Shopify vs WooCommerce
Shopify and WooCommerce are both e-commerce software. Shopify is a commercial product from Shopify Inc. WooCommerce is open source under GPL-2.0, with 11k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick Shopify when
- A merchant wants to sell online quickly without managing hosting, and can work within Shopify's data model.
- Pick WooCommerce when
- A small or mid-size business already on WordPress, or wanting content and shop in one, sells online.
Side by side
Hosted e-commerce platform for building online stores with themes, checkout, payments, point-of-sale and a large app store.
A WordPress plugin that turns a WordPress site into an online store with products, cart, checkout, payments and thousands of extensions.
Monthly app costs add up, and checkout and URL structure are only partly customisable.
Many needed features are paid extensions, and performance and security depend on your hosting and plugin choices.
Production-ready (both)
Cloud service and mobile app
Self-hosted server
Ruby on Rails and Liquid
PHP, WordPress, TypeScript, React and MySQL
Closed source, sold by Shopify Inc.
Open source, GPL-2.0 (strong copyleft)
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
Use inside your business is unrestricted, but anything you distribute that includes it must be released under the same license.
11k Wikipedia readers a month on phones
11k GitHub stars
Not known
Established: started 15 years ago, latest release 11.2.1.
Other comparisons
More e-commerce platforms
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.