WooCommerce vs Shopify Plus

Which should you choose?

Start with what your site runs on – content or commerce – and who keeps it running. WooCommerce gives you open-source ownership and the whole maintenance job. Shopify Plus takes hosting, security and updates off your team and, in exchange, sets limits on what you can change.

How do WooCommerce and Shopify Plus compare side by side?

Broad comparison; details vary by host, plugin stack and project. Platform facts as of October 2026. Moving a WooCommerce store to Shopify Plus typically takes 3–⁠10 weeks.

Is WooCommerce really free?

The software is. Running a store on it isn’t. WooCommerce’s costs are spread across invoices nobody adds up: hosting, plugin renewals, security tools and the developer hours that keep everything compatible.

Shopify Plus pricing checked on Shopify’s pricing page and the WooCommerce Subscriptions price on WooCommerce.com in October 2026. Hosting and maintenance vary too much between stores to quote as one range – which is why the worksheet below starts from your own invoices.

Do the math with your own invoices

Add up the last 12 months:

1. Hosting. The plan, CDN, staging and any managed-hosting add-ons.
2. Licenses. Every premium plugin and theme renewal.
3. Security and backups. Firewall, malware scanning, backup and uptime services.
4. Maintenance hours. Developer or agency time spent on updates, conflicts and fixes – not on new features.
5. Lost sales. An honest estimate of revenue lost to slow pages or downtime during your biggest sale.

Compare that total with what replaces it on Shopify Plus: the $27,600–⁠$30,000 subscription (high-volume stores move to a revenue-based variable fee) plus the monthly apps you would add. Leave new-feature development out of both sides – you pay for it on either platform. For the full budget, a realistic all-in Shopify Plus spend, including apps and development, runs $60,000–⁠$250,000+ a year before payment processing; the Shopify Plus pricing guide breaks that down by store size.

For content-led sites with light commerce, WooCommerce often still wins this math. For commerce-led businesses, it usually doesn’t. The move itself is a one-time cost: a WooCommerce migration typically runs $25,000–⁠$60,000, and the migration cost guide shows what moves the number.

Do you need Shopify Plus, or will standard Shopify do?

Many WooCommerce stores don’t need Plus. Below roughly $1M–⁠$2M in yearly sales with a simple catalog, a standard Shopify plan is usually the better economics – and if that’s your store, our free assessment will tell you.

Prices from Shopify’s pricing page, checked October 2026. The Shopify fee applies only when you use a third-party gateway instead of Shopify Payments; your processor’s own fees come on top. High-volume Plus stores pay a revenue-based variable fee instead of the flat fee.

Wholesale alone no longer means Plus. Since April 2, 2026, Shopify’s core B2B features – company accounts, up to 3 B2B catalogs, volume pricing, net payment terms and a B2B checkout – are on every paid plan. Plus earns its premium when you need:

• Checkout UI extensions on the information, shipping and payment steps
• Custom apps built with Shopify Functions for your own discount, shipping or payment logic
• B2B at scale: more than 3 catalogs, catalogs assigned to specific companies, deposits and partial payments
• Expansion stores – up to 9 more stores for the same brand (regions, wholesale or outlet) under one contract; a separate brand needs its own Plus contract
• Higher API limits for heavy ERP, PIM or OMS integrations

If BigCommerce is on your shortlist too, read BigCommerce vs Shopify Plus.

Who keeps the store updated and secure?

Both platforms change constantly. The difference is who does the work when they do – and on WooCommerce, keeping up with updates is also most of your security.

WooCommerce: you run the update cycle

WooCommerce ships a new major version on a roughly 5-week cycle. WordPress core, your theme, every plugin and the PHP version on your server update on their own schedules, and any of them can break another. Careful teams test each update on staging before it reaches the live store.

Around those releases sit the routine jobs:

• Resolving conflicts when two plugins – or a plugin and your theme – change the same thing
• Updating theme templates that override WooCommerce’s own after WooCommerce flags them as outdated
• Moving to newer PHP and database versions as hosts retire old ones
• Keeping the database lean as orders, sessions and logs pile up. Stores started before late 2023 may still keep orders in WordPress’s posts tables rather than High-Performance Order Storage, the default for new installs since WooCommerce 8.2
• Renewing plugin licenses: when a WooCommerce.com subscription lapses, updates and support stop, and an outdated extension can clash with newer WooCommerce versions

Shopify Plus: no upgrade projects, but not zero maintenance

Shopify updates the platform continuously, so there is no version to upgrade. Your team’s time goes to the theme, apps, custom features and integrations – including new theme versions, where code edits that clash with the update are merged by hand.

Two things still need planning. Shopify releases a new API version every quarter and supports each for at least 12 months, so custom apps and integrations need a yearly update. And Shopify retires features on its own schedule: stores that relied on Shopify Scripts had to rebuild that logic in Shopify Functions before Scripts stopped running on June 30, 2026.

Security and PCI: who owns what

The risk sits in plugins, not WordPress itself. Patchstack’s State of WordPress Security in 2026 report counted 11,334 new vulnerabilities in the WordPress ecosystem in 2025: 91% in plugins, 9% in themes and just 6 in WordPress core.

Almost half – 46% – had no fix available when they were disclosed. Every plugin you add is code someone has to keep patched.

On PCI, a gateway’s hosted payment fields keep card numbers off your server and shrink your scope – but WooCommerce’s own documentation is clear that “PCI DSS compliance is ultimately the responsibility of the store owner.” On Shopify Plus, the platform and checkout are covered by Shopify’s PCI DSS Level 1 compliance.

What happens to speed when traffic spikes?

On WooCommerce, every layer of the stack is yours to size, patch and watch – or your host’s, depending on the plan you pay for:

• Nginx or Apache
• PHP workers
• MySQL or MariaDB
• Redis object cache
• Page cache
• CDN
• SSL certificates
• Staging
• Backups
• Uptime monitoring
• Scaling before peak sales

Why sale days are hard on WooCommerce

A page cache serves product and category pages cheaply. Carts, checkout, account pages and logged-in customers can’t be served from it, so during a launch or Black Friday your most valuable traffic runs PHP and database queries on every request.

That is where an undersized server runs out of headroom, and every plugin adds its own queries and scripts to the load. Teams prepare with bigger servers, more PHP workers, object caching, database tuning and load tests – work that has to be repeated as the store grows.

On Shopify Plus

Shopify runs hosting, a global CDN, caching, SSL and scaling, so there is nothing to provision before Black Friday. Page speed comes down to theme code, app scripts and image weight – which is where performance optimization on Plus focuses.

Content and SEO: where does WordPress still lead?

WordPress is still the stronger publishing tool. If guides, recipes, reviews or a magazine drive your traffic, that matters more than any checkout feature.

• WordPress: categories and tags, custom post types, the block editor, revisions, editorial roles and SEO plugins such as Yoast or Rank Math, with full control of your URL structure.
• Shopify: blogs with tags and authors, pages, metaobjects for structured content such as lookbooks or size guides, an automatic sitemap and an editable robots.txt – with fixed paths: /products/, /collections/, /pages/ and /blogs/.

3 ways to handle your content when you move

A /blog path served by WordPress on the store’s own domain isn’t supported out of the box on any Shopify plan, Plus included: Shopify’s app proxy puts content under a prefixed path such as /apps/blog, and routing part of the domain to another server at the edge is custom infrastructure you would own and maintain. If the exact path matters, headless commerce is the clean way to get it.

What changes for SEO

Both platforms rank well. The risk is the move: Shopify’s paths are fixed, so almost every store URL changes.

WooCommerce permalink bases can be customized, so the real map starts from your full URL list – including old redirects, tag pages and query-string URLs.

A per-pattern 301 map, the titles and meta descriptions carried over from Yoast or Rank Math, and ranking monitoring after launch decide whether traffic holds. OUXP includes all three in every migration.

What can you customize – checkout, catalog and B2B?

WooCommerce lets you change almost anything because you own the code. Shopify Plus is flexible through extension points – Functions, checkout extensions, metafields – not through access to the core.

Checkout

• WooCommerce: change any checkout field, step or rule in PHP or through the checkout block’s extension points, and connect any payment provider that has a plugin.
• Shopify Plus: you don’t own the checkout code. You customize it with checkout UI extensions, the branding API, web pixels and Shopify Functions for discount, shipping and payment logic, and take payments through Shopify Payments or a supported third-party gateway.

That covers the usual changes: extra checkout fields, delivery-date pickers, custom discount and shipping rules, and hiding or renaming payment and delivery options. It doesn’t let you rewrite the checkout’s code or add a payment provider Shopify doesn’t support – so list every change your WooCommerce checkout makes and check each one before you commit.

Catalog

• WooCommerce: attributes and variations with no fixed cap, plus add-on plugins for engraving, gift messages and other custom fields.
• Shopify: 3 options and up to 2,048 variants per product, extra data in metafields and metaobjects, and personalization through line item properties.

Products with more than 3 option types are the main restructuring job: some options become separate products, others become metafields or personalization fields.

B2B and wholesale

• WooCommerce: wholesale pricing, customer roles, minimum orders and net terms come from plugins.
• Shopify: company accounts with multiple buyers and locations, B2B catalogs, volume pricing, quantity rules, net payment terms and quotes through draft orders are native – on every paid plan since April 2026, with the larger-scale features on Plus.

ERP connections run through the Admin API or middleware; see commerce integrations.

Subscriptions and international selling

• Subscriptions: WooCommerce Subscriptions on one side; Recharge, Skio or Shopify Subscriptions on the other.
• Selling abroad: currency and translation plugins on WooCommerce; on Shopify, Markets handles currencies, domains and pricing per market, with Shopify’s Translate & Adapt app or a translation app for languages.

What is it like to build on each – and what about AI?

Your developers feel the trade-off every week: WooCommerce gives them more freedom and more upkeep, Shopify Plus fewer choices and faster releases.

AI and automation

Shopify ships AI in the admin on every plan, Plus included: Shopify Magic for content, and Sidekick, an assistant that can analyze the store and carry out tasks with your approval (usage limits vary by plan). Shopify Flow handles automation, and the app ecosystem adds AI search and merchandising. On WooCommerce, AI comes from plugins and third-party services that you install, connect and keep updated.

Thinking about leaving WooCommerce?

Price the move before you commit to it. OUXP moves WooCommerce stores to Shopify Plus, and our free assessment needs no access to your store. Within 2 business days an engineer sends a written platform verdict, timeline band, cost band and the 2–⁠3 risks most likely to complicate your move – and says so if staying on WooCommerce, or starting on standard Shopify, is the better call.

What a WooCommerce move involves

1. Plugin audit. Every plugin is classified: built into Shopify, replaced by an app, rebuilt in code or retired.
2. Product model. Attributes become up to 3 options; extra attributes and custom fields become metafields; add-on options become line item properties.
3. URLs and SEO. A per-pattern 301 map, carried-over metadata and ranking monitoring after launch.
4. Customers and orders. Customers, addresses and order history move; passwords can’t. With Shopify’s customer accounts, customers sign in with a one-time code sent by email.
5. Subscriptions. Active subscribers and renewal schedules move to the new subscription app; whether stored cards can move depends on your payment gateway, so that is checked first.
6. Content. Decide early whether posts move into Shopify or WordPress stays on a subdomain.
7. Integrations. Each ERP, 3PL, accounting or marketing connection is its own small project.

What happens to your plugins

Plugin sprawl usually shrinks a lot: much of what plugins add to WooCommerce is built into Shopify.

Common outcomes, not a fixed list – every plugin is itemized during discovery. Backup plugins are the exception: Shopify doesn’t restore store data for you, so keep scheduled exports or a backup app. App subscriptions are billed by their vendors.

Typical range: $25,000–⁠$60,000 over 3–⁠10 weeks, depending on catalog size, custom functionality and integrations. WooCommerce data exports cleanly, so mapping plugins to apps and features is most of the work.

The assessment gives you a band; the price and timeline are fixed in writing before work starts, after a deeper review with read-only access under NDA. SEO preservation is always included.