Almost every WooCommerce versus Shopify comparison online is published by someone with a commercial interest in the answer. Hosting companies conclude WooCommerce. Shopify partners conclude Shopify. We build and run both, which makes this piece duller and more useful: what each platform actually costs at three revenue levels, including the lines that never appear on a pricing page.
The headline subscription fee is the least important number in this decision. At every tier below, it accounts for well under 10% of total cost. What matters is the shape of the cost curve — and the two platforms curve in opposite directions.
The only fair way to compare them
Comparing platforms on their monthly plan price is like comparing two cars on the sticker and ignoring fuel, insurance and servicing. A store has four cost categories, and only the first is advertised:
- Platform cost — the subscription or license. Advertised, predictable, small.
- Transaction cost — payment processing, plus any cut the platform takes on top.
- Extension cost — apps and plugins, most of them recurring.
- Operating cost — hosting, maintenance, updates, security, and the developer time to keep it upright.
Here is the thesis in one sentence, and everything below is evidence for it: Shopify concentrates your cost in transactions and apps, which scale with revenue. WooCommerce concentrates your cost in operations, which scale with complexity.
That is why the right answer changes as you grow. A store doing $250k with a simple catalog and a store doing $5M across five countries are not the same question, and any article that gives one answer for both is selling something.
Tier one: around $250,000 a year
At this level Shopify usually wins, and we say that as a team that builds a lot of WooCommerce.
The reason is not the software. It is that at $250k in revenue you almost certainly do not have anyone whose job is to own a website. Nobody is monitoring uptime, applying security patches, testing plugin updates against a staging copy, or getting paged when checkout breaks on a Saturday. Shopify absorbs all of that into the subscription. That is genuinely worth paying for.
WooCommerce at this tier is cheaper on paper and frequently more expensive in practice, because the operating work does not disappear — it becomes unpaid and unscheduled, and gets done badly or not at all. We have taken over stores at this level where the real cost of "free" was a nine-month-old PHP version and a checkout quietly dropping mobile orders.
Choose WooCommerce at this tier only if you have a specific requirement Shopify genuinely cannot meet, or you already have technical ownership in-house. "It is cheaper" is not that reason.
Tier two: around $1,000,000 a year
This is where it gets close, and where the decision stops being about the platform and starts being about your catalog.
Two things change at $1M. First, transaction costs become a real line item rather than a rounding error — a percentage point of $1M is $10,000 a year, which buys a lot of engineering. Second, you have usually accumulated an app stack: subscriptions, bundles, wholesale pricing, advanced shipping rules, reviews, loyalty, a page builder. Each is a modest monthly fee that felt trivial when you added it, and collectively they are often the largest single line in a Shopify store this size.
The honest test here is a boring one. List every app you pay for, total the annual cost, and ask how many exist to work around something the platform will not let you change. If most of your app spend adds capability, Shopify is serving you well. If most of it fights the platform, you are paying rent on a workaround — and that is the point where WooCommerce starts to pay for itself.
Tier three: around $5,000,000 a year
At $5M the arithmetic usually favors WooCommerce — but only for businesses that can support it properly.
Percentage-based costs dominate at this volume. Fees that were invisible at $250k are now large enough to fund a permanent engineer. Meanwhile the operating cost of a well-run WooCommerce store does not scale with revenue in the same way: serious hosting, a maintenance retainer and a staging workflow cost roughly the same whether you are doing $2M or $8M. One curve is flat and the other is not, and eventually they cross.
The catch is the phrase "well-run". WooCommerce at this scale is not a cheaper Shopify — it is a system you own, with everything ownership implies. If nobody is accountable for it, the savings evaporate the first time an unpatched plugin takes checkout down mid-campaign.
The costs nobody quotes you
These lines decide real budgets, and neither vendor puts them on a pricing page.
WooCommerce vs Shopify fees at a glance
| Fee | Shopify | WooCommerce |
|---|---|---|
| Platform subscription | Monthly plan; rises by tier | None — the plugin is free |
| Payment processing | Shopify Payments rate, lower on higher plans | Your gateway's rate (Stripe, PayPal, WooPayments) |
| Third-party gateway fee | Extra percentage on every order if you skip Shopify Payments | None |
| Apps and extensions | Mostly monthly subscriptions | Mostly annual licenses |
| Hosting | Included | Paid separately; scales with traffic |
| Maintenance and updates | Included | A retainer or in-house time |
| Checkout changes | Limited below the enterprise tier | Unrestricted |
On the Shopify side: payment processing carries an additional platform fee if you use a third-party gateway rather than Shopify Payments, which quietly makes "just keep your existing processor" an expensive choice. App costs compound rather than add — apps that read order data often need other apps to reconcile it. And checkout remains the least modifiable part of the system until you reach the enterprise tier, which is a significant step up in price.
On the WooCommerce side: hosting that genuinely absorbs a traffic spike is not the budget plan advertised at a few dollars a month. Most serious plugins renew annually and lapse into no-updates mode if you stop paying, which is a security problem rather than a feature problem. Someone must own updates, backups and a staging environment. Budget a maintenance retainer from day one — a store without one is not cheaper, it is accumulating a debt that comes due unpredictably.
Because platform and app pricing moves, we have kept this comparison structural rather than quoting figures that will be stale within months. Check current pricing for both before committing: the shape described here is stable, the numbers are not.
Where Shopify genuinely wins
- Time to launch. Weeks, not months, for a standard catalog.
- Checkout conversion. Their checkout is tested at a scale no individual store can replicate, and it converts.
- Compliance and security. PCI scope, patching and uptime become someone else's job.
- Traffic spikes. Nothing to plan for. It holds.
Where WooCommerce genuinely wins
- Content and commerce together. If organic search is a primary channel, publishing lives natively alongside the store rather than bolted on.
- Complex catalogs and B2B. Customer-specific pricing, wholesale tiers and unusual product logic are configuration rather than a fight.
- Cross-border logistics. Multi-country shipping with live carrier rates is where owning the code matters. We run Ideal Indiska Livs across several countries with live carrier integration — a build where platform constraints would have decided the business model.
- Owning your data and workflow. No per-transaction platform tax, and no ceiling on what you can change. Our own WooCommerce POS exists because the counter workflow a client needed could not be bought.
How to actually decide
Five questions, in order. They matter more than any cost table:
- Who owns the site on a Tuesday afternoon when something breaks? If the answer is nobody, choose Shopify.
- Is organic content a primary acquisition channel or a secondary one? Primary pushes toward WooCommerce.
- How unusual is your catalog? Standard products favor Shopify. Configurable, wholesale or multi-currency complexity favors WooCommerce.
- What share of app spend is capability versus workaround? Mostly workaround means you have outgrown the platform.
- What is a percentage point of revenue worth to you today? Below roughly $1M, less than the operational risk. Well above it, considerably more.
Our actual position
We build both, and we decline the migration more often than we take it. Replatforming is expensive, disruptive and frequently solves a problem that was never the platform's fault — a slow store is usually slow because of what was installed on it, and that travels with you.
If you want a straight answer for your own numbers rather than a generic one, our eCommerce team will look at your catalog, your app stack and your real transaction costs and tell you which way the arithmetic points — including when the answer is "stay where you are".