The comparison people make is £25 a month versus free. The comparison that matters is what you actually spend over three years — including the hours you or your team lose to maintenance. We have built and inherited stores on both platforms, so here are the real numbers.
The licence fee is the smallest line item
On Shopify's UK price list, Basic is £25 a month on monthly billing (£19 billed yearly), Grow £65 (£49) and Advanced £344 (£259); Plus starts at £1,800. Prices differ by country. WooCommerce charges nothing for the plugin. That is where the honest part of the 'free' story ends, because WordPress needs hosting that can survive traffic, and shared hosting cannot.
Hosting, and what 'good enough' really costs
A WooCommerce store doing meaningful revenue needs managed hosting — Kinsta, WP Engine or Cloudways at $60–$300/month. Shopify's hosting, CDN, and PCI compliance are included, and it does not fall over on a Black Friday spike. That difference alone closes most of the licence gap.
Plugins versus apps
Both platforms need paid extensions, and both charge for them. The difference is failure mode: when a WooCommerce plugin conflicts with a WordPress core update, your checkout can break at 2am and nobody is on call. Shopify apps run in a sandboxed, versioned API — they can annoy you, but they rarely take the store down.
Developer hours are the hidden invoice
In our experience a WooCommerce store consumes roughly 4–8 hours of maintenance per month once it is live: updates, compatibility testing, security patching, the occasional emergency. At European agency rates that is more than the entire Shopify Advanced licence. On Shopify, that time goes into conversion work instead.
Where WooCommerce genuinely wins
It is the better choice when content is the product: a large editorial operation with commerce attached, or a business needing database-level customisation that Shopify's APIs do not expose. If you already have a WordPress team, that expertise has real value. We will tell you honestly when this is your case.
Three-year totals
For a store doing €40K/month: Shopify lands around €14,000–€19,000 over three years all-in. WooCommerce lands around €19,000–€34,000, with the spread driven almost entirely by how much developer time you buy. The platforms are close on paper; they are not close on the total.
Payment fees belong in the total
On Shopify Payments in the UK, online card rates run from 2% + 25p on Basic to 1.5% + 25p on Advanced. Using a third-party gateway instead adds a Shopify transaction fee — 2%, 1% or 0.6% depending on the plan — on top of the gateway's own charge. WooCommerce has no platform fee on payments, only the gateway's. For card-heavy stores at volume this line can move the comparison, so put your own payment mix into it rather than using ours.
If the numbers point to Shopify, the move itself is a WooCommerce to Shopify migration with a full redirect map; what breaks in a Shopify migration lists the risks worth planning for. For the monthly side, see Shopify plans compared.