I build exclusively on Shopify, so you know where I stand. Which is exactly why I am careful with the facts: what you really pay, who looks after the server and the security, and who WooCommerce genuinely suits better.
A written answer within 24 hours
For the overwhelming majority of stores Shopify wins: hosting, security and updates are handled for you, you deal only with selling, and the cost is predictable in one subscription. WooCommerce pays off for a narrower group: when your business is built on content in WordPress and you have developers who will keep the server and the security in hand. The rest of this page is the argument – draw your own verdict.
Written by someone who ran his own Shopify store and has worked with WooCommerce too – not by an affiliate site collecting a commission on every hosting referral.
Shopify is fully hosted: hosting, updates, security, backups and scaling run themselves and are included in the plan. WooCommerce is an open-source plugin you install on your own server – and from that moment the operation is yours. You keep WordPress, PHP, WooCommerce and every plugin current, you back them up, and you watch that they do not break each other. It is complete freedom and complete responsibility, in the same package.
WooCommerce likes to present itself as free – and the plugin genuinely costs nothing. A real store, though, pays for hosting, a premium theme, annual plugin licences and a developer to join it all together and keep it running. Those items are scattered, they repeat every year, and they are easy to underestimate. Shopify puts most of it into one monthly fee from €32 – dearer at first glance, and without the surprises.
On Shopify the checkout, payments, CDN and security are part of one platform that maintains itself – and Shopify says its checkout converts up to 15% better. WooCommerce assembles the same thing from parts: WordPress, WooCommerce, a theme, a payment plugin, a shipping plugin, caching, backups, security. That modularity is its strength and its weakness – the more parts, the more places something can break, and the more time you spend working out where the fault actually is.
The decision is not won by a price list but by what you genuinely deal with every week. These are the four things you feel on Shopify in the first month.
Shopify updates the platform for you, without downtime and without your involvement. On WooCommerce you keep WordPress, PHP, WooCommerce and every plugin current – and after each update you verify they have not fallen out with each other. One incompatible plugin can take the whole store down.
Shopify handles PCI DSS, SSL and backups for you and is certified at the highest level. On WooCommerce security is on you or your host. And this is not theory: according to the Patchstack and Wordfence reviews, 96% of WordPress vulnerabilities in 2024 were in plugins rather than the core. Your store is exactly as secure as its weakest plugin.
Shopify auto-scales and runs on a global CDN, with a published average uptime of 99.99%. WooCommerce speed is decided by your hosting and your tuning – and the cart and checkout cannot easily be cached. You survive a peak exactly as well as your server is good, and as expensive.
The Shopify admin is fully translated into more than twenty languages and the official mobile app is free – an ordinary day in the store can be handled from a phone. WooCommerce is run from a WordPress admin assembled out of plugins; translations exist for most European languages, but the interface is more fragmented and the mobile app covers only the basics.
No percentage scores. Four areas, verifiable facts – including the rows WooCommerce wins.
Hosting and operations
Updates and maintenance
Security and PCI
Backups and recovery
Support
Entry cost
Platform transaction fees
Custom design
Custom features and code
Apps and plugins
Checkout
Ownership of code and data
Card payments
Local payment methods
Carriers and parcel lockers
Invoicing and accounting
Who keeps the integrations working
Selling in more countries
Speed and performance
SEO – control of URLs
Content and blogging
No lock-in
Figures verified on 13 September 2026 against the official documentation of both platforms and published WordPress ecosystem security reviews. Shopify prices from the eurozone price list; card rates vary by market.
Shopify has one monthly fee. WooCommerce is free as a plugin – but a real store pays for hosting, a theme and plugins separately, often annually. Both models side by side, excluding VAT, eurozone pricing as of September 2026.
Hosting, security, updates and CDN are in the plan from €32 – on WooCommerce you pay for each of them and manage them yourself.
Annual billing saves roughly 25%.
Hosting and plugin prices vary widely by provider and by market, so these are indicative. The "free version" here means the plugin, not a finished store.
On paper WooCommerce is free – except "free" is only the plugin. A real store pays for hosting, a premium theme, annual plugin licences and, above all, the developer time that keeps it running. If you do the hosting and the upkeep yourself, WooCommerce can genuinely come out cheaper – you pay for it with your own hours. Shopify puts most of it into one fee from €32. The question is not what is cheaper today, but what it will cost you every month for the next three years – and how much of it lands on your head when something breaks at the weekend.
In writing within 24 hours · no commitment
WooCommerce handles European selling too – through plugins you choose, pay for and maintain. On Shopify I connect it as part of the build and keep watching it, so the integrations are my problem rather than yours.
DHL, DPD, GLS, InPost and PostNord all connect to Shopify – pickup point selection, labels and tracking run automatically. They work on WooCommerce too, mostly through official carrier plugins; you just set them up and keep them updated yourself.
Google Shopping, idealo, Ceneo or Prisjakt all run on a product feed – on both platforms. On Shopify I generate it to match your categories per market and wire up conversion tracking. On WooCommerce you pick a feed plugin and maintain it yourself.
Card payments through Shopify Payments, plus the methods each market actually expects – iDEAL in the Netherlands, Bancontact in Belgium, Klarna across the Nordics and Germany, SEPA transfers. An outside gateway like Mollie or Adyen works too, it just carries Shopify’s surcharge; on WooCommerce there is no surcharge, only the plugin to look after.
Selling across EU borders means VAT rates per country and OSS reporting. I set the tax handling up as part of the build and connect Xero, Lexware Office or DATEV through an app or the API, so issuing documents and matching payments runs by itself rather than as a plugin on your maintenance list.
Not sure? I will tell you straight – I only build on Shopify, but "stay on WooCommerce" is also an answer. Write to me
Your data comes out of WooCommerce – products, customers, orders and content. The design does not transfer; a new one gets built. And that is precisely where the opportunity is.
I go through the data, the URL structure and the plugins. WordPress permalinks get mapped onto the Shopify structure and every address gets a 301 – the basis of a migration that does not cost you rankings on Google or Bing.
A new design in Liquid built around your brand. Payments, carriers, feeds and invoicing connected from the start – not as plugins you then maintain yourself.
Products, customers and order history through export and the API, in batches for larger catalogues. Redirects go live on launch day and the store stays online throughout.
I monitor indexing, rankings and conversion. Thirty days of support is included in every project.
A typical migration from WooCommerce takes 2 to 8 weeks.
In writing within 24 hours · no commitment
It is not only the monthly plan. "Free" on a self-hosted platform means you pay for running it elsewhere – and in more line items.
Shopify
WooCommerce
The widths are illustrative rather than exact amounts – I will send a calculation for your case in writing within 24 hours.
Real stores I have worked on – every one of them live, click through them yourself.
Shopify has one fee: Basic €32, Grow €92 a month, roughly a quarter less paid annually, plus apps as you need them. WooCommerce is free as a plugin, but add managed hosting (commonly €20–100 a month), a premium theme, annual plugin licences (€100–250 a year each) and developer time for upkeep. For a comparably equipped store the total usually lands around the Shopify level – and it is scattered and unpredictable.
If you do the hosting and the upkeep yourself, WooCommerce can be cheaper; you pay for it with your own time. I will send an exact calculation for your case in writing within 24 hours.
How I price a buildThe plugin is – it is open source and costs nothing. A real store on it is not: you pay for hosting, a premium theme, annual plugin licences (shipping, subscriptions, SEO) and a developer to join it together and keep it working. "Free" is the entry ticket, not the total. Which is exactly why I compare the cost of running it, not the cost of installing it.
In one respect yes: WooCommerce gives you full control of the URL structure, and through WordPress it is the strongest system there is for content and blogging. Shopify has fixed /products/ and /collections/ prefixes you cannot change. Everything else is level – Shopify has strong technical SEO, 301 redirects, meta and sitemaps natively, and above all the speed you would have to tune into WooCommerce through hosting. If your business stands on content, that is a point for WooCommerce; if it stands on the product and on speed, for Shopify.
Yes – or your host and your developer do it for you. WordPress, PHP, WooCommerce and every plugin need keeping current, backing up and checking for compatibility. Security sits on your side too: the vast majority of WordPress vulnerabilities are in plugins rather than the core. Managed hosting takes part of the work, but plugin updates and their compatibility stay with you. Shopify handles the whole of this in the price of the plan.
With Shopify Payments you pay the card rate – from 2% + €0.25 on Basic down to 1.5% on Advanced, and the exact rate varies by market – with nothing on top. Plug in an outside gateway such as Mollie or Adyen instead and Shopify adds a surcharge: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced. WooCommerce takes nothing from your revenue and has no gateway surcharge at all. That is a genuine WooCommerce advantage, and worth weighing if a specific local gateway is non-negotiable for you.
Yes. DHL, DPD, GLS, InPost and PostNord all run through apps – the customer picks a locker or pickup point in the cart or the checkout, and labels and tracking happen automatically. Feeds for Google Shopping, idealo or Ceneo are handled by a feed app or a custom feed. I connect all of it in every migration, conversion tracking included.
Shopify Payments covers cards plus the methods each market expects – iDEAL, Bancontact, Klarna, SEPA – natively, without an extra plugin. Cash on delivery exists as a native manual method where carriers still offer it. On WooCommerce all of this exists too, through gateway plugins; the difference is not what is possible but who keeps the plugin working.
More easily than out of most hosted platforms. WooCommerce has its own exports and Shopify has an import tool built for it, so products, variants, customers and orders come out without workarounds. The work is elsewhere: in the plugins whose data does not live in WooCommerce at all, and in permalinks, which every store sets up its own way. I go through that on the migration page.
What exactly comes out of WooCommerceExpect short-term movement – Google itself calls that normal and allows several weeks for a mid-sized site before the index settles. A lasting drop is caused by missing redirects and lost metadata. So I start with an audit of every URL, every WordPress permalink gets a 301, I carry over meta and structured data – and for the first 30 days after launch I actively watch indexing and rankings on Google and Bing.
Typically two to eight weeks from brief to launch. Price is driven by the volume of data, the number of addresses to redirect and above all the number of plugins I replace with native functionality – in the low thousands to low tens of thousands of euros depending on scope. Send a few sentences through the form below and you get a written estimate within 24 hours.
What a migration involvesNo. I build the new store alongside the running one – WooCommerce keeps selling the whole time. On launch day the domain switches and the redirects go live; downtime is measured in minutes, not days. You lose no orders and no customers.
Not for day-to-day. Products, orders, discounts and content are straightforward in the admin. You need a developer once, for the build and the integrations – and that is exactly the difference from WooCommerce, where a developer is closer to a standing cost for upkeep, updates and fixes. After handover you run the store yourself; I stay available for whatever comes next.
In theory yes – it is open source, so you can touch anything. In practice Shopify also gives full code access through Liquid, an open API and 16,000+ apps, so it handles the overwhelming majority of customisations too. The difference is not what can be changed but who then keeps that change working through every update – on WooCommerce you, on Shopify the platform.
When your business is built mainly on content and you already live in WordPress, when you want full ownership of code and data with no lock-in whatsoever, and when you have a developer or an agency who will handle hosting, updates and security. Then the freedom of WooCommerce repays the extra work. If that is not you, I will say so plainly in my reply to your enquiry – pushing you onto a platform you do not want to run does not pay off for me either.
Both run on your own server and both cores are free, but they are otherwise quite different. WooCommerce is a plugin for WordPress; PrestaShop is a dedicated ecommerce package with multistore and B2B pricing in the core itself. You feel the difference with modules: on the official marketplace they are bought once, and on top of that you renew Business Care each year at 40% of the price. Running, security and upgrades stay with you on both.
PrestaShop vs ShopifyYes. The comparison hub puts the platforms side by side on the criteria that decide it – hosting and upkeep, real cost, checkout, selling across borders and ownership – so you can see where each one genuinely wins before going into the detail.
All platform comparisonsWrite me a few sentences about your store – where you are now, or that you are only starting. Within 24 hours you get it in writing: what makes sense for your case and what to do next. No commitment, no pressure.
Would rather not fill anything in? Write straight to ahoj@hynekkraus.cz
