Shopify vs. WooCommerce: The Total Cost of Ownership in 2026

For a store doing 300 orders a month at a $65 average order value, Shopify and WooCommerce land within about $40 of each other in year one. The gap only opens up later, and it opens in both directions depending on order volume, payment processor and how many hours you spend on maintenance. That is the part most Shopify vs. WooCommerce comparisons skip, so this breakdown prices the boring line items too.

We host a lot of WooCommerce stores, including plenty that moved off Shopify and a few that moved back. Both outcomes were rational. The numbers below are the ones that decided it.

Sticker price is maybe 40% of what you actually pay

Shopify’s published plans in 2026 sit at roughly $39 per month for Basic, around $105 for Grow and about $399 for Advanced, with annual billing shaving off close to 25%. Shopify Plus starts near $2,300 per month. You can check current numbers on Shopify’s pricing page, since they adjust regionally and by billing term.

WooCommerce lists at $0, which is technically true and practically misleading. The plugin is free; the store around it is not.

Here is what a working WooCommerce store usually pays for in a given year:

• Hosting: $20 to $150 per month for managed ecommerce-grade hosting, depending on traffic and logged-in user load.
• Premium extensions: Subscriptions runs about $279 per year, Bookings around $249, and most stores buy two to five paid extensions.
• Theme: $0 to $129 one time, or $1,500 to $8,000 for a custom build.
• Email, search and backups: often bundled with hosting, otherwise $10 to $60 per month combined.
• Maintenance: either your hours or roughly $80 to $250 per month on retainer.

Shopify’s equivalent hidden bucket is apps. Stores with any real complexity run six to twelve paid apps, and $150 to $400 per month in app subscriptions is common once you add reviews, subscriptions, upsells, bundles and a proper email tool.

Year one, side by side, for a 300-order-per-month store

Assume $19,500 in monthly revenue, one storefront, US card payments and no custom development beyond setup.

Shopify Grow, billed annually: about $948 in platform fees, roughly $2,400 in apps, $0 in hosting, $0 in security patching, plus card processing at 2.9% plus 30 cents on online orders. Processing on $234,000 in annual revenue lands near $7,870. Year one total sits around $11,200 before any design work.

WooCommerce on managed hosting: about $600 in hosting, $700 in extension licenses, $0 platform fee, and the same 2.9% plus 30 cents if you use WooPayments or Stripe. Add a $1,500 theme and setup budget and 24 hours of your own time. Year one total sits around $10,700 in cash, plus the labor.

So the cash difference in year one is small. Year two is where it separates: Shopify’s app stack and platform fee renew in full, while WooCommerce’s recurring cost drops to hosting plus license renewals, often under $110 per month.

The $100 order, broken into fees

On a $100 online sale paid by a US credit card, Shopify Basic keeps 2.9% plus 30 cents, so $3.20 goes to processing and you net $96.80. There is no additional Shopify transaction fee when you use Shopify Payments.

Use an outside gateway instead and Shopify adds a platform transaction fee on top: roughly 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow and 0.6% on Advanced. That single decision can cost a mid-size store $4,000 a year for nothing extra in return.

WooCommerce charges no platform fee at all. You pay only your gateway, which in 2026 is typically 2.9% plus 30 cents for Stripe, PayPal or WooPayments, and drops toward 2.2% once you qualify for interchange-plus pricing at volume. That flexibility is the strongest structural argument in WooCommerce’s favor at scale.

WooCommerce’s real variable is hosting, not licensing

Store owners underspend on hosting and then pay for it in conversion rate. Checkout, cart and My Account pages cannot be cached, so every logged-in shopper hits PHP and the database directly. A $6-per-month shared plan collapses under 40 concurrent buyers, which is exactly why shared hosting fails online stores during a promotion.

Budget realistically for the layer that actually runs your revenue:

• Under 500 orders a month: $20 to $45 per month on managed WooCommerce hosting with object caching and a CDN.
• 500 to 5,000 orders: $60 to $150 per month, with Redis, dedicated cron handling and staging.
• Above 5,000 orders: $200 to $600 per month for isolated resources and a proper database tier.

Two technical costs show up on WooCommerce invoices and never on Shopify’s. The first is scheduled task load: unmanaged Action Scheduler queues can eat a server, which is why we wrote about running WooCommerce cron jobs without crashing your server. The second is compliance. On Shopify, card data never touches your infrastructure; on WooCommerce, your host carries part of the burden, and PCI requirements under the PCI Security Standards Council spell out what that means in practice.

Price your own hours, because they are the biggest line item

A WooCommerce store in steady operation needs plugin updates, a staging test, backup verification and the occasional conflict fix. Figure two to five hours a month. At $75 an hour, that is $1,800 to $4,500 a year of real economic cost, whether you write yourself a check or not.

Shopify absorbs most of that, which is what the platform fee buys. The trade is control: you cannot touch checkout logic below Plus, and app pricing changes are not negotiable. Several stores we migrated left after an app they depended on tripled its monthly tier.

Where the total cost of ownership actually crosses over

Run it per order rather than per month and the picture gets clear fast. At 100 orders a month, Shopify costs roughly $0.60 per order in platform and app overhead above processing, while a WooCommerce store on decent hosting costs about $0.90. At 2,000 orders a month, Shopify’s overhead per order falls to around $0.25 while WooCommerce’s falls to roughly $0.08, because hosting is close to a fixed cost while revenue is not.

The practical crossover for most US stores lands somewhere between 400 and 900 orders a month, earlier if you need a non-standard payment gateway, later if you have no technical help. Above that line, choosing WooCommerce usually saves four figures a year. Below it, Shopify often costs less once you value your time honestly.

One more cost that only appears in year three: platform lock-in. Moving off Shopify means rebuilding the front end and remapping data, typically $3,000 to $15,000. Moving a WooCommerce store between hosts is a database and file transfer, and most managed hosts do it free, which is worth reading about in our comparison of dedicated and cloud hosting for growing stores.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Shopify still worth it in 2026?

Yes, for stores under roughly 400 orders a month or teams without technical support, Shopify’s $39 to $105 monthly fee usually costs less than the hours WooCommerce requires. It stops being the cheaper option once app subscriptions pass about $250 a month or you need a payment gateway Shopify Payments does not cover.

How much does Shopify take from a $100 sale?

Shopify takes $3.20 from a $100 online card sale on Basic, which is 2.9% plus 30 cents in processing, assuming you use Shopify Payments. Switch to an outside gateway and Shopify adds a 2% platform transaction fee on Basic, bringing the total to about $5.20 per $100.

Where will Shopify be in 5 years?

Shopify has grown gross merchandise volume at a double-digit annual rate for more than a decade, and analysts generally expect it to stay a top-two hosted commerce platform through 2030. The likely shifts are deeper AI-assisted merchandising, more enterprise Plus accounts and continued pressure on app pricing.

Who is Shopify’s biggest competitor?

WooCommerce is Shopify’s biggest competitor by number of live stores, running on a large share of the world’s ecommerce sites because it ships with WordPress. On enterprise deals, Shopify Plus more often competes with Adobe Commerce, BigCommerce and headless builds on Salesforce.

Working out what a WooCommerce store would cost you

If your math points toward WooCommerce, hosting is the number that decides whether the savings are real. Send us your order volume and current stack and we will tell you which plan fits, including a free migration if you are moving an existing store.