Shopify's Basic plan runs $25 a month. WooCommerce is free to download. Anyone weighing Shopify vs WooCommerce for small business use starts at those two numbers, and on their own they explain almost nothing about what you'll spend.
Where the platforms differ is where each one takes its cut. Shopify charges a predictable subscription, then adds a penalty if you process payments anywhere else.
WooCommerce charges nothing for the software. It moves the whole bill onto hosting, extensions, and whoever keeps the thing running.
Here's what each side actually costs, using figures from the platforms' own pricing pages. All of them are US dollars.
What Shopify charges
Four tiers are published. Basic is $25 a month billed monthly, or $19 on annual billing. Grow costs $65, dropping to $49 annually.
Above those, Advanced sits at $399 monthly or $299 annually, and Plus starts at $2,300 a month. Most small stores never have a reason to look past the first two.
Staff seats are the limit stores hit first. Basic includes none at all.
Grow gives you five and Advanced fifteen. If two people need their own logins, Basic is already the wrong plan, and that pushes your real floor to $49 a month before you've sold anything.
Every tier below Plus caps inventory locations at ten. For a business shipping from one warehouse, that ceiling never comes up.
The fee that changes the maths
Read the pricing table closely and a second charge appears, one that scales in the opposite direction from the subscription. Use any payment provider that isn't Shopify Payments and Shopify adds 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced, and 0.2% on Plus.
That sits on top of whatever your processor already charges you.
Run it against a real store. At $20,000 a month in sales on Basic with an outside processor, the surcharge alone is $400 a month. The $25 subscription has stopped being the number that matters.
Notice which direction the incentive runs. The cheaper your plan, the more Shopify charges you for processing elsewhere.
So the penalty lands hardest on the smallest stores, the ones least able to absorb it. Upgrading to Grow to halve the surcharge is a calculation plenty of stores end up making, and it's a $40 a month decision wearing the costume of a feature upgrade.
One figure is missing from that page: Shopify's own card processing rates. The pricing FAQ confirms the fees "vary depending on the plan that you choose" without printing what they are. They're findable, just not where a buyer would reasonably look.
What WooCommerce charges
Nothing, for the plugin itself. WooCommerce states plainly that the core platform carries no monthly subscription and no revenue share, with unlimited products, orders and API access.
Then the real bill arrives.
WooCommerce's own pricing page puts hosting at $25 to $350 a month for most stores, scaling with traffic and performance needs. Extensions run $29 to $299 a year each.
On payments, WooPayments takes roughly 2.50% to 2.90% plus 30 cents. Bring your own processor instead and there's no extra platform fee, which is the exact mirror of Shopify's arrangement.
Take the middle of those ranges. A modest store on decent managed hosting lands near $100 a month, and most need three or four paid extensions to do ordinary things like subscriptions or advanced shipping.
Call it $1,600 a year before anyone has touched the site.
Maintenance is where WooCommerce budgets usually break. Someone has to apply updates, untangle the plugin conflict that follows an update, and restore the store when a conflict takes it down.
That's either your evenings or an invoice. It's also the only line item here nobody can quote you in advance.
The market share figure, and why it misleads
WooCommerce sits on more websites. Analysis of HTTP Archive data from May 2026 found WooCommerce on 6.64% of measurable web origins against Shopify's 4.76%.
Narrow the sample to the top million sites and it flips. Shopify holds 6.08% there against WooCommerce's 3.12%, close to a two-to-one lead.
Both numbers are accurate. Because they describe different populations, no two comparison articles quote the same figure.
GravityKit, whose analysis produced those numbers, says as much directly: sources measure different things, some counting all websites and some only sites detected as stores, with detection methods varying between them.
Read it this way. WooCommerce wins on sheer count of installations, Shopify wins among stores pulling real traffic.
Whether that's because Shopify attracts larger businesses or because it helps them get larger, the data can't tell you. Anyone claiming otherwise is reading their preference into a crawl statistic.
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Which one to pick
For most small businesses opening their first store, Shopify. The reasoning is narrow and it has little to do with features.
Shopify's costs are legible. You know the subscription, you know the payment surcharge, and you can work out your annual spend before building anything.
WooCommerce's costs are just as real but scattered. They sit across a hosting bill, a stack of annual renewals, and a maintenance load that only announces itself when something breaks.
Pick WooCommerce when you have a specific reason for it. Maybe you already run WordPress and content is the actual business.
Maybe you need something no Shopify app covers and you have a developer who can build it. Or your volume is high enough that Shopify's third-party payment surcharge would exceed what hosting and maintenance cost you.
That last case arrives earlier than people expect. On Basic, 2% of monthly sales overtakes a $100 hosting bill at $5,000 a month in revenue.
Run that calculation against your own volume instead of assuming the free platform is the cheaper one. It takes ten minutes and it's the only part of this decision that's genuinely arithmetic rather than judgement.
The reasoning worth abandoning is that WooCommerce is free and therefore the safe pick on a tight budget. Free software carrying a $1,600 annual operating cost and an open-ended maintenance liability is a different proposition from $300 a year of Shopify Basic.
That gap widens every time something needs fixing.
Before you commit either way, price your first year properly. Take your expected monthly order volume, apply the processing rates, then add hosting and extension renewals if you're going WooCommerce, or the third-party payment surcharge if you're going Shopify and want to keep the processor you already have.
