Shopify vs WooCommerce in 2026: Which Should You Choose?

Shopify and WooCommerce both run serious online stores, from a first product launch to catalogues with thousands of SKUs. The real difference is who does the work of running the store. Shopify sells you a managed platform for a monthly fee; WooCommerce gives you free, open-source software that you host and maintain yourself.

In short: Choose Shopify if you want a managed store that handles hosting, security, checkout and Canadian sales tax for you, and you are comfortable with a monthly plan plus app subscriptions. Choose WooCommerce if you already run on WordPress, publish a lot of content, or need full control over your data, checkout logic and hosting. Both handle CAD, GST/HST/PST/QST and bilingual English-French stores well when they are set up properly.

The core difference: hosted platform vs open-source plugin

Shopify is software as a service. You never touch a server, and Shopify ships updates, security patches and checkout improvements for you. In exchange, you work inside its rules: themes are built in Shopify Liquid, extra features come from apps, and the core code is closed.

WooCommerce is a free plugin that turns a WordPress site into a store. You own everything, including the PHP code and the database, and you can change almost anything. You also own the hosting, the updates, the backups and the security.

What each platform really costs in 2026

Shopify plan prices in Canada

These are the prices on Shopify's Canadian pricing page in October 2026. Shopify adjusts pricing from time to time, so confirm before you commit.

If you are billed in US dollars, the same plans list at US$25, US$65 and US$399 a month (US$19, US$49 and US$299 billed annually), and Shopify Plus starts at US$2,300 a month.

On top of the plan, budget for two things. First, a theme: Shopify has free themes, and paid Theme Store themes are a one-time purchase, usually a few hundred US dollars, licensed to one store. Second, apps: reviews, subscriptions, bundles, product filters, loyalty and email tools are mostly monthly subscriptions. App fees are where Shopify running costs most often creep up, so review your app list every quarter.

WooCommerce running costs

The WooCommerce plugin is free, but a store is not. Expect these line items:

• Hosting. Shared hosting is fine for a test store. A real store generally needs managed WordPress hosting or a VPS, which typically runs from about US$30 to US$150 a month depending on traffic and support.
• Extensions. Subscriptions, bookings, advanced shipping and product add-ons are usually paid extensions with annual licence renewals.
• Payments. WooPayments is available in Canada at 2.9% + CA$0.30 per domestic card transaction, plus 1% for international cards and 2% when currency conversion applies. You can also use Stripe, PayPal or a Canadian processor. WooCommerce itself takes no transaction fee.
• Maintenance. WordPress core, WooCommerce, the theme and every plugin need regular updates, testing and backups. That is either your time or a maintenance plan.

A realistic first-year comparison

The takeaway: WooCommerce is not automatically less expensive. Card processing costs are similar on both. The real trade is Shopify's plan and app fees against WooCommerce's hosting, licences and maintenance time.

Selling in Canada: CAD, sales tax, payments and French

Currency and payments

Shopify Payments is available in Canada, pays out in CAD and supports Shop Pay, Apple Pay and Google Pay. Using it also removes the extra third-party gateway fee listed above. Shopify Markets lets you show USD prices to American shoppers from the same store.

WooCommerce works with almost any gateway, which matters if you already have a merchant account with a Canadian processor. WooPayments includes multi-currency support, and other gateways offer their own options.

Sales tax: GST, HST, PST and QST

Shopify calculates Canadian sales tax by the buyer's province. In May 2026 Shopify began rolling out Shopify Tax for Canada, which calculates GST, HST, PST, QST and RST, shows each tax separately at checkout and keeps rates up to date. It also flags when your taxable Canadian sales approach the CA$30,000 small-supplier threshold. You still choose the provinces where you are registered.

WooCommerce gives you tax tables where you enter rates by province, plus tax classes for products with different treatment. That works, but you have to keep the rates current yourself or add a tax-calculation extension.

On either platform, provinces with their own sales tax (British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Quebec) have separate registration rules for out-of-province sellers. This is general information, not tax or legal advice; confirm your obligations with an accountant.

Bilingual stores and Quebec

If you sell to customers in Quebec, French-language requirements apply to your product information and shopping experience. Our guide to bilingual websites in Quebec covers the details.

Shopify supports multiple languages natively. Its free Translate & Adapt app handles translations, publishes French under its own URL path such as /fr, and Shopify adds the hreflang tags for you. WooCommerce relies on plugins such as WPML, Polylang, Weglot or TranslatePress. Both approaches work. On either platform, remember to translate the parts people forget: order emails, shipping notices, checkout messages and legal pages.

SEO: content, control and speed

Shopify has solid SEO defaults: an automatic sitemap, canonical tags, editable titles and meta descriptions, and an editable robots.txt. Its URL structure is fixed, though. Products live under /products/, categories under /collections/ and articles under /blogs/<blog-name>/, and you cannot remove those prefixes. The built-in blog is basic.

WooCommerce inherits WordPress, still the strongest blogging platform available. With Yoast SEO or Rank Math you control URLs, schema markup and internal linking in detail. If organic content is your main acquisition channel, that is a real advantage.

Speed is a different story. Shopify serves every store from a global CDN with an image service, so slow Shopify stores are usually slowed down by heavy themes and too many apps. WooCommerce speed depends entirely on your hosting, caching and plugin discipline. Our Core Web Vitals checklist covers both platforms, and our SEO services team can audit an existing store.

Scalability and maintenance

Shopify absorbs traffic spikes such as Black Friday without you provisioning anything. Growth mostly means moving up a plan, and very high-volume brands move to Shopify Plus for checkout customization, B2B features and higher API limits. The limits you will meet are about flexibility, not capacity: unusual checkout flows or complex product configurators can be hard to build within Shopify's rules.

WooCommerce scales well when the infrastructure does. Since October 2023, new stores use High-Performance Order Storage, which keeps orders in dedicated database tables instead of the general WordPress posts table. A busy store also needs page caching, an object cache such as Redis, a CDN and a host that can absorb peaks. Because you control the whole stack, WooCommerce can also sit inside a larger system. Merchant Deals, a deals marketplace we built, combines WooCommerce with React and Laravel.

Which platform should you choose?

Choose Shopify if

• You want to launch quickly and spend your time on products and marketing, not servers.
• You sell physical products with a standard checkout.
• You want sales tax, PCI compliance and security handled by the platform.
• You sell in person as well and want online and in-store inventory in one place.

Choose WooCommerce if

• Your site already runs on WordPress, or content and SEO drive most of your sales.
• You need custom checkout logic, unusual pricing rules or deep integrations with your own systems.
• You want to own your data and hosting, and you have a developer or maintenance plan in place.
• You would rather pay for hosting and licences than a monthly platform fee plus apps.

When neither is the right answer

Some businesses outgrow both: marketplaces with many vendors, complex B2B pricing or heavily customized buying journeys. Then a headless build (Shopify Hydrogen or Medusa with a custom front end) or a fully custom e-commerce platform is worth pricing out.

Moving from one platform to the other

Migrations are routine when they are planned. The usual steps:

1. Export products, variants, customers and order history, then clean the data before import.
2. Map every old URL to its new address and set up 301 redirects. This protects your search rankings.
3. Rebuild the theme, and reconfigure taxes, shipping zones and payment gateways.
4. Plan for customer passwords: they cannot be transferred, so customers will need to reactivate or reset their accounts.
5. Test checkout end to end on a staging store, then launch during a quiet sales period.
6. Watch Google Search Console for crawl errors and 404s during the following weeks.

Need help choosing?

We build on both platforms, so we have no reason to push one. A Shopify store typically takes 2 to 6 weeks, and we also build custom Shopify themes and WooCommerce stores. Every project starts with a free call and a fixed, itemized quote, and comes with a dedicated project manager, weekly demos, a live staging link and 30 days of free post-launch support. See how we quote on our pricing page, or tell us about your store and we will recommend a platform in writing.

Frequently asked questions

Is Shopify or WooCommerce better for a small business in Canada?

For most small product businesses without a developer, Shopify is the simpler choice: hosting, security, Canadian sales tax and payments come ready to use. WooCommerce makes more sense if you already have a WordPress site, rely on content for traffic, or need custom features. Compare the total yearly cost of each, not just the plan price.

Does Shopify charge transaction fees in Canada?

If you use Shopify Payments, you pay card processing rates (2.8% + 30¢ on Basic, lower on higher plans) but no extra transaction fee. If you use a third-party gateway instead, Shopify adds a fee of 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow and 0.6% on Advanced, on top of your gateway's own charges. These figures are from Shopify's Canadian pricing page in October 2026.

Can WooCommerce handle GST, HST, PST and QST?

Yes. WooCommerce lets you set tax rates by province and assign tax classes to products, so it can charge the right combination of GST, HST, PST and QST. You are responsible for keeping rates current, or you can add a tax-calculation extension. Check your registration obligations with an accountant, since this is general information, not tax advice.

Can I move from WooCommerce to Shopify without losing SEO?

Yes, if you map every old URL and set up 301 redirects before launch, keep your titles and descriptions, and keep content on the new site. Expect some ranking movement for a few weeks while Google recrawls the store. Monitoring Search Console after launch lets you catch and fix missed redirects quickly.