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

For a quick comparison of Wix and Shopify, refer to the table 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
AI features Shopify Sidekick: AI assistant AI product descriptions Agentic storefronts (for AI search results) Shopify SimGym app (test site ideas with AI)	AI features AI product descriptions AI product recommendations AI site-chat for customers AI marketing agent AI email generator Wix benchmarks
Multi-currency Can sell in multiple currencies via Shopify Payments and international sales tools	Multi-currency Can’t sell products in multiple currencies (must pick one)
Dropshipping Can set up dropping via Shopify apps, Shopify Collective, or setting up via third-party suppliers.	Dropshipping Can set up dropshipping via Wix apps (standard products and print-on-demand)
SEO tools Automatic canonical tags & sitemaps Metadata edits Translated storefronts URL redirects	SEO tools Personalized SEO setup checklist Google Business Profile integration Google Search Console integration AI visibility overview URL redirect manager
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

Wix is better value 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 costs $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 costs $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 short timeframe 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 and is best for selling. On every plan, it comes with:

• Unlimited products
• Multiple sales channels (e.g. TikTok and Amazon)
• Abandoned cart recovery
• Discount codes
• Localized selling tools

This makes Shopify 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 multichannel selling options than Shopify. You can sell on marketplaces like Amazon, but fewer social media platforms. Wix sticks with the classics like Facebook and Instagram and you’ll need to connect your Wix store to TikTok if you want to sell there.

How Do Wix and Shopify Handle Dropshipping?

Shopify has the best dropshipping capabilities, having 700+ dropshipping apps compared to Wix’s 20+, 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. This might sound like a lot, but it could be a decisive factor, especially for large businesses wanting the extra room to grow and the reassurance of unlimited inventory space.

What Payment Options Are There?

This is how Shopify and Wix’s payment methods compare:

• Shopify has 100+ payment methods, while Wix only has 80+
• Shopify and Wix have their own native solutions that make it easier to collect payments in one place
• Both platforms come with a free SSL certificate with all plans as well as full PCI compliance, meaning customer credit card information is 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?

Wix’s app market has 800+ third-party apps, while Shopify has 16,000+, including Linkpop which lets you add ecommerce links to your social media bios.

That said, Wix has more built-in features than Shopify, so you don’t need to waste additional time searching for the right apps to install. For example, Wix has a built-in scheduling tool, but Shopify doesn’t – meaning you’ll have to find an app for this functionality.

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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, which includes marketing tools like:

• Google Ads with Wix integration
• Four lead-capture forms on your website you could use for quizzes or registration forms
• Up to 10 fields in forms for contact details, payment information, or other data

While this is already robust, Wix’s marketing suite improves more as you upgrade plans. For example, on the Core plan and above, customers can create an account on your website for faster checkouts.

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?

Wix and Shopify excel when it comes to the SEO basics. Their scope includes sitemaps, metadata, mobile optimization, and other staple SEO features.

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.

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?

Setting up with Shopify used to be a slower, more manual process than Wix. That said, its ease of use has improved in recent years due to additional tools, like its AI store builder.

To get started with Shopify, the builder asks you key questions about your business, such as where you’d like to sell and what you’re planning to sell. Once you’ve made your account, you can choose a pre-made theme, or use the AI store builder to generate a design based on a short prompt.

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.

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 gives 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.”

Shopify has a better range of customer help options for online stores, especially with its fast-replying AI assistant. Key Shopify help and support you can access includes:

• An 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 (Shopify Plus accounts only)
• Phone support (Shopify Plus accounts only)
• 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 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.

For serious ecommerce growth, Shopify Sidekick is the better AI assistant since it can support you throughout each stage of building an online store. For example, it can:

• Support you during the onboarding process
• Analyze your sales data and suggest ecommerce strategies
• Generate custom images for your website

Though I found Wix’s AI assistant, Wix Aria, less powerful, it is better suited for marketing purposes than Shopify Sidekick. You can have Aria evaluate your website’s SEO performance, or generate blog posts or event pages for your website.

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 scaling online stores because of its unbeatable ecommerce capabilities, including an extensive app store and over 100 payment options.

That said, Wix is better for small businesses looking to take their first step online with an all-in-one platform.