WooCommerce vs. Shopify: Should You Replatform?
Replatforming to Shopify pays when your current stack costs more in engineering hours than a published plan costs: Basic $39, Grow $105, Advanced $399 and Plus from $2,300 per month (verified Sep 2026). WooCommerce's core plugin is free, with published hosting at $25–$350/mo and extensions at $29–$299/year (verified Sep 2026). Stay put while your current platform is stable and the growth constraint sits somewhere else.
Your profile — see how the verdict shifts
- Confidence
- Medium — Shopify, WooCommerce and BigCommerce all publish current pricing, so the subscription comparison is solid; Adobe Commerce publishes no price at all, and migration cost depends on catalog, integrations and custom logic, which is why this stays a Medium-confidence call
- Reference scenario
- $20M–$100M GMV · self-hosted or licence-based platform today · 5,000–50,000 SKUs · small in-house dev team carrying hosting and security
- As of
- September 2026
Decision at a Glance
| Your profile | Verdict | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Under $2M revenue, a working store and no dedicated developer | WAIT | A stable WooCommerce store on $25–$350/mo hosting is not what is limiting you at this size (verified Sep 2026). A migration costs months of owner attention that marketing and product would repay faster. Move when the platform actively breaks, not because a comparison chart says so. |
| $2M – $20M, small team, extensions and plugins multiplying | DEPENDS | Count hours, not licences. Shopify Grow is $105/mo and Advanced $399/mo (verified Sep 2026), while extensions run $29–$299/year each on top of hosting (verified Sep 2026). Replatform when patching, plugin conflicts and downtime are eating a developer's week; stay when they are not. |
| $20M – $100M with a small dev team carrying the platform (reference scenario) | BUY | Shopify at Advanced $399/mo, or Plus from $2,300/mo (verified Sep 2026), moves hosting, PCI scope, checkout scaling and security patching off your team. At this revenue the salary cost of owning that layer exceeds the plan by a wide margin, and peak-day risk is the part nobody prices. |
| $100M+ with bespoke commerce logic and ERP-deep integrations | DEPENDS | Plus starts at $2,300/mo and now bundles a headless API layer with a React-based stack at no extra cost (verified Sep 2026), while Adobe Commerce publishes no price at all and quotes through sales. Run a real comparison, because the migration of custom logic is the cost that decides this one. |
What Replatforming To Shopify Actually Drives
| Outcome | Impact | How it works |
|---|---|---|
| Operational efficiency | High | Hosting, patching, PCI scope and peak-day capacity move from your team to the platform vendor, which is the single largest recurring saving in a replatform. |
| Revenue — direct | High | Checkout that scales through peak traffic without a capacity plan protects the exact hours when a store makes a disproportionate share of its year. |
| Revenue — indirect | Medium | URL structure and redirect mapping decide whether organic rankings survive the move, which makes SEO planning a revenue task rather than a technical one. |
| Customer experience | Medium | Faster pages and a familiar accelerated checkout reduce the friction that self-hosted stores usually accumulate through plugin sprawl. |
| Data & insight | Medium | One platform's reporting replaces analytics stitched across plugins, though direct database access is traded away in the process. |
Spend ceiling: Size the migration against the hours and risk you stop carrying, not against the subscription. A team spending a developer's week each month on the platform can justify an estimated $75,000–$400,000 migration (Deploi estimate, illustrative); a stable store with no ops burden cannot, at any plan price.
What buying enables (top apps)
- + Hosting, PCI scope, security patching and peak-day capacity handled by the platform, with published pricing from Basic $39 to Plus from $2,300 per month (verified Sep 2026)
- + A large, current app ecosystem and a deep partner bench, so most requirements are configuration rather than a release
- + Predictable flat plan pricing with no GMV-triggered auto-upgrade, unlike BigCommerce's threshold model (verified Sep 2026)
- + Plus bundles a headless API layer with a React-based stack at no extra cost, which used to be a separate project (verified Sep 2026)
What building additionally unlocks
- + Direct database access and total control of commerce logic, with no checkout guardrails to design around
- + No platform subscription at all on WooCommerce, where the core plugin is free and open-source (verified Sep 2026)
- + Freedom to run any integration, any data model and any deployment process your team prefers
- + No vendor able to deprecate a surface your business depends on, provided you keep the stack patched yourself
Find Your Verdict in 3 Questions
Is your team spending real weekly hours on hosting, patching, plugin conflicts or downtime?
Yes: Go to question 2.
No: Your verdict: WAIT — a stable stack is not the constraint; spend the migration budget on demand instead.
Does your checkout or commerce logic depend on customization Shopify cannot host, or on an ERP integration nobody has mapped?
Yes: Your verdict: DEPENDS — scope the custom logic first; Plus starts at $2,300/mo and quote-based platforms need a real comparison (verified Sep 2026).
No: Go to question 3.
Can you run a 3–9 month project that finishes at least a full quarter before peak season?
Yes: Your verdict: BUY — replatform to Shopify and move hosting, PCI scope and patching off your team (verified Sep 2026).
No: Your verdict: WAIT — harden what you have this year and plan the cutover for a quiet quarter.
The TCC Scorecard — 12 Dimensions
TCC — Total Cost of Capability: what it actually costs to have this capability over three years, whichever way you get it. Each dimension is scored 0–5 for both paths. How we score →
| Dimension | Buy | Build | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | |||
| Acquisition & implementation | A mid-market migration runs an estimated $75,000–$400,000 for data, theme, integrations and redirects (Deploi estimate, illustrative); staying costs nothing to start, which is exactly why stacks drift for years. | ||
| Recurring fees | Shopify publishes Basic $39, Grow $105, Advanced $399 and Plus from $2,300 per month (verified Sep 2026); WooCommerce charges no platform fee but bills hosting at $25–$350/mo and extensions at $29–$299/year (verified Sep 2026). | ||
| Maintenance & upgrades | Hosting, uptime, PCI scope, core upgrades and plugin patching all move to Shopify on the buy path; on the stay path they remain a standing engineering commitment with no end date. | ||
| Switching & exit | Leaving Shopify later means another migration, and orders cannot be imported through the admin, so historical order data is the hardest part to move in either direction. | ||
| Risk | |||
| Vendor risk | Shopify is a single vendor holding your storefront, checkout and data; open-source WooCommerce cannot be discontinued, though the plugins you depend on absolutely can. | ||
| Security & compliance surface | Card data, PCI scope and platform patching sit with Shopify on the buy path; a self-hosted store carries every unpatched plugin as its own liability. | ||
| Platform-deprecation exposure | Shopify retires surfaces on its own schedule — Scripts stopped executing in June 2026 and checkout.liquid is gone — while self-hosted stacks face major-version upgrades and abandoned extensions instead. | ||
| Value | |||
| Fit to requirement | Owning the code means any requirement is buildable; Shopify covers the common 95% brilliantly and puts guardrails around checkout that bespoke commerce logic sometimes cannot live inside. | ||
| Time to market | After the migration, shipping a campaign, a market or a sales channel is configuration rather than a release cycle — the compounding benefit that rarely appears in the business case. | ||
| Performance & scale | Peak-day traffic is Shopify's problem on the buy path; on a self-hosted stack every flash sale is a capacity plan, a cache strategy and someone's weekend. | ||
| Data ownership & AI-readiness | A self-hosted database is yours to query directly; Shopify exposes the same data through Admin and Storefront APIs with rate limits and no direct database access. | ||
| Focus & opportunity cost | Every hour spent on hosting, patching and plugin conflicts is an hour not spent on merchandising, retention or new channels — the real argument for renting the platform. | ||
The App Landscape
| App | Status | Pricing | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shopify | Native — The own-store lane: four published tiers, card rates that fall as plans rise, and an Agentic row at $0/mo for selling in AI channels (verified Sep 2026); inventory locations cap at 10 below Plus and 200 on Plus | Basic $39 USD/mo or $29 billed yearly; Grow $105 or $79 yearly; Advanced $399 or $299 yearly; Plus starts at $2,300 USD/mo; online card rates Basic 2.9% + 30¢, Grow 2.7% + 30¢, Advanced 2.5% + 30¢; Agentic $0/mo (verified Sep 2026) | Merchants who want the platform layer maintained for them and their team pointed at merchandising instead of hosting |
| WooCommerce | Live — Competing platform; no Shopify App Store listing. The core plugin is free and open-source on WordPress, and the vendor markets against flat platform fees with the line 'no platform fees, revenue share, or growth taxes' | Core platform free; hosting $25–$350/month for most stores, scaling with traffic; extensions $29–$299/year each; WooPayments processing around 2.50–2.90% + 30¢ per transaction (verified Sep 2026) | Teams with in-house engineering who want database access and no platform subscription, and who can carry hosting, patching and uptime |
| BigCommerce | Live — Competing platform; no Shopify App Store listing. Plans auto-upgrade once trailing-twelve-month GMV thresholds are crossed, and the Scale tier adds a 0.9% overage on GMV above its monthly allowance | Core $39/mo ($29 annually) to $30K TTM GMV, Growth $105/mo ($79) to $100K, Scale $399/mo ($299) with 0.9% overage above allowance, Performance custom from $1,499/month on annual billing; 15-day free trial (verified Sep 2026) | Merchants comparing hosted platforms who can model GMV-triggered upgrades into their three-year cost |
| Adobe Commerce | Live — A competing platform, not a Shopify app: no App Store listing, and no price, tier or GMV band published anywhere on Adobe's own Commerce pages; every path routes to a consultation request | Quote-only; no prices, tiers or GMV bands published (verified Sep 2026) | Enterprises with bespoke commerce logic and the procurement capacity to run a full evaluation |
The Build Path
- Stay and harden the current stack: Move to managed hosting, audit and retire unused extensions, fix the performance debt, and put core and plugin upgrades on a real schedule instead of an emergency one.
- Re-front without replatforming: Keep the existing commerce backend and rebuild the storefront layer, which buys a modern experience without touching orders, payments or integrations.
- Stay on a quote-based enterprise platform: Where bespoke commerce logic already runs and works, the honest comparison is renewal terms against a migration budget, not a feature grid.
- Effort band
- $25,000–$120,000 to modernize and harden what you already run (Deploi estimate, illustrative); lands in the $25–75K contact-form band for most stores and above it where performance debt is deep
- Typical timeline
- 6–14 weeks to stabilize an existing stack, against an estimated 3–9 months for a full migration (Deploi estimate, illustrative)
- Maintenance, honestly
- $40,000–$150,000 a year for a mid-market self-hosted store: hosting, extension renewals, security patching and the engineering time that carries them (Deploi estimate, illustrative). Custom work on top carries the usual ~15–20% of build cost per year (Deploi estimate).
- What you own — and what you take on
- You own: the database, the code, every integration and the ability to build anything. You take on: uptime, PCI scope, core and plugin upgrades, peak-day capacity, and the recruiting problem that comes with needing people who can do all of it.
3-Year Total Cost of Capability
| Buy (app path) | Build (custom path) | |
|---|---|---|
| Year 0 (setup) | $75,000–$400,000 (data, theme, integrations, redirects, training) | $25,000–$120,000 (hardening, performance, upgrade backlog) |
| Years 1–3 (recurring) | $14,000–$83,000 (Advanced-to-Plus subscription band, illustrative) + app subscriptions | $120,000–$450,000 (hosting, extensions, patching, engineering time) |
| 3-year total | ≈$89,000–$483,000 | ≈$145,000–$570,000 |
- † All figures illustrative samples for the reference scenario — not quotes, not verified pricing.
- † Buy column: a Shopify migration for a mid-market catalog plus an Advanced-to-Plus subscription band; three-year horizon.
- † Build column: staying on the current platform with hardening work in year 0 and ongoing hosting, extensions and platform engineering.
What the Sticker Price Hides
On the buy path
- — Migration cost lands mostly in data and integrations, an estimated $75,000–$400,000 for a mid-market store (Deploi estimate, illustrative), not in the theme everyone focuses on
- — Historical orders cannot be imported through the Shopify admin, so plan where order history will actually live before cutover
- — Extensions become app subscriptions, and a stack of them can quietly exceed the plan itself
- — Checkout customization has boundaries: Scripts stopped executing in June 2026 and checkout.liquid is gone, so legacy logic gets rebuilt as Functions or extensions
On the build path
- — Hosting scales with traffic at $25–$350/month, and the top of that range arrives exactly when a campaign works (verified Sep 2026)
- — Extension renewals at $29–$299/year each compound quietly across a dozen plugins (verified Sep 2026)
- — Security patching is unpaid until it is very expensive; an unpatched plugin is the classic breach path
- — $40,000–$150,000 a year in platform engineering for a mid-market self-hosted store (Deploi estimate, illustrative)
What Merchants Say
The migration regret merchants describe most often is timing rather than platform: a cutover scheduled too close to peak season turns every small defect into a revenue incident.
Free-platform arithmetic keeps catching teams out. The licence costs nothing, then hosting, a dozen extension renewals and a developer's standing hours turn out to be the actual bill.
If You Change Your Mind Later
If you bought and outgrow it
Leaving Shopify later means another migration: products, customers and content export cleanly, historical orders do not import through the admin anywhere, and theme work never ports. Keep integrations behind your own middleware so the next move touches the storefront rather than every system you run.
If you built and want out
Staying keeps every option open, because you hold the database and the code. The cost of that optionality is paid monthly in hosting, patching and the engineering headcount that carries it, and it compounds whether or not you ever exercise the option.
When This Answer Changes
We're watching for:
- ▸ Shopify changing the published lineup of Basic $39, Grow $105, Advanced $399 and Plus from $2,300 per month (verified Sep 2026)
- ▸ BigCommerce adjusting its GMV auto-upgrade thresholds or the 0.9% Scale overage, which is the structural difference from Shopify's flat tiers (verified Sep 2026)
- ▸ Your own hosting bill, plugin renewals or unplanned downtime crossing a developer's monthly salary — the honest trigger to reopen this decision
Verdict change log:
No changes since first publication (September 2026).
Common Questions
Is WooCommerce cheaper than Shopify?
WooCommerce is cheaper on subscription and rarely cheaper in total. The core plugin is free, with hosting at $25–$350/month and extensions at $29–$299/year each (verified Sep 2026). Shopify publishes Basic $39, Grow $105, Advanced $399 and Plus from $2,300 per month (verified Sep 2026), and includes hosting, PCI scope and patching that a self-hosted store pays for in engineering time.
How long does replatforming to Shopify take?
Replatforming a mid-market store takes an estimated 3–9 months end to end (Deploi estimate, illustrative), driven by catalog size, integration count and custom checkout logic rather than by theme design. Budget an estimated $75,000–$400,000 for data, integrations, redirects and training (Deploi estimate, illustrative). Never schedule the cutover inside your peak season.
How does BigCommerce pricing compare with Shopify?
BigCommerce publishes Core $39, Growth $105 and Scale $399 per month with 25% off annually, plus Performance from $1,499/month (verified Sep 2026). Plans auto-upgrade once trailing-twelve-month GMV thresholds are crossed, and Scale adds a 0.9% overage above its allowance. Shopify's Basic $39, Grow $105, Advanced $399 and Plus from $2,300 per month carry no GMV-triggered upgrade (verified Sep 2026).
Your Next Steps
If you're going with BUY(matches your selected profile)
- Price your current stack honestly: hosting, extension renewals, developer hours and downtime, over the last twelve months
- Compare that against Basic $39, Grow $105, Advanced $399 or Plus from $2,300 per month plus expected app subscriptions (verified Sep 2026)
- Inventory every integration and custom checkout behavior before scoping — that list is the migration
- Map URL structure and redirects first, because organic traffic is the asset most often damaged in a replatform
- Set a cutover date at least one full quarter clear of peak season
If you're going with WAIT
- Move to managed hosting and get the core and plugin upgrade backlog current
- Audit extensions and retire everything nobody can name an owner for
- Fix the top three performance issues before considering any platform change
- Track platform hours monthly; when they cross a developer's salary, this decision has already been made for you
Official Docs & Sources
- Shopify plans and pricing — Shopify
- Shopify Plus — Shopify
- Theme architecture — shopify.dev
Official documentation linked for verification — our verdicts and estimates are our own.
Related Decisions
Should You Build or Buy a Shopify App Stack Audit?
Audit app spend on Shopify's bill, which itemizes charges but not ROI (verified Sep 2026), then replace widget-class apps with native features; Vitals under 10 apps.
Adobe Commerce vs. Shopify Plus: Do You Need an Enterprise Platform?
Enterprise platform evaluation is a WAIT on Shopify Plus for $20M–$500M merchants: Plus starts at $2,300 USD/mo (verified Sep 2026); rivals publish no prices.
Own Store or Marketplace: Should You Sell on Shopify, Etsy or Amazon?
Marketplace vs. own store is both/and, not either/or: own the Shopify store, add Etsy ($0.20 + 6.5%) and Amazon ($39.99/mo + 5–45%) as channels (verified Sep 2026).
Shopify Plan Tiers: Should You Stay on Advanced or Move to Plus?
Plus wins past ~$10M GMV or any Plus-only need; Advanced is the workhorse tier below it, Grow under ~$2M. Plus publishes no card rate, so get the quote in writing.
Build or Buy Performance Monitoring & App Audits on Shopify?
Measurement is free on Shopify; storefront speed comes from an audit-and-remediation program, not a speed app.
Ready to find out whether replatforming actually pays for you?
We price your current stack honestly — hosting, extensions, patching, downtime — against a real Shopify migration plan, and tell you when staying put is the better answer. Plenty of stores get that answer from us.
Contact us todayVerdict scored for the reference scenario above. Estimates are not quotes; platform pricing carries its verification date and gets re-verified quarterly. Full scoring anchors: see the TCC methodology.
Read how we score these decisions (the TCC Framework). No affiliate links, no paid placement — no app vendor pays to appear here.