Shopify vs WooCommerce: The Real Cost Comparison

“Shopify vs WooCommerce” usually gets answered as if it were a single number – one platform costs more, one costs less, pick the cheap one. The honest answer is that the two are not priced the same way at all, which makes a straight comparison misleading unless you account for what each one actually asks you to pay for. Figures below reflect list pricing as published in September 2026; check each vendor directly before you commit, since plans and fees do change.

Two different things being sold

Shopify is a hosted platform – you pay a monthly subscription and Shopify runs the servers, the security, the checkout, and the updates. WooCommerce is free, open-source software that plugs into WordPress, which means the software itself costs nothing, but you are responsible for finding somewhere to host it, keeping it secure, and paying separately for anything Shopify would otherwise bundle in. Neither model is a trick – they are simply different trades, and the “cheaper” one depends on how much of that responsibility you want to hand off versus manage yourself.

What Shopify actually costs

Shopify's current plans list at $39 a month for Basic, $105 a month for Grow (Shopify's mid-tier plan, sometimes called just “Shopify”), and $399 a month for Advanced, each discounted somewhat if paid annually. On top of the plan fee, Shopify charges a transaction fee on card payments if you use its own Shopify Payments – 2.9% plus 30 cents on Basic, dropping slightly on the higher tiers – and an additional fee if you route payments through a third-party processor instead. Apps, if you need them, are billed separately on top of all of this, same as they would be on any platform.

The number that matters is not the headline plan price but the plan price plus whatever apps you actually install. A store running three or four paid apps for features WooCommerce plugins provide for free can close much of the gap that the plan price alone suggests. This is worth checking before comparing platforms at all: a wishlist app, a size-chart app and a subscriptions app at $10 to $20 each easily adds $30 to $60 a month on top of the base plan, and that figure varies entirely by which app store listings you happen to install rather than anything fixed about Shopify itself.

What WooCommerce actually costs

The software is free, but almost nothing around it is. You need WordPress hosting, and the range is wide: basic shared hosting runs roughly $3 to $10 a month, while managed WooCommerce hosting – built specifically to handle store traffic and keep the site fast – typically runs $20 to $50 a month. A domain name costs about $10 to $20 a year, and a basic SSL certificate is usually free through Let's Encrypt, though some hosts upsell a premium certificate on top.

Then come the parts a Shopify subscription bundles in by default. A premium WooCommerce theme commonly runs $50 to $150, sometimes as a one-time purchase, sometimes billed yearly for updates and support. Payment processing through WooPayments or Stripe runs close to Shopify's own rate, around 2.9% plus 30 cents per online transaction in the US, so that part of the cost is roughly a wash between the two. Security and performance plugins have solid free tiers, but the premium versions that add real protection or speed – a proper firewall, a caching layer built for commerce traffic – tend to run somewhere between $10 a month and $120 or more a year.

Putting a rough annual number on it

Add it up and a lean WooCommerce store – shared hosting, a modest theme, mostly free plugins – can land in the region of $100 to $300 a year in direct costs, genuinely cheaper than Shopify's cheapest plan. A mid-sized store with managed hosting, a paid theme, and a handful of premium plugins is more commonly in the $600 to $1,500 range, which starts to sit closer to what a Shopify Basic or Grow subscription would cost over the same period once a couple of apps are added. A larger store leaning on several premium plugins, stronger hosting, and outside help for maintenance can run $2,000 to $10,000 or more a year – at that point, whichever platform you are comparing it against, the plugin and app stack is doing most of the spending, not the base subscription.

None of these figures are exact for your store specifically – they move with your host, your theme choice, and how many plugins you decide you actually need. Treat them as a rough shape of the comparison, not a quote. What they do show fairly reliably is that the gap between the two platforms narrows sharply once a WooCommerce store needs real reliability under traffic, and once a Shopify store needs more than the handful of features its base plan covers. The cheap end of each platform is genuinely cheap; the middle ground is where the two converge.

The cost that never appears on a pricing page

WooCommerce's lower floor comes with a trade most comparisons skip: someone has to keep WordPress core, the WooCommerce plugin, and every other installed plugin updated and compatible with each other, and someone has to respond if a plugin conflict breaks checkout at the worst possible moment. That someone is either you, learning as you go, or a developer you pay for the privilege. Shopify's subscription folds that maintenance into the monthly fee – you are, in part, paying not to have to think about it.

This is not an argument that one platform is better. A founder who is comfortable around WordPress, or who already has a developer on hand, may find WooCommerce's control worth the extra responsibility. A founder who wants to spend their time on product and marketing rather than server maintenance is often better served paying for that time back.

Which one actually fits your store

Lean toward WooCommerce if you are already comfortable with WordPress, want full control over hosting and code, and are willing to own security and updates yourself or pay someone who will – the lower cost floor is real, but it is earned through more hands-on responsibility. Lean toward Shopify if you would rather pay a predictable monthly fee for a platform that is maintained, secured, and updated for you, and would prefer your own time to go toward the store itself rather than the infrastructure underneath it. Neither choice is the discount option in every scenario – it depends on which costs, time or money, you have more of to spend.

Once you're on Shopify, the theme is the next decision

If Shopify is the platform you land on, the plan fee gets you the engine; your theme is the entire storefront a customer actually sees, and it is where a store built for a considered brand starts to look like one. Kiosk builds numbered Shopify editions with no required third-party apps – wishlist, quick view, subscriptions and bundles included in the build rather than sold back to you piece by piece, which is worth factoring into the “versus WooCommerce plugins” comparison above. Two editions, FLYER and LUMIERE, are free to try with no Shopify plan commitment required to look at the code. See the full range at Kiosk.