Shopify vs WooCommerce (2026): what each really costs and when WooCommerce wins

For most stores, Shopify is the better choice in 2026, because it removes the server, the plugin updates and the security patching from your to-do list. WooCommerce wins when you need control below the theme layer, already pay a WordPress team, or sell enough to get your own card rate. At CA$250,000 a month, that rate has to be under about 2.48% + 30¢ to beat Shopify Advanced in Canada.

That answer depends on numbers, so here they are. In Canada, the card rate is the surprise: WooPayments charges 2.90% + 30¢ per Canadian card sale, which is more than the Shopify Payments online rate on every standard Shopify plan (2.8% on Basic down to 2.4% on Advanced, plus 30¢). The cheap software bill on WooCommerce gets eaten by the payment fee before you pay anyone to maintain the site.

Speed is the other gap. In Chrome field data for September 2026, 87.6% of Shopify sites visited by Chrome users in Canada passed all three Core Web Vitals on mobile, against 58.4% of WooCommerce sites.

A disclosure before we start: EVDEV is a Shopify agency in Toronto, so we build on Shopify for a living. We have kept WooCommerce's strong points in, and given it its own section at the end. Shopify's Canadian prices, and every WooCommerce, hosting and extension price below, were read on the vendor's own page on 25 October 2026. Shopify shows US prices only to US visitors, so the US Shopify prices and card rates are as reported from Shopify's US page by WooCommerce and PricingSaaS. The full list of sources is at the bottom.

Shopify vs WooCommerce at a glance

What does Shopify cost in Canada and the US?

Shopify charges a monthly plan fee plus a card fee on every sale. In Canada the three standard plans cost CA$37, CA$99 and CA$389 a month on yearly billing, or CA$49, CA$132 and CA$517 billed monthly. In the US, the plans are reported at US$29, US$79 and US$299 a month on yearly billing, and US$39, US$105 and US$399 billed monthly. The Sources section says where each US figure comes from.

If you use a payment provider other than Shopify Payments, Shopify adds its own fee on top of that provider's rate: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus. Shopify Payments is available in both Canada and the United States, so most stores in either country can avoid that fee.

In person, Canadian rates are 2.6% on Basic, 2.5% on Grow and 2.4% on Advanced with no fixed fee, and Interac debit is a flat 15¢. POS Pro costs CA$119 a month per location.

Plus starts at CA$3,400 a month on a three-year term (CA$3,650 on a one-year term), or US$2,300 and US$2,500. Shopify also says higher-volume businesses "might" pay a variable platform fee based on revenue, without publishing the thresholds.

For every Canadian fee in detail, including POS, tax on the bill and worked bills at three sales levels, see our Shopify pricing in Canada guide.

What does WooCommerce cost?

The WooCommerce plugin is free. WooCommerce's own site says it is "free to use without costly subscription fees." What you pay for is everything around it.

Hosting

WooCommerce runs on WordPress, on a server you rent. Its current server requirements are PHP 8.3 or newer, MySQL 8.0 or MariaDB 10.6 or newer, a WordPress memory limit of at least 256 MB, and HTTPS. Backups are your job.

WooCommerce's start page recommends two hosts, WordPress.com and Pressable. Pressable's managed plans run from US$250 a year (Signature 1, about US$20.83 a month) to US$6,750 a year (Signature 8), with Premium plans from US$350 a month. On WordPress.com, the plans that suit a store are Business at US$25 a month and Commerce at US$45 a month on yearly billing (US$40 and US$70 billed monthly). Both charge 0% on standard WooCommerce payment features, and Commerce adds WordPress.com's own ecommerce tools. The cheaper plans, from US$4 a month, take a share of payments instead (8% on Personal).

Payments

WooPayments has no setup fee and no monthly fee for online payments. It charges per transaction:

• Canada: 2.90% + 30¢ per card sale, plus 1.00% for international cards and 2.00% for currency conversion. A dispute costs $20.
• United States: 2.90% + 30¢ per card sale, plus 1.50% for international cards and 1.00% for currency conversion. A dispute costs $15.
• In person: $5 a month for each active card reader.

You can use another processor instead. That is where WooCommerce can get cheaper than Shopify, if you are big enough to negotiate a rate.

Extensions

Some features are paid extensions on WooCommerce, billed yearly. Prices from the WooCommerce Marketplace, shown to us in CAD:

On Shopify, the Shopify Subscriptions app by Shopify is free.

Developer and maintenance time

This is the line most comparisons leave out, and it decides the total. On WooCommerce someone has to update WordPress, WooCommerce, the theme and every plugin, check the store still works after each update, keep PHP current and keep backups. On Shopify the platform does that part. Price those hours at whatever your developer or agency charges, and add them to the WooCommerce column. For a reference point on the Shopify side, EVDEV's monthly support plan starts at CA$299 a month, after the 3 months of support included with every build.

Total cost of ownership: two stores, worked out

Here is the arithmetic for two example stores, using only the published prices above. We left out the domain, the theme and paid apps or extensions on both sides, so the gap you see is plan, hosting and card fees.

Store A: CA$25,000 a month, 250 orders of CA$100

In Canada, the WooCommerce store is already about CA$17 a month dearer than Shopify Basic, before you pay anyone to keep it updated. The plugin is free, but hosting plus the 0.1-point higher card rate (CA$25 a month on these sales) cost more than the CA$37 Shopify plan. Shopify Grow on the same sales comes to CA$99 + CA$650 + CA$75 = CA$824, still below WooCommerce.

The same store in the US is close to a tie. Shopify Basic comes to US$29 + US$725 + US$75 = US$829 a month. WooCommerce with WooPayments and Pressable Signature 1 comes to US$725 + US$75 + US$20.83 = US$820.83. About US$8 a month apart, so the maintenance hours decide it.

Store B: CA$250,000 a month, 2,500 orders of CA$100

On Shopify Advanced with Shopify Payments: CA$389 + 2.4% of CA$250,000 (CA$6,000) + 2,500 × 30¢ (CA$750) = CA$7,139 a month.

On WooCommerce with WooPayments and Pressable Signature 5 (US$1,550 a year, about CA$180.75 a month): CA$7,250 + CA$750 + CA$180.75 = CA$8,180.75 a month.

At this size you would not stay on 2.9%. With your own processor at rate r, WooCommerce beats Shopify Advanced only when 250,000 × r + 750 + 180.75 is less than 7,139. That works out to a rate below about 2.48% + 30¢. Get the processor's written quote before you decide, because the whole comparison turns on that one number.

WooCommerce's own comparison article (26 August 2026) runs a similar US store (US$250,000 a month, 2,500 orders) at a negotiated 2.5% + 30¢ and gets US$7,191.67 for WooCommerce against US$8,899 for Shopify Advanced. That Shopify figure includes a US$1,500 third-party transaction fee, because it assumes you bring your own processor to Shopify too. Shopify's own US Advanced rate is 2.5% + 30¢, the same rate, with no third-party fee. Rerun that way, Shopify is US$399 + US$7,000 = US$7,399, about US$207 a month more than WooCommerce. Again, before developer time.

If you sell subscriptions, add CA$402 a year (CA$33.50 a month) for WooCommerce Subscriptions. Shopify's Subscriptions app is free.

For what a Shopify build itself costs, from a DIY store on a free theme to a custom build, see how much a Shopify website costs.

Which is faster, Shopify or WooCommerce?

On average, Shopify. The HTTP Archive Core Web Vitals report uses Chrome UX Report data, which is measured from real Chrome users rather than a lab test. For September 2026, mobile, the share of sites passing:

Two columns explain the gap. Time to first byte (TTFB) is how fast the server answers, and only 21.4% of WooCommerce sites visited from Canada had a good TTFB, against 92.2% of Shopify sites. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), the time until the main image or heading shows, follows from it. Both depend on hosting, and on WooCommerce the host is your choice and your problem. WooCommerce sites did slightly better than Shopify on INP, which measures how fast the page reacts to a tap.

Two caveats. "Canada" in this data means where the visitors are, not where the store is based. And this is a platform average, not a promise for one store: a WooCommerce store on good hosting with a light theme can pass, and a Shopify store loaded with apps can fail. The overall pass rates for July and August 2026 were within about one point of these figures.

Security and maintenance: who patches what?

On Shopify, hosting, an SSL certificate and Level 1 PCI DSS compliance are included, according to Shopify. You are responsible for your staff accounts and the apps you install, not for the server.

On WooCommerce, you or your host patch everything. The risk sits mostly in plugins. Patchstack, a WordPress security company, counted 11,334 new vulnerabilities in the WordPress ecosystem in 2025, up 42% on 2024. Of those, 91% were in plugins, 9% in themes, and 6 in WordPress core. And 46% did not have a fix from the developer by the time they were made public.

Those figures cover the whole WordPress plugin ecosystem that a WooCommerce store runs on, not WooCommerce itself. The practical point is the same: every plugin you add is code someone has to keep patched, and on WooCommerce that someone is you.

Shopify vs WooCommerce for SEO

Both can rank. The differences are in how much control you get over URLs and files.

• URLs. WooCommerce lets you edit permalinks: the default product base is /product/ and the category base is /product-category/, and you can switch to a shop base, a shop base with the category, or a custom base. Shopify's paths are fixed at /products/ and /collections/.
• Redirects. Shopify allows up to 100,000 URL redirects, or 20,000,000 on Plus, but only from URLs that no longer exist, and you can't redirect the fixed /products, /collections and /collections/all paths.
• robots.txt. Shopify lets you edit it through a robots.txt.liquid template, but calls it "an unsupported customization" and warns that "incorrect use of the feature can result in loss of all traffic." On WordPress the file is yours.
• Content. On WooCommerce your shop and your blog live in the same WordPress install, which suits a store where articles bring in most of the traffic.

If your store's rankings depend on a URL structure Shopify can't reproduce, that is a real reason to stay. For most stores it isn't, and a migration with a complete redirect map is how you protect the rankings you have.

Scalability and Shopify Plus

Shopify's plan limits are mostly about staff and locations. Grow includes 5 staff accounts and Advanced 15. Plus has unlimited staff, 20 POS Pro locations included (up to 200 with Shopify Payments) and unlimited B2B catalogs, and costs CA$3,400 or US$2,300 a month on a three-year term. The hosting scales without you doing anything.

On WooCommerce, growth means a bigger hosting plan. Pressable's range shows the steps: Signature 1 at US$250 a year up to Signature 8 at US$6,750 a year, then Premium from US$350 a month. Each step up is also more for your developer to watch as traffic grows.

Shopify vs WooCommerce for B2B and wholesale

Shopify B2B is built in on the Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus plans. Below Plus you get up to 3 active catalogs (price lists) across all your B2B markets, and you can't assign a catalog directly to a company. Deposits, partial payments and payment requests per fulfillment are Plus only.

On WooCommerce, B2B comes from an extension. B2B for WooCommerce by Addify costs CA$215 a year and adds role-based pricing, quantity tiers, a quote cart, tax exemption and restrictions by customer role. It has a 4.7 rating from 141 reviews and more than 4,000 active installs.

If you need more than three wholesale price lists, or deposits and partial payments, the real comparison is Shopify Plus against WooCommerce plus that extension, and the Plus fee will usually decide it.

When WooCommerce is the better choice

WooCommerce is the right call in these cases:

• Your site is mostly content and already runs on WordPress. If articles bring the traffic and the shop is a smaller part, keeping both in one install is simpler than splitting them.
• You already pay a PHP or WordPress team. The maintenance line that makes WooCommerce expensive is a cost you are already carrying.
• You need to change code Shopify doesn't let you touch, such as the URL structure or files on the server.
• You sell at volume and can get a card rate below about 2.48% + 30¢ from your own processor. At CA$250,000 a month, that is the line where WooCommerce becomes cheaper than Shopify Advanced in Canada.
• You want the store's data on a server you choose. WooCommerce is self-hosted, so you decide where it lives.

If none of these describe you, Shopify will usually cost about the same or less and take less of your time.

Already on WooCommerce? Moving without losing data or rankings

Shopify's Store Migration app can import a WooCommerce product CSV. The parts that need planning are URLs, subscriptions and saved cards. Our WooCommerce to Shopify migration guide covers what moves cleanly, what breaks and the order to run it in.

EVDEV's fixed-price migrations start at CA$2,000, and new Shopify builds at CA$3,000. If you want a quote in writing before any work starts, see our Shopify experts page.

Frequently asked questions

Should I use Shopify or WooCommerce?

Use Shopify if you want the store to run without you managing a server, plugins and security patches. Use WooCommerce if your site already runs on WordPress, you have a developer on hand, or you sell enough to negotiate your own card rate. At CA$250,000 a month, that rate has to be under about 2.48% + 30¢ to beat Shopify Advanced in Canada. For a typical Canadian store doing CA$25,000 a month, Shopify Basic comes out slightly cheaper.

Is WooCommerce free or paid?

The WooCommerce plugin is free. You pay for hosting (from about US$20.83 a month on Pressable Signature 1 to US$45 on WordPress.com Commerce, both on yearly billing, on WooCommerce's two recommended hosts), card processing (2.90% + 30¢ with WooPayments in Canada and the US), any paid extensions, and the time to keep it all updated.

What are the downsides of using WooCommerce?

You are responsible for hosting, updates, backups and security. Speed depends on your host: only 58.4% of WooCommerce sites visited from Canada passed Core Web Vitals on mobile in September 2026, against 87.6% of Shopify sites. Features such as subscriptions and B2B are paid yearly extensions, and in Canada the WooPayments card rate is higher than Shopify Payments.

How much does Shopify take from a $20 sale?

On Basic with Shopify Payments, CA$0.86 in Canada (2.8% + 30¢) and US$0.88 in the US (2.9% + 30¢). On a $10 sale it is CA$0.58 or US$0.59. For comparison, WooPayments takes $0.88 on a $20 sale in either country.

How much does a 1-year Shopify plan cost?

Basic billed yearly costs CA$444 a year in Canada (CA$37 a month) and US$348 in the US (US$29 a month). Grow is CA$1,188 or US$948, and Advanced CA$4,668 or US$3,588. Card fees are extra.

Is Shopify still worth it in 2026?

For most small and mid-sized stores, yes. The plan fee is a small part of the bill once you sell, Shopify Payments rates in Canada are lower than WooPayments, and the platform handles hosting and security. It is less worth it if you need control over URLs or server code, or can negotiate a lower card rate elsewhere.

Which is better for ecommerce, Shopify or WordPress?

WordPress on its own is not a store. You add WooCommerce to sell. If selling is the main job of the site, Shopify is usually less work. If content is the main job and the shop is secondary, WordPress with WooCommerce keeps it all in one place.

Who is Shopify's biggest competitor?

WooCommerce is one of the largest. WooCommerce says it powers more than 4 million stores and 31% of the top 1 million ecommerce sites, citing Store Leads. That is the vendor's own claim.

Is WooCommerce good for SEO?

Yes. It gives you more control over URLs and files than Shopify, including editable product and category bases and a robots.txt you fully control. The weak spot is speed, which depends on your hosting and affects Core Web Vitals.

Sources and how we checked

All pages were read on 25 October 2026 unless a date is given. Card-fee arithmetic is ours, from the published rates. USD-only host prices were converted at the Bank of Canada rate of 1.3993 CAD per USD (23 October 2026). Shopify shows prices by visitor location, and its US pricing page would not load for us from Canada, so the US Shopify figures are reported ones. The US monthly prices and the US Grow and Advanced card rates come from WooCommerce's comparison table, which shows only the monthly prices. The yearly Grow and Advanced prices come from PricingSaaS (16 October 2026 update), and the yearly Basic price from Google's US listing for shopify.com/pricing. The US Basic card rate is from Shopify's own comparison page.

• Shopify plans and card rates in Canada: shopify.com/ca/pricing
• Shopify Plus terms and the variable platform fee: Shopify Help Centre, Shopify Plus plan
• Shopify US plan prices, as reported from Shopify's US page: shopify.com/pricing and PricingSaaS, 16 October 2026 update
• Shopify's own comparison, used for its SSL, PCI and migration claims and the US Basic card rate (not for plan prices): shopify.com/ca/compare/shopify-vs-woocommerce
• Shopify B2B plans and limits: Shopify B2B and B2B plan features
• Shopify redirects and robots.txt: URL redirects and editing robots.txt
• Shopify Payments countries: supported countries
• Shopify Subscriptions app: Shopify App Store
• WooCommerce pricing and recommended hosts: woocommerce.com/start
• WooCommerce's own comparison and cost scenarios: WooCommerce vs Shopify and WooCommerce blog, 26 August 2026
• WooPayments fees by country: WooPayments fees
• WooCommerce server requirements and permalinks: server requirements and permalinks
• WooCommerce extension prices: Subscriptions and B2B for WooCommerce and Product Bundles
• Hosting prices: Pressable and WordPress.com
• WordPress security data for 2025: Patchstack, State of WordPress Security in 2026
• Core Web Vitals by platform, September 2026: HTTP Archive technology report
• Exchange rate, 23 October 2026: Bank of Canada