Hostinger vs Shopify: Which Is Best for Your Online Store?

If you’re short on time, I’ve pulled together a side-by-side look so you compare Hostinger and Shopify at a glance:

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Best for Selling Online
Shopify	Hostinger
Overall rating 4.8	Overall rating 4.2
Starting Price $29 $1/mo for 3 months	Starting Price $13.99 $3.99 + 3 months free (48-month term)
Free plan or free trial 3-day free trial	Free plan or free trial 7-day free trial
Free custom domain	Free custom domain
AI website builder	AI website builder
Standout features Sell unlimited products App market with 8,000+ apps Customizable checkout Multichannel selling	Standout features Fastest loading times Suite of AI tools Easy drag-and-drop editor
Areas to improve Free trial length Restrictive editor Advanced AI tools	Areas to improve Limited product space App market Email marketing Ecommerce scalability
Recommended for Businesses who want to easily scale their store as they grow	Recommended for Beginners and budget-conscious businesses
Try Shopify	Try Hostinger
See our Shopify review	See our Hostinger review

When it comes to affordability and pricing, Hostinger is a cheap website builder for online stores, whereas Shopify is more expensive. I’ll break down each builder’s pricing plans below:

How Much Does Hostinger Cost?

Hostinger’s pricing ranges from $2.99 to $3.99 per month, but only one plan includes ecommerce functionality. The Business Website Builder plan costs $3.99 per month (for a 48-month term), unlocking sales tools and Hostinger’s full suite of AI features.

For such a minimal price difference, I’d recommend opting for the Business plan from the start if you’re a small business owner. Unfortunately, there’s no free plan to test things out but you can get familiar with Hostinger using its seven-day free trial.

How Much Does Shopify Cost?

Shopify’s pricing ranges from $29 to $299 per month (billed annually), making it far more expensive than Hostinger. However, you can sell across all three premium plans:

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

Shopify makes up for its steep prices with its impressive range of sales tools, which I’ll discuss later on. You can soften the blow to your budget with Shopify’s introductory deal and get your first three months for just $1 per month.

The Winner

Hostinger is more affordable than Shopify

Hostinger has a single ecommerce plan which costs just a few dollars per month, making it incredibly budget-friendly for small businesses. On the other hand, Shopify’s cheapest plan is pretty expensive, starting at $29 per month. Plus, you can test out Hostinger with its seven-day free trial, whereas Shopify’s free trial is only three days long.

If you’re looking to get your business online, you’ll want to pick a website builder with the tools and scalability to support you on your journey. Our research analyzed key ecommerce tools, and I’ve focused on those most important to our readers below.

What the researchers think...

Shopify is the leading platform for ecommerce tools on the market, and it’s a much stronger choice for both growing and established stores. First of all, I’m a huge fan of Shopify’s process for adding products as it lays it out really clearly and makes the process straightforward, with clearly signposted sections and AI support if you’re struggling to write your product descriptions. Although Hostinger offers the core sales tools for an online store, Shopify helps you go to the next level with tools like customizable checkout pages, guest checkout options, POS integrations, multichannel sales support, advanced shipping tools, as well as offering unlimited products on your site!

Ollie Simpson Senior Research Executive

📦 Product Management

With Hostinger’s single ecommerce plan, you’re capped at 500 products, which is a tiny amount compared to most ecommerce builders. For example, Wix lets you sell up to 50,000 products. However, Shopify is the clear winner here since you can sell unlimited products on any Shopify plan. This is great for businesses looking to expand and grow their inventory.

But what can you actually sell with Hostinger or Shopify? When adding products to your Hostinger store, you have the option of physical and digital products, services, appointments, donations, and gift cards. With Shopify, the default is set to physical goods, but you can also sell digital products (such as ebooks and music), services, dropshipping products, and print-on-demand products.

🛒 Multichannel Selling

A key way to reach new audiences and build brand awareness is by engaging with and selling across other channels, beyond your website. With Shopify, you have impressive multichannel integration options, including Amazon and TikTok. Hostinger, on the other hand, only supports Google Shopping, meaning you can’t connect your website to popular marketplaces (such as eBay) or social media channels.

If you’re simply looking to sell on social media channels (and don’t need a full online store), you can subscribe to Shopify’s $5 per month Shopify Starter plan. This lets you sell across socials and messaging apps, including WhatsApp. It’s a cheaper alternative to Shopify’s website builder, but it’s still more expensive than Hostinger’s ecommerce plan (which allows you to build an online store).

💰 Payment Options

Both Hostinger and Shopify provide over 100 payment methods, meaning businesses can give a variety of choices to customers when it’s time to checkout. These payment processors include popular options, such as PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Pay.

However, Shopify goes the extra mile by offering a native payment gateway, known as Shopify Payments. If you’re a Shopify merchant, I recommend picking this to simplify the process and eliminate third-party transaction fees. While Hostinger promises to not charge transaction fees as well, you might be subject to transaction fees from your chosen payment provider.

The Winner

Shopify has unbeatable sales features

We’ve tested the best ecommerce website builders in 2025, and Shopify continues to have the best quality of sales features on the market. You can sell unlimited products, sell across multiple channels (such as Amazon and TikTok), and customize your checkout page.

When testing both of the builders myself, I found Hostinger much easier to use than Shopify for a few reasons. I’ll dig into each builder’s setup process below, as well as their editors and overall user experience.

My experience with Hostinger...

While I think Shopify has made steady improvements in this area, building an online store with Hostinger is a straightforward and beginner-friendly process. I found it incredibly easy to use the drag-and-drop editor since it gave me the freedom to position elements wherever I wanted, whereas Shopify limited me to sections. Plus, Hostinger has a bunch of AI tools to speed up the design process, which is great for business owners short on time.

Emma Ryan Lead Writer

Setting Up Your Online Store

Hostinger keeps things simple for new users with its AI website builder prompt. I was asked to fill out a brief form, giving my brand name and a summarized description of my business. Hostinger then used this information to generate a personalized template for me. All in all, the onboarding process took a minute or two.

With Shopify, I had to answer a few questions about my business, including where I’d like to sell (e.g., an online store, online marketplaces, or social media), what types of products I’d be selling, and the location of my business. After ticking the necessary boxes, Shopify then guided me to my account dashboard, where it then encouraged me to start adding products to my inventory. Hostinger, in comparison, took me directly to the editor to start designing my store.

Using the Editor

Hostinger uses a drag-and-drop editor, making it an easy website builder to get to grips with. As the name suggests, I could drag elements onto my site’s page and drop them wherever I wanted. I also love that Hostinger provides grid lines, which I could choose to ignore or follow – this helped me align images and text boxes in seconds. There are plenty of professionally-designed sections to use, and I could also use Hostinger’s AI tools to generate text and images.

Unfortunately, while Shopify offers a lot of impressive features for businesses, I struggled to feel creative when using its editor. Shopify has a section-based editor, meaning you can stack sections (such as an “About Us” section or “Product carousel” section) on top of one another, but you can’t drag elements to your desired location. It’s simple to use, but restrictive, and it lacks the flexibility provided by Hostinger.

The Winner

Hostinger's editor is very beginner-friendly

Hostinger uses the familiar drag-and-drop editor, meaning you can place elements wherever you want on your website. This gives you total creative control, and its AI website builder provides a decent starting point with a personalized template. In comparison, it took longer for me to get to grips with Shopify’s section-based editor.

Of course, sales features aren’t all you need when building an online store. You must also make sure your website builder has the right functionality and tools to help you manage your website and grow your business, whether you’re looking to increase your site’s traffic or connect with customers. Based on our 2025 research, Shopify offers better website features than Hostinger and here’s why:

Email Marketing

An essential website feature for any business is email marketing, and Shopify has great email marketing tools. You can customize your own emails, set up automations, build email campaigns (which can be great for big events, such as Black Friday), and keep your customers engaged with abandoned cart recovery emails.

Unfortunately, Hostinger lacks any email marketing tools, meaning you’ll find it harder to connect with your audience, promote products, or share important updates.

SEO

SEO, or search engine optimization, is an essential practice for any business looking to broaden their reach, improve visibility online, and boost sales. Luckily for Shopify merchants, Shopify has some of the best SEO tools I’ve tested. You’ll get the SEO basics, such as metadata and mobile optimization, but Shopify provides additional SEO support, including the ability to add schema markup.

In contrast, Hostinger keeps its SEO features very beginner-friendly, rather than offering any advanced tools. I did appreciate the SEO tips and advice when editing my website’s pages, but they won’t provide much value for anyone with a certain level of SEO knowledge already.

Apps

This is an easy win for Shopify since Hostinger doesn’t have an app market. Hostinger’s cheap ecommerce plan provides you with basic sales tools and website features, but you can’t add extra functionality through third-party integrations. This can be pretty limiting for businesses looking to scale up.

The good news is that Shopify has over 8,000 apps to choose from. In fact, Shopify relies heavily on these third-party apps, more so than its built-in features. This can be a drawback for some, since a lot of apps come with additional fees to install and use, but you can budget accordingly and only choose the apps that work best for your business.

The Winner

Shopify provides the tools your business needs

Shopify provides your business with both the sales tools and general functionality you’ll need to boost your site’s traffic, grow your business, and connect with your audience. Plus, if you can’t find a feature built-in, Shopify has thousands of third-party apps to choose from.

Of the two builders, Shopify offers the best templates and designs for online stores. People do judge a book (or website) by its cover, so it’s important that your site appears professional and modern if you want to encourage people to shop with your business.

Shopify offers over 200 templates to choose from. A small number of these are free to use, while the majority have a one-time fee, ranging between $100 and $500. In comparison, Hostinger has roughly 150+ free templates, but they’re not all suitable for an online store – some cater to blogs, portfolios, and other website types.

The Winner

Shopify's templates cater to various industries

Shopify has a great range of free and premium templates built with online stores in mind, meaning they’re already equipped with the pages and features your store will likely need. And, Shopify’s new AI store setup feature is a great way to generate tailored templates for your business.

Hostinger beats Shopify when it comes to AI-powered tools, which is why I highly recommend Hostinger for beginners and tech novices since it’s a great platform if you need a helping hand. Not only does AI save you time (which you can then spend on other important business tasks), but it can give you a great starting point to build on.

Shopify, in comparison, has a small handful of AI features, mostly offering support with business tasks and products, such as AI-generated product descriptions. Hostinger’s suite of AI features is more well-rounded:

• AI website builder (and an AI builder for WordPress sites)
• AI image generator
• AI SEO tools
• AI writer
• AI blog generator
• AI product generator
• AI heatmaps
• AI logo maker
• AI page generator

The Winner

Hostinger has a better range of AI features

While Hostinger can’t compete with Shopify’s sales features and website functionality, Hostinger comes out on top when it comes to AI tools. You can expect AI assistance throughout your website builder journey, whether you’re designing your website, adding new products to your inventory, or assessing the user experience.

Every business will need a helping hand now and again, and Shopify provides better customer support than Hostinger. I’ve listed what each builder offers below so you can compare them side-by-side:

The Winner

Shopify delivers 24/7 customer support

Shopify has great 24/7 customer service, providing a lot of options, from AI live chat to email support. I also loved using the newest AI feature, Shopify Sidekick, which I could toggle on and off within my account whenever I had a question or needed help with a certain task, such as adding products.

To fairly compare Hostinger and Shopify, I’ve used our annual research findings and conducted hands-on testing to assess their features and usability. Our thorough research process focuses on seven key areas of investigation that we know are important for small businesses, and weights these areas according to how significant they are:

• Sales Features: 30%
• Design Features: 15%
• Help and Support: 15%
• Website Functionality: 15%
• Pricing: 10%
• User Experience: 10%
• Reputation: 5%

I’ve been using Hostinger and Shopify for years, but this year’s round of research continues to show that Shopify is the best builder for online stores. This is largely because of Shopify’s impressive sales tools and 24/7 support for business owners.

Which builder do I recommend?

Of course, Shopify won’t be right for everyone. It’s expensive for smaller businesses, and its customization options can feel limiting. So, if you’re looking for an affordable and user-friendly builder, Hostinger could be the right fit. That said, you get what you pay for with Shopify, and that’s a recognizable and powerful platform for anyone looking to sell online.

While I’ve given you my expert opinion after hundreds of hours of testing and analysis, the best advice I can really share is to test out each builder for yourself by using their free trials. This will give you a good feel for the builder’s features and editor, so you’ll know if you’re happy to use it before you subscribe to a paid plan. 

Emma Ryan Lead Writer