Shopify Alternatives in 2026: WooCommerce and What Else Actually Works

Most Shopify alternatives lists rank platforms by features. We’re going to start somewhere more useful: the line item on your Shopify bill that you probably can’t see. If you sell on Shopify and use any payment processor other than Shopify Payments, Shopify charges you an extra cut of every sale on top of the normal card fees. That number is small enough to ignore at $2,000 a month in sales and painful at $50,000. It’s the single biggest reason stores call us about leaving, so let’s run the math first and pick alternatives second.

The Shopify tax most people never calculate

Shopify’s plans run roughly $39, $105, and $399 a month. That part is visible. The part that hides is the third-party transaction fee: about 2% on the Basic plan, 1% on Shopify, and 0.5% on Advanced if you process payments through anyone other than Shopify Payments. Use PayPal, Stripe, or your bank’s gateway and you pay that surcharge on top of the processor’s own card fee.

Run it on real numbers. A store doing $40,000 a month on the Basic plan, processing through Stripe, hands Shopify roughly $800 a month just in transaction surcharge, on top of the $39 subscription and Stripe’s own fees. That’s close to $10,000 a year for the privilege of not using Shopify’s processor. Move that store to WooCommerce and the surcharge is zero, because nobody sits between you and Stripe. The subscription disappears too. That gap is what funds the migration in the first year.

What we move Shopify stores to, by situation

There’s no universal best Shopify alternative. There’s a right one for your order volume, your team, and how much you want to own. Here’s how we sort it.

WooCommerce, when you want to own the store

This is where most stores we migrate land. WooCommerce is a free plugin that turns WordPress into a full shop, and because it’s self-hosted, there are no platform transaction fees and no monthly SaaS bill. You pay for hosting (figure $30 to $150 a month once you’re doing real volume) and whatever paid extensions you actually need. The trade-off is that you own the maintenance too: updates, backups, and security are yours, or your developer’s. For a side-by-side on where each platform actually wins, we wrote up WooCommerce vs Shopify with real numbers. And if you want to see how we plan a WordPress store end to end, that’s our WordPress for ecommerce page.

BigCommerce, if you want hosted but hate the fees

BigCommerce is the closest thing to “Shopify without the transaction tax.” It’s still a hosted SaaS platform, so you trade some ownership for convenience, but it charges no extra fee on third-party gateways and ships stronger native B2B features than Shopify’s base plans. We point larger wholesale and catalog-heavy stores here when they want someone else to handle hosting and still keep their payment processor.

A custom or headless build, at real scale

Once a store clears a few thousand orders a month or needs deep integration with an ERP, a warehouse system, or a custom checkout, off-the-shelf platforms start fighting you. At that point we build on WooCommerce with custom development, or go headless with WordPress as the backend. This isn’t for everyone; it costs more upfront and needs a developer on call. But for stores where the platform itself is becoming the bottleneck, owning the code pays back fast. That’s the kind of work our WordPress development team handles.

Stay on Shopify, and we’ll tell you so

If you use Shopify Payments, do under a few hundred orders a month, and don’t want to think about hosting or updates, leaving is usually a mistake. With Shopify Payments the transaction surcharge is gone, which removes the main financial argument for switching. Shopify is a genuinely good product for a store that fits inside its box. The problems we get hired to fix are almost always stores that have grown past that box.

WooCommerce vs Shopify: the honest split

People want a winner. The truer answer is that they optimize for different things. Here’s how we frame it for clients.

Shopify trades money for convenience. WooCommerce trades convenience for ownership and lower running costs. Neither is wrong. The right pick depends on whether your bottleneck is time or margin.

When WooCommerce is the wrong call

We don’t push WooCommerce on everyone, because for some stores it’s a liability. If you have no technical person, no appetite to hire one, and you’re happy paying for convenience, a self-hosted store will frustrate you the first time a plugin update breaks checkout at 9pm. WooCommerce rewards owners who treat the store like infrastructure. If you’d rather treat it like a utility you pay a bill for, a hosted platform is the saner choice, and we’ll say so before you spend a cent on migration.

What a Shopify to WooCommerce move involves

Migrating a store is more involved than moving a blog, because you’re moving live commerce data. We export products, variants, customers, and order history, then import them into WooCommerce with the relationships intact. We rebuild the theme, reconnect the payment gateway and shipping rules, and set up 301 redirects from every old Shopify URL so you don’t lose rankings or break links customers have saved. The riskiest part is the cutover, so we stage it on a test site, verify checkout end to end, and switch DNS only once orders flow cleanly. A small catalog takes about a week; a large store with thousands of SKUs runs two to four. If that sounds like a project you’d rather not run alone, it’s what our WordPress migration service exists for.

Common questions

What is the best alternative to Shopify?

For most stores that want lower running costs and full control, WooCommerce. For stores that want hosted convenience without Shopify’s gateway fees, BigCommerce. “Best” depends on whether you’d rather own the store or rent it.

Is WooCommerce cheaper than Shopify?

At real sales volume, almost always, because there’s no monthly platform fee and no transaction surcharge. At very low volume the hosting cost can make it a wash. The crossover usually lands somewhere around a few thousand dollars in monthly sales.

Can I move my Shopify products and orders to WooCommerce?

Yes. Products, variants, customers, and order history all migrate. It isn’t one click, and order history needs care to keep customer records intact, but the data moves. Themes and apps get rebuilt with WooCommerce equivalents.

Will leaving Shopify hurt my SEO?

Only if you skip redirects. Shopify uses fixed URL patterns like /products/ and /collections/, so every one needs a 301 to its new WooCommerce address. Done properly, rankings hold. Skipped, they drop. We never skip it.

Run your own numbers first

Before anything else, check your Shopify billing for the third-party transaction fee and multiply it out for a year. If that number stings, you have a real case for moving. Tell us your order volume and current setup and we’ll give you an honest read on whether a switch pays off. Start with our WordPress migration service, or read our WooCommerce vs Shopify breakdown if you want the full comparison first.

Comparing storefront platforms more broadly? See our honest take on OpenCart vs WooCommerce in 2026.