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.