I’ve Tested and Reviewed Wix vs Shopify: Which Is My Winner?

I’ll review pricing, sales features, ease of use, and more in this comparison. If you’re short on time, you can get a quick side-by-side look below:

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Best for Selling Online	Best All-in-One
Shopify	Wix
Starting Price $29 $1/mo for 3 months	Starting Price $29 $26.10 with code “TAKE10”
Free plan or free trial 3-day free trial	Free plan or free trial Free plan
Free custom domain	Free custom domain
AI website builder	AI website builder
Transaction fees 2.9% + $0.30	Transaction fees 2.9% + $0.30
Recommended for Businesses who want to easily scale their store as they grow	Recommended for Businesses promoting their online presence
Try Shopify	Try Wix
See our Shopify review	See our Wix review

Wix is more cost-effective than Shopify in the long term, with Wix’s most expensive plan ($159 per month) costing roughly half of Shopify’s ($299 per month). However, neither builder’s entry-level commerce plans (both $29 per month) are budget-friendly, so consider Hostinger or Square Online to save money.

How Much Does Wix Cost?

Wix’s pricing ranges from $17 to $159 per month (billed annually), though you’ll need the $29 per month Core plan or above to sell online.

• Light – $17 per month (no ecommerce functionality)
• Core – $29 per month
• Business – $39 per month
• Business Elite – $159 per month

Wix also offers a free plan that you can stay on forever, but it comes with ads and limited storage space. This isn’t ideal for a small business looking to build a professional brand.

How Much Does Shopify Cost?

Shopify’s pricing ranges from $29 to $299 per month (billed annually) and is generally more expensive than Wix, although ecommerce is included in every Shopify plan, making it more flexible for small businesses. Here’s a breakdown of Shopify’s plans:

• Basic – $29 per month
• Grow – $79 per month
• Advanced – $299 per month

Shopify doesn’t offer a free plan like Wix, but you can get a three-day free trial and your first three months for just $1 per month, softening the initial cost. Even so, this time frame isn’t long enough to get familiar with Shopify, so I’d argue that it’s not a very effective trial period.

Author's notes...

Shopify’s $29 per month Basic plan is good for businesses finding their feet. It includes unlimited products and up to 10 inventory locations. However, I recommend using the Grow plan ($79 per month) if you run a larger business because of its additional staff accounts, so you can delegate work to multiple people, and its reduced processing fees with Shopify Payments.

Emma Ryan Lead Writer

Shopify is our top-rated ecommerce website builder, with unlimited products, multiple sales channels (such as TikTok and Amazon), abandoned cart recovery, discount codes, and localized selling tools, included on every plan. Shopify is ideal for online stores with growing or substantial inventories, whereas Wix is better suited for managing a business with a handful of products.

🛒 What Multichannel Selling Options Are There?

Shopify has the best multichannel integration options, allowing you to connect your store with marketplaces and social media channels. This is a great way to target customers on platforms that they’re already engaged with and broaden your reach beyond your website.

Wix offers fewer options than Shopify in this regard. You can sell to customers via similar marketplaces, such as Amazon, but considerably fewer social media platforms. For example, Shopify lets you sell with TikTok, whereas Wix sticks with the classics, like Facebook and Instagram. If you want to connect your Wix store to TikTok, you’ll need to download the TikTok Shop app from the app market.

🛳️ How Do Wix and Shopify Handle Dropshipping?

Wix and Shopify are both suitable for dropshipping with popular apps, such as DSers, Spoket, Alibaba, and AliExpress. However, Shopify has over 480 dropshipping plugins compared to Wix’s 38, making it a much more flexible option for businesses selling niche products. Plus, Wix’s 50,000 product limit caps dropshipping growth, while Shopify allows users to sell unlimited products.

📦 How Much Inventory Space Do I Get?

Shopify allows you to sell unlimited products on all plans, whereas Wix limits users to a maximum of 50,000 products, as well as an additional allowance of between 25 to 50,000 products if you dropship with Modalyst. Of course, this is still a lot of products, but it might be a decisive factor for growing or large businesses that want the reassurance of unlimited inventory space.

💰What Payment Options Are There?

Shopify offers over 100 payment methods, such as PayPal and Apple Pay. Comparatively, Wix lets your website connect with over 80 providers. In addition to these third-party options, you can choose Shopify or Wix’s native solution to simplify the process. Wix Payments and Shopify Payments are the easiest way to take payments online since they’re designed by the builders directly.

Wix and Shopify also prioritize security when taking payments, both including a free SSL certificate with all plans as well as full PCI compliance, meaning customer credit card information will be handled with the highest level of security possible.

🌍 Which Platform Is Better for International Selling?

Shopify is the best option for international selling, with a plethora of tools to support global expansion found in Shopify Markets. While Wix has tools to translate text and currencies, this doesn’t follow through to checkout for a fully localized experience. Shopify Markets includes:

• Multi-currency checkouts: Allow customers to pay for products in their local currency (Wix localizes currency while browsing the site but reverts this back to your store’s default at checkout)
• Market-specific inventories: Tailor your inventory for each market, controlling product visibility and pricing in each location

💻 What’s the Difference Between Wix’s and Shopify’s App Markets?

Both Wix and Shopify have app markets so you can add further functionality to your website, but the difference in scale is notable. Wix’s app market features around 800 third-party apps, whereas Shopify offers over 8,000 free and paid apps to merchants, such as Linkpop which lets you add ecommerce links to your social media bios.

Unfortunately, Shopify is more reliant on its app store than Wix.

Wix provides a lot more features in-house, so you don’t need to waste additional time searching for the right apps. For example, you’ll need to download a tool like Easy Appointment Booking to take appointments or set events online with Shopify. Wix offers scheduling software as a built-in feature.

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Wix has the best website features to help improve your site’s visibility, increase traffic, and encourage customers to shop with you, from email marketing tools to custom SEO support.

I recommend watching our detailed Wix review video to learn more about Wix’s high-quality features:

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What Marketing Tools Are Available?

Wix’s Light marketing suite is available on Wix’s cheapest plan – this includes automated workflows, four lead-capture forms, and up to 10 fields in forms, such as contact details or payment information. While this is already robust, Wix’s marketing suite improves more as you upgrade plans.

Shopify also lets you seamlessly integrate marketing features into your store through apps like Facebook and Instagram, helping you identify and reach your target audience.

That said, both Wix and Shopify offer great email marketing tools. With diverse templates, customization options, and automations, you can easily set up email campaigns to reach out to your market or re-engage customers with abandoned cart recovery emails. You can also connect your store to popular email marketing solutions, such as Mailchimp.

Are There Effective SEO Features?

Improving and optimizing your website for search engines is important when building an online presence – mastering the SEO basics can help direct the right customers to your store and product pages.

Since Wix and Shopify are powerful website builders, it’s no surprise that they equally excel in this area. You can expect the standard SEO features from either option, such as sitemaps, metadata, and mobile optimization.

Author's notes...

When testing Wix’s SEO, I loved the personalized SEO checklist it created for my website. This is a really useful tool to get real-time feedback on your site’s content and settings. And the AI meta tag creator (available for premium plan owners only) helps businesses optimize their pages by automatically generating meta titles and descriptions for you.

Wix is also the best SEO website builder we’ve tested this year, with Shopify following shortly behind, so I recommend reading our full guide to see how they compare in this area.

Emma Ryan Lead Writer

It’s easier to build an online store with Wix than Shopify, thanks to Wix’s helpful AI tools, drag-and-drop editor, and beginner-friendly dashboard.

What the researchers think...

I’d recommend Wix if you’re looking for an easy-to-use builder to set up your online store. One of its standout setup features is its chatbot-style website creation. Not only does this create your site for you, but it also creates a fully customized business dashboard based on what features you tell Wix you need!

I loved that the chatbot gave the creation process a more friendly feel and felt like I was talking to a designer. I could even then ask it to reconfigure more granular parts, such as the layout, color scheme, or page structure. But don’t worry, you still get full control of customization of your site to easily create what you want.

Ollie Simpson Senior Research Executive

How Do I Build a Site With Wix?

With Wix, I was presented with a couple of setup options – an AI chatbot (Wix’s AI website builder) or choosing a template. I recommend using Wix’s AI chatbot to get a customized website for your business needs – it gave me a polished and personalized website within minutes, whereas Shopify’s manual approach is much more time consuming.

When testing it myself, I was impressed by how it picked up on my fake slime company’s target audience, just from my answers about the brand.

Once you’ve got through the setup process for Wix, you can start designing your website. Wix uses an easy drag-and-drop editor, which is incredibly beginner-friendly – you get total creative freedom, since you can drag elements anywhere you’d like on the page. Wix has also recently introduced an AI theme assistant to support you at the design stage and share suggestions.

How Do I Build a Site With Shopify?

To get started with Shopify, the builder asks if your business is in the early stages of life or if it’s already an established business. From there, you simply answer a few more questions based on your needs:

If you’re a new business:

• Where would you like to sell?
• What do you plan to sell first?
• Where will your business be located?

If you run an existing business already, Shopify will also ask about where you’re currently selling (e.g., Amazon, eBay, Wix).

Shopify takes a different approach to designing with its section-based editor. This is slightly more restrictive, but it’s straightforward to add and reorder sections on top of one another. Unlike Wix, I couldn’t just drag an element to a position on the page.

That said, as of December 2025, you can now use Shopify Sidekick to help you design your online store. Simply select an area of your website to tweak and ask Sidekick to make the changes for you.

Shopify also recommended I add products first, before editing my template. From my experience with Shopify, this makes complete sense since you’ll benefit from having the products in the backend to display on your website’s pages. Plus, you can use AI tools like Shopify Magic to generate product descriptions and simplify the process of adding new items or variants to your inventory.

Shopify’s 1,000+ modern and stylish templates are better suited to online stores, although Wix has a wider range (over 2,000) to choose from.

Unfortunately, Shopify has only 24 free templates, compared to all 2,000+ of Wix’s being free of charge. Shopify’s premium templates range from $100 to $500 – an additional one-time cost on top of your core plan. However, Shopify’s 1,000+ themes are aesthetically pleasing, professionally designed, and cater to different stores and industry needs.

Shopify’s AI store setup option business owners the choice to generate a custom template using AI. It’s not as advanced as Wix’s AI website builder, but Shopify creates three personalized design options based on a brief prompt, for example “sustainable shampoo brand.”

It’s a close call, but Shopify has a better range of customer help options for online stores, from a fast-replying AI Assistant to email support – the latter of which Wix doesn’t offer. With Shopify, you can use the following support channels:

• AI assistant – available in the Help Center, 24/7 (in my experience, the AI assistant responds instantly with a helpful answer or link to additional resources)
• Email support
• Phone support (for urgent issues)
• Community forum
• Shopify Academy – an online training program for businesses
• Shopify Help Center – full of guides, video tutorials, courses, and more

In comparison, Wix offers the same or its own version of these support options (for example, a Wix SEO Learning Hub instead of the Shopify Academy), but it doesn’t offer email support, which can alienate people who prefer to use this form of communication. And Wix’s AI in the Help Center isn’t as responsive or as conversational as Shopify’s, so I’d recommend Shopify’s customer service over Wix’s.

We want to make sure our comparisons are fair and reflective of the website builders in their current state, which is why we carry out regular testing and data collection.

Our thorough research process assesses an ecommerce website builder’s ability to support your online store – we review seven core areas of investigation to do this:

• Sales Features (30%): Testing the ecommerce tools offered, such as POS, shipping, inventory management, and payment providers
• Design Features (15%): How high-quality the templates and AI builder results are, and the editing tools that’re provided
• Help and Support (15%): We look into the available support options and test the quality of responses to common queries
• Website Functionality (15%): Assessing built-in tools, such as AI, SEO, marketing, scheduling, and blogging, as well third-party plugins
• Pricing (10%): Looking at the price of each plan, what’s included, the jump between plans, and whether free plans or trials are offered
• User Experience (10%): We conduct tests with users to establish how easy it is to carry out tasks on the platform
• Reputation (5%): Searching reviews of the builder online to understand the general online sentiment and asking our testers how likely they are to recommend it to a friend

Myself and the rest of the Website Builder Expert team have all carried out hands-on testing with these platforms. So, when I talk about what Wix and Shopify are like to use in this comparison, you know it’s based on real experiences.

After comparing the two website builders in areas like sales features, pricing, and ease of use, Shopify is our top choice for online stores because of its unbeatable ecommerce capabilities, including an extensive app store and over 100 payment options.

That said, it’s a close call between the two:

1. Shopify is ideal for established businesses looking to grow online, and is recommended if you’re managing a large inventory.
2. Wix is better for small businesses looking to take their first step online with an all-in-one platform.