If you are leaving a marketplace, two platforms come up first: Shopify and WooCommerce. Both let you own your store, your customers, and your data — the whole point of moving. The choice between them is not about which is better, but which fits how you run your business. Here is the honest comparison.
The core difference: managed vs self-hosted
Shopify is fully managed. Hosting, security, and updates are handled for you in exchange for a monthly fee. WooCommerce is self-hosted: it is a free plugin for WordPress that you run on your own hosting, with no platform fee but full responsibility for the stack. That single difference drives almost everything below.
Fees over time
Shopify charges a monthly plan (and a small per-transaction fee unless you use Shopify Payments). WooCommerce has no platform fee at all — you pay only for hosting and any premium plugins. At low volume the costs are similar; at high volume, WooCommerce usually costs less, while Shopify buys you time you would otherwise spend on maintenance.
Control and customisation
WooCommerce gives you direct access to the code and database, which suits custom checkout logic, unusual catalogues, and integrations a hosted platform would gate behind an app store. Shopify is more constrained but far simpler, and its app ecosystem covers most needs without a developer.
Content and SEO
WooCommerce runs on WordPress, the strongest content platform on the web, so a blog, knowledge base, and content-led SEO live natively beside the store. Shopify has a blog, but content marketing is not its strength. If organic traffic from articles and guides is central to your plan, WooCommerce has the edge.
Maintenance and risk
This is the real trade-off. Shopify keeps your store patched, fast, and secure automatically. A WooCommerce store left unmaintained gets slow and vulnerable — it needs caching, updates, backups, and security hardening. That work is straightforward when set up properly, but it is work someone has to own.
So which should you pick?
As a rough guide: choose Shopify if you want to run the store yourself with minimal technical overhead and value speed and simplicity. Choose WooCommerce if you want zero platform fees, total control of the stack, and content marketing built in, and you are comfortable having the maintenance handled. Whichever you pick, the win is the same: you own the store, the customers, and the margin a marketplace used to take. When we scope a migration we recommend one or the other based on your catalogue, volume, and team — not a house preference.