01 / The short version
Shopify sells you a shop. WooCommerce lets you build one.
Shopify is a product you rent: hosting, security, payments and updates are handled, and you work inside what it allows. WooCommerce is a plugin for a WordPress site you own: it will do almost anything, and almost anything is also your responsibility.
Neither is better. They fail in different directions, and the right choice depends on which kind of problem you would rather have.
02 / Take Shopify if
Selling is the business, not a part of it
You want to start this month. A competent Shopify store goes live faster than anything else, because most decisions are already made.
You do not want to think about infrastructure. Updates, certificates, PCI compliance, uptime: all handled. That is worth real money once you are taking real orders.
Your catalogue is straightforward. Products, variants, stock, shipping zones. The standard model fits most shops.
You want the app ecosystem. Subscriptions, reviews, loyalty: there is an app, it works, it costs a monthly fee.
03 / Take WooCommerce if
The shop is one part of a bigger site
Content does the selling. If your route to a sale runs through articles, guides or search traffic, WordPress is a better publishing system than Shopify’s blog, and the shop sits inside it rather than beside it.
Your products are not normal. Bookings, quotes, made-to-order, trade pricing, weird units. Anything unusual is a fight in Shopify and a plugin or a bit of code in Woo.
You care about owning it. Your data is in your database on your hosting. Nobody can change the terms.
The monthly cost matters at low volume. Shopify’s fee is fixed whether you sell five things or five hundred.
04 / The honest costs
What each one charges you in a currency other than money
Shopify: you live inside its decisions. When you need something it does not do, the answer is an app subscription, a workaround, or no. Checkout customisation is limited on purpose. Leaving later means migrating product data and rebuilding URLs.
WooCommerce: nobody is keeping it running but you. Updates, backups, a staging site, and the day a plugin conflict takes the basket down. Budget for maintenance as a line item, not as an afterthought. A neglected Woo store is a genuine liability.
05 / From our own work
What we actually see
Six of the shops in our portfolio run on WooCommerce, and the pattern is consistent: they came to it because the site had to do something else as well (publish, book, quote, serve trade customers) and the shop was one part of that. Nobody chose it for the shop alone.
That is the honest dividing line. If the whole business is the storefront, rent the storefront. If the storefront is one room in a bigger building, build the building.
06 / Honestly
If you cannot decide, you are probably a Shopify
Genuine uncertainty usually means the requirements are ordinary, and ordinary requirements are what Shopify is for. The teams who should choose WooCommerce generally know why within a minute of being asked.
Tell us what you sell and how, and we will say which one we would pick, including when it is the one we did not build.