Shopify
Best for: Retail and ordinary products, small teams, nobody who wants to patch software.
Take the subscription and get on with selling. The maintenance you are not doing is the product you are buying.
Platform comparison
Shopify vs WooCommerce Compared
These two are not really competing on features. They are competing on responsibility. Shopify runs the software and you run the shop; WooCommerce hands you both. Everything else in this comparison follows from that.
The short answer
Choose Shopify if nobody at your business wants to be responsible for software. Choose WooCommerce if your site is already WordPress, or you want to own the whole stack and have somebody to keep it patched. That covers most cases honestly, and the table below is for the ones it does not.
Side by side
| Shopify | WooCommerce | |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting | Included. Nothing to buy | Yours. See WooCommerce hosting |
| Software updates | Shopify's responsibility | Yours, forever, including plugins and theme |
| Storefront SSL | Included | Your certificate on your plan |
| Control of the code | Limited by design. Themes and apps, within the platform's rules | Complete. It is your site |
| Unusual pricing and process | Apps and workarounds, which add up | Buildable, if you are willing to build |
| Cost shape | A predictable subscription, plus apps | Hosting, plus paid extensions, plus somebody's time |
| If it breaks at 2am | Shopify's problem | Yours, or your host's, or your developer's |
| Leaving | Export data, rebuild the front end, plan redirects | Same, and you keep the server |
Where each one goes wrong
Shopify, badly chosen
A business with trade pricing, quantity breaks or a quoting process buys a subscription, then fills the gaps with apps. Twelve apps later the monthly bill and the page speed both look like a build would have been cheaper. If your first month is spent searching for an app to make the platform behave, that is the signal.
WooCommerce, badly chosen
A business with nobody to maintain it. The store launches, updates stop about four months in, the site gets slower, and eventually something out of date gets exploited. This is the single most common failure we are called in to clean up, and the platform is not what went wrong. The plan for maintaining it is.
Recommendation by business type
Which column you are in, stated plainly.
WooCommerce
Best for: Businesses already on WordPress, or with a developer on hand.
Keep the store and the content together on hosting you control, and put a maintenance habit in place before launch rather than after the first incident.
A build by AldoMedia
Best for: Trade sales, made to order, quoting, or a catalog tied to another system.
When both columns need a pile of workarounds, the platform is not the problem. AldoMedia builds on either, and hosts the self-hosted one.
Want a straight answer for your business?
Tell us what you sell, roughly how many products, and who would keep the site updated. That is enough for us to put you in a column, and we will name the one that earns us nothing when that is the right call.
Shopify and WooCommerce questions
Is Shopify better than WooCommerce?
Neither is better in the abstract. Shopify is better if you would rather sell than maintain software, because the servers and updates are its responsibility. WooCommerce is better if you already run WordPress or you want control of the whole stack, and you have somebody to keep it current. The wrong answer for a business with nobody to do maintenance is WooCommerce, and it is the most common mistake we see.
Is WooCommerce cheaper than Shopify?
The monthly line usually looks cheaper because the plugin is free and you only pay for hosting. Add paid extensions and the hours somebody spends applying updates and it often is not. The comparison worth making is total cost including time, not the subscription alone.
Do I need hosting for WooCommerce but not for Shopify?
Exactly that. WooCommerce is self-hosted, so it needs a plan, an SSL certificate and backups. Shopify is fully hosted, so the platform provides all three and a separate hosting plan would sit empty.
Can I move from Shopify to WooCommerce, or the other way?
Yes, and it is real work either way. Products and customers export reasonably well. Themes, apps and URL structure do not travel, and it is the URL changes that cost you search rankings if nobody plans the redirects. Hold your domain at a registrar so at least the address is never part of the migration.
Which is better for SEO, Shopify or WooCommerce?
Both are capable and neither gives you rankings. WooCommerce gives you more control over URLs and markup because you control the site. Shopify fixes some of the URL structure but is fast and clean by default. In practice the store that ranks is the one with better pages and a sensible structure, not the one on a particular platform.