Shopify or WooCommerce: how to actually choose

Almost every store owner asks the same question, and most comparisons answer it badly — with a feature table that ignores the thing that actually decides the outcome: who maintains the site after launch.

Here is the version I give clients, after building and rescuing stores on both platforms for over a decade.

The short answer

• Choose Shopify if you want to sell quickly, you do not want to think about hosting, security patches or plugin conflicts, and your business model fits its rules.
• Choose WooCommerce if you need custom pricing, B2B logic, unusual shipping, deep integration with an existing system, or full ownership of the stack.
• Choose neither if you have fewer than about 20 products and no repeat purchase — a well-built site with Stripe or a simple checkout will cost less to run.

What Shopify really costs

The subscription is the smallest number. Budget for:

• Plan: roughly $39–$105 per month depending on staff accounts and reporting.
• Theme: $0–$400 one-off, or $2,000+ for custom development.
• Apps: typically $30–$150 per month for reviews, email, upsells, subscriptions and accounting. Apps are where Shopify stores quietly become expensive.
• Transaction fees if you use a payment provider other than Shopify Payments.
• Development: theme customisation, migrations and conversion work.

A realistic small store runs $80–$250 per month in platform and app costs before any development. That is still often cheaper than a badly maintained WooCommerce site attracting security incidents.

What WooCommerce really costs

The software is free; the responsibility is not.

• Hosting: $15–$80 per month for something that can actually handle checkout traffic.
• Premium plugins: often $100–$400 per year across payments, shipping, subscriptions and SEO.
• Maintenance: updates, staging, backups and the occasional plugin conflict. Either your time or someone else's.
• Development: custom plugins and integrations are more common here, which is both the strength and the cost.

WooCommerce becomes cheaper than Shopify when you need logic that would otherwise require several Shopify apps — tiered B2B pricing, quote requests, complex tax rules, or a connection to an ERP you already run.

Speed and Core Web Vitals

Both can be fast. Both are usually slow, for the same reason: too many third-party scripts. Shopify's infrastructure is fast by default, but the average store loads a dozen apps that each add JavaScript. WooCommerce depends entirely on hosting and plugin discipline.

The platform is rarely the bottleneck. The app list is.

Control and lock-in

This is the real dividing line. On Shopify you rent the checkout: you cannot change the checkout flow beyond what the platform allows, and you cannot take the store elsewhere without rebuilding. On WooCommerce you own the code and the database, but you also own every failure at 2am.

If your business depends on a checkout flow that Shopify does not support, stop comparing features and move to WooCommerce. If your business depends on nobody touching servers, move to Shopify.

Migrations: the part nobody budgets for

Switching platforms is not a copy-paste. You need:

• A URL map with 301 redirects for every product, collection and blog URL.
• Preserved metadata and structured data, or rankings reset.
• Customer accounts and order history migrated where the platform allows it.
• Tracking rebuilt and validated — conversions will be misattributed for days if you skip this.

Migrations done carelessly cost more in lost organic traffic than the platform saves in a year.

How I decide with a client

1. Business model first. Retail with standard checkout? Shopify. B2B, quotes, unusual shipping? WooCommerce.
2. Who maintains it? No technical staff and no appetite to hire? Shopify.
3. How custom is the logic? If it needs bespoke code, Shopify means private apps and workarounds. WooCommerce means a plugin.
4. What is the five-year cost? Subscription plus apps versus hosting plus maintenance. The cheap option changes depending on volume.

The mistake to avoid

Do not pick a platform because a theme demo looked good. Pick it because of how you sell, how much maintenance you can absorb, and what your checkout must do. Everything else — design, speed, SEO — is execution, and execution is fixable on either platform.

If you want a second opinion on which way to go, send the store URL and a short description of how you sell. I will tell you plainly, including when the answer is to stay where you are.