If you are someone who has been in the market for an easy answer to the question – “Shopify or WooCommerce. Which one is better?”, we are sure it must not have been an easy ride. We get queries day in and day out from potential customers who want to be given an unbiased answer. More often than not, conversations, questions and doubts ensue. Some of these are really interesting and give us points to ponder on. But the fact remains, a simple answer to the original question is not easily available. Depending on our experience of these conversations, we try to present an easy answer here.
For an easy answer to be available, there has to be clear comparison available. Here goes…
Shopify vs WooCommerce: Price comparison (CA $)
| Cost | Shopify | WooCommerce |
| Cost of a premium theme | $95 | $41 |
| Cost of Hosting (annual) | $1,296 | $180 |
| Cost of setup & customization | $1,500 | $1,500 |
| Cost of maintenance (annual) | $1,188 | $1,188 |
| Total | $4,079 | $2,909 |
WooCommerce is a clear winner here.
Costs explained
Premium Theme – Both Shopify and WooCommerce offer free themes for anyone to start with. But more often than not, you would look for a modern theme that is capable to enticing the visitor in the first look. This is where Premium themes play their part. We have taken the the prices from Themeforest – a great marketplace for buying themes for both WooCommerce and Shopify. We averaged out the prices for top 5-selling themes at the time of writing this.
Hosting – Shopify charges US $79 per month which takes care of the hosting. Shopify offers free SSL and free support. This is important and can totally tilt the comparison in Shopify’s favor if you believe you would not need to do any changes to your site and would be able to do absolutely fine without any maintenance whatsoever.
Setup & Customization – If you are someone who has landed on this page, chances are, you would need professional help for setting up your website. And it should be fine too. After all, every quality business makes and saves money. The pricing for setup & customization is same because we at Thames Technologies try to be as impartial as possible towards every technology.
Maintenance – No matter how much you believe that you would not be requiring maintenance, sadly it is not entirely true. Especially in the case of external customer-facing businesses, there would be times when you would want to get something urgently done to your website. The unplanned updates and changes at time such as these are mostly costly. It is better to have a systematic plan in place that would insure your website against surprise costs.
We hope the above comparison was helpful. We have kept it as concise as possible because that is what we set out to do. We are here to inform you and not confuse you with an overload of information. In case you are looking for any specific piece of information that you could not find here, feel free to drop us a line or comment below and we would be happy to talk to you.
