Feature comparisons between WooCommerce and Shopify are mostly useless, because both will sell a product, take a payment and email a receipt. The interesting differences are not in the feature grid. They are in who carries the maintenance burden, and what happens the first time your business needs something the platform did not anticipate.
The real question: who looks after it
Shopify is hosted. Shopify handles updates, security patches, uptime and scaling, and you pay a monthly fee plus, on most plans, a cut of transactions. When something breaks at the platform level, it is their problem and their engineers are already on it.
WooCommerce is software you install on hosting you control. Nobody patches it but you. Nobody notices the payment gateway plugin has gone unmaintained but you. In exchange there is no platform fee, no transaction cut beyond your payment processor, and no limit on what you are permitted to change.
That trade is the decision. Everything else is detail. If your organisation has nobody who will own updates and monitoring, and no budget for someone external to own them, WooCommerce will slowly rot. We have inherited plenty of stores where that is exactly what happened.
Where Shopify is clearly the better answer
A conventional catalogue of physical products, standard shipping, standard tax, standard checkout. Teams that want to add products and run promotions without involving a developer. A business that would rather pay a predictable monthly fee than carry technical responsibility.
Shopify’s checkout in particular is worth taking seriously. Shopify optimises it heavily and tests it at a scale no individual store can replicate, and on most plans you cannot substantially modify it. That restriction is a feature. A great many custom checkouts are worse than the default they replaced.
Where WooCommerce is clearly the better answer
When your catalogue or your process is genuinely unusual. Products configured from many options where the price depends on the combination. Customer-specific pricing negotiated per account. Stock that lives in an existing system that must remain the source of truth. Quotes rather than instant checkout. Fulfilment logic tied to something specific about your industry.
It is also the better answer when commerce is a component of a larger site rather than the whole thing. If you have substantial content, a service business, a resource library, and a shop attached to it, WooCommerce sits inside WordPress where the rest already lives, instead of bolting a separate platform onto the side.
And it is the better answer when you need the data to go somewhere specific. Direct database access and an unrestricted plugin layer mean an integration can be built to fit the system you already run, rather than fitting your operation around what an app in a marketplace happens to support.
The cost comparison nobody does honestly
Shopify’s cost is visible: subscription, apps, transaction percentages. It is easy to underestimate the apps. Stores routinely accumulate a dozen paid apps, each modest on its own, that together exceed the subscription.
WooCommerce’s cost is mostly invisible until it arrives: hosting that can handle checkout under load, premium extensions, and the maintenance time. If you are being told WooCommerce is free, you are being told half the story. It has no licence fee. It absolutely has a running cost.
The genuinely honest summary is that for a straightforward store the total costs land closer together than either camp likes to admit, and the decision should be made on fit rather than on price.
Migration between them is not symmetrical
Moving products, customers and orders in either direction is a solved problem with known tooling. What does not move is everything built around the platform: app configurations, theme customisations, integrations, automations, and the accumulated URL structure that your search rankings currently depend on.
If you are already on one and considering the other, cost the redirect map and the integration rebuild honestly before you cost the migration itself. That is where the surprises live.
A reasonable way to decide
Write down the three things about how you sell that are unusual. If you cannot think of any, use Shopify and spend the saved effort on photography, copy and getting people to the site.
Where all three are genuinely awkward, and especially where they touch a system you already run, WooCommerce will fit better, provided you have accounted for the maintenance.
If you want that assessed against your actual operation rather than in the abstract, that is what our e-commerce website work starts with, and where the store has to talk to something you already run, system integration is the part that matters more than the platform choice.
Further reading: both platforms publish their own comparison of hosted and self-hosted commerce — WooCommerce and Shopify — and reading each one against the other is a fair way to sanity-check the trade-off above.
In short
Shopify hosts everything. So you pay a fee and they carry the maintenance.
WooCommerce runs on your hosting. Therefore you carry the maintenance, and nothing limits what you can change.
Choose Shopify if your catalogue is conventional. WooCommerce suits you better if your process is not, or if the store must talk to a system you already run. Above all, be honest about who will look after it.
Related reading
- Redesign or rebuild? How to tell which one you actually need — A redesign changes how a site looks; a rebuild changes how it works. How to tell whether you need a redesign or rebuild before the budget is set.
- Core Web Vitals, explained without the jargon — Core Web Vitals are three measurements of how fast a page feels. What each one measures, what usually causes a bad score, and what you can ignore.
- What business process automation actually means in practice — Business process automation is sold as removing work. In practice it means writing a process down precisely enough for a machine to follow it.