Shopify vs. WooCommerce
Commerce runs on platforms—not plugins
Between strong conversion, cost officiency, and first to market innovation, the data all points to one conclusion: Shopify is leading the commerce race
Join thousands of brands who have outgrown WooCommerce
Brands are switching to Shopify—the most dependable global commerce platform to expand your business.
Secure and reliable
Run on Shopify’s global infrastructure
Shopify provides you with secure encryption, access control, data backups, and network security—so you can focus on your brand’s growth. With open-source platforms like WooCommerce, your teams are responsible for hosting, PCI compliance, and software updates all on their own —increasing potential cybersecurity threats.
33
Reported vulnerabilities on WooCommerce in 2023, highlighting security risks for brands
99.99%+
Shopify’s average uptime ensures that online stores are always accessible to customers.
WE HANDLE IT ALL
Industry-leading performance
When it comes to performance, we’re leading the race. Shopify services over 644 million shoppers worldwide, with high-speed performance and high converting sites. A global study shows Shopify outperforms WooCommerce’s checkout by 17%. And with over 5.5 billion processed orders on record, Shopify empowers you with market-leading scalable solutions.
END-TO-END COMPLIANCE
Keep all of your data safe
Shopify prioritizes enabling your compliance with frameworks like PCI for secure payments, SOC 1, 2, 3 for retailers, and GDPR for data protection. In comparison, WooCommerce lacks out-of-the-box PCI, SOC, and GDPR compliance—increasing the risks of identity theft, damage to your company’s reputation, and loss of customers—not to mention potential lawsuits, insurance claims, and government fines.
FRAUD PROTECTION
Protect against fraud
Shopify offers layered fraud protection, including integrated fraud analysis tools that sync with top detection services. With insights on order risk, chargebacks, and more, our built-in analytics empowers you to make informed decisions without security breaches, ensuring data safety.
Our website was stopping our growth. We realized we needed to stop, rewind, and get the right infrastructure in place to stabilize us. Then we could focus on growing again.
- Chris Anastasi — Co-owner
- Read case study
Whenever we did a launch, we had to pray the site wouldn’t crash. The stability of Shopify Plus has given us peace of mind. We have a global community of football fans and we needed a platform that could keep up with high traffic and large volumes of orders being placed at the same time—especially when we launch new products.
- Matthias Leibitz — Co-founder and CEO, T1TAN
- Read case study
Better TCO
Be more efficient on Shopify
Shopify’s total cost of ownership (TCO) is 36% better than WooCommerce’s. From competitive platform fees to platform simplicity and user-friendliness, Shopify is the platform of choice for businesses looking to improve their operational efficiency.*
See your TCO savings with Shopify
Use our TCO calculator to get a detailed view of your costs compared to Shopify’s.
36% Better TCO on Shopify than WooCommerce, on average
Compared to Shopify, WooCommerce has:
49%
Higher implementation and setup costs, on average
32%
Higher platform fees and ecommerce stack costs, on average
41%
Higher operating costs, on average
UNCOVER SURPRISE COSTS
WooCommerce is free (but read the fine print)
Platform costs are better on Shopify, overall. WooCommerce, being a plugin itself, provides only the basics out-of-the-box, and relies heavily on additional plugins for functionality. When adding up the costs of payment fees, additional plugins and software, you’ll pay 32% more in platform and tech stack costs on WooCommerce than Shopify, on average.
OPERATE WITHOUT DELAY
Choose convenience over compromise
Shopify's overall operating costs are better than WooCommerce's due to platform simplicity and less reliance on developers. WooCommerce requires multiple add-ons and many of the brands that have switched from WooCommerce to Shopify reported having to hire someone in-house or outsource an agency just to keep things running smoothly. This can cost you more money and slow down your work. WooCommerce has 41% higher operational and support costs, on average.
IMPLEMENT EFFICIENTLY
Save on your setup
An implementation of a new storefront on Shopify is 41% faster than on WooCommerce, on average. This could be due to additional plugins and customizations required to enhance your site. This can complicate your tech stack and slow down your setup on WooCommerce. In fact, WooCommerce's limited functionality and complex integrations, like needing API gateways, lead to about 49% higher setup costs, on average.
BETTER ROI
Our conversion study says it all
Shopify has the best global checkout and, on average, a 17% higher conversion rate than WooCommerce. Consider this 17% difference in conversion rate as money you're leaving on the table by choosing WooCommerce instead of Shopify.
WordPress... incurs significant additional costs in terms of development and project management, which would have eventually exceeded the price of the Shopify package.
- Vincent Arrouet — CEO and co-founder, Sunology
- Read case study
Usable and agile
One plugin shouldn't power your entire business
With a user-friendly interface, Shopify fuels agility, allowing your business to adapt and respond to market trends as you grow. Your teams can manage your storefront with ease, even without technical expertise. In contrast, WooCommerce operates as a plugin for your WordPress site, with additional plugins required to enhance it. However, plugins don’t always work well together when integrated on WooCommerce—leading your teams to rely on developers even for minor changes.
EASY ADMIN MANAGEMENT
Anyone on your team can run Shopify
Shopify's intuitive UI empowers both technical and business users to drive value, independently. In contrast, WooCommerce requires developer involvement for implementing and updating plugins and many changes to storefronts. Shopify has the ability to run on “low code” without compromising the quality of your storefront.
WORDPRESS
Shopify integrates seamlessly with Wordpress
Brands are often surprised by Shopify’s content capabilities. You can create rich content on our platform, reducing the need for a separate CMS. However, Shopify seamlessly supports headless storefronts of all types including Wordpress. As Mark Negelmann, Director of Operations at Lull, says, "Would our unique identity fit into the confines of the Shopify infrastructure? The answer: Yes," leading Lull to save 25% on software costs and 10%–15% on tech expenses.
Shopify's powerful CMS allows RUDIS to exhibit their wrestling ethos and unparalleled expertise with engaging product stories, highlights of RUDIS's design and engineering, champion athlete stories, and spotlights on Team RUDIS.
MOVE FASTER WITHOUT FRICTION
All the agility, none of the technical debt
Empower your engineers to innovate by working with Shopify's prebuilt solutions. Eliminate technical debt and the need for custom development on WooCommerce. On Shopify, you can accelerate business innovation by reducing time spent on implementations and maintenance.
With WordPress and WooCommerce, I was completely out of sync with my agency. Every time I needed to change a comma or anything, I had to create specifications, request a quote, wait for the developer to be available... It was not at all sustainable.
- Vincent Arrouet — CEO and co-founder, Sunology
- Read case study
By being an easy-to-use ecommerce platform, Shopify Plus takes the stress off retailers by maintaining an efficient and seamless environment. It allows you to focus on building your brand, building your customer base, improving your messaging, and things that are actually going to drive your bottom line.
- Sam Bjelke-Petersen — Cofounder
- Read case study
Shopify Plus makes collaboration across the team easier,” says Anastasi. “If our team members haven’t come from an ecommerce background, we can train them up in half a day or less. The accessibility offered allows everyone to take ownership of certain areas of the website.
- Chris Anastasi — Co-owner
- Read case study
More capabilities
Get more out of the box on Shopify
Shopify has a full suite of best-in-class commerce capabilities that will support your business no matter what your plans are for growth. Features on Shopify like advanced B2B, product configurations, and marketing tools are just some features we’ll provide your business—minus the technical debt.
100%
Shopify is commerce-focused
200+
Product enhancements and updates in the past year alone
BUILT-IN CAPABILITIES
Everything you need is on one platform
Shopify’s comprehensive commerce solution across DTC, B2B, and Point of Sale (POS) is here to help your business grow, in every way. Our built-in features like semantic search, multicurrency and language management, free first-party marketing tools, and customizable data models provide best-in-class functionality to help your teams focus on innovating more and building from scratch less.
EXTENSIVE APP SELECTION
The advantage of Shopify's trusted ecosystem
Shopify gives you access to more than 8,000 trusted apps that are prebuilt and ready to use, so you can extend functionality that meet your business needs—without a developer to assist. On WooCommerce, there’s limited governance as to what plugins are listed, and little information about how they’re maintained. Shopify focuses on making sure everything works together smoothly and updates easily.
WHY RECOGNITION MATTERS
Trust the leaders in commerce
Shopify, with its growing customer base, CMS optionality, and scalability, is highly rated as a leader in ecommerce in known analyst reports. With WooCommerce’s slow growth momentum, coupled with a customer base focused primarily on smaller businesses, they don’t show up on reports like IDC, Forrester, or Gartner that are geared towards scalability for larger brands. Also, the company’s dependence on WordPress limits your CMS options, placing a roadblock in front of your growing business.
A CLEAR ROADMAP
Shopify launches more new features than WooCommerce
Shopify has released hundreds of product updates, twice a year, through Editions since 2021—with a focus on making commerce better for everyone. In contrast, WooCommerce’s roadmap is sparse. At Shopify, we provide you with a frequently updated, secure, optimized, and sustainable commerce platform that’s made for your business growth.
TRUSTED ECOMMERCE PARTNERS
Shopify expertise is easy to find
Hundreds of global agencies and partners are deeply versed in Shopify to help support your business. Quickfire Digital, a Shopify partner, developed a guide on why moving off of WooCommerce to Shopify will benefit your growing business. Another Shopify partner, Fyresite, released a brief stating reasons why they won’t implement WooCommerce any longer.
Shopify’s investment in R&D
We’re standing by our mission of making commerce better for everyone. Shopify has spent billions on research and development (R&D) to continuously make product improvements for our customers.
Billions
Invested to improve Shopify’s platform for its customers
800+
Shopify features and improvements added since 2020
One of the biggest advantages of Shopify Plus is the peace of mind we get being with the biggest platform with the biggest players on it.
- Justin Gaggino — Chief Operating Officer, HiSmile
- Read case study
We initially went global on one website, but our sales multiplied by 10 in each market as soon as we sold our products in Australian dollars, U.S. dollars, in the Euro, and in the Great Britain pound.
- Nik Mirkovic — Co-founder, HiSmile
- Read case study
LVLY had a WordPress website, built using WooCommerce, and was a “house of cards.” Overloaded with customizations, the website became fragile, and making minute changes or running basic functions was a challenge.
- Hannah Black — Chief Growth Officer
- Read case study
Analyst validation
The experts choose Shopify
70%
Shopify’s market share of the top 800 global DTC brands
83%
Number of rising apparel brands on Shopify, according to 2PM
GARTNER® MAGIC QUADRANT™
Shopify named as a Leader in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™
In 2023, Shopify was named a Leader in Gartner® Magic Quadrant™, with the highest ability to execute of any platform. We believe this is a testament to our innovation and unique vision for commerce.
August 21, 2023
2PM
2PM reports a surge of brands using Shopify vs. WooCommerce
The news outlet 2PM recently audited the technology of 60+ rising apparel brands from around the world. Their finding? 55 of those brands, or 83%, are on Shopify, while 3% of those brands are WooCommerce customers.
November 2023
IDC
IDC says Shopify is “reshaping the concept of enterprise commerce”
At Shopify's Enterprise Partner Summit in Los Angeles, IDC concluded that Shopify’s “bold foray into the enterprise sector” is “reshaping the concept of enterprise commerce” and “challenging established enterprise players with ‘unified commerce’ capabilities.”
October 4, 2023
PROMINENT VOICES
Rick Watson says the future of ecommerce is between Shopify and Commercetools
On the Your Basket Is Empty podcast, Rick Watson predicts that Shopify will be a major ecommerce player going forward.
October 4, 2023
Migration partners
Migrate with the largest commerce partner ecosystem there is
Looking to migrate from WooCommerce? Shopify Partners can help. Let our global partners help you pave the way to your growth.
10,000+
App and technology partners
100+
Shopify Plus Certified App Partners
Featured WooCommerce migration partners
SHOPIFY VS. WOOCOMMERCE
Want better results? Switch to Shopify
From higher revenue to constant innovation, customers and analysts agree that Shopify’s the undisputed choice.