Shopify vs Magento vs WooCommerce

Shopify’s monthly fee is higher, but it bundles hosting, security patches, performance and platform upgrades. You’ll pay $29–$2,000+/month plus transaction fees if you don’t use Shopify Payments, plus app subscriptions.

Magento’s licence is zero (Open Source) or six-figure annual (Adobe Commerce). Hosting and engineering staff are the real spend — a serious Magento Open Source operation needs at least one senior PHP dev plus DevOps. Total cost frequently exceeds Shopify Plus once you account for people.

WooCommerce is cheapest at small scale — a $50/month VPS, a developer for a few hours a month — but the math flips around 30,000 monthly orders, where hosting and plugin licences add up.

Magento is the deepest of the three by a wide margin — every layer (catalog, pricing, checkout, fulfillment) is extensible. If your business needs custom pricing rules, complex B2B catalogs or unusual fulfillment logic, Magento was built for that.

Shopify constrains you intentionally. Checkout is locked down (Plus loosens it slightly); some catalog logic is fixed. The app ecosystem fills most gaps but adds monthly cost. Hydrogen + headless gives full storefront freedom while keeping the managed backend.

WooCommerce sits in between. The platform is open and hookable, but real customisation depth depends heavily on which plugins you choose and how well they’re maintained.

Magento has the highest ceiling — once tuned, multi-million-SKU catalogs and complex configurable products work well. Reaching that ceiling takes serious engineering.

Shopify’s ceiling is whatever Shopify decides to invest in (currently very high — Plus stores routinely handle Black-Friday peaks invisibly). Shopify Markets handles multi-region cleanly.

WooCommerce performance is plugin-quality and host-quality dependent. A well-built WooCommerce store with managed hosting can comfortably serve hundreds of thousands of monthly orders, but you cross a tipping point around the time you need real-time inventory across multiple warehouses.

Shopify wins this every time. A new store with default theme, a few apps and basic customisation is launchable in 2–4 weeks. Shopify Plus with bespoke theming and Hydrogen storefront is 8–14 weeks.

WooCommerce takes 4–10 weeks for a typical mid-sized launch, mostly because of plugin configuration and theme work.

Magento implementations are notoriously long — 12–24 weeks for the first store, more for complex B2B setups. That investment buys you a platform that fits your business exactly, but it is an investment.