Short version: yes, for most stores, and for some stores it is clearly better. But "better" depends almost entirely on two things nobody puts in the comparison tables, which are what you pay once transaction fees are counted, and whether you are allowed to change your own checkout.
This guide covers both properly. Every Shopify price and restriction below was checked against Shopify’s own pricing page and developer documentation on 6 August 2026, not against a listicle.
Is WooCommerce as good as Shopify? The short answer
WooCommerce is as good as Shopify at selling things, and better than Shopify at owning what you have built. Shopify is better at getting you to your first sale quickly and at taking the operational burden off you.
Scale is not the differentiator people assume. According to W3Techs, WooCommerce runs 48.5% of all ecommerce systems and appears on 8.2% of all websites. It is not a hobbyist alternative to a serious platform. It is the most widely deployed ecommerce software there is.
The honest framing is a trade. Shopify rents you a very good store and keeps the keys. WooCommerce hands you the keys and expects you to look after the building.
What is WooCommerce used for, and what does it let you do?
WooCommerce is a free, open-source plugin that turns a WordPress site into a shop. It is distributed through the official WordPress plugin directory. Because it sits inside WordPress rather than beside it, your products, posts, pages and landing pages all live in one system.
What it handles out of the box:
- Physical products with variations, stock management, weights and shipping classes
- Digital and downloadable products, with access limits and expiry
- Subscriptions and memberships, via extensions
- Bookings and appointments, which are awkward on hosted platforms and native here
- Wholesale and B2B pricing, including per-customer-group rates
- Any tax and shipping logic you can express in code, rather than only the rules the platform anticipated
That last point is the real character of WooCommerce. There is no category of "things the platform will not let you do", only things you have not built yet. If your business has an unusual rule, whether that is pricing by square metre, a deposit-then-balance flow, or a checkout that asks for a delivery date, WooCommerce can express it.
Our step-by-step guide to starting a WooCommerce store walks through the setup if you are beginning from scratch.
WooCommerce vs Shopify cost: the real breakdown
Shopify’s pricing looks simple and is not, because the subscription is only part of what you pay. Here are the figures published on Shopify’s pricing page:
| Shopify plan | Billed annually | Billed monthly | Card rate | Fee if you do not use Shopify Payments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | £19/mo | £25/mo | 2% + 25p | 2% |
| Grow | £49/mo | £65/mo | 1.7% + 25p | 1% |
| Advanced | £259/mo | £344/mo | 1.5% + 25p | 0.6% |
| Plus | from £1,800/mo | negotiated | 0.2% | |
That final column is the one that costs real money. If you want to use your own payment provider rather than Shopify Payments, Shopify charges you a percentage of every order on top of what your provider charges. On Basic that is 2% of revenue, forever, for the privilege of choosing your own processor.
WooCommerce charges nothing per order. The software is free and the platform takes no cut. What you pay instead:
| WooCommerce cost | Typical | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| WooCommerce plugin | £0 | Free and open source |
| Hosting | $25 to $75/mo | The main recurring cost |
| Domain | ~£12/yr | Same on either platform |
| Theme | £0 to £80 once | Free themes are genuinely usable |
| Extensions | £0 to £200/yr | Only if you need subscriptions, bookings and similar |
| Payment processing | Your provider’s rate | No platform cut |
Work an example. A store turning over £20,000 a month, using its own payment processor:
- Shopify Basic: £19 subscription + £400 in third-party transaction fees = £419/mo, before your processor’s own charges
- WooCommerce: £40 hosting + £0 platform fees = £40/mo, before your processor’s own charges
The subscription difference is trivial. The transaction fee difference is roughly £4,500 a year. This is why the "WooCommerce is free but hosting costs money" framing is misleading: hosting is the small number in this comparison.
Below about £2,000 a month in sales, the two are close enough that convenience should decide it. Above that, the maths moves decisively and keeps moving.
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Talk To Sales →Cart and checkout: what Shopify will not let you change
This is the restriction most merchants meet only after committing, and it tightened again in 2026.
Shopify deprecated checkout.liquid, the file that used to let developers edit the checkout, and replaced it with Checkout Extensibility. Legacy checkout scripts were sunset for Plus stores on 28 August 2025 and for Basic, Grow and Advanced stores on 26 August 2026.
What matters is what replaced it. Per Shopify’s developer documentation, checkout UI extensions for the information, shipping and payment steps are available only to stores on the Shopify Plus plan. Shopify’s own checkout styling documentation adds that the Checkout Branding API and Checkout Blocks are Plus-only too, as are custom form field values set via API and app blocks on those same pages.
In practice, on Basic, Grow or Advanced you may change your checkout’s logo, colours, typography and layout. You may not add a field, change the flow, or install an app that modifies the information, shipping or payment steps. Plus starts at £1,800 a month.
On WooCommerce the checkout is a template in your theme and a set of documented hooks. Adding a delivery-date picker, a purchase-order field for B2B buyers, an age confirmation, or a one-page checkout is a normal development task on a £25 hosting plan. There is no tier at which this becomes permitted, because it was never forbidden.
The same applies to the cart. Conditional shipping rules, quantity-based discounts, minimum order values by customer group, mixed subscription and one-off baskets: all ordinary work in WooCommerce, all constrained on Shopify below Plus.
If your checkout is the same as everyone else’s, none of this costs you anything. If your business has a rule that has to happen at checkout, it is the whole decision.
Self-hosted, customisable, and actually yours
WooCommerce is self-hosted, which means the software runs on a server you choose and the database belongs to you. Three consequences follow, and they are the reason established merchants migrate to it.
You can leave. A WooCommerce store is files and a MySQL database. Both can be exported in full and moved to any host that runs WordPress. There is no export limitation, no proprietary format, and no need for the platform’s cooperation.
You are not exposed to platform pricing decisions. Shopify has raised prices and changed what sits behind Plus more than once. Merchants absorbed it because migrating was harder than paying. Open-source software cannot do this to you: the version you have keeps working on terms that do not change.
You can change anything. Every part of WooCommerce is filterable and every template overridable. You are not waiting on a roadmap or hoping an app exists.
The other underrated advantage is that WooCommerce sits inside WordPress, which remains the strongest content platform on the web. If your growth strategy involves content, and for most stores it should, running the blog and the shop in one system is a genuine structural advantage. Shopify’s blogging tools are basic by comparison.
Where WooCommerce is genuinely worse
An honest comparison has to include this, and most do not.
- You are responsible for maintenance. Updates, backups, security and uptime are yours. Shopify does all of it. Good managed hosting closes most of this gap, but not the concept.
- Setup takes longer. Shopify gets you selling in an afternoon. WooCommerce needs hosting, a domain, a theme and configuration first.
- Performance is your problem. A poorly hosted WooCommerce store is slow, and a slow store loses sales. Shopify’s infrastructure is fast by default; yours is as fast as you make it.
- Plugin sprawl is a real risk. The flexibility that lets you build anything also lets you install thirty conflicting plugins. Discipline is required.
- No single phone number. Support comes from your host, your theme author and your plugin developers rather than one company.
Most of that list is really one item: WooCommerce moves responsibility from the platform to you and whoever you host with. Which is exactly why the hosting decision matters more here than it does anywhere else.
Where can WooCommerce be hosted?
WooCommerce runs anywhere WordPress runs, which is almost everywhere. That is a strength and a trap, because the cheapest options are the ones least suited to it.
Your realistic choices:
- Budget shared hosting (from about £3/mo). It will technically run a store. It will also put you on a server with hundreds of neighbours, and WooCommerce is far more demanding than a brochure site because cart and checkout pages cannot be cached the way ordinary pages can. Workable for a handful of orders a week; painful beyond that.
- VPS or cloud (from about £20/mo). Full control, good performance, and you are now a sysadmin. Fine if you have those skills or an agency who does.
- Managed WooCommerce hosting (from about $25/mo). The server is configured for WooCommerce specifically, and updates, backups, caching and security are handled for you.
The reason WooCommerce needs more than generic hosting comes down to caching. On a normal site, a page cache serves everyone the same stored HTML and the server barely works. A store cannot do that for cart, checkout and account pages, because those are different for every visitor. Those requests hit PHP and the database every single time. Object caching with Redis is what keeps them fast, and it is the single biggest difference between a store that holds up during a sale and one that falls over.
How FastCow hosts WooCommerce
This is what we do, so weigh it accordingly and check the claims on the WooCommerce hosting page.
FastCow’s managed WooCommerce hosting runs on AMD EPYC and NVMe hardware we own rather than resold cloud capacity, with servers tuned for WooCommerce specifically. Object and page caching are configured for stores out of the box, including Redis for the cart, session and product lookups that cannot be page-cached, which is the part budget hosting gets wrong.
Every plan includes the premium CDN, free SSL, a web application firewall, malware scanning, daily backups, staging and free migrations done by hand by our engineers. Support is 24/7 from in-house WordPress specialists rather than an outsourced first line, which matters more for a store than for a blog: downtime on a shop is lost revenue, not just lost traffic.
Pricing starts at $25/mo with no introductory rate and no renewal increase, and there is a 30-day money-back guarantee. Against Shopify Basic at £19 plus 2% of everything you sell, a flat hosting fee stops looking like the expensive option very quickly.
WooCommerce or Shopify: which should you choose?
| If you... | Choose | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Want to sell this week with no technical work | Shopify | Fastest path to a first order |
| Turn over more than about £2,000/mo | WooCommerce | Transaction fees start to dominate |
| Need a custom checkout or cart rule | WooCommerce | Shopify puts this behind Plus at £1,800/mo |
| Use your own payment processor | WooCommerce | Shopify charges up to 2% extra for the privilege |
| Rely on content and SEO to grow | WooCommerce | WordPress is the stronger content platform |
| Have no technical resource at all | Shopify | Someone has to own maintenance |
| Sell subscriptions, bookings or B2B pricing | WooCommerce | Native, rather than app-dependent |
| Want to own your store outright | WooCommerce | Self-hosted, exportable, no platform dependency |
The pattern is consistent. Shopify is the better product for getting started and the more expensive one to grow on. WooCommerce costs more effort up front and less money over time, and it does not have a tier where your own checkout stops being yours.
If you are weighing other options too, our guide to the top Shopify alternatives covers the wider field, and ecommerce security is worth reading whichever way you go.