Trying to make the choice between Shopify vs WordPress for your ecommerce store?

By the numbers, Shopify and WordPress are the two most popular ways to create an ecommerce store, so both can definitely get the job done.

However, there are still some important differences between the platforms that might push you in one direction or the other.

In this post, we’ll try to highlight those differences and help you make the right choice for your unique situation by focusing on the following areas:

• What you can create with Shopify and WordPress
• Ease of use and basic store management
• Flexibility and customization
• Design options
• App and plugin marketplaces
• Pricing

For the most part, we’ll discuss using the WooCommerce plugin to add ecommerce functionality to WordPress. However, we’ll also cover a number of other suitable WordPress ecommerce tools, including Gravity Forms, which may be more suitable depending on your use case.

What can you create with Shopify and WordPress?

While you’re probably interested in creating an ecommerce store if you’re reading this comparison, we still think it’s useful to kick things off by talking about the types of websites that you can create with Shopify and WordPress.

Shopify

Shopify focuses exclusively on ecommerce, so that’s pretty much all you can build with it.

It does include support for some other functions that ecommerce stores might want, such as a basic blogging tool. But in general, Shopify doesn’t offer robust functionality for anything beyond ecommerce.

In fact, you’ll see some Shopify stores that still use WordPress to power other parts of their sites (such as their blogs) because WordPress generally gives you a lot more flexibility if you want to move outside ecommerce.

WordPress

While WordPress is one of the most popular ecommerce platforms in existence, one of the key differentiators between WordPress vs Shopify is that WordPress is not just an ecommerce platform.

You can use WordPress to build pretty much any type of website, thanks in large part to its extensible nature and large library of plugins.

To create an ecommerce store with WordPress, most people use the WooCommerce plugin, which offers full-service ecommerce functionality on par with Shopify.

However, you can also use other plugins for ecommerce depending on your use case. For example, if you don’t want to create a full-blown ecommerce website, and instead just want to sell a few physical or digital products, you could use the Gravity Forms plugin to create payment forms for those products.

Gravity Forms integrates with popular payment gateways like PayPal, Stripe, and Square, allowing you to securely process one-time or even recurring payments without the overhead of managing a large ecommerce system.

This makes it a great solution for businesses, creators, or freelancers who want to quickly set up a checkout process for things like digital downloads, event tickets, or limited product runs, without needing to manage inventory, shipping, or advanced storefront features.

Beyond that, you can add pretty much any other type of functionality to your site using either built-in features or plugins.

This can include full-service blogs, online courses, membership websites, social communities, forums, appointment booking, and lots, lots more.

Having all this flexibility in one platform lets you simplify your business’s online presence now and also makes it easier to scale and grow your business in the future.

Basically, even if you’re only focused on building an ecommerce store right now, there’s still value in choosing a tool that can grow and expand with you in the future.

Ease of use and basic store management

Next, let’s take a look at the user experience of creating and managing your store, which will give you an idea about the ease of use of WordPress vs Shopify.

Shopify

Because Shopify is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, one of its standout features is its ease of use.

Creating a store is pretty much as simple as registering for a Shopify account and going through a short setup wizard.

You can manage your store from a dashboard that looks like this:

You’ll get non-technical areas to manage pretty much every part of your store, including all its settings.

You can add products using an interface like this:

WordPress

Creating a WordPress ecommerce store is also something that a non-technical person can do.

However, how you create your store will affect the ease of use of the experience:

• If you want to self-host the WordPress software, you will need to purchase your own hosting and then install the software there.
• If you want more of a SaaS experience like Shopify, you could use something like the WordPress.com Commerce plan, which lets you launch a WordPress ecommerce store just by registering for an account.

While purchasing your own hosting and installing the software might sound complex, it’s really easier than it sounds.

For example, here’s what it looks like to install WordPress at Kinsta, a popular WordPress host:

Once you’ve installed WordPress, you can manage everything from a non-technical dashboard that looks like this:

If you’re using the WooCommerce plugin to create your store, it will add a number of areas to the WordPress dashboard where you can manage ecommerce details, including all of the settings for your store.

For example, here’s what it looks like to add products in WooCommerce:

Flexibility and customizability

Because Shopify is a hosted, closed-source platform and WordPress is a self-hosted, open-source platform, there are some pretty big differences in terms of the level of flexibility that you have.

If you’re not familiar with what those terms mean, here’s a very quick rundown:

• Hosted + closed-source – Shopify hosts the software for you and you don’t have the ability to interact with the source code underlying your store. Basically, you can only make the customizations that Shopify allows you to make.
• Self-hosted + open-source – You have full control over all the code on your site and you’re free to edit it as needed. This essentially means that you’re free to make any customizations that you want.

If you’re just creating a “regular” ecommerce store, there might not be any practical difference between the two. For many store owners, Shopify offers plenty of flexibility via its app marketplace and the built-in customizations that it allows.

However, there can be some situations where you run into hard limits at Shopify that you wouldn’t with WordPress.

For example, Shopify puts some hard limits on variable products, which could cause issues if you want to offer highly customizable products:

• Maximum of three options per product.
• Maximum of 100 variants per product.

In contrast, you can have as many variants and options as you want when you use WordPress.

This is just one illustrative example of the types of hardcoded limits that can pop up with Shopify.

All in all, if you need to create a really unique, customized ecommerce store, WordPress will give you more flexibility.

Themes and design options

To control the sitewide design of your store, both Shopify and WordPress rely on themes.

Your theme controls sitewide elements such as layouts, colors, typography, etc. You can also use visual editors to control the design and content of key pages.

Shopify themes

Shopify offers an official theme marketplace that includes 800+ different themes. You can also buy themes from other sources.

Shopify also offers a code-free interface to customize your theme. It gives you a live preview of your site along with some sidebars where you can make changes, which is similar to how the native WordPress theme customizer works.

You cannot click and type on the live preview, but you can drag things around and use options in the sidebar to customize the content.

WordPress themes

WordPress offers thousands of free and premium pre-made themes that you can choose from. Or, if you want something completely custom, you can always create your own theme from scratch.

How you customize your theme will depend on the theme itself, but most themes give you a real-time visual interface similar to what Shopify offers:

If you want even more code-free design control over your store, you can use one of the many visual, drag-and-drop builder plugins. Elementor is a popular option that supports WooCommerce, but there are many other high-quality plugins to choose from.

App and plugin marketplaces

To help you add functionality to your store and integrate with other services, both Shopify and WordPress support extensions:

• On Shopify, they’re called apps.
• On WordPress, they’re called plugins.

In general, WordPress has a larger collection of plugins, which gives you some extra flexibility for adding features and integrations. However, Shopify’s app marketplace is still quite good when compared to other website building tools.

If you were ranking the diversity of extensions across every single website building tool, WordPress would be number one, but Shopify would probably be in or near second place.

Shopify apps

Currently, there are more than 8,000+ free and paid apps available in the official Shopify App Store.

These apps span a variety of different categories, including adding frontend user-facing features, backend management features, integrations, and more.

Because Shopify uses a hosted, SaaS approach, Shopify generally assumes you’ll be exclusively using apps from the Shopify App Store. It’s kind of like how Apple only lets you install apps from its own app store (in the USA, at least).

You can create a custom app for just your store, but Shopify does not really allow widespread third-party distribution.

WordPress plugins

Currently, there are more than 59,000+ free plugins available on the WordPress.org plugin directory, plus thousands more plugins available at other marketplaces or directly from developers. There’s also an official WooCommerce plugin marketplace, though you can find lots of WooCommerce plugins outside this marketplace as well.

While not all of these plugins are specifically focused on the ecommerce use case, even general plugins can still be valuable for WordPress ecommerce stores.

For example, the Gravity Forms plugin is a form builder that lets you create any type of form using a drag-and-drop builder (pictured below) and integrate your forms with a wide variety of sources.

You can use it for customer registration forms, contact forms, customer service forms, refund request forms, email newsletter subscribe forms, customer surveys, and more. You can even create your own custom payment forms, including integrating those forms with your existing WooCommerce products.

Because WordPress is an open-source, self-hosted tool, it makes it easy to install apps from any source. That is, you’re not limited to just using the WordPress.org plugin directory, though you should make sure to only install apps from trusted third-party developers.

Pricing

Comparing Shopify vs WordPress pricing is difficult because there are so many variables within each platform that will affect the overall cost of your store.

In addition to the basic platform costs of running a store – your subscription for Shopify and your web hosting for WordPress – almost every store will need to pay for additional premium extensions, regardless of whether you use Shopify or WordPress.

We’ll go into more detail below, but here are some general trends/takeaways for pricing between these two tools:

• If you’re on a tight budget, it is possible to build a functioning WooCommerce store for less than what you’d pay for Shopify.
• The exact apps and plugins that you use will play a major role in determining the overall cost of your store, so it’s possible that the price of each tool could vary based on your use case.
• Shopify apps typically use monthly recurring SaaS billing, whereas WordPress plugins are typically one-time or annually recurring purchases (you’ll usually want to renew your license so that you can continue receiving new updates for your plugins).

Shopify pricing

If you want to create an actual ecommerce store, there are three “regular” pricing tiers, plus a fourth option for Shopify Plus.

The regular plans start at $25 per month for the Basic plan and go up to $399 per month for the Advanced plan. Shopify Plus starts at $2,300 per month, so it’s really only an option for enterprise-level stores.

Shopify credit card processing rates

In addition to the feature differences and top-line pricing differences, there are also different credit card processing rates depending on the plan.

It’s important to discuss these because, depending on your specific situation, these rates could be more expensive than the rates that you can access via WordPress. Over time, this could add up to being a significant extra expense to using Shopify.

In general, Shopify’s card processing rates are competitive if you’re ok with using the built-in Shopify Payments service. In the USA, they start at “2.9% + $0.30” per transaction on the Basic plan.

However, if you want to use your own third-party payment processor, Shopify can become quite expensive because Shopify will charge its own extra fee of 2.0% to 0.6% on top of whatever your third-party payment processor charges.

Shopify theme and app pricing

Shopify themes are typically significantly more expensive than WordPress/WooCommerce themes. From the Shopify theme marketplace, they typically cost $200-$400. However, your store only needs one theme, so this cost won’t add up too much.

Where things can get expensive is when you’re using Shopify apps.

Unlike WordPress plugins, which are typically one-time purchases with optional renewals for support/updates, premium Shopify apps use recurring subscription billing.

Because each premium Shopify app is a monthly or annual subscription, the recurring costs can really add up over the long term.

The exact cost will depend on the app, but they’re usually more expensive than equivalent WordPress plugins. For example, we opened a random app that Shopify recommends, and its premium plan costs $15 per month, which adds up to $180 per year.

WordPress ecommerce pricing

The core WordPress software and the core WooCommerce plugin are both 100% free. However, you will need WordPress hosting to power your website.

While you can find WordPress hosting for as little as $5 per month, you’ll typically want to invest in more powerful hosting if you’re planning to use WordPress for ecommerce.

On the low end, hosting that costs $20-$30 per month can work for simple stores, but you can definitely spend more than this for complex and/or high-traffic stores.

WordPress/WooCommerce credit card processing rates

Unlike Shopify, you can use any payment processor with your WordPress store without needing to pay extra transaction fees. You’ll only pay the rates at whatever payment processor you choose.

WordPress/WooCommerce theme and app pricing

If you want a premium theme for your WordPress store, they’re usually in the $50-$80 range, which is cheaper than most Shopify themes.

Just like Shopify, you’ll spend most of your money on WordPress plugins.

Unlike Shopify apps, most WordPress plugins do not use a SaaS subscription model. Instead, you typically pay a one-time fee, which includes one year of support and updates.

After that year, you can usually continue using the version of the plugin that you have forever, but you often need to renew your license if you want to continue receiving support and updates. There are some plugins that offer lifetime updates for a one-time fee, but these are becoming less common.

For example, Gravity Forms costs $59 per year for the Basic license. That single plugin can handle everything from contact and support forms to payments, subscriptions, and surveys. Compared to Shopify apps, which often charge $15-$50 per month each, plugins like Gravity Forms can help make WordPress much more cost-effective in the long run.

In general, you should plan to renew your license for any essential plugins because security and bug fixes are important for WordPress ecommerce stores.

This means that you will have some recurring costs for plugins. But even factoring that in, WordPress plugins will still usually be a lot cheaper than Shopify apps. Some WordPress developers also offer discounts for plugin license renewals, which can further reduce long-term costs.

Launch your store today

In the end, choosing between Shopify vs WordPress really comes down to your specific requirements.

One of Shopify’s key advantages is its simplicity. Creating a store is as simple as registering for an account, and you don’t really need to think about software updates or security.

On the other hand, one of WordPress’s biggest advantages is the flexibility that it gives you, both in terms of customizing the actual ecommerce functionality of your store, as well as in adding functionality that goes beyond just ecommerce.

Beyond that, WordPress can also be more affordable than Shopify, though the exact difference will depend on your specific situation.

All in all, unless you put a very high premium on simplicity, WordPress can make a lot of sense because of how much flexibility it gives you for growing and scaling your ecommerce business.