Not rivals, different contracts
Shopify and WooCommerce both power serious stores, and the internet's version of this comparison treats them as rival products. They are not. They are different contracts: Shopify rents you a maintained machine and takes fees for the privilege; WooCommerce hands you the machine and the keys, fees-free, and the maintenance is yours. Every difference below is that one difference wearing costumes.
The bill, side by side
| Shopify | WooCommerce | |
|---|---|---|
| Software | Monthly platform fee, tiered by features | Free, open source |
| Payments | Processor fees; platform fee added if you use another gateway | Processor fees only, gateway is your choice |
| Apps / plugins | Recurring app subscriptions, common and compounding | One-time or annual plugin licenses, usually cheaper long-run |
| Hosting | Included, scales silently | Yours: quality hosting is cheap, bad hosting is expensive |
| Maintenance | Platform's problem | Updates, backups, security, speed, someone's actual job |
| Development freedom | Themes and apps; checkout increasingly open on higher tiers | Total, any workflow, any checkout, any integration |
| What leaves with you | Your data, your products, not your storefront | Everything, it all runs anywhere WordPress runs |
The fee math that decides it
Platform fee plus app stack minus gateway freedom: for a store doing steady volume, Shopify's monthly stack commonly lands somewhere between a car payment and a mortgage payment depending on tier and app count, while an equivalently serious WooCommerce stack costs the hosting bill plus plugin licenses. The crossover where ownership wins is well below where most people assume. The catch is the far-right column: WooCommerce's savings are paid in maintenance labour, and that labour must be a real arrangement, a person, a retainer, a routine, or the savings are fictional and the security risk is not.
Who each one suits, without ceremony
Shopify suits the owner who wants to sell, not operate software; the team with no one to own updates and backups; the conventional catalog that fits the platform's shape. It is the right answer surprisingly often, and saying so is not a betrayal of custom development, it is what honest advice looks like.
WooCommerce suits the business whose store is the business: margins tight enough that fees compound visibly, requirements weird enough that apps cannot reach them, content strategy meaty enough that WordPress-the-CMS was already in the picture. See the WordPress vs Shopify guide for the content-vs-commerce version of this fork.
The three questions that pick for you
- Who maintains it? A named person or partner who updates WordPress weekly: WooCommerce viable. No one: Shopify, and sleep well.
- What are your three weirdest requirements? All three answered by Shopify apps off the shelf: Shopify. Any requiring custom code against your own database: WooCommerce.
- What is the fee stack at your realistic year-two revenue? Do the multiplication, one evening with a spreadsheet beats three years of finding out.
Platform migrations in either direction are routine work and fall in the migration band of the cost guide, the one non-negotiable being the redirect map that keeps your rankings alive. Whatever side of the fork you land on, send the brief: you will get a scoped quote with the recommendation argued from your requirements, not from a stack preference.