I Put Shopify vs WooCommerce to the Test in 2025: Which Do I Recommend?

Need a quick comparison of both builders? You can use the table below to inform your final decision.

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Shopify	WooCommerce
Starting Price $29	Starting Price $6.45 with Bluehost
Free plan or free trial 3-day free trial, then 3 months for $1/month	Free plan or free trial Free to install
Number of templates 200+	Number of templates 100+
Recommended for Businesses who want to easily scale their store as they grow	Recommended for Businesses that want more control over their store
Visit Shopify	Try WooCommerce
See our Shopify review	See our WooCommerce review

The Winner

WooCommerce’s flexible pricing helps you find costs that suit your business

Despite the need to pay for domains and hosting yourself, WooCommerce’s flexibility allows you to find pricing that suits your business, and you can find affordable hosting from $6.45 with Bluehost.

Before diving headfirst into an ecommerce platform, you need to look at the pricing plans available. Do they fit your budget and come with the features you need? Let’s see.

How Much Does WooCommerce Cost?

• Free plugin
• No set pricing plans
• Hosting costs depend on your web host 

WooCommerce is the cheapest platform at first glance, since it’s a free WordPress plugin offering ecommerce capabilities. However, it’s also a self–hosted platform, meaning that you’ll be responsible for finding and purchasing a domain, a suitable WooCommerce site host, and additional plugins to install — this is where costs start to rise.

For your reference, I’ve broken down the average WooCommerce pricing for each of these factors:

Total monthly costs = $4 – $480/month

If you’re confident budgeting and deal hunting, you won’t find it challenging dealing with these additional costs. WooCommerce is a great option if you enjoy searching for flexible pricing that’ll suit your store’s budget, or if you want more control over how you spend your money — be it on cheap shared hosting or your go-to domain registrar.

How Much Does Shopify Cost?

• Between $29-$299 per month (billed annually)
• 3-day free trial
• Get your first three months for $1 per month

Shopify’s pricing, ranging from $29 per to $299 per month (billed annually), isn’t the cheapest. Additional costs from paid templates, apps, and transaction fees can also add up over time, which isn’t great if you’re on a tight budget.

But the quality of Shopify’s built-in features make this investment worth it. On each plan, you’ll receive a pre-built or custom theme, multiple sales channels, ecommerce app access, and Shopify POS for in-person transactions. This is all you need to set up a successful online store without much technical expertise.

How High Are Each Platform’s Transaction Fees?

Not all ecommerce platforms charge a transaction fee per sale, but you will always encounter processing fees based on the payment gateway you process orders through, such as Stripe or Safepay.

Shopify’s transaction fees vary based on the plan you’re on. For example, the Basic plan is 2.9% plus 30¢ for all online transactions. However, if you use Shopify’s in-house payment processor, Shopify Payments, you can avoid these transaction fees. 

Though WooCommerce doesn’t take a transaction fee from each sale, the payment gateways you choose will. Rates can vary depending on the provider you choose. As an example, WooCommerce’s WooPayments plugin offers standard pricing from 2.90% plus 30¢ per transaction (the same as Shopify’s Basic plan).

The Winner

Shopify’s sales features go above and beyond WooCommerce’s

From a straightforward inventory system to various shipping options, Shopify’s strong built-in sales features help large-scale stores to thrive.

Following our 2025 round of in-house research , Shopify remains the best platform for sales features, which includes inventory organization tools, in-person sales options, and flexible shipping.

Inventory

Shopify is the perfect ecommerce platform for stores with a large inventory. Helping you scale your business, its handy sales features make it easy to manage a large quantity of items.

For instance, the Shopify winter ’25 update made it even easier to manage your inventory, with the addition of low inventory cart warnings that alert merchants when stock is running out, and the ability to create collections of items based on attributes like color or material.

In comparison, WooCommerce’s scalability options are limited. You will receive a degree of inventory control — mainly through built-in features like stock tracking and product variations — but you will also need to download plugins to access more features. The platform also lacks inventory automations like Shopify, making managing your WooCommerce inventory much more tedious.

Because of these limitations, WooCommerce is more suitable for small to medium-sized stores. If you’re already using WooCommerce but are looking to scale your inventory, Shopify is the platform to switch to.

Shipping Options

So a customer has snapped up an item and you need to make sure it gets to them. How will you make that shipment? If using Shopify, you can pick from four courier shipping options: USPS, UPS, DHL Express, and FedEx. Even better, you can use Shopify Shipping to print discounted shipping labels that’ll save you some cash.

This still hasn’t covered the variety of Shopify’s shipping options that are accessible from the dashboard:

• International shipping
• Free shipping
• Local pickup for buyers to collect their parcel from a specified location
• Estimated delivery dates shown at checkout
• Custom shipping rates
• Delivery customizations that must be carried out via your external app of choice

WooCommerce does offer essential shipping options with its built-in system — think free shipping, DHL and USPS label printing, and shipping zones based on area — but your options will be limited unless you add additional plugins. To save you from this hassle (unless you like the flexibility of adding your own plugins), Shopify will streamline the shipping process for you.

Payment Methods

Taking online payments isn’t a headache with Shopify. Its unique Shopify Payments feature is built into the platform, offering a streamlined and stress-free process that is managed from the dashboard.

Sellers can easily accept payments for their stores, while buyers have the option to process their orders through payment providers. This includes:

• Credit and debit cards like Mastercard, Visa, American Express, and Discover
• Digital wallets like Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Amazon Pay
• Buy now, pay later plans like Klarna, Afterpay, or ShopPay

Do note that transaction fees will vary depending on the payment provider used, so be sure to check these beforehand.

WooCommerce is also flexible with its payment gateways. Through extensions, you can integrate your store with PayPal, Stripe, Amazon Pay, and Klarna.

Alongside online payments, Shopify provides point of sale systems that allow you to sell in-person — another great way to increase your business’ sales by moving beyond your online retail space.

WooCommerce no longer offers its own POS, which was discontinued. Instead, you’ll need download an app from the store, such as Kestrel’s Lightspeed POS that costs $249 per year to use.

The Winner

Shopify’s marketing features will help your online store grow quickly

Even if your marketing knowledge is limited, Shopify makes it easy to grow online thanks to its built-in SEO, email marketing, and analytical tools, which WooCommerce doesn’t have.

To boost traffic and sales, you’ll need to promote your store with a foolproof content marketing strategy. Here’s how Shopify and WooCommerce’s marketing features compare.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

An understanding of basic SEO practices will ensure that your product listings are visible to users on search engines like Google and Bing.

Shopify’s SEO tools offer easy, integrated ways to optimize your store for search. This includes:

• Automatic canonical tags and sitemaps
• Ecommerce schema markup
• Alternative text
• Metadata like title tags and meta descriptions

These features offer a brilliant way for beginners to grasp SEO regardless of their technical knowledge. However, since they’re all baked into Shopify, you’ll have less control over your site’s performance if you want to make more technical adjustments yourself.

But what about WooCommerce? Since it allows you to add your own code to your website, it’s ideal for tech-savvy users who want more control over their SEO. 

But be careful. If you ever need to change WooCommerce website hosts, the downtime will temporarily impact your SEO while you migrate your online store to a new host. Definitely something to think about when considering WooCommerce over Shopify.

Email Marketing

To reengage users that are already interested in your store, it’s highly recommended that you set up email marketing campaigns to notifiy your email list when there’s a new update.

Shopify comes with Shopify Email, a built-in feature that provides users with professional email marketing templates. An easy way to create and manage campaigns all in one place, you’ll receive a selection of pre-made designs and an intuitive drag-and-drop editor to work with, alongside automations to speed up the entire process.

Whether you’re on the Basic plan or Shopify Plus plan, you’ll get to send 10,000 free emails at the beginning of each month, with additional emails starting from $1 per 1,000 extra emails.

But if you’re keen on using another email marketing platform — like Klaviyo, Mailchimp, and Privy — you can download their respective apps from the Shopify app store.

WooCommerce, however, doesn’t have a built-in email marketing feature. Instead, you’ll want to delve into the available plugins and look for a suitable provider. As a recommendation, Mailchimp and MailPoet have plugins that are free to download from WooCommerce’s extensions page.

Analytics

With SEO and ecommerce email marketing driving traffic to your online store, you’ll probably be keen to keep track of your store’s visitors, clicks, and conversions. No matter which pricing plan you’re on, Shopify has store analytics you can view in the dashboard.

Listed below are just a few of the analytics you’ll find on your Shopify dashboard:

• Total sales
• Total orders
• Average order value
• Top selling products
• Returning customer rate
• Sales by traffic source

If you’re using WooCommerce, you need to download the free WooCommerce Analytics tool to track your website’s progress. New for 2025 (it’s currently in the beta release stage), you can access order attribution reports that’ll tell you important store metrics. This includes orders by channel, orders by source, and orders by device.

For further insights, there’s also a free Google Analytics tool available where you can see where your store traffic is coming from.

The Winner

Shopify’s easy-to-use editor allows you to set up fast

Thanks to its intuitive, user-friendly editor, Shopify is more suitable than WooCommerce for setting up shop under a tight schedule. If you’re new to ecommerce platforms, you won’t feel intimidated either since Shopify will take you through each step.

If you need to set up your store fast and dive straight into making your first sale, Shopify will speedily lead you through the entire process, from uploading your first items to choosing the right template.

Shopify is best fit for large scale stores. From the outset, I was asked to upload my products before I picked out a template and started editing my store. This order was intuitive, since it allowed me to edit my item listings and create variants as I went along.

I could even upload a bulk number of items via CSV, which is especially useful if you’re switching to Shopify from another ecommerce platform and want to migrate your listings over.

Once you’ve uploaded your items, it’s plain sailing while you choose a template and add sections like contact forms and featured collection lists to your website. Also, there’s much less to worry about overall because its plans already include built-in hosting and an SSL certificate.

In contrast, setting up with WooCommerce will take longer if you’re a beginner starting from scratch. The editor itself isn’t difficult to use, but you’ll need to think about your domain, hosting, and additional plugins while you set up, alongside additional tech skills like coding.

The Winner

Shopify’s responsive and sleek templates will make your online store look professional

The clear winner is Shopify with its stylish templates containing user-friendly features and optimization for phone and desktop.

Though both Shopify and WooCommerce offer polished store designs, I found that Shopify’s mobile-optimized themes will give your homepage some flair and entice users to keep clicking through your site.

I could browse through over 200 Shopify themes, of which 13 are free and the rest require a one-off payment to use. Each theme offers practical features leading to seamless site navigation, including mega menus, quick views, and even a stock counter showing how much of a specific item is left. Just be aware that the best themes must be paid for, with the average prices ranging from $100 to $500.

In 2025, Shopify released its AI theme generator, allowing users to generate a free store design based on a short prompt. If you don’t want to choose from a set theme, this gives you the option to create a storefront that’s tailored to your needs.

With Shopify, you are also able to switch between themes without losing your site’s content. To find out how, take a look at our video that demonstrates the process (it’s easier than you think).

Play

When using WooCommerce, you can choose from specified WooCommerce designs, or pull from WordPress’ existing theme catalog when designing your online store.

When looking through WooCommerce’s main theme store, I could only find five free templates, while the rest required a one-off payment to use. This ranged between $47-$129 per theme, a bit cheaper than Shopify’s selection!

Don’t forget that you’ll likely need plugins to expand on certain WooCommerce templates, a process that can be time consuming or frustrating for new users.

The Winner

Shopify’s security features make is easy to protect your store against threats

Thanks to the variety of security features included in its plans, Shopify is the best ecommerce platform to keep store and customer data safe and secure.

Top ecommerce security is a priority for any online store. It’s also a two way street, because both merchants and buyers should be able to rest easy knowing that their precious data and card information is protected at all times.

Since Shopify is a dedicated ecommerce platform hosting thousands of online stores, it’s serious about the security measures in place to protect sellers. This makes Shopify the best platform for security overall.

Even with a Basic Shopify plan, you’ll receive all of the security features listed below that we found in our hands-on testing:

• Default SSL Certificates for secure website data
• A fraud analysis tool
• 2-factor authentication
• Dedicated customer login areas so users can manage their security settings all in one place.

WooCommerce does offer security measures, like 2-step authentication for admin accounts, but additional features will take longer to set up. In fact, more self-management is needed to protect a WooCommerce store against threats.

Since you’d be looking for an ecommerce hosting provider yourself, you’ll have to make sure that the provider you pick offers adequate security features. WooCommerce recommends users to look for reputable hosts, like Bluehost, that provides an SSL certificate – a necessity for any safe online store. 

You’ll also need to take security plugins into account. Popular WooCommerce plugins that cover all-in-one-security include Jetpack, Shield Security, Sucuri Security, Security Ninja, and Wordfence Security – all scoring four stars or more on WordPress’ plugins store page.

This additional research on secure hosts and additional plugins can take time, so Shopify will give you a better peace of mind for security since it’s all included in your plan.

The Winner

Shopify’s help and support services make it easy get find assistance

Shopify’s robust customer support and valuable help resources makes it easy to receive help and support when building your online store. Because these features are all in one place, it’s easy to find what you’re looking for.

Anyone setting up their ecommerce store for the first time will need a little help along the way. For this reason, I recommend Shopify as the best platform for reliable help and support. Its customer service lines are available around the clock via its live chat feature.

Alongside Shopify’s seamless customer support, its website is home to useful resources that’ll help support you at each stage of your journey. Among these resources is the Shopify Help Center that includes everything you need to know about the platform.

💡 One thing I noticed during testing...

I recommend browsing Shopify’s Help Center resources if you want to take your store to the next level. During testing, I found news on monthly Shopify-related webinars, as well as useful business lessons from the Shopify Academy. You can even showcase your newfound knowledge by displaying badges on your website!

Holly Choules Writer

In comparison, WooCommerce makes it trickier for users to find the help and support they need. Although the platform has comprehensive information in documentation and blog posts, many users find themselves digging through community forums to find answers to a specific question, or even watching YouTube videos from veteran WooCommerce users.

On the flipside, you won’t ever feel alone when using WooCommerce. Since it’s such a popular platform, you’ll find a wealth of user-led resources across the web that will help you while you build your online store.

Finding additional support becomes even more strenuous with the addition of plugins. Since they come from third-party companies, you’ll need to look elsewhere if you’re having an issue with a specific extension. So, if you’re looking for centralized help and support at every step of the way, I recommend Shopify.

If you’re keen to switch from either platform, you’re probably wondering how easy it is to transfer your store over. Unfortunately, store migration is rarely a quick process, especially considering the amount of website content and product files that you’ll need to transfer. However, you do have a few options when switching between the platforms:

1. Using a CSV: On both Shopify and WooCommerce, you can download your product files and customer data via CSV. Once you’ve downloaded these files, you can transfer the data to your new store. However, this doesn’t cover website content, which you’ll need to transfer manually.
2. Using an app: You can download apps for Shopify and WooCommerce that’ll help you migrate your store. If you want to switch to Shopify, the platform is working on its own Store Migration app, but it’s currently in the early access stage and isn’t available to all users yet.
3. Hiring a professional: If you have the budget for it, you can hire a professional to complete the migration for you. Shopify Partners and Woo Partners both have lists of verified professionals to choose from.

Remember, when you make the switch, you’ll also need to transfer your domain, choose a new theme, recreate your store’s key pages, and complete any necessary URL redirects to prevent dead links from appearing on your new website.

Also, if you’re transferring to WooCommerce’s open source platform, then you’ll need to buy an ecommerce website host first to get set up.

Finding it difficult to choose between Shopify or WooCommerce? To help you decide, it’s useful to think about which features to look out for based on your unique needs. Below are a few pointers I’ve come up with to help you get started.

Will the platform help me scale over time?

• Strong inventory management tools
• Ability to create variants on products in multiple styles
• Varied shipping options that ship globally and offer discounted rates
• In-depth analytics handling large amounts of data from visitors

Will the store be quick and painless to set up?

• Pre-made templates
• Intuitive store editor
• Prompt customer service to resolve any technical issues along the way
• Built-in security measures

Will there be any additional costs over time?

• Free extensions
• Free themes
• Reasonably priced plans that features the key features you’re looking for
• Special offers on plans
• Good transaction fees

Will the platform’s marketing features help me grow my store?

• Social media integration
• SEO
• Email marketing
• Tracking tools to follow user behaviors

Will I have access to additional features when needed?

• App market to download additional extensions from
• Price plan upgrades when your online start scales up

Need additional help to decide? Use this handy quiz to choose from a range of ecommerce platforms for your next store:

To compare Shopify and WooCommerce, I applied insights from our 2025 ecommerce website builder research. This consisted of over 300 hours of data collection, alongside an examination of 283 key areas of investigation.

Our findings were split into seven areas of investigation, which were then weighted based on their overall importance to businesses looking for an ecommerce builder:

1. Sales features – 30%
2. Website functionality – 15%
3. Design features – 15%
4. Help and support – 15%
5. User experience – 15%
6. Pricing – 10%
7. Reputation – 5%

Alongside our in-house research, I also took part in hands-on testing where I got up close and personal with each platform. So, I’ve also added my firsthand experiences to this article to better help you identify a builder that suits your needs.

After juggling the pros and cons of each builder, it’s clear that Shopify is the overall winner. I was impressed by its huge range of built-in sales features and seamless website editor, as well as its scalability capabilities fit for large businesses.

Our research also agrees with this conclusion, since it was named the best ecommerce builder out of all the platforms we tested in 2025.

In contrast, WooCommerce offers an overwhelming experience for newbies due to the hosting, domains, and plugins needed. However, more knowledgeable users may prefer the independence the platform gives them.

But because everyone’s needs are different, let’s briefly summarize who Shopify and WooCommerce are best suited for.

• Shopify’s tailored ecommerce features will help your business grow over time with ease. Its intuitive editor, brilliant inventory options, and prompt customer support means you’ll receive everything you need to manage and grow your store.
• WooCommerce offers more flexible pricing and customization options. It’s better for two kinds of users: those with technical know-how, and those who want more control and personalization options over their store.

Find Out More

Read our Shopify review for a more detailed look at its features and pricing

Read our WooCommerce review for more information on this platform’s pros and cons