Shopify vs WooCommerce: Hosted or Self-Managed?

Updated August 2026

Almost every Shopify versus WooCommerce article you'll find frames this as a price fight, and almost every one of them gets the answer wrong in the same direction. WooCommerce is free, Shopify costs $39 a month, therefore WooCommerce wins. That comparison is only true for about a week, right up until the store needs hosting that can survive a promotion, an SSL certificate, four paid extensions, a PHP upgrade, and someone who knows what to do when a plugin update takes checkout down on a Friday night. By then the two stacks cost roughly the same money and differ enormously in who does the work.

So the question that actually decides this shortlist isn't feature count and it isn't sticker price. It's ownership. Shopify sells a managed store where the platform owns hosting, uptime, security patching, and PCI scope, and charges you a subscription plus a fee if you route payments outside its own processor. WooCommerce sells you a free plugin and hands you everything else: the server, the updates, the backups, the compatibility testing, and the pager. This guide prices both honestly using each vendor's own published figures, checked in August 2026, and then works through the operational question underneath the money, which is whether your team wants a landlord or a deed.

Key Facts

• The WooCommerce core plugin is "Free, with no monthly subscription" with a 0% revenue share, but WooCommerce's own pricing page budgets hosting at "$25 - $350/month for most stores" and extensions at "$29 - $299/year per extension" on top of that free plugin. (WooCommerce)
• As of the August 25, 2026 survey, WooCommerce runs 48.1% of all ecommerce systems W3Techs tracks and 8.1% of all websites, while Shopify runs 31.6% of ecommerce systems and 5.3% of all websites. (W3Techs: WooCommerce, W3Techs: Shopify)
• Patchstack counted 11,334 new vulnerabilities across the WordPress ecosystem in 2025, a 42% year-over-year increase, with 91% of them found in plugins and 1,966 (17%) scored as high severity, meaning they were likely to be hit by automated mass-scale attacks. (Patchstack)
• Every paid Shopify plan includes unlimited web hosting, a custom domain name, and a free SSL certificate, and Shopify is certified Level 1 PCI DSS compliant, stating that all stores on its platform are "PCI compliant by default." (Shopify pricing, Shopify security)
• Shopify's $5 a month Starter plan is not an entry option for a new merchant. Shopify's own Help Center states that "The Starter plan isn't available to new stores," and that a merchant who moves off it "can't revert back to the Starter plan." (Shopify Help Center)

TL;DR: Shopify vs WooCommerce at a Glance

Who Each Platform Is Built For

Both platforms sell to merchants who need a real catalog, real order management, and room to grow. They diverge on what kind of team is holding the thing six months after launch.

If your actual need is a mostly-content website with a small shop bolted on rather than a dedicated commerce platform, neither of these is automatically the answer. Our best Squarespace alternatives and best Wix alternatives roundups cover the lighter website-builder end of the field, which is cheaper and faster for a store that is really a page with a checkout attached.

The distinction that matters most in practice is who signs up for the maintenance. WooCommerce's install base is enormous, with the plugin reporting 7 or more million active installations and requiring PHP 7.4 or higher and WordPress 6.9 or higher, both of which the store owner keeps current (WordPress.org). That number tells you the hiring pool is deep and the documentation is everywhere. It doesn't tell you that a percentage of those installs are running outdated PHP, unpatched extensions, and a theme nobody has touched in two years, because the platform never forces the issue the way a hosted vendor does.

Plan Lineup: What Each Side Actually Costs

Shopify has plans. WooCommerce doesn't. That single structural difference is why the two cost tables below don't look alike, and why a straight plan-versus-plan row is misleading.

Shopify (US list price)

Shopify publishes both a monthly-billed and a yearly-billed column, so always say which one you mean. Shopify also localizes pricing by country, and fetching the same pricing page from outside the US returns a noticeably different set of figures, so treat the table below as the US list and check your own country's page before you budget.

Two notes before anyone quotes this table back at a vendor. First, the third-party gateway fee drops to zero entirely if you process on Shopify Payments, so for most merchants it's a conditional cost rather than a certain one. Second, Shopify's $5 a month Starter plan does not belong in a comparison like this and should be treated as retired for anyone reading it today: Shopify's Help Center says plainly that it "isn't available to new stores," and that a merchant who leaves it can't go back. Plenty of comparison content still prints it as the entry price. It isn't one.

Shopify's page also runs a promotional offer ("Try 3 days free, then $1/month for 3 months") that changes the first quarter's cost and none of the years after it. Budget on the list price, not the promo.

WooCommerce (there is no plan, so here is the cost stack)

WooCommerce has no hosted tier and no subscription. Every figure below is WooCommerce's own published estimate from its pricing page, not a plan price it charges you.

That last row is the whole argument. WooCommerce's pricing page is honest about hosting and extensions, which is more than most open-source projects bother with, but it does not price the labor, and the labor is the part that scales with the age and complexity of the store rather than with its traffic.

The honest summary is this: WooCommerce charges no platform fee and takes no cut of your sales, at $10,000 a year in revenue or $10 million. It is also never genuinely a $0 stack once a store is actually live and taking orders. Both of those statements are true at the same time, and any comparison that only prints one of them is selling something.

Who Owns Hosting, Security, Updates, and the 2am Fix

Here's the axis that should decide this shortlist. Everything in the money tables downstream is a consequence of this table.

That Patchstack number deserves reading twice, because it's the single most under-discussed line item in this comparison. In 2025 the WordPress ecosystem disclosed 11,334 new vulnerabilities, up 42% year over year, and 91% of them were in plugins rather than in WordPress core. Core itself had six. That distribution is exactly what you'd expect from an open marketplace of extensions maintained by thousands of independent developers, and it's not an argument that WordPress is insecure. It's an argument that the security posture of a WooCommerce store is a function of how disciplined its owner is about updates, not a property of the software you install on day one.

On Shopify, that discipline is the vendor's job and it is priced into the subscription. You don't get to skip it, negotiate it, or forget it. On WooCommerce, you get to make that choice every month, which is genuinely better if you have someone who makes it well and genuinely worse if you don't. Teams that pay for managed WooCommerce hosting are effectively buying part of the Shopify arrangement back, and that shows up in the hosting figure they end up paying.

Payment Processing and Platform Fees

The fee stories on these two platforms are shaped completely differently, and the difference favors WooCommerce more clearly than any other section of this comparison.

Card processing itself is deliberately excluded from the total-cost tables below, on both sides. WooCommerce publishes WooPayments at roughly 2.50% to 2.90% plus 30 cents, and Shopify Payments charges a comparable card rate that varies by plan and by country, so including one and not the other would distort the comparison, and quoting a US Shopify Payments figure from a page that renders differently per region would be worse. Check your own country's rate on both sides. What the tables below isolate is the platform cost, which is where these two actually differ.

The Real Annual Cost at Two Store Sizes

Every number in this section is our own arithmetic, built on the published figures above. Neither vendor publishes a total like this. The assumptions are stated in each table so you can swap in your own.

A small store: about $60,000 a year in online sales

Assumptions: one person running the store, four paid add-ons, entry-level hosting for a store at this traffic level, and no card processing on either side.

At this size the two land close enough that price shouldn't decide it. WooCommerce's lean end is a genuinely cheap store, and Shopify's lean end is a genuinely cheap store, and they're within about $70 a year of each other. What separates them is that Shopify's lean end requires no server decisions and no update schedule, while WooCommerce's lean end requires you to pick a host, keep WordPress and PHP current, and accept that a $25 a month plan is entry-level hosting with entry-level headroom. If the person running this store bills their time at anything, that gap closes fast in Shopify's favor. If the store is a side of a business that already runs a WordPress site with a host and a developer on retainer, the marginal cost of adding WooCommerce to it is close to zero, and that's the scenario where the free plugin genuinely is free.

A growing store: about $500,000 a year in online sales

Assumptions: a team of three to five people needing staff logins, eight paid add-ons, mid-band hosting, and again no card processing on either side.

Look at what happened between the two tables. WooCommerce's low end got better relative to Shopify, because the free plugin still costs nothing while Shopify's plan stepped up a tier. WooCommerce's high end got much worse, because hosting scales with traffic and Shopify's doesn't. The bands overlap heavily, which is the honest answer: at half a million dollars a year in sales, these two platforms cost roughly the same money in most realistic configurations, and the deciding variable isn't the invoice.

Two caveats worth applying before you use these figures. The Shopify side assumes you can stay on Grow, which caps staff accounts at five; a bigger team pushes you to Advanced at $359 to $399 a month and changes the math. The WooCommerce side assumes somebody is doing the maintenance for free or that it's already inside an existing retainer; if you're buying that labor fresh, price it as a real line item, because it's the only cost in this comparison that doesn't appear on either vendor's pricing page.

If your store's economics are being decided by fees rather than by features, it's worth running the same exercise against a third option before committing. Our best ecommerce platforms in 2026 roundup covers the wider field, and our Shopify vs BigCommerce comparison walks through a hosted-versus-hosted matchup where the fee structures differ in a completely different way.

Extensions, Apps, and Ecosystem Depth

Shopify's app store and WooCommerce's extension marketplace are both large, but they're organized around different assumptions about who owns the code.

The practical difference is what happens when you hit a requirement neither marketplace covers. On Shopify, you're building against public APIs and living inside the platform's model of what a store is, which is a real constraint but also a real guardrail. On WooCommerce, you can change anything, including things you probably shouldn't, and a heavily customized WooCommerce store eventually becomes a bespoke application that only its author fully understands.

Email and lifecycle marketing tends to be the first place stores add a paid layer on either platform, and the tooling is largely platform-agnostic; our best email marketing software in 2026 and best Klaviyo alternatives roundups cover that decision separately, because it should be made on merit rather than on which storefront you happened to pick.

Ownership, Data, and What Leaving Costs

Neither platform makes migration painless, but they lock you in with completely different mechanisms, and knowing which one you're accepting matters more than the raw difficulty.

That last row is the one people skip. WooCommerce's freedom is real and it is not the same thing as portability. Moving a WooCommerce store to a new host is straightforward. Moving a WooCommerce store to Shopify is exactly as much work as moving a Shopify store to WooCommerce, because in both directions you're rebuilding the theme, remapping the extension stack, and re-testing tax, shipping, and checkout rules that had been quietly working for years.

If you're already looking past both of these because your catalog or your B2B requirements have outgrown them, our best Magento alternatives roundup and our BigCommerce vs Adobe Commerce comparison cover the heavier end of the market, where the tradeoffs shift again toward implementation cost and away from monthly subscriptions.

Who Runs It Day to Day

The skills question is where most of these decisions actually get made, whether or not anyone writes it down.

Read that last row as the summary of the whole comparison. Neither platform eliminates the work. Shopify converts it into a predictable monthly bill; WooCommerce converts it into a variable labor cost that's cheap when the store is calm and expensive at exactly the moments you can least afford it. A business that already employs or contracts WordPress talent has effectively pre-paid for the WooCommerce side, which is why WooCommerce wins so decisively among content-led sites and agencies and struggles among teams whose only technical person is also their only marketer.

When Shopify Is the Right Call

• Nobody on your team wants to own a server. Hosting, SSL, patching, uptime, and PCI scope are all Shopify's job, included in the plan, with no decision for you to make every month.
• You want the fee structure to be predictable. The plan price is the plan price, hosting doesn't jump when a campaign lands, and the third-party gateway fee disappears entirely if you process on Shopify Payments.
• Speed to launch matters more than control. A basic Shopify store can be live and taking orders the same day, with no hosting purchase, no PHP version to check, and no theme to install by hand.
• Your risk tolerance for a broken checkout is low. On Shopify, a platform update breaking your storefront is Shopify's problem to prevent and to fix. On WooCommerce it's yours, and it happens on the schedule of whoever pushed the plugin update.

When WooCommerce Is the Right Call

• You already run WordPress and have the skills in the building. The marginal cost of adding a store to an existing, well-maintained WordPress site is close to nothing, and this is the scenario where "free" is honestly free.
• You want zero platform fee at any volume. WooCommerce takes no revenue share and charges no fee for using a third-party payment provider, which matters more the bigger your GMV gets and the more you dislike conditional pricing.
• Content is a real part of your commerce strategy. The store is a plugin inside a full CMS, so your blog, landing pages, documentation, and product catalog live in one system rather than in a storefront with a blog attached.
• You need control over code, data, or hosting location. Self-hosting is the answer to requirements a SaaS platform structurally cannot meet, whether that's a custom checkout flow, a specific data residency rule, or an integration nobody has built as an app.

If Neither One Fits

If the storefront is fine but the price ladder is the problem, the wider field is worth a look before you commit to either of these. Our best ecommerce platforms in 2026 roundup covers hosted, self-hosted, and headless options side by side, and the heavier catalog and B2B end of the market is covered in best Magento alternatives.

And if the actual gap isn't the storefront at all, if what's breaking is that orders, stock counts, invoices, and the customer record live in three or four separate tools stitched together with integrations that quietly drift out of sync, that's a different problem and neither Shopify nor WooCommerce solves it. Rework's Commerce module runs order and commerce operations inside a wider platform that also carries Sales CRM, Lead, Inventory, Invoice, Product and Work Ops, so the order, the customer record, and the stock count sit on one platform instead of three synced tools. It is not a storefront builder: there's no themed storefront, no template gallery, and no D2C checkout, so it sits behind or beside whichever platform you pick rather than in place of it. Rework doesn't publish a price for Commerce; it's quoted per organization at rework.com/pricing, and it's built for mid-size operators of roughly 10 to 200 people, not solo sellers. If that's the shape of your problem, our best order management software in 2026 roundup is the more useful starting point than either storefront platform.

Decision Framework

What to Do Next

1. Decide the ownership question before you look at another price. Write down, by name, who patches the store and who gets called when it's down. If that name is blank, the money tables above don't matter and Shopify is your answer.
2. Price your actual hosting, not the low end of the range. WooCommerce's own band runs from $25 to $350 a month. Get a real quote from a host for your traffic and your catalog size rather than budgeting the floor.
3. List the add-ons you'd genuinely install on day one. Then price them as Shopify apps (monthly) and as WooCommerce extensions (yearly, at $29 to $299 each) and compare the two totals rather than the two plan prices.
4. Pick your payment processor before you pick your platform. Shopify's third-party gateway fee only applies if you skip Shopify Payments, and that one decision moves every Shopify figure in this article.
5. If you're comparing more than two platforms, start from best ecommerce platforms in 2026, or read Shopify vs BigCommerce if a second hosted platform is on your shortlist alongside Shopify.