Shopify vs WordPress (2026): We Review Features, Pricing, and More

If you want to build an online store, you’ll need to compare ecommerce platforms to find the right fit for your business. Shopify is the best platform overall, offering powerful sales features, a huge app store, and intuitive product management tools.

That said, WordPress powers over 40% of all websites, and its open-source nature gives you limitless customization options. However, it’s a more hands-on approach in comparison to Shopify.

Shopify vs WordPress: Quick Comparison

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		Overall rating	Starting price	Free plan or free trial	Number of templates	AI website builder	Recommended for
Shopify	WordPress.org
4.8	3.4
$29 $1/mo for 3 months	$2.95 (for Bluehost hosting)
3-day free trial	Free to install
1,000+	14,000+
check	close
Businesses who want to easily scale their store as they grow	Businesses running content-heavy websites

Is Shopify Cheaper Than WordPress?

Shopify has the most transparent pricing, with plans starting from $29 per month (billed annually), whereas WordPress’ pricing varies depending on the features and functionality you require. I’ll break it down further below:

How Much Does Shopify Cost?

• Shopify’s pricing ranges from $29 to $299 per month (billed annually)
• Get your first three months for just $1 per month
• You can test the platform with its three-day free trial
• Shopify’s three core premium plans all include ecommerce

How Much Does WordPress Cost?

• WordPress is free to download but requires paid plugins to build a functional site
• Pay extra for features (for example, plugin costs can start from $5 per month)
• Budget for a hosting provider (Hostinger’s WordPress hosting plans start from $2.99 per month)

The Winner

Shopify is the best value for money

While WordPress is free to use, costs can add up quickly. Shopify’s plans might seem more expensive initially, but you get everything you need to run your online store in one package.

Which Platform Is Best for Selling?

Shopify is our top recommended ecommerce website builder for 2026, due to its powerful built-in, sales features. This sets it apart from WordPress which requires third-party ecommerce plugins and tools.

With Shopify, you’ll be able to:

• Sell unlimited products
• Add up to 2048 variants per product
• Sell on marketplaces, social media platforms, and AI answer engines
• Send abandoned cart recovery emails
• Run targeted discounts for customer segments
• Use Product Networks to fill gaps in your inventory by offering complementary products from other Shopify merchants and earn a commission on every sale
• Use the SimGym app to gather feedback on the user journey from AI personas to make instant store improvements
• Ask Shopify Sidekick to track your profits and move money, create custom analytics and explain data reports, and provide personalized recommendations to improve your sales based on store and market research

To sell on WordPress, you’ll need to install the WooCommerce plugin, which allows users to sell unlimited products, choose from 140 payment gateways, and sell with no transaction fees. However, WooCommerce requires consistent manual testing and updating of apps, which can stop your store from working temporarily.

➡️ You can read our full Shopify vs WooCommerce review to see the key differences.

The Winner

Shopify's sales features help you grow

Shopify’s built-in sales features are much easier to get to grips with, especially if you’re new to running a business and selling online. Plus, you don’t need to go hunting around for specific tools, like you would with WordPress, since Shopify houses everything in your account.

Can You Add Apps With Shopify or WordPress?

Shopify’s app store features over 8,000 integrations, compared to over 60,000 offered by WordPress. However, Shopify users are much less reliant on plugins for functionality thanks to its wide range of built in AI tools and features. 

Not only are WordPress’ wide array of apps overwhelming and time-consuming to choose between, but they aren’t vetted like Shopify’s, which leads to security concerns for businesses with limited IT resource.

The Winner

Shopify offers over 8,000 apps

It’s quality over quantity in this match-up! While WordPress has a greater range and variety of apps on offer for stores, you’ll first need to find them and review if they’re worth using or too risky. Not only does Shopify provide secure and high-quality apps, but you can add them to your store with a single click.

Is Shopify or WordPress Best for Marketing?

Shopify and WordPress both have impressive SEO and marketing features to help you get your products seen online and increase sales.

Shopify has a number of built-in marketing and SEO tools to support its merchants, whereas WordPress relies on plugins again. That said, you get greater control and flexibility over advanced settings with WordPress.

📨 Marketing

Shopify helps you get products mentioned by AI answer engines, such as ChatGPT and Perplexity, with Agentic Storefronts. Shopify is at the forefront of agentic commerce developments in 2026, helping you get seen and secure sales in high-converting channels.

Shopify also has an AI-powered SMS and email marketing campaign app, Shopify Messaging, which generates subject lines and text, optimizes send times, and provides personalized recommendations. The Shopify Forms app also makes it easy to create contact forms for collecting leads, which can be automatically translated into 19 languages, helping to boost engagement and sales globally.

As expected, WordPress requires plugins for most of its marketing functionality, but there are a lot of popular brands on offer, including:

• Mailchimp for email marketing
• Hubspot for CRM
• Google Ads for creating ad campaigns
• Pretty Links for affiliate marketing

Of course, there’s still the issue of having to install and manage these apps yourself. With Shopify, you can access everything from your dashboard which keeps things simple.

🔍 SEO

Shopify is one of the best website builders for SEO from our 2025 round of testing, with AI- generated metadata, image alt text, product descriptions, and personalized SEO recommendations. Shopify also handles the SEO basics automatically, making it perfect for beginners.

WordPress leaves SEO up to the user. While this grants you greater control, you need the know-how to tweak and action changes to improve areas like site speed. Of course, you can use a plugin, like Yoast SEO, to help you along the way, but Shopify’s SEO tools are more beginner-friendly.

Does WordPress Have Better Design Options?

WordPress offers greater customization options than Shopify, although it requires basic coding knowledge and a lot of time to implement your designs, so it won’t be the right option for beginners. Shopify’s onboarding and editing process is more accessible, but limited in comparison to WordPress.

Designing With Shopify

• Support from Shopify Sidekick, including custom app generation and AI prompting to make design changes
• Fast onboarding
• No drag-and-drop editor
• Over 1,000 templates
• Use AI to create custom blocks
• Schedule and A/B test theme changes with Rollouts
• Not as easy as other website builders

Designing With WordPress

• Basic coding knowledge required
• Over 14,000 templates
• Pre-designed “patterns” for your pages
• Complete control over website design
• Relies on plugins to simplify editor
• Find what works best for you

The Winner

WordPress gives you total creative control

WordPress has a wider choice of themes (with more free options than Shopify!), and you have greater control over the look of your website thanks to its advanced editor. But, be warned that WordPress won’t be ideal for complete beginners to website building.

How We Test Ecommerce Website Builders

We’ve spent over 300 hours testing and building with the top ecommerce builders. Our in-house research process is carried out regularly to ensure our reviews and recommendations are accurate, up-to-date, and fair.

Should You Pick Shopify or WordPress?

If you’re looking to build an online store, Shopify has my recommendation. Not only are its sales features the best we’ve tested this year, but businesses can manage everything from a single dashboard for convenience.

With WordPress, your success is entirely dependent on which plugins you decide to use and the hosting provider you opt for. Ultimately, which one you decide on depends on your budget, skill level, and business needs, but Shopify is the better choice for ecommerce websites overall.

Written By

Emma Ryan

Emma is Deputy Editor of MVF’s B2B brands, specializing in website builders, ecommerce, marketing, and vibe coding. Emma combines her wealth of knowledge and years of hands-on testing with a passion for helping small businesses and website owners navigate the highs and lows of being online. Her work has been featured in Newsweek, Digiday, TechRound, and Industry Today.

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Reviewed By

Oliver Simpson Senior Research Executive

After three years of refining his skills in data analysis, Oliver transitioned to a role as a researcher to help understand reader preferences, decision making factors, pain points, and needs when it comes to building an online presence.

Oliver’s professional journey started out as a researcher in law enforcement, where he developed strong analytical abilities. He later moved into operations, which strengthened his understanding of quantitative data.

Now, Oliver blends his quantitative analysis skills with qualitative research to explore both audience preferences and product nuances.

In his three years at Website Builder Expert, Oliver has used his skills to provide up to date, unbiased insights into the products we review, to help ensure the best possible recommendations for readers. Oliver regularly assesses and iterates our website builder research methodology, staying on top of industry trends, digging into platform features and UX, and prioritizing areas that matter most to business owners. This provides web builder and ecommerce rankings you can trust.

In 2025 alone, Oliver’s conducted over 100 hours of data collection across website builder and ecommerce testing, and investigated 283 individual areas in the ecommerce methodology. He’s overseen 54 individual user tests of website builders, to assess how easy they are to use, and compiled the data into clear ratings for each builder.

You’ll find Oliver’s research referenced across all of our key pages; our content team use it to determine the ranking orders of pages such as the Best Website Builders of 2025, or comparisons like Wix vs Squarespace. We don’t decide who “wins” on personal preference; Oliver’s thorough research clearly outlines which platforms are best for different user needs.

Equipped with a UX design diploma, Oliver translates complex research findings into actionable insights that facilitate informed decision-making.

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