If you’re weighing up Shopify vs WooCommerce for a UK shop, you’ll notice the comparison posts split neatly along one line: agencies that build WooCommerce sites conclude WooCommerce, and Shopify partners conclude Shopify. We sell neither — we build Orbit, a hosted UK platform, so we have our own horse and we’ll name it plainly when it appears near the end. Until then, treat this as a referee’s card. Every price below was checked on 7 August 2026 against Shopify’s UK pricing page and WooCommerce.com.
The comparison is usually framed as a features fight. It isn’t one. Both will sell a t-shirt, take a card payment and email a receipt. The real question — the one behind every Shopify or WooCommerce decision — is who does the maintenance, and what that arrangement costs at your size.
The short version
- WooCommerce is cheaper on software at every size we modelled, and nobody can raise your rent: you own the stack, the data and the code. In exchange, you run a website as well as a shop.
- Shopify costs more — meaningfully more once apps arrive — but hosting, security and updates are somebody else’s job, and its app and theme ecosystem is the deepest in commerce.
- There’s a third path — UK hosted platforms, ours included — for people who want Shopify’s hands-off model without the app bill. Clearly labelled, further down.
This is really a question about who does the maintenance
Shopify is a platform. Servers, PCI compliance, software updates, security patches: handled, invisibly, as part of the subscription. When something breaks at platform level, there’s a status page and a support queue.
WooCommerce is software — a free plugin for WordPress, which is also free. You (or someone you pay) choose the hosting, keep PHP on a supported version, update WordPress core, update WooCommerce, update every other plugin, take backups, and handle the occasional awkward afternoon when two plugins disagree after an update. When checkout breaks at 9pm on a Friday, it’s your outage.
Neither arrangement is wrong; they’re different jobs. A well-run WooCommerce shop needs a few hours of attention a month, more around major version releases, and ideally a staging site so you’re not testing updates on live customers. If you enjoy that work — plenty of owners genuinely do — it’s a real advantage, because those hours buy you total control. If you don’t, it’s a tax paid in evenings, or in invoices to whoever holds the pager for you.
What Shopify costs a UK shop
Checked 7 August 2026 on Shopify’s UK pricing page: Basic is £25/month (£19/month billed annually), Grow is £65/month (£49 annually) and Advanced is £344/month (£259 annually). Shopify Payments takes 2% + 25p per UK online card payment on Basic, 1.7% + 25p on Grow and 1.5% + 25p on Advanced. Use your own payment provider instead and Shopify adds a surcharge of 2%, 1% or 0.6% by plan — a loyalty penalty WooCommerce simply doesn’t have.
The subscription is rarely the real bill, though. Features that come built into other platforms — subscriptions, decent reviews, bundles — are rented monthly from the app store. When we audited this in the real cost of Shopify in the UK, a lean app stack ran £40–£100 a month and established shops commonly reported £150+, with subscription apps alone at £78–£99 a month plus per-order fees.
One number worth knowing before you upgrade: Advanced’s better card rate only beats Grow once you’re putting roughly £1.7 million a year through cards. Below that, the £279/month jump in subscription costs more than the 0.2% saves. Most £300k shops belong on Grow.
What WooCommerce actually costs in the UK
The core plugin is free, so the bill assembles itself from parts. UK WordPress hosting is genuinely cheap: Krystal’s plans ran £7–£37 a month including VAT when we checked on 7 August 2026, with the £11–£19 tiers covering most small shops. WooPayments charges 1.5% + 25p on domestic UK cards — Advanced-tier pricing from day one — plus 2% on international cards, and note the fees themselves attract VAT (reverse-charged if you’re VAT registered).
Extensions are where costs creep in, priced yearly rather than monthly: WooCommerce Subscriptions is £210/year and Product Add-Ons £60/year on WooCommerce.com, both checked the same day. Plenty of shops run entirely on free plugins; a typical paid stack lands somewhere between £0 and £300 a year — a fraction of Shopify’s app rents for the same jobs.
What the invoices don’t show is the maintenance from the previous section. If you do it yourself, it costs hours. If you pay an agency retainer, get quotes — they vary too widely for any published number to be honest.
Shopify vs WooCommerce UK costs at three shop sizes
Assumptions, so you can argue with them: £50 average order, everything paid by card online, monthly billing, Shopify Payments or WooPayments, and the lean app/extension stacks above. Yearly totals:
| Turnover | Orders | Shopify (per year) | WooCommerce (per year, software only) |
|---|---|---|---|
| £30,000 | 600 | ~£1,530 (Basic £300 + card fees £750 + apps ~£480) | ~£790 (hosting £132 + card fees £600 + extensions £60) |
| £100,000 | 2,000 | ~£4,180 (Grow £780 + card fees £2,200 + apps ~£1,200) | ~£2,500 (hosting £228 + card fees £2,000 + extensions £270) |
| £300,000 | 6,000 | ~£9,180 (Grow £780 + card fees £6,600 + apps ~£1,800) | ~£6,710 (hosting £444 + card fees £6,000 + extensions £270) |
The gap — roughly £700, £1,700 and £2,500 a year as you grow — is the price of the pager. It’s what you pay Shopify so that updates, security and hosting are never your problem. Whether that’s a bargain depends entirely on what your hours are worth and how you feel about being on call. Note what WooCommerce’s column doesn’t include: those hours.
Where each one wins
Choose WooCommerce if…
You want ownership. Your shop is yours in a way no hosted platform can match: export everything, move hosts, edit any line of code, and pay no surcharge for choosing your own payment provider. It sits inside WordPress, still the best content and blogging system going, which matters if SEO and editorial are your growth engine. And it flexes into genuinely weird requirements — custom pricing logic, unusual checkout flows — that hosted platforms flatly refuse. The condition: you, or someone you pay, must be comfortable running a website.
Choose Shopify if…
You never want to think about hosting, PHP or plugin conflicts again. The app store has something for every niche, the themes are polished, the checkout is relentlessly conversion-optimised, and if you need help there are more Shopify freelancers in the UK than for any other platform. That ecosystem is the honest answer to why Shopify costs more: you’re buying membership of the biggest club in commerce. Budget properly for it — the app rents are the real price, not the £25.
The third option — declared interest and all
There’s a category the agency comparison posts skip: hosted UK platforms — EKM, ShopWired, Bluepark and Orbit, which is ours, so read this section knowing who wrote it. The pitch is Shopify’s model — someone else holds the pager — with the app-store features built in instead of rented. On Orbit, subscriptions, abandoned-cart recovery and free Amazon, eBay and Etsy plugins are included, so the £100k shop in our table comes to roughly £3,220 a year (Team at £85/month plus 1.7% + 25p card fees) against Shopify’s ~£4,180 — full numbers on our pricing page and a line-by-line breakdown in Orbit vs WooCommerce. Fair warning both ways: no hosted UK platform matches WooCommerce’s ownership or Shopify’s app depth. If this category interests you, the field is compared honestly in our guide to UK Shopify alternatives.
Questions people ask us about Shopify vs WooCommerce in the UK
Is WooCommerce really cheaper than Shopify in the UK?
On software, yes, at every size we modelled — roughly £790 vs £1,530 a year at £30k turnover, and £6,710 vs £9,180 at £300k, checked 7 August 2026. But WooCommerce’s figure excludes the hours you’ll spend on updates, backups and security, or the agency retainer that replaces them. Price those hours honestly and the gap narrows; for some owners it disappears.
Which is better for a UK small business, WooCommerce or Shopify?
If nobody on the team wants to run a website, Shopify — or a UK hosted platform like EKM or Orbit — because the maintenance is done for you. If you have WordPress skills in-house, care about owning your stack, or lean heavily on content and SEO, WooCommerce rewards the effort with lower software costs and total control.
Do I have to use Shopify Payments in the UK?
No, but it costs you: Shopify adds a 2% surcharge on Basic, 1% on Grow and 0.6% on Advanced when you take payment through a third-party provider, on top of that provider’s own fees. WooCommerce charges nothing extra for using whichever payment provider you like.
Can I switch between Shopify and WooCommerce later?
Yes — products, customers and orders move via CSV on both, and the migration is routine. The friction is everything else: themes and apps don’t transfer, and you must redirect every old URL or forfeit your Google rankings. So choose for the next two or three years, not forever, and keep your product data exportable from day one.