If you’re building a website for your business, two of the options you’re probably considering are Shopify and WordPress. Both power millions of websites, from small family-owned stores, charities, and buzzy startups to massive enterprises with thousands of employees. Both have huge numbers of fans. And both are entirely justifiable choices.
But which one is right for you and your business? I’ve been building websites for almost 20 years—I’ve used both WordPress and Shopify in the past and dug back in for this head-to-head comparison.
They’re both great platforms, but they have different strengths. Let’s look at how they stack up.
Shopify vs. WordPress at a glance
Before digging into a deeper comparison, here’s a quick overview of some of the major differences.
|
Shopify |
WordPress |
|
|---|---|---|
|
Ease of use |
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Great onboarding, 24/7 support, and generally just easy to use |
⭐⭐ All that power and flexibility comes with complexity |
|
Flexibility |
⭐⭐⭐ Best for online stores but not for other kinds of websites |
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ More than 40% of websites on the internet used WordPress—and you wouldn’t know it |
|
Affordability |
⭐⭐⭐ Transparent if expensive pricing |
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Technically free, but hosting, plugins, and everything else add up |
WordPress lets you build any kind of website
WordPress is used by more than 40% of all websites. While you might associate it with small blogs, it’s also used by large publications, government websites, online stores, and anything else you can imagine. If you don’t know what CMS a website is using, it’s a coin flip that it’s WordPress.
All this is to say WordPress is incredibly practical and flexible. The same core product can be adapted to fit almost any need, and if it doesn’t work right out of the box, you can almost certainly find a plugin that does what you need. WordPress is open source, so there’s a huge ecosystem of third-party tools and professionals that can help you build any kind of website. Obviously, it’s simpler to make a basic blog than a private member site, but both are entirely possible—especially if you know a bit of HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript.
Given that we’re comparing WordPress and Shopify, it’s worth pointing out that you need a plugin to use WordPress as an online store. The most popular one is called WooCommerce—and you can see how WooCommerce stacks up to Shopify—but you can also use plenty of other plugins (including Shopify!).
Shopify is focused on online stores
Shopify is nowhere near as flexible as WordPress. It’s designed to make launching an online store fast and easy—and it succeeds.
While you could use Shopify to build a normal business website, it would be pretty silly to do so. Its features are all geared toward selling products, both physical and digital. From the start, it’s easy to create new products, track orders, manage inventory, and just sell, baby, sell. (You can also set up offline point-of-sale integrations, sell through social media, and even use marketplaces like Amazon and eBay.)
Shopify lets you build a blog, but it’s only fine. You can create pages, but again, your options aren’t as varied as they are with WordPress. There are third-party apps that add extra features, but they have nothing on WordPress’s plugins ecosystem. Themes are more limited and more expensive. You can see the pattern. If you aren’t ever planning to sell products through your website, seriously, skip the rest of this article and just install WordPress. Shopify isn’t the app for you.
Shopify is far easier to use
While WordPress is justifiably popular, its flexibility comes with a lot of complexity. Let’s start with the basics—signing up.
But wait, you can’t. WordPress is open source and available from countless different hosts. There isn’t just one way to sign up. You have to choose. You can sign up through WordPress.com, which offers convenience but at the cost of some flexibility and dollars. You can download WordPress and install it on your own server, but that comes with all sorts of headaches. You can find a budget host that lets you handle things yourself, or go with a fully managed option that makes things easy but charges more. These are all things you have to consider before you even enter an email address.
Assuming you’ve decided on a hosting service, you then have to build your site. The good news is that there are countless great tutorials that will help you get started. The bad news is that you’ll probably need them. Your to-do list now includes finding and installing a theme, creating all the pages you need, adding any plugins for features you need, and so on, and so on. If you aren’t familiar with WordPress, it’s a lot.
Shopify, on the other hand, is simple. Enter an email address, work through the onboarding wizard, and you’ll have a basic store up and running. Yes, to get the most out of it you might need to watch a few tutorials and add a few apps, but on the whole, things are just a lot easier.
Crucially, Shopify offers 24/7 chat support. If you do run into difficulties, you’ve got somewhere to turn. WordPress support is a hodgepodge of community forums, your hosts’ customer support, plugin developers, and freelance professionals.
If you’re looking to build an online store and any of what I just said about WordPress scares you, save yourself the stress and go with Shopify.
WordPress almost certainly wins on price
WordPress is technically free, though you’ll almost certainly have to pay for hosting. The cheapest good plans from the likes of Bluehost and SiteGround will cost you around $3/month billed annually, while WordPress.com starts at $9/month, and managed hosting from an enterprise host can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars per month. Themes (which change how your site looks), plugins (which add extra features), and other services and adds ons can cost anything from free to thousands of dollars per year. If you’re just starting out, a budget of $200/year isn’t unreasonable—but it could be significantly lower.
Shopify, on the other hand, starts at $39/month for the Basic plan (with your first month for $1). That means the absolute minimum you can spend is $430 before themes, apps, and transaction fees. If you aren’t selling, Shopify is an expensive proposition—even if it has better support and features like an AI that can generate product descriptions.
Things get more complicated as you add plugins to WordPress to match Shopify’s feature set, choose payment gateways, and otherwise try to compare them on a like-for-like basis, but in all but the most edgy of edge cases, WordPress is likely to be the more affordable platform. (For a more direct comparison, check out our guide to WooCommerce vs .Shopify.)
Both are great website and online store builders
The hard part of choosing between WordPress and Shopify is that there really isn’t a wrong answer.
Let me put it this way: building a simple About My Business website with Shopify would be like hiring a building contractor to put in a lightbulb—but your customers won’t know that you’re overpaying for loads of awesome features that you aren’t using. It’s a bad idea, but you can still have a great website.
At the other end of things, selling products is easier to set up with Shopify, but it’s very possible with WordPress—and you get a lot more flexibility. You can choose from WooCommerce, WPEasyCart, Ecwid, or even Shopify. And if you don’t like any of them, there are dozens more options.
Perhaps the biggest advantage WordPress has is that you can start off with a regular website, then, when you want to, list a few products for sale, launch a blog, or add a community. It’s just that flexible. With Shopify, you need a store from the start.
Both integrate with the other apps you use
Both Shopify and WordPress have a ridiculous number of apps or plugins that extend the functionality. And if you don’t find what you need there—or want to build entire systems around your online store—you can integrate either Shopify or WordPress with Zapier. Automatically track sales, stay in touch with customers, cross-promote content, and more.
Learn more about how to automate Shopify and how to automate WordPress, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.
Zapier is the leader in workflow automation—integrating with thousands of apps from partners like Google, Salesforce, and Microsoft. Use interfaces, data tables, and logic to build secure, automated systems for your business-critical workflows across your organization’s technology stack. Learn more.
WordPress vs. Shopify: Which should you choose?
Choose WordPress if you’re building something other than an online store, or if you want all the flexibility and affordability it offers. Choose Shopify if you want the easiest option for selling online and don’t mind paying a little extra.
Of course, you could also try both out, start building your website, and see which one you like more.
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