new tab), the same as the standard-card rate on Shopify Basic. WooPayments publishes one US base rate, where Shopify’s falls with the plan. International cards add 1.50% on WooPayments against 1% on Shopify, currency conversion adds another 1.00%, and a dispute costs $15.00.

For subscription stores, WooPayments adds 1.00% to any order containing a subscription payment, on the whole order, when the subscription runs on the Stripe Billing engine.

Hosting is the first bill a WooCommerce store pays that a Shopify store doesn’t. WooCommerce’s own estimate is $25 to $350 a month (opens in new tab) for most stores. Kinsta’s single-site managed WordPress plans run from $35 a month for 35,000 visits (opens in new tab) to $375 a month for 750,000 visits on monthly billing. WP Engine’s ecommerce plans (opens in new tab) start at $150 a month for up to 100,000 visitors and $500 a month for up to 600,000.

Two more hosts belong to Automattic, the company that owns WooCommerce. Pressable’s plans run from $250 a year (opens in new tab) for one site and 30,000 visits a month to $6,750 a year for 100 sites and 2 million visits. WordPress.com’s Commerce plan, the one built for WooCommerce stores, is $70 a month (opens in new tab), or $45 a month on annual billing.

Extensions are the second bill. WooCommerce puts them at $29 to $299 per year each (opens in new tab). Woo’s own Subscriptions extension (opens in new tab) is $279 a year, Bookings (opens in new tab) is $249 and Table Rate Shipping (opens in new tab) is $119. A store that needed all three would pay $647 a year, and each listing offers a two-year plan at 20% off.

The tax and shipping-label extensions are free. WooCommerce Tax (opens in new tab) calculates sales tax at checkout and collects only where the store has nexus, and it doesn’t file returns or remit payments. WooCommerce Shipping (opens in new tab) prints labels from the dashboard with no markup and no monthly fee, for shipments that originate in the United States.

A WooCommerce store on Kinsta’s 125,000-visit tier (opens in new tab) at $900 a year on annual billing, with Subscriptions and Table Rate Shipping, has $1,298 a year in published platform costs before payment fees. Shopify Grow on yearly billing is $948 a year before apps and payment fees. The published totals for WooCommerce and Shopify are close. The unpublished parts are app prices and the Plus variable fee on Shopify, and on WooCommerce the hours someone spends on updates, extension conflicts and security.

Our guide to ecommerce replatforming sets running costs like these beside the one-time cost and timeline of a move, across more platforms than these two.

Hosting is included with every Shopify plan (opens in new tab), with unlimited bandwidth, a CDN operated by Fastly and automatic platform updates. TLS certificates are free for every domain added to a store (opens in new tab) and issued automatically, which can take up to 48 hours for a third-party domain pointed at Shopify. That leaves the theme, the apps and the media as the parts of Shopify store speed a merchant controls.

A WooCommerce store supplies its own server. WooCommerce recommends PHP 8.3 or later (opens in new tab), MySQL 8.0 or MariaDB 10.6 or later, a WordPress memory limit of at least 256 MB, and HTTPS support. Meeting that spec, and keeping it met as versions move, is your host’s job or yours, depending on the hosting plan you buy.

PCI compliance sits with a different party on Shopify and WooCommerce. Shopify states that it’s certified Level 1 PCI DSS compliant (opens in new tab) and that every store on the platform is compliant by default, with the certification covering the shopping cart and web hosting. On WooCommerce, PCI DSS compliance is ultimately the store owner’s responsibility (opens in new tab), and the requirements extend to the hosting provider and the plugins in use. The core plugin isn’t PCI certified, because it doesn’t handle cardholder data or process payments itself, and a WooCommerce site that accepts cards is within PCI DSS scope even when a hosted gateway takes the payment.

WooCommerce gives the store owner this list:

Keeping everything updated is the recurring item on that list. WooCommerce treats only its latest version as fully secure (opens in new tab). WooCommerce 11.0.0 shipped on August 4, 2026, and six more releases followed in the next ten weeks, the last of them 11.2.1 on October 9. Over the same ten weeks WordPress published six releases (opens in new tab), from 7.0.3 on August 6 to 7.1.3 on October 6, including the 7.1 major version on August 19, and five of the six carried security fixes.

That’s 13 core updates in ten weeks before a single theme or extension update. Each one should be tested against the store’s extensions before it goes live, because a WooCommerce update can break an extension that hasn’t caught up. Shopify updates its platform itself, so a Shopify merchant’s update work is the theme and the apps.

Backups are the merchant’s job on both Shopify and WooCommerce. A Shopify merchant backs up a store (opens in new tab) with CSV exports of products, customers, orders, gift card codes, discount codes and financial data, a download of the theme, or a backup app from the App Store. WooCommerce stores use a plugin or a service such as Jetpack VaultPress Backup (opens in new tab), an Automattic product with a regular price of $9.95 a month on yearly billing and 10 GB of storage to start. Jetpack says a restore can keep orders and products current while the rest of the site goes back to an earlier point.

Shopify has one checkout, and how far you can change it depends on the plan. Checkout UI extensions (opens in new tab) for the information, shipping and payment steps are available only on Plus, and so are apps that customize those pages (opens in new tab). Plans below Plus can customize the thank you and order status pages and use customer account extensions, web pixels and post-purchase extensions.

Shopify Functions, which carry discount, delivery, payment and cart logic, sit behind a different gate. A store on any plan can install public apps that contain functions (opens in new tab) from the Shopify App Store. Only Plus stores can use custom apps that contain Shopify Function APIs, so logic written for one store needs Plus. Our guide to Checkout Extensibility covers how Shopify checkout is customized in more detail.

WooCommerce has no plans, so it has no plan gate on checkout, and it has two checkouts where Shopify has one. The Cart and Checkout blocks (opens in new tab) are the default for stores started after WooCommerce 8.3 in November 2023, and a store can revert each page to the classic shortcode checkout with the block toolbar’s Transform option. The classic checkout is extended with PHP hooks. The block checkout is extended with JavaScript and the Store API (opens in new tab), and only some of the shortcode checkout’s actions and filters still work in it.

The cost is extension compatibility. An extension that isn’t compatible with the checkout block can leave elements of checkout unavailable, and an incompatible payment gateway can leave shoppers with no payment method shown. Extensions that add markup through hooks, such as custom checkout fields, usually need integration work for the block checkout. Each marketplace listing has a Compatibility section, so check it before you install anything that touches checkout.

Which checkout is cheaper to customize, Shopify or WooCommerce? It depends on what you’re changing and who’s doing it. A merchant who needs a custom field on the shipping step or a rearranged payment step pays Shopify for Plus, from $2,300 a month, or pays a developer on WooCommerce with no plan upgrade. WooCommerce wins that comparison for a store that has development capacity and can’t justify Plus, and Shopify wins it for a store whose changes fit a public app or the thank you page.

Shopify’s limits are caps set by the platform, and WooCommerce’s are what your server can carry. Shopify raised the variant limit per product to 2,048, from 100 (opens in new tab), in a change announced on October 15, 2025, and it applies to all merchants (opens in new tab). Apps that don’t use the supported GraphQL product APIs may give a degraded or broken experience on products with more than 100 variants. Check your apps before you build a product that large.

WooCommerce has no fixed cap on variations (opens in new tab) per product. Its thresholds are about performance. Above 30 variations, the attribute dropdowns on the product page become static and show every option regardless of what’s already selected, a default that protects site performance and can be changed with a code filter. In the admin, products with more than 15 variations are paginated.

Catalog size and API throughput have published ceilings on Shopify. Once a store has 500,000 product variants (opens in new tab), it can create no more than 10,000 new variants a day through any API, with Plus exempt. The GraphQL Admin API allows 100 points per second on standard plans (opens in new tab), 200 on Advanced and 1,000 on Plus. A WooCommerce store’s API capacity is whatever its own server provides, so comparing Shopify vs WooCommerce for ecommerce at volume is comparing a plan tier against a hosting bill.

Order storage is one more compatibility check on WooCommerce. High-Performance Order Storage (opens in new tab), WooCommerce’s dedicated order tables, is enabled by default for new installations from WooCommerce 8.2 onward. A store running an extension that isn’t compatible with it can’t switch.

Shopify B2B is available on Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus (opens in new tab). All four plans include companies and company locations, quantity rules, quantity price breaks, net terms and PO numbers, and the first three allow 3 active B2B catalogs where Plus allows unlimited. Direct company catalogs, which set pricing for one company or location, are Plus only, along with deposit requirements and partial payments. WooCommerce has no B2B in core: the marketplace’s B2B for WooCommerce (opens in new tab) extension is built by Addify, not Woo, and costs $149 a year.

Shopify Markets, which covers localized selling in local currency with translation, duties and taxes, is included on all four plans (opens in new tab). On WooCommerce, WooPayments multi-currency (opens in new tab) shows prices and takes payment in the currency the shopper picks, with the 1.00% conversion fee. It doesn’t pay out in multiple currencies, and the store adds the currency switcher itself as a block or widget, with a built-in setting for it only in the Storefront theme.

Every paid Shopify plan includes basic in-person selling, and POS Pro (opens in new tab) is an add-on at $89 per location per month, billed yearly, on Basic, Grow and Advanced. Shopify’s in-person card rates run from 2.6% plus 10¢ on Basic to 2.3% plus 10¢ on Plus. WooCommerce’s point of sale (opens in new tab) is part of the WooCommerce mobile app on an Android or iOS tablet, with no extra plugin, in ten countries that include the United States, Canada, the UK and Australia. WooPayments charges 2.70% plus $0.10 in person (opens in new tab), and card readers cost $5.00 per active reader per month.

WooCommerce gives the merchant four product permalink options (opens in new tab): a default that puts products under /product/, a shop base that uses the shop page’s name, a shop base that adds the product’s category, and a custom base that takes any text. The default category base is product-category. Shopify’s paths are fixed, with products under /products/ and collections under /collections/, so almost every product and category URL changes in a move from WooCommerce to Shopify and each one needs a redirect.

Shopify allows up to 100,000 URL redirects (opens in new tab) per store, or 20,000,000 on Plus, and they can be imported in bulk by CSV. Redirects can’t start with /apps, /application, /cart, /carts, /orders, /services or /shop. A WooCommerce store on the shop base has product URLs that begin with /shop/, so decide how those URLs will be handled before the redirect map is built.

That map is the core of an SEO migration, and our guide to keeping your rankings through a platform move covers how to build it. Order history needs its own plan, because orders can’t be imported through the Shopify admin (opens in new tab). That takes an app or the API.

If you’ve already decided between WooCommerce and Shopify and you’re moving, our walkthrough of how a WooCommerce to Shopify migration runs covers the sequence.

WooCommerce is the right platform when the store has someone to own the operating work and one of four conditions holds.

The first is a payment processor you have to keep. If your orders can’t run on Shopify Payments, Shopify’s third-party fee is a permanent line on every order, and WooCommerce charges nothing for the same arrangement. The second is a catalog built on products with more variations than Shopify’s 2,048 cap.

The third is a checkout that needs changes on the information, shipping or payment steps, at a revenue level where Plus isn’t justified and with a developer available to maintain the code. The fourth is a URL structure you need to control, which WooCommerce lets you set and Shopify fixes.

Shopify is the right platform when the store has no developer or agency assigned to updates, hosting and the PCI list, and the store’s checkout needs fit a public app or its revenue supports Plus. It also suits a store that wants B2B, in-person selling and multi-currency from the plan instead of from separate extensions. A merchant who can use Shopify Payments avoids the third-party fee entirely, which removes Shopify’s largest cost disadvantage against WooCommerce.

Is WooCommerce cheaper than Shopify? On published prices the two are close for a small store, and WooCommerce is cheaper for a store that would pay Shopify’s third-party fee at volume. The comparison reverses when the WooCommerce store has to buy the update, security and compatibility work from a developer or an agency. Price that labor before you compare WooCommerce vs Shopify cost on license and hosting alone.

If you’re on WooCommerce and the operating work has become the expensive part of the store, BLKDG’s WooCommerce to Shopify migration service plans and runs the move, redirect map included.