Shopify alternatives: an honest guide to WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Wix, and more

Every platform below was set up and run as an actual store rather than skimmed from its marketing pages, and each is weighed by the kind of store it genuinely fits instead of a single overall score.

Cost is the first, and it's rarely the plan price itself. Shopify runs Starter at $5 a month (a checkout link, no full site), Basic at $29 annually or $39 month to month, Grow at $79 or $105, Advanced at $299 or $399, and Plus starting around $2,300 a month for large merchants. What catches people off guard is the transaction fee the moment you use anything other than Shopify Payments: 2.9% plus $0.30, plus an extra 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, or 0.6% on Advanced. If you're already tied to a different payment processor for a good reason, that added percentage is a real, recurring cost that never shows up on the plan comparison chart, and it's the single most common thing that sends people searching for Shopify alternatives.

App-dependence is the second reason. Shopify's core is intentionally lean, and a lot of what a store actually needs, reviews, upsells, subscriptions, better search, gets bolted on as a separate paid app. Each one is small on its own. A store running eight or ten of them is often paying more in app subscriptions than in the base plan, and every app is one more thing that can break during a theme update.

Speed is the third, and it's genuinely a range rather than a fixed number. Real Shopify stores score anywhere from 45 to 92 on mobile PageSpeed, depending almost entirely on how many apps and how much product photography got loaded onto the page. A typical small store, not a showcase example, scored 62 on desktop and 45 on mobile in cold testing, which is not fast. That's less a knock on Shopify's core than on how easy it is to weigh a store down without noticing.

A store running eight or ten small apps is often paying more in app subscriptions than in the base plan.

All three are real. What's also real, and worth conceding plainly before going further: for an actual growing store, high SKU count, multiple sales channels, a physical register alongside the website, Shopify's app ecosystem, its Shopify Payments and POS integration, and its dropshipping tooling are genuinely deep, and most of what's below isn't trying to beat that. It's trying to find a cheaper or lighter fit for a store that doesn't need all of it.

WooCommerce is a free plugin that turns a WordPress site into a store: products, cart, checkout, order management, all running inside the same install as your content. The appeal is ownership. It's your database and your files, in full, movable to any host or developer without anyone's permission, and there's no platform-level cut of a single sale, ever. You also get WordPress's entire plugin library behind it, tens of thousands of tools well past what any commerce-specific app store offers. The catch is that "free" undersells the real cost. A properly built store, hosting, a couple of paid extensions for shipping and tax, a decent theme, a payment gateway, tends to land somewhere between $100 and $150 a month once it's all added up. It's rarely dramatically cheaper than Shopify; it's just billed in more separate pieces from more separate vendors, and someone still has to keep the plugins patched and compatible with each other. WooCommerce is the right call for a store that wants full control and content depth and either has a developer on hand or is genuinely comfortable doing the upkeep.

BigCommerce has spent years marketing itself as the "no transaction fee" alternative to Shopify, and for most of its history that was true. It's built for more catalog depth out of the gate: native multi-currency, stronger B2B features, and higher default limits before you need a paid app to hit them. That pitch got more complicated in 2026. BigCommerce renamed its tiers (Standard became Core, Plus became Growth, Pro became Scale, Enterprise became Performance) and, starting June 1, introduced an Open Payment Provider fee on any gateway that isn't on its own approved list of embedded providers: 2% on Core, 1% on Growth, 0.6% on Scale, and a negotiated rate on Performance. Use one of BigCommerce's embedded payment providers and the fee disappears, so for most merchants it's avoidable, but it's a real, new wrinkle worth knowing before you migrate expecting the old zero-fee pitch to still be entirely true. BigCommerce is the right call for a store genuinely outgrowing a light catalog that wants deeper native commerce without stacking as many paid apps as Shopify tends to require, so long as you check the payment fine print first.

Squarespace's commerce tools sit on top of what is, honestly, the best template design in this list. Every paid plan supports unlimited products, physical and digital, with basic inventory built in. Basic runs $16 a month and carries a 2% transaction fee on top of standard payment processing; Core at $23 removes that fee entirely, which makes Core the tier that actually matters for anyone selling with any regularity. Plus runs $39 and Advanced $99. The tradeoff is depth, not looks. A Squarespace store runs in exactly one currency with no way around it at checkout, the extensions marketplace is small at around 50 apps, and the fixed grid editor that makes every template look considered also means you're arranging content within sections Squarespace defined in advance. For a modest, single-currency catalog where the site's design matters as much as the store, photographers selling prints, a small apparel line, it's a strong, low-effort choice. See our dedicated Shopify vs Squarespace comparison for the fuller commerce-versus-design tradeoff.

Wix gives you more layout freedom than Squarespace's grid, a real drag-and-drop editor rather than a fixed set of blocks, and it doesn't charge its own transaction fee on top of standard payment processing on any tier. Plans run Light at $17 a month (no ecommerce), Core at $29, Business at $39, and Business Elite at $159 for merchants who need the top-tier feature set. The looser editor cuts both ways. It's easier to build something that looks unfinished if nobody on the team has a design eye, and a lot of the deeper commerce functionality, subscriptions, advanced shipping rules, multi-channel sync, lives behind Wix's own App Market rather than built into the core, the same app-stacking pattern under a different name. Wix Stores fits a business that wants more visual control than Squarespace offers and doesn't mind assembling a few apps for the rest. We've laid out the fuller tradeoff in a dedicated Shopify vs Wix comparison.

Ecwid is a different kind of alternative because it isn't a website builder at all. It's an embeddable store widget that drops into a site you already have, WordPress, Squarespace, a Wix page, a Facebook or Instagram shop, without rebuilding anything. If the actual problem is "I like my website and I just need a cart," Ecwid solves exactly that and nothing more. Plans start at Starter for $5 a month, then step up through Venture, Business, and Unlimited, roughly $19 to $130 a month with a discount for paying annually. The tradeoff is that it's a widget inside someone else's design, not a store with its own identity. It inherits the look of whatever site it's embedded in, which can read as bolted-on if nobody styles it carefully, and its reporting and feature depth trail a dedicated commerce platform once a catalog gets complex. Ecwid is the right call specifically for an existing site that needs a cart added, not a store built from scratch.

Big Cartel is built for a maker or artist with a small, mostly static catalog, and it's genuinely close to free while doing it. The Gold plan costs nothing and covers up to five products; Platinum at $15 a month covers 50 and adds a custom domain and digital goods; Diamond at $30 covers 500 and adds cart recovery and priority support. There's no transaction fee on any tier, ever, and all eighteen themes are free regardless of plan. The limit is right there in the plan names: product counts are capped, inventory and marketing tools are thin next to a full commerce platform, and it's not built to scale past a modest, largely handmade catalog. Shift4Shop occupies similar territory from a different angle, a genuinely free plan for merchants who use Shift4 Payments, with paid tiers starting at $29 a month for anyone using a different processor. Between the two, Big Cartel is the simpler pick for someone selling art, crafts, or a small product line who wants the lowest possible cost and the least setup.

If the honest answer is "I need real ecommerce depth and I'm willing to do the setup," WooCommerce or BigCommerce are the serious options, and Shopify itself is still worth a second look given how deep its tooling runs. If template selection and design polish matter more than catalog complexity, Squarespace or Wix are the ones to shop, with a real tradeoff between Squarespace's polish and Wix's layout flexibility. If you already have a site and just need a cart, Ecwid is the narrowest, cheapest fix. If you're a small maker who wants close to free, Big Cartel or Shift4Shop cover that ground well. And if what you actually want is a fast, good-looking content site with a few products attached rather than a store with a website bolted on, that's the specific gap Devani was built to fill.