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:

Swipe right to see more

0 out of 0

• backward
• forward

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
Number of templates 200+	Number of templates 900+
Free custom domain	Free custom domain
AI website builder	AI website builder
Standout features Sell unlimited products 8,000+ app market Customizable checkout Multichannel selling	Standout features AI chatbot builder Branded email marketing AI image editing Personalized SEO support
Areas to improve Free trial length Restrictive editor Advanced AI tools	Areas to improve Storage space Changing templates Loading speed Inventory capacity
Recommended for Businesses who want to easily scale their store as they grow	Recommended for Businesses promoting their online presence
View Shopify	View Wix
See our Shopify review	See our Wix review

When it comes to value for money, Wix is the more cost-effective option of the two. I’ll break down each builder’s pricing plans below:

How Much Does Wix Cost?

Wix’s pricing ranges from $17 to $159 per month (billed annually). There are four premium plans to choose from, but you’ll need the $29 per month Core plan or above if you want to sell online.

• Light – $17 per month (no ecommerce functionality)
• Core – $29 per month
• Business – $36 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.

➡️ You can get 10% off your Wix plan with the code “TAKE10”.

How Much Does Shopify Cost?

Shopify’s pricing plans are generally more expensive than Wix, but you can sell across all plans. With Wix, you’ll need to choose an appropriate ecommerce plan. Shopify’s pricing ranges from $29 to $299 per month (billed annually), but you can get your first three months for just $1 per month, softening the initial cost.

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

Shopify also has a three-day free trial. This provides a much shorter window than Wix’s free plan 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

The Winner

Wix is cheaper for businesses

You can start selling online with Wix for just $29 per month (Core plan), the same as Shopify’s cheapest Basic plan. But Wix’s most expensive Business Elite plan ($159 per month) is roughly half the price of Shopify’s Advanced plan, which costs $299 per month. So, upgrading Wix’s plans is cheaper in the long run than Shopify. Unfortunately, neither builder is really great value for money, so I wouldn’t recommend Wix or Shopify if you’re a budget-conscious business. Instead, check out Hostinger or Square Online.

Shopify is our top-rated ecommerce website builder for a reason – it has the best sales features on the market. 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.

🛒 Multichannel Selling

Want to broaden your reach beyond your website? 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.

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.

📦 Inventory

With Shopify, you can sell unlimited products no matter which plan you subscribe to. In comparison, Wix limits its users to a maximum of 50,000 products, as well as an additional allowance of products (between 25 and 50,000 products) if you dropship with Modalyst. Of course, this is still a lot of products, but it might be a make or break factor for growing or large businesses that want the reassurance of unlimited inventory space.

Wix and Shopify are fairly evenly matched when it comes to general storage as well. Wix’s plans range between 2GB and 100GB of space, unless you choose the Business Elite plan which unlocks unlimited storage. With Shopify, you won’t get unlimited storage, but its plans offer more from the start, ranging from 100GB (with Shopify’s cheapest plan) to 500GB (with the Advanced plan).

💰 Payment Options

Both Wix and Shopify provide a variety of payment options, giving you flexibility when serving customers at the checkout stage.

Shopify offers 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.

💻 App Market

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 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.

Play

The Winner

Shopify has the best sales features on the market

As our top-rated builder for online stores, it’s not surprising that Shopify has the best sales features for business owners. All plans include unlimited products, multiple sales channels (such as TikTok and Amazon), abandoned cart recovery, discount codes, localized selling tools, and more.

Selling isn’t the only consideration when setting up an online store. Wix has the best website features to help you promote your business online, from email marketing tools to keyword support.

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

Play

Marketing Tools

Wix offers a robust marketing suite that improves as you upgrade plans. The 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.

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.

SEO

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

The Winner

Wix’s features are the best for promoting your store

Wix provides a suite of impressive built-in tools – such as custom SEO support and email automation – that help improve your site’s visibility, increase traffic, and encourage customers to shop with you.

Of the two, Wix is easier to use than Shopify. When it comes to building an online store, you have to take a few factors into account: the setup process, designing your website, and how easy it is to oversee and manage your store from the backend.

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

Building 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.

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.

Building 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.

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.

The Winner

Wix’s editor is more user-friendly

There’s a lot to do when setting up an online store, and Wix’s drag-and-drop editor and beginner-friendly dashboard make it easy for small businesses to get up and running. I had total creative control, whereas Shopify’s editor limits what you can do with your pages, and Wix’s AI chatbot builder gets your site ready to publish in minutes.

First impressions matter, especially if you want people to purchase a product or service from your website. While Wix caters to a broad audience with its 900+ templates, Shopify offers better custom templates for online stores.

Unfortunately, Shopify has a limited number of free templates (all of Wix’s templates are free to use). At the time of writing, there are 13 free template options, and Shopify’s premium templates range from $100 to $500 – this is an additional one-time cost on top of your core plan. However, Shopify’s themes are aesthetically pleasing, professionally designed, and cater to store and industry needs.

The Winner

Shopify’s templates are built for online stores

While Shopify can’t beat Wix’s quantity of templates, Shopify’s 200+ themes are built with online stores in mind. They’re modern and stylish, and you can filter the library for different industries, such as “Clothing” or “Pet supplies.”

If you think you’ll need a helping hand with setting up your online store and managing your business, Shopify has slightly better help and support than Wix. 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.

The Winner

Shopify provides better support for businesses

It’s a close call, but Shopify has a better range of customer support options for online stores, whether you’re looking to get online for the first time or expand your business. I was particularly impressed by its AI assistant since it would always respond in seconds, plus Shopify has the added benefit of email support (something Wix lacks).

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

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 my 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. Shopify is ideal for established businesses looking to grow online, and I highly recommend it if you’re managing a large inventory. On the other hand, Wix is better for small businesses looking to take their first step online with an all-in-one platform.