Short answer: Shopify vs WooCommerce cost
Over three years, Shopify is usually cheaper for small stores (up to roughly £100,000 a year in revenue) because there is no hosting or maintenance to pay for. WooCommerce is usually cheaper for growing stores because it has no platform fee, no extra transaction fees and fewer paid apps, so its costs stay mostly flat while Shopify's grow with revenue. In our model, the gap reaches about £4,500 a year at £1 million revenue, before any negotiated card rates.
The real Shopify vs WooCommerce cost depends on three numbers: your revenue, your average order value and how many paid apps or plugins you need. Below, we work through all three with current prices so you can rerun it for your store.
Why monthly plan prices are misleading
Most comparisons put Shopify's £25 a month next to "WooCommerce is free" and stop there. Both numbers are true, and both hide the larger costs.
On Shopify, the plan is fixed but payments are a percentage of revenue, and features that are core on other platforms (subscriptions, product bundles, B2B price lists, advanced filters, reviews) are often paid apps billed monthly. On WooCommerce, the software is free but you pay for hosting, maintenance and premium plugins, mostly fixed amounts that do not grow with revenue.
So the right comparison is the total cost of ownership (TCO): everything you pay to build and run the store over a realistic period. Three years is a good horizon, because most stores are redesigned or replatformed within three to five years.
Shopify and WooCommerce fees in 2026
These are the published prices we used, checked in October 2026. Always confirm them on the providers' own pages before you decide.
| Cost | Shopify (UK) | WooCommerce |
|---|---|---|
| Platform plan | Basic £25, Grow £65, Advanced £344 a month on monthly billing (£19, £49, £259 on yearly billing); Plus from £1,800 | Free, open source |
| Online card rate, built-in payments | Shopify Payments: 2% + 25p (Basic), 1.7% + 25p (Grow), 1.5% + 25p (Advanced) | WooPayments: 1.5% + £0.25 for UK cards |
| Card rate with a direct provider | Provider's rate plus Shopify's fee: 2% (Basic), 1% (Grow), 0.6% (Advanced), 0.2% (Plus) | Provider's rate only, e.g. Stripe 1.5% + 20p for standard UK cards |
| Hosting | Included | £15–£300 a month depending on host and traffic |
| Maintenance | Mostly handled by Shopify | Updates, backups, monitoring: DIY or a care plan |
| Apps or plugins | Monthly app subscriptions | Mostly yearly licences |
Sources: Shopify pricing (UK), WooPayments fees, Stripe pricing (UK). EEA and international cards cost more on every provider, so model your real card mix if you sell abroad.
Which one costs less for your store? Three worked examples
The examples below assume a UK store, an average order value of £60, mostly UK cards, and yearly billing on Shopify. Build costs are excluded here and covered in the next section. Hosting and maintenance for WooCommerce is a managed plan, not the cheapest shared host.
Small store: £60,000 a year (about 1,000 orders)
| Yearly cost | Shopify Basic + Shopify Payments | WooCommerce + Stripe |
|---|---|---|
| Plan | £228 | £0 |
| Card fees | £1,450 (2% + 25p) | £1,100 (1.5% + 20p) |
| Apps or plugins | £600 (£50 a month) | £200 |
| Hosting and maintenance | £0 | £1,200 |
| Yearly total | £2,278 | £2,500 |
| Three years | £6,834 | £7,500 |
At this size, Shopify is slightly cheaper and needs no technical care. If you would run WooCommerce on a £15 host and do updates yourself, it flips, but you take on the risk.
Growing store: £250,000 a year (about 4,170 orders)
| Yearly cost | Shopify Grow + Shopify Payments | WooCommerce + Stripe |
|---|---|---|
| Plan | £588 | £0 |
| Card fees | £5,292 (1.7% + 25p) | £4,583 (1.5% + 20p) |
| Apps or plugins | £1,800 (£150 a month) | £400 |
| Hosting and maintenance | £0 | £1,200 |
| Yearly total | £7,680 | £6,183 |
| Three years | £23,040 | £18,549 |
If this Shopify store used Stripe or Adyen instead of Shopify Payments, Grow's 1% third-party fee would add about £2,500 a year on top of the provider's own charges.
Established store: £1,000,000 a year (about 16,700 orders)
| Yearly cost | Shopify Advanced + Shopify Payments | WooCommerce + Stripe |
|---|---|---|
| Plan | £3,108 | £0 |
| Card fees | £19,175 (1.5% + 25p) | £18,340 (1.5% + 20p) |
| Apps or plugins | £3,600 (£300 a month) | £600 |
| Hosting and maintenance | £0 | £2,400 |
| Yearly total | £25,883 | £21,340 |
| Three years | £77,649 | £64,020 |
At this volume, negotiating card rates matters more than the platform. Stripe, Adyen and others offer custom pricing for high volumes, and on WooCommerce that saving is yours in full. Shopify Plus also negotiates, but starts at £1,800 a month.
Build costs and the costs that don't show up in fee tables
The fee tables leave out four things that often decide the outcome.
Build and design. A Shopify store on a premium theme (a one-off licence of a few hundred pounds) configured by an agency typically costs £3,000–£10,000. A custom-designed WooCommerce store costs a similar £3,000–£12,000. Custom functionality is where they diverge: on Shopify, you work within apps and the Shopify APIs; on WooCommerce, you can change anything, including checkout logic and the database.
App and plugin creep. Established Shopify stores often run a long list of apps, each typically billed monthly, and features you remove later often leave code behind in the theme. WooCommerce plugins are usually yearly licences of £40–£250, but each one is an update to test.
Lock-in. Shopify owns the platform, so pricing, policies and features can change and you adapt. Your data exports, but your URL structure (/products/, /collections/, /pages/) and app-based features do not. WooCommerce is open source: you can change host, agency or developer at any time, and the data stays in a database you control.
Internal time. Shopify's main saving is not money but attention: no servers, no core updates, no security patches. If nobody on your team will own the technical side of WooCommerce, budget for a care plan rather than assuming it will be fine.
What changes for stores in the Netherlands, Germany and the US?
The structure of the model holds everywhere, but the payment mix changes the numbers.
- Netherlands. Most Dutch shoppers pay with iDEAL, which is priced per transaction rather than as a percentage on most providers. A store with mostly iDEAL payments pays far less in fees than the card-based model above, on either platform, which shrinks Shopify's percentage disadvantage but not its third-party fee if you use Mollie or another provider.
- Germany. PayPal and invoice payment (Kauf auf Rechnung, often via Klarna) are expected at checkout. Both cost more than domestic cards, and on Shopify they need checking against the third-party fee rules for your plan.
- United States. Card rates are higher than in the UK and EU (Stripe's standard US rate is 2.9% + 30¢), and sales tax by state usually needs a paid app or service on both platforms. Higher card rates make the platform choice matter less and the negotiated rate matter more.
If you sell across several of these markets from one store, model each market's revenue and payment mix separately, then add them up.
Surprises in year two and three
These are the costs that appear after launch and are rarely in anyone's spreadsheet:
- Renewals at full price. Many WooCommerce plugins and some Shopify apps discount the first year. Check the renewal price, not the launch price.
- PHP and server upgrades. WooCommerce runs on PHP, and each PHP version has a fixed end of support: PHP 8.1 stopped receiving security fixes on 31 December 2025, and PHP 8.2 follows on 31 December 2026. Moving a store to a newer version means testing every plugin. A care plan should include this.
- Theme updates on Shopify. Custom code added directly to a Shopify theme has to be reapplied or merged when you update the theme to a newer version. Agencies often charge for this.
- Apps that leave code behind. Uninstalling a Shopify app or WooCommerce plugin does not always remove its scripts, shortcodes or database tables. Over three years, this slows pages down unless someone cleans up.
- Growth thresholds. Moving from Shopify Grow to Advanced, or from a basic WooCommerce host to a server with object caching, is a step change in cost. Put the likely date of that step in the model.
Step by step: calculate Shopify vs WooCommerce cost for your store
Rerun the model with your own data. It takes about an hour.
- Take last year's online revenue and order count from your analytics or payment provider
- Split revenue by card type: domestic, EEA, international, plus PayPal, Klarna or other methods
- List every feature you need that is not core (subscriptions, B2B pricing, bundles, filters, reviews, ERP sync) and price the Shopify app and the WooCommerce plugin or integration for each
- Get two hosting and maintenance quotes for WooCommerce that include updates, backups, monitoring and a response time
- Price the build for both platforms on the same written scope
- Add one realistic feature project per year (a new integration, a redesign of category pages)
- Multiply by three years, and add 15–25% revenue growth per year if that is your plan
- Price the exit: what it would cost to move away from each platform in year three
If you are on Shopify today and considering a move, the main technical risk is SEO: map every old URL to its new one with 301 redirects before launch. We explain the full process in migrating from Shopify to WooCommerce.
When each platform is the better choice
Choose Shopify if you want to launch quickly with a standard catalogue, your revenue is modest or uncertain, nobody will own the technical side, and the apps you need are few and cheap.
Choose WooCommerce if your revenue is growing past the low six figures, you want to choose and negotiate your own payment provider, you rely on content for marketing, you need integrations or checkout changes that apps do not cover well, or you want to own the platform outright.
Consider a custom build if neither fits: configurators, B2B portals, deep two-way ERP sync or very large catalogues. We cover that decision in WooCommerce vs custom ecommerce.
What about Shopify Plus?
Shopify Plus starts from £1,800 a month in the UK at the time of writing (on a one- or three-year term), which is about £64,800 over three years before apps, card fees or agency work. It adds B2B features, checkout extensibility, automation tools and lower third-party fees (0.2%). For a store doing several million a year, that can be good value. Before you commit, price the same requirements on WooCommerce with managed hosting, or as a custom build: at that budget, both are realistic alternatives, and neither has a platform fee that rises with your plan.
What a WooCommerce or custom store costs with Raao
Our prices are in EUR, excluding VAT, with a fixed quote after discovery. Starter starts from €1,900 (up to 500 products, card payments, one courier, SEO setup, GA4, 30 days of support). Launch starts from €3,900 (up to 2,000 products, two couriers, invoicing, abandoned-cart emails, 60 days of support). Enterprise is a custom quote for ERP and marketplace sync, B2B, multi-language and SLA.
Hosting and maintenance plans start from €89 a month, on cloud, dedicated or VPS servers we manage, with updates, monitoring, daily backups and development hours. There are no licence fees and no revenue share, so the WooCommerce column in the tables above stays flat as you grow. Details are on our pricing page and ecommerce page. If you want us to run this model on your real numbers, book a free 30-minute call.
How we did it for Kuiba
Kuiba is neither Shopify nor WooCommerce: it is a custom platform we built. It shows why ownership matters once a store becomes the centre of the business rather than a sales channel:
- The catalogue outgrew off-the-shelf platforms. 10,000+ configurable products from 25+ European brands, in hundreds of finishes and sizes, could not be priced correctly on standard platforms.
- Integrations are built in, not rented. Orders go to Microsoft Business Central automatically through the client's CRM layer, and supplier imports for brands such as Bonaldo, Calligaris, Nardi and Miele run with AI-assisted category mapping.
- Marketing data is first-party. Server-side GA4 and the Meta Conversions API, plus feeds for Google Merchant, Meta, TikTok and Pinterest, run from the same platform.
- One platform for every channel. Online sales, showroom bookings, quote requests, sales agents and designer partners share one system, with no per-feature app subscriptions.
Most stores do not need a platform like Kuiba's. But the further you are from a standard catalogue, the more the three-year numbers favour owning your stack.