The best Shopify alternatives for UK businesses (2026)

People rarely search for a Shopify alternative because Shopify is bad. They search because the £25 store somehow became a £200 store (an app here, a surcharge there, a plan upgrade because a second person needed a login) or because they'd simply rather deal with a UK company, in pounds, with UK support hours. Whatever brought you here, this is the honest version of the comparison: every price below comes from the platform's own pricing page, checked on 21 July 2026, and one disclosure up front. We build Orbit, one of the platforms on this list. Read with that in mind; the numbers don't care who wrote them down.

What actually separates the alternatives

Sticker prices won't help you choose: most of these platforms cost £16–£35 a month at entry level and the difference buys a coffee. Four things actually separate them, and none sits on the front of a pricing page: what happens to card fees when you don't use the platform's own payment system, what's included versus sold back to you as apps, where the caps are (turnover, products, staff, storage), and who picks up the phone when checkout breaks on a Saturday. That's how we've compared them. If you dropship, our guide to dropshipping in the UK without Shopify scores the options against what a dropshipping shop needs.

The list, honestly annotated

1. Orbit Commerce: UK-first, more in the plan

Ours, so we'll keep it factual. Orbit's plans are £25 (Solo), £85 (Team) and £249 (Pro) a month (£19, £64 and £187 billed yearly) priced in pounds, with unlimited products on every plan and storage from 100GB to 1TB. The pitch is that the things Shopify sells as apps are in the plan: subscription plans, gift cards, abandoned-cart recovery, discounts and reporting, plus a drag-and-drop page builder instead of a theme you pay for. UK personal card rates are published per plan (2% + 25p on Solo, 1.7% + 25p on Team, 1.5% + 25p on Pro) identical tier-for-tier to Shopify's own rates, so on UK personal cards the fees are a wash and the decision comes down to the plan and the app bill. Migration tools recognise Shopify's product export on upload and import customers and past orders from CSV, each order joined to the customer with the same email address, and a separate importer reads Shopify's redirect export. The full Orbit vs Shopify comparison goes feature by feature.

2. ShopWired: UK-based, capped by turnover

ShopWired is the most direct UK-native competitor, based in the West Midlands, with a 14-day trial and a strong feature list: unlimited products, subscriptions, trade accounts and abandoned-basket recovery, plus 0% platform fees on more than 40 external payment gateways. The catch is structural: plans are capped by turnover. Essentials at £34.95 + VAT a month covers you to £50,000 a year; past that you're on Advanced at £79.95, then Premium at £149.95 to £500,000, then Enterprise from £299.95. Selling more is the trigger for paying more, which is worth pricing into any success you're planning. Essentials also charges small add-ons (£5–£10/month) for unlimited users and trade accounts that higher tiers include, and the theme catalogue is a modest 20. We've written a full Orbit vs ShopWired comparison if it's on your shortlist.

3. Bluepark: small, UK, unlimited staff

Bluepark has run since 2004, hosts around 4,500 stores, and is the quiet cousin on this list: £29.99 + VAT (Retail), £44.99 (Business) and £64.99 (Enterprise) a month, no transaction fees on any plan, unlimited staff accounts everywhere, and UK phone support from a small team. The caps here are products and storage rather than turnover: Retail allows 500 products and 500MB of storage, Business 2,000 and 1GB, and even Enterprise's 2GB expandable allowance is tight if your product photography is any good. B2B and marketing features sit on Business and above. It's a sensible choice for a compact, stable catalogue; less so for media-heavy or fast-growing stores. We've written a full Orbit vs Bluepark comparison if it's on your shortlist.

4. EKM: no longer the platform you remember

EKM was the default UK-native answer for two decades, but as of our July 2026 check, its self-serve tiered plans are gone. The current offer is a single plan, Evolve, at £327 + VAT a month (half price for the first three months), with a dedicated ecommerce manager and design support. No platform transaction fees, and their in-house EKMPay processing starts at 1.4% + 20p (plus VAT). If you want a dedicated manager and the budget fits, that's a real offer. If you were comparing it against £30-a-month platforms, it no longer plays in that market, which reshuffles the UK-native field considerably. The three-way breakdown is in our EKM vs ShopWired vs Bluepark comparison.

5. Wix: strong builder, read the billing small print

Wix's commerce plans are Core at £16, Business at £25 and Business Elite at £119 a month, but those are annual-billing prices, paid up front in full, quoted excluding VAT, and the monthly-billing prices aren't published on the pricing page at all. Card processing through Wix Payments is a flat 2.1% + 20p on UK cards regardless of plan, higher than the 1.5–1.7% the platforms above offer mid-tier, and the product catalogue caps at 50,000. The builder itself is excellent and the abandoned-cart and multichannel basics are on every commerce plan. For a content-led site with a small shop attached, it's a fair pick; as the main engine of a growing UK store, the processing rate and the upfront annual billing deserve a hard look.

6. WooCommerce: free software, real running costs

WooCommerce hands you the whole stack to run: the plugin is free, and the store around it is not. Managed WordPress hosting is a monthly bill, official extensions renew annually (Subscriptions is £209 a year, bookings £186, memberships £152), and the maintenance (updates, backups, security, compatibility testing across every plugin) is yours or your retainer's. WooPayments charges 1.5% + 25p on UK cards, competitive with anything here. We've written the full sum up separately in when self-hosted stops being free, and the hosted-platform escape routes in WooCommerce alternatives for UK stores.

Side by side

Prices from each vendor's pricing page, 21 July 2026. Orbit, ShopWired, Bluepark, EKM and Wix quote prices excluding VAT; annual-billing rates shown where offered. Promotional first-term discounts (Wix's 50%-off offer, EKM's three months half price, Shopify's £1/month intro) are excluded on purpose. You'll pay the list price for years, not the promo.

The switching part, briefly

Whichever way you lean, test the move before you commit to it. Every platform above offers a trial; the useful test is always the same: import your real catalogue, rebuild your best-selling page, place a real order, and watch what happens to your URLs, because redirects are where replatforming rankings go to die. Our Shopify migration guide walks the whole sequence with honest timings, and it applies in spirit to any destination on this list. For the SEO side on its own, our guide to changing ecommerce platform without losing your search rankings covers the redirect map and the launch-day checks.

Questions people ask us about Shopify alternatives

What is the best Shopify alternative in the UK?

It depends on the trap you're escaping. Leaving because of the app bill: Orbit or ShopWired, where subscription plans and carts are in the plan. Leaving for UK support in UK hours: Orbit, Bluepark or ShopWired. Wanting a dedicated account manager: Orbit's Enterprise plan, or EKM's single plan.

Is there a cheaper alternative to Shopify?

At entry level, barely: most platforms cluster at £16–£35 a month and card fees are similar everywhere. The real savings appear at the app bill (on plan-inclusive platforms, the features Shopify sells as monthly apps come with the plan) and at the surcharge line if you use a third-party gateway on Shopify.

Can I move my store without losing my Google rankings?

Yes, if redirects are set up for every old URL: products, collections and the long tail of pages that rank. On Orbit, product handles are kept, old /collections/ links 301 to /categories/, and a separate importer reads Shopify's redirect export; on any platform, spot-check your top landing pages from Search Console after cutover.

How long does switching from Shopify actually take?

A small store (a couple of hundred products, a short app list) is a weekend of honest work plus a quiet hour for DNS. Large catalogues with deep variants are a couple of weeks of evenings, mostly in data QA and the app audit.