Shopify costs more per month and gives you fewer things to worry about. WooCommerce is free to install and charges you in time, plugins and maintenance instead. That’s the honest one-paragraph version — here’s the full comparison for Indian store owners, from an agency that has built on both and migrated plenty from one to the other.
The Real Cost Comparison (India, 2026)
| Shopify | WooCommerce | |
|---|---|---|
| Platform | ₹1,994/mo (Basic) | Free (software) |
| Hosting | Included | ₹500–5,000/mo |
| Essential plugins/apps | ₹0–3,000/mo | ₹1,000–8,000/mo (security, backup, speed, SEO) |
| Maintenance | Minimal — platform managed | Yours: updates, conflicts, security patches |
| Typical build cost | ₹75,000–5,00,000 | Similar — but rebuilds are more frequent |
On paper WooCommerce looks cheaper. In practice, the hosting + plugin + maintenance stack usually matches or exceeds Shopify’s subscription — and that’s before valuing your weekends. Full build-cost context: what a Shopify website costs in India.
Where WooCommerce Genuinely Wins
- Total control. Own code, own server, no platform rules. If your business model needs deep customisation Shopify’s ecosystem can’t deliver, WooCommerce (or custom) is right.
- Content-heavy sites. If your store is 20% shop and 80% publishing empire, WordPress’s content tooling is unmatched.
- No transaction pressure. No platform fee logic influencing your gateway choice.
Where Shopify Wins for Most Store Owners
- It stays up and stays fast. Hosting, security, scaling — the platform’s problem, not yours. Diwali traffic spike? Shopify shrugs.
- Checkout quality. Shopify’s checkout is the most conversion-tested on earth. WooCommerce checkouts are only as good as your plugin stack and patience.
- Predictable costs. One subscription beats surprise developer invoices every time a plugin update breaks the cart.
- You run the business, not the server. The most underrated feature. Every hour spent debugging WordPress is an hour not spent on products and customers.
Our Actual Recommendation
For 80% of new and growing Indian D2C stores: Shopify — which is why we specialise in building on it. For the WooCommerce store owner drowning in maintenance: you’re our most frequent migration client, and yes, your SEO survives the move. For the genuine edge cases where WooCommerce fits better — we’ll tell you so in the free audit, because a mismatched platform becomes our problem six months later anyway.
Still weighing it? The broader version of this question — Shopify vs WordPress for e-commerce — covers the CMS angle, and the Shopify plan comparison answers what you’d actually pay.