Shopify vs WooCommerce: costs, speed, security and who wins when

Shopify vs WooCommerce is the platform question most Dutch webshops ask sooner or later. WooCommerce is still the most used shop software in the Netherlands: Store Leads counts 98,489 live Dutch WooCommerce stores against 67,941 on Shopify. The direction is the other way round. In the Netherlands, WooCommerce lost 10% of its live stores between Q3 2025 and Q3 2026, while Shopify grew 13%.

Whether you search for WooCommerce vs Shopify or simply ask "Shopify or WooCommerce?", most comparisons stop at features. Features rarely decide it. What decides it is who runs the servers, who tests the updates, what your payment mix costs and how much content you publish. This guide compares the two platforms topic by topic, with a table and a winner per situation: costs over three years for two fictional Dutch shops, speed, security and maintenance, payments in the Netherlands, content and SEO, B2B, international sales, POS, apps and plugins, and who owns your data and code.

This is a direct comparison. If you are already looking beyond these two, read our guide to WooCommerce alternatives. If you have decided to move, the WooCommerce to Shopify migration guide covers the steps.

Prices and figures: status October 2026, from the vendors' own pricing pages, the HTTP Archive Web Almanac 2025, Patchstack and Store Leads. Check VAT and current prices before you decide.

Key takeaways

• Different models. Shopify is a hosted platform from €21 a month (Basic, annual billing). WooCommerce is a free WordPress plugin: you pay for hosting, extensions and the hours to keep it running.

• Cost: for a €2 million shop, three years cost €55,374 on Shopify Grow with Shopify Payments and €57,690 on WooCommerce with WooPayments, excluding hours and apps. Keeping Mollie on Shopify Grow raises it to €116,949.

• Speed: 76% of mobile Shopify sites pass all Core Web Vitals, against 35% of WooCommerce sites (Web Almanac 2025).

• Security: 11,334 new WordPress vulnerabilities in 2025, 91% in plugins, 46% without a patch at disclosure (Patchstack). On Shopify, the platform patches the core and the checkout.

• Payments: iDEAL | Wero costs €0.29 on Shopify Payments and WooPayments, €0.32 at Mollie. An external provider on Shopify adds 2%, 1% or 0.6%, depending on the plan.

• Content: WordPress wins on blogging, layouts and URL freedom. Shopify uses fixed paths such as /products/ and /blogs/.

• Ownership: on WooCommerce you own the code, the database and the server. On Shopify you can export products, customers and orders, but not the checkout, Functions or app data.

Shopify vs WooCommerce at a glance

One table with the short answer per topic. The sections below explain each row with numbers.

The basic difference: renting a shop or owning a building

Shopify is software as a service. You pay a monthly fee and Shopify runs the servers, the CDN, the checkout, PCI compliance and the core updates. You build on top of it with a theme and apps.

WooCommerce is an open-source plugin for WordPress. The software is free under the GPL. Everything around it is yours to arrange: hosting, caching, backups, security, PHP upgrades and every plugin update. That gives you complete freedom and complete responsibility.

Most of the comparison follows from this table. Where Shopify wins, it wins because work moves to the platform. Where WooCommerce wins, it wins because nothing is locked.

Costs: three years, two Dutch shops

License prices tell you little. A fair comparison counts hosting, extensions and above all payment fees, because those make up most of the bill. Our overview of Shopify costs lists every running cost on the Shopify side.

The prices we use

• Shopify (annual billing): Basic €21, Grow €59, Advanced €289 per month. Shopify Payments: iDEAL €0.29; EEA cards 1.9% + €0.25 (Basic), 1.8% + €0.25 (Grow), 1.6% + €0.25 (Advanced). With an external payment provider, Shopify charges 2% (Basic), 1% (Grow) or 0.6% (Advanced) on top.

• WooCommerce: the plugin is free. Hosting at Hypernode, a Dutch e-commerce host: Falcon XS €129, S €181, M €237, L €388 per month. Extensions are annual licences: WooCommerce Subscriptions €249, Product Bundles €71, Dynamic Pricing €116 per year.

• Payments on WooCommerce: Mollie charges €0.32 per iDEAL payment and 1.80% + €0.25 for EEA consumer cards. WooPayments charges €0.29 for iDEAL and 1.50% + €0.25 for cards for Dutch stores, with 2% extra for cards from outside Europe.

Example 1: a €2 million shop

Assumptions: €2 million online revenue a year, average order €80, so 25,000 orders. 70% paid with iDEAL | Wero (17,500 orders), 30% with EEA consumer cards (7,500 orders, €600,000). WooCommerce runs on Hypernode Falcon M with Subscriptions, Product Bundles and Dynamic Pricing. Not included: development and maintenance hours, migration, Shopify apps, themes and VAT.

The difference between the cheapest WooCommerce setup and Shopify Grow is €2,316 over three years. That is noise. Three things do matter:

• The payment provider. Keep Mollie on Shopify Grow and you pay 1% on €6 million revenue: €60,000 extra, for a total of €116,949. On Basic the extra fee is 2%, on Advanced 0.6%.

• The plan. Shopify Advanced with Shopify Payments costs €60,054 over three years for this shop: the lower card rate does not earn back the higher licence at this volume.

• The empty line. Maintenance hours on WooCommerce against app subscriptions on Shopify. If your developer spends eight hours a month on updates, testing and fixes, that is 288 hours in three years. Multiply by your own hourly rate and compare it with the apps you would need on Shopify.

Example 2: a €250,000 shop

Same mix, smaller scale: €250,000 revenue, average order €80, 3,125 orders, 70% iDEAL | Wero. WooCommerce runs on Hypernode Falcon XS (€129 per month) with Product Bundles and Dynamic Pricing. Shopify runs on Basic.

At this size hosting is the largest fixed cost on WooCommerce, and Shopify is cheaper on paper. Cheaper hosting closes part of the gap, but then you carry more of the work yourself: staging, backups and speed. Shopify Grow comes to €8,780 for this shop; Basic with Mollie as an external provider to €22,609, because of the 2% fee.

Winner on cost: small shops without a developer in house: Shopify. Large shops: a draw on paper, decided by maintenance hours and app subscriptions. Shops that insist on keeping Mollie: WooCommerce, or Shopify Plus, where the external provider fee drops to 0.2% (see Shopify Plus).

Hosting and speed: Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are the speed and stability metrics Google measures on real visits: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). The Web Almanac 2025 measured them on 995,782 WooCommerce and 567,932 Shopify origins, using Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) data.

The gap is almost entirely loading speed. INP and CLS are close. LCP is not: 86% against 39%. That fits the model. On WooCommerce, the server builds each page in PHP with database queries from WordPress, WooCommerce and every plugin, on hosting you pick and pay for. On Shopify, hosting, CDN and caching are the platform's job, so the baseline starts higher.

These are averages. A lean WooCommerce shop on good hosting with a light theme passes. A Shopify shop with a heavy theme and twenty apps that each load a script can fail. But the starting point differs, and on WooCommerce keeping the score is your job every month.

Winner on speed: Shopify, unless you have a WordPress team that treats performance as a product.

Security and maintenance

Patchstack counted 11,334 new vulnerabilities in the WordPress ecosystem in 2025, 42% more than in 2024. 91% were in plugins, 9% in themes and six in WordPress core. 46% had no patch available when they were disclosed. Heavily exploited vulnerabilities were attacked within a weighted median of five hours. WooCommerce Payments up to version 5.6.1 (2023) was still among the most exploited WordPress vulnerabilities in 2025.

WordPress core is not the problem; the plugin layer is. Every WooCommerce shop has one, and every plugin is code from a different author, on your server, with access to your customer data. Five hours is shorter than a weekend.

Shopify is not free of risk. Apps can request access to orders and customers, and a badly built app can slow the storefront. But apps run on the developer's servers, not inside your shop's code, and Shopify reviews public apps before they appear in the App Store.

Winner on security and maintenance: Shopify. If you stay on WooCommerce: managed hosting with staging and backups, fewer plugins, a fixed update routine with a named owner, PHP upgraded before 31 December 2026.

Payments in the Netherlands

iDEAL | Wero is the default in the Netherlands, and by the end of 2027 every iDEAL merchant will have moved to Wero. Both platforms support it. The difference is in who processes it and what that costs.

Sources: Shopify pricing NL, Mollie pricing and WooPayments fees, status October 2026. WooPayments adds 21% VAT on its fees unless you provide a valid VAT ID.

The key line is the last column. WooCommerce has no platform fee, so you pick any provider and pay only its rate. Shopify rewards Shopify Payments and charges extra for everything else. For many Dutch shops that is the hardest part of a switch: years of Mollie or another provider, linked to the bookkeeping, sometimes with subscriptions running on stored mandates.

Subscriptions deserve a separate check. Shopify Subscriptions, a free app by Shopify, imports contracts by CSV. Stored payment methods can be imported only from Stripe, Braintree, Authorize.Net, PayPal and Adyen. iDEAL and SEPA mandates at Mollie do not move: those customers enter their details once more.

Winner on payments: WooCommerce on freedom of choice; Shopify on simplicity if you accept Shopify Payments. Shops with a large Mollie subscription base: WooCommerce, or plan the switch as a separate workstream.

Content, SEO and blogging

This is where WordPress wins, and it is the most common reason we advise a brand to stay. WordPress was built to publish. WooCommerce adds a shop to it.

What this means in practice: if your shop wins traffic with hundreds of guides, recipes or long articles, and editors publish several times a week, WordPress is the better tool for that work. Shopify's blog has tags, several blogs and scheduled posts, but fewer layout options and no plugin ecosystem around it.

Product and category pages are a different matter. There, speed and structured product data count more than editorial freedom, and Shopify's Core Web Vitals help. Some brands combine the two: the shop on Shopify, content in WordPress or a headless CMS. That is two systems and two budgets, so only choose it when content really drives sales.

Winner on content and SEO freedom: WooCommerce. On product page speed: Shopify.

B2B: wholesale next to the webshop

Shopify B2B is part of the platform: companies, locations, catalogues and payment terms sit next to the B2C shop, in the same admin. On WooCommerce, every B2B function is an extension with its own licence and update cycle. That works for a simple wholesale price list. It gets fragile when tiered prices, approval flows and customer-specific assortments come together.

The ERP decides more than the platform. If your ERP cannot deliver a price per customer per order line, neither platform will fix that. See Shopify B2B and ERP integration for how we approach it.

Winner on B2B: Shopify, and Shopify Plus as soon as you need more than three price lists.

International sales and multiple languages

Prices: WPML, status October 2026: Multilingual Blog €39, CMS €99 and Agency €199 per year. The Blog plan does not include WooCommerce support.

WPML is mature and widely used. The cost is not the licence but the layers: every plugin has to be translation-compatible, and every update of WPML, WooCommerce or a plugin can break a translated page. On Shopify, Markets is one system for languages, currencies, domains and prices per country. High Clean, which moved from WordPress and WooCommerce to Shopify, is now live in eleven languages.

Winner on international sales: Shopify, especially from three markets up.

POS: selling in a physical store

WooCommerce's own POS arrived in the Netherlands in May 2026, which is a real step for small shops with one counter or a market stall. Shopify POS has been around much longer and is built for chains: staff roles, multiple locations, transfers between stores and one customer file. OGÉR moved from Magento to Shopify Plus and POS; after go-live revenue rose 45%, according to their CCO.

Winner on POS: Shopify for retail with several stores. WooCommerce POS is enough for an occasional counter sale.

Apps and plugins: the ecosystem

Both ecosystems are large. WordPress has the largest directory of free plugins on the web, and the WooCommerce Marketplace adds paid extensions. Shopify has its App Store, with apps from Shopify and third parties.

The difference is not the number but the model:

• Plugins run inside your shop. They share the server, the database and the PHP version. One badly written plugin slows everything down or opens a vulnerability. In return, a plugin can change anything.

• Apps run outside your shop. They work through Shopify's APIs and theme extensions. They cannot break the core, but they also cannot change what the APIs do not allow.

• The bill differs. WooCommerce extensions are annual licences, often tens to a few hundred euros. Shopify apps are monthly subscriptions, often priced by order volume. Count both before you compare.

A test we use on every WooCommerce shop: list the active plugins and give each one a label. Native (Shopify does it), app, custom (needs development) or bin (nobody needs it). Caching, image optimisation and security plugins are almost always bin on Shopify. SEO, multilingual and B2B plugins are mostly native. The custom rows decide the build budget; the app rows decide the monthly bill.

Winner on ecosystem: WooCommerce on freedom, Shopify on stability.

Ownership of data and code

This is the argument for WooCommerce that Shopify cannot answer. With WooCommerce you own the software, the database and the server. You can move hosts, change anything and keep running as long as you maintain it.

Two remarks. First, on Shopify the exit is less dramatic than it sounds: products, customers and orders leave as data. What you lose is the checkout, Functions and the app layer, so write down now what you would need to leave. Second, owning the code also means owning the maintenance. Freedom on WooCommerce is real, and it costs hours every month.

Winner on ownership: WooCommerce.

Hard limits on Shopify to check first

Shopify's limits decide more than its features. These are the ones that come up when WooCommerce shops compare:

• Products: 3 options and 2,048 variants per product, 250 media per product. Configurators cross that quickly.

• Custom fields: 250 metafield definitions per store.

• Checkout logic: Functions with fixed limits (11 million instructions, 128 kB in, 20 kB out). Any PHP rule on WooCommerce is not automatically possible on Shopify.

• URLs: fixed prefixes, so every product, category, page and post URL from WooCommerce changes and needs a redirect.

• Plus contract: one brand per contract, a main store plus nine expansion stores.

WooCommerce has no platform limits on options, variants or fields. Your hosting decides how fast it stays.

When WooCommerce remains the better choice

We are a Shopify partner and still advise WooCommerce in these situations:

• Content drives sales. Your traffic comes from hundreds of articles, your editors work in WordPress every day, and the shop is a smaller part of the site.

• You have a strong WordPress team. In house or with a fixed partner, with staging, an update routine and someone who watches the advisories.

• Your logic is unusual. A configurator with more than three options, pricing rules that Functions cannot run, or integrations that need direct database access.

• Your payment setup is fixed. A large subscription base on Mollie mandates, or contracts with a provider that make the Shopify fee too expensive.

• Volume is modest and stable. No peaks that strain the hosting, one market, one language.

Look again when updates keep breaking things, when Black Friday slows the shop down, or when you start selling in more countries or to business customers.

Winner per situation

Switching: what it takes and what shops say

If the comparison points to Shopify, the switch is a project, not an export. Three questions decide whether it is worth it. We call it the Breakup Talk, asked in one meeting with twelve months of invoices on the table:

1. Version: how old is your stack? For WooCommerce that means PHP, plugin licences and order storage.

2. Ceiling: does one of the three things your plan needs in the next twelve months require a rebuild instead of a release?

3. Cost: is the median lead time of your last ten change requests longer than four weeks?

No red answers: stay and invest in conversion and marketing. One red: fix that one thing. Two or more: move. Plan backwards: to sell on Shopify on Black Friday 2027 (26 November), you decide in February 2027.

Two Dutch brands made this move with us. Jansen Holland moved from WooCommerce to Shopify and wrote in its public review: "Our migration from WooCommerce to Shopify was handled smoothly and professionally, with excellent support throughout the process." High Clean moved from WordPress and WooCommerce to Shopify and is now live in eleven languages.

The steps, from plugin audit to redirects and the first 90 days, are in our WooCommerce to Shopify migration guide. How we run the project is on WooCommerce to Shopify, and the general approach on Shopify migration.

Our view

Shopify vs WooCommerce is not a question of which platform is better, but of which work you want to own. WooCommerce gives you everything: the code, the data, the server, and every update and vulnerability that comes with them. Shopify takes the servers, the checkout and the security off your hands, and in return you accept its limits, its URL structure and its fee on external payment providers.

Our numbers show that the licence rarely decides it. For a €2 million shop the cheapest setups are within a few thousand euros of each other over three years. The payment setup and the maintenance hours make the difference. On speed and security the data favours Shopify clearly. On content and ownership WooCommerce wins.

As a Shopify Platinum Partner we are not neutral, so we say it openly. If content drives your sales and you have a WordPress team that keeps the shop fast and updated, stay on WooCommerce. If you want to keep open source but leave WordPress, look at the options in our WooCommerce alternatives guide. If you want to stop running servers and plugins, sell B2B or across borders, Shopify is the better fit. For custom work on a new store, see Shopify development.