I run on both. Here is how I decide.
I have shipped stores on WooCommerce and on Shopify in the same quarter, for clients with similar revenue and very different temperaments. The hot takes online about which one wins are almost always written by someone who only sells one of them. I sell neither. I just pick the right tool for the project and try not to argue about it in public.
So here is the version of this comparison I wish I could send people instead of having the same call six times a year. Six axes, no drama, a decision rule at the end.
1. Cost
Woo is free, and you pay for everything else. The plugin itself costs nothing. Then you pay for hosting that can actually carry a cart under load, for a payment gateway plugin, for a shipping plugin, for a tax plugin, for backups, for a security layer, for whichever page builder the project ended up needing, and for somebody to keep all of that updated. None of those individual bills are huge. Added up across a year they are real money, and they tend to grow as the store grows.
Shopify Basic starts at $39 a month, and most of the stuff is already in the box (there is a $5/mo Starter tier, but it only lets you sell via social and link-in-bio, so it is not really a like-for-like with a real Woo store). Hosting, checkout, basic shipping, basic tax, security, uptime, the admin app. You still pay transaction fees if you do not use Shopify Payments, and you still pay for apps once you outgrow defaults. But the baseline bill is honest and predictable, which is something Woo only achieves with a lot of discipline.
The honest framing is that Woo trades a low headline cost for a longer tail of small costs, and Shopify trades a higher headline cost for fewer surprises.
2. Customization
Woo wins when you want a weird thing. A subscription model that does not exist on any app store. A B2B portal with custom pricing tiers and net 30 invoicing. A configurator with conditional fields that affect stock in three warehouses. A checkout flow that adds an upsell only if the cart contains exactly two of one SKU and none of another. Woo can do any of that because under the hood it is just WordPress and PHP, and you can reach into anything.
Shopify wins when you want the default thing, perfectly. Clean product pages, a checkout that converts well out of the box, a theme that looks polished without three weeks of CSS, a payments flow your customers already trust. Shopify is opinionated, and those opinions are mostly correct for a normal direct-to-consumer store. The price of those opinions is that going against them is harder. Custom checkout used to be Plus-only, the storefront has guardrails, and some of the apps charge monthly to do things that would be twenty lines of code on Woo.
3. Performance
Shopify is faster out of the box on bad hosts. That is the simplest way to put it. Their CDN, their image pipeline, their checkout infrastructure, all of that is taken care of. A small store on Shopify will load fast even if nobody on the team knows what a cache header is.
Woo can be faster on good hosts. With a proper stack, page caching, object caching, a real CDN, and an optimized theme, a Woo store can absolutely beat a Shopify store on Core Web Vitals. The catch is the word can. It requires someone who knows what they are doing, and it requires that they keep doing it. The default Woo experience on cheap shared hosting is usually slower than Shopify's worst day.
4. Apps and plugins
Both ecosystems are massive. The difference is the curation.
Shopify's app store is more curated. Apps have to play by Shopify's API rules, they get reviewed, and there is real pressure to keep them maintained. The downside is the subscription tax. Many apps charge $20 to $200 a month, and a store with twelve apps installed has a real second bill on top of the platform fee.
Woo's plugin ecosystem is wilder. There are more plugins, they are mostly cheaper, a lot of them are one-time purchases, and a meaningful number are abandoned. You will find a plugin that does exactly what you want. You will also find that it has not been updated since 2023 and conflicts with another plugin you also need. Discipline about what you install matters more on Woo than on Shopify.
5. Maintenance
Woo needs love. Plugin updates, WordPress core updates, PHP version upgrades, occasional security advisories, backups you have actually tested. Nothing here is hard, but somebody has to own it. Stores that skip this for a year tend to find out the hard way during a Black Friday.
Shopify is hands-off. They handle the platform, you handle the storefront and the catalog. That is genuinely less work, and for a founder who would rather think about marketing than about WP-CLI, it is the right tradeoff.
6. Headless and API
Shopify's Storefront API is excellent. It was designed for headless from the start. Hydrogen, their own React framework, exists for exactly this. If you want to build a custom frontend on Next.js or Nuxt or anything else, Shopify is the friendlier backend.
Woo's REST API is fine but not designed for it. You can build a headless Woo store, and people do, but you will be working around the fact that the API was added later and was not the design center. Performance under load needs more thought, the data shapes are heavier, and the documentation is thinner.
The six axes at a glance
| Axis | WooCommerce | Shopify |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free plus a long tail | Basic $39+/mo, most included |
| Customization | Wins for weird needs | Wins for the default done well |
| Performance | Faster on a good host | Faster on a bad host |
| Apps and plugins | Wilder, cheaper, less curated | Curated, subscription heavy |
| Maintenance | Needs ongoing love | Hands off |
| Headless and API | REST works, not designed for it | Storefront API is excellent |
A simple decision rule
Under one million ARR with simple needs, pick Shopify. The time you save on operations is worth more than the platform fee, and the defaults will not hold you back at that size.
Custom needs, or you want to own the stack end to end, pick Woo. The flexibility pays for itself, but only if you have the operational maturity to keep it healthy.
Mid-sized agency with PHP devs on staff, pick Woo. You already have the skill set, and your team can deliver bespoke work faster than they can fight Shopify's guardrails.
Founder who hates platform fees and wants to own everything, pick Woo, eyes wide open. You are not avoiding fees, you are trading them for hosting, plugin licenses, and your own time. Make sure that math actually works for you.
The elephant in the room
Shopify's monthly cost and per-transaction take rate add up at scale. A store doing five million a year on Shopify Plus is paying a meaningful percentage of revenue to the platform. That is fine if the platform is doing meaningful work for you. It stops being fine the day you realize you could have hired a part-time engineer for less.
Woo's total cost can sneak up the other way. The platform is free, but the hosting bill grows with traffic, the plugin licenses add up, and the engineering hours to keep it stable are not free either. A Woo store that is being honestly accounted for, including the time of the person maintaining it, is rarely as cheap as the headline number suggests.
Both platforms are fine. Both have happy customers doing real revenue on them. The thing that makes a store work is rarely the platform. It is the product, the brand, and the operator. Pick the platform that fits your team and your project shape, and then stop reading articles like this one and go ship something.