9 Shopify alternatives for 2027, and why you might switch

Shopify is the default answer to “how do I start an online store?”, and for plenty of shops it's the right one. It's also a monthly bill that grows with every app you add, an extra fee on every sale if Shopify Payments doesn't work in your country, and a store you rent rather than own. If any of that has started to pinch, it's worth knowing exactly what else is out there before you plan 2027.

This guide compares nine alternatives on what matters when you're choosing: what each costs, what it charges on your sales, who it suits, its strengths and weaknesses, and how hard it is to move to. There's a worked example of what a year costs on each, a section on taking payments in different countries, and an honest section on when staying with Shopify is the better call.

Prices are in US dollars unless marked, from each platform's pricing page in October 2026. Shopware's are in euros, as it publishes them. Plans change often, so check the current page before you sign up.

What Shopify costs today

Shopify cut its entry price in 2026, so it's worth knowing the current numbers before comparing anything against them.

Every plan now includes unlimited products, Shopify's own email marketing, selling on social media and marketplaces, and selling inside AI chats. In-person selling with POS Pro is $89 a month per location on every plan below Plus.

Why shops look past Shopify

• Payments where you sell. Shopify Payments only works in some countries. Everywhere else you use another provider and pay Shopify's fee on top, 2% of every sale on Basic. You also lose features that need Shopify Payments: showing prices in local currencies and accepting local payment methods.
• Apps. Reviews, subscriptions, bundles, product options and upsells are usually paid apps, and many charge monthly. A store with five apps can spend more on them than on the plan.
• Ownership. Your store runs on Shopify's servers, on Shopify's terms. Some businesses want their own code, their own hosting and full control of their data.
• Fit. A shop with five products, a café that mostly sells at the counter and a wholesaler with a price list for every customer can each be better served by something built for exactly that.

When Shopify is still the right choice

If Shopify Payments works in your country, the bill doesn't worry you and your store is growing, moving is rarely worth the disruption. Shopify has the largest app store, one of the most trusted checkouts, and a lead in something that matters more in 2027 than it did a year ago: selling through AI assistants. Selling in AI chats is included on every plan, its Agentic Storefronts put products in front of shoppers in ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity, and in January 2026 Shopify and Google launched the Universal Commerce Protocol, an open standard for shopping through AI.

The others are catching up. When Stripe launched its Agentic Commerce Suite in December 2025, it named Wix, Squarespace, WooCommerce and BigCommerce among the platforms that would use it. Whatever you're considering, ask how your products will reach AI assistants, and when.

The nine alternatives side by side

The short version

• You want to own your store and choose every part of it: WooCommerce.
• You're growing fast, or sell to businesses as well as shoppers: BigCommerce.
• You want the easiest way to build a whole website with a shop in it: Wix.
• Design matters most, or you sell services as well as products: Squarespace.
• Most of your sales happen in person: Square Online.
• You already have a website, or sell mostly on social media: Ecwid.
• You're an artist or maker with a small range: Big Cartel.
• You have developers and want a store built your way: Medusa.
• You sell in Europe or wholesale, with an agency behind you: Shopware.

1. WooCommerce

WooCommerce is a free, open-source plugin that turns a WordPress website into a store. Because you host it yourself, you own all of it: the code, the data and the customer list. There's no platform fee on your sales, and you choose your payment provider, including local card and mobile-money providers, through plugins.

The trade is that you're responsible for it. Hosting, updates, backups and security are yours to manage, or to pay someone to manage. Good hosting for a small store typically runs from about $10 to $50 a month, and paid extensions usually cost $29 to $299 a year each.

• Pros: no platform fee; any payment provider; thousands of plugins; WordPress's blogging and SEO tools; you can move host whenever you like.
• Cons: you maintain it; speed depends on your host; plugin conflicts happen; costs are spread across many small bills.

2. BigCommerce

BigCommerce is a hosted platform, like Shopify, aimed at stores with large catalogues, lots of product options or business customers as well as shoppers. More of what growing stores need is built in rather than sold as apps, and it charges no fee of its own on sales through its embedded payment providers.

The catch to understand before you join is that each plan has a sales limit. Pass it, and BigCommerce moves you up to the next, more expensive plan automatically.

• Pros: no platform fee with its embedded payment providers; strong product options and catalogue tools; built for B2B as well as retail; 24/7 support on every plan.
• Cons: dearer than Shopify at the same level; sales limits push you up plans; a smaller app and theme store.

3. Wix

Wix is a website builder first and a store second, and that's the point. If your shop is one part of a wider website, such as a portfolio, a restaurant that takes orders or a salon that takes bookings, Wix lets you drag and drop the whole thing together without code. Scheduling and services come with every plan that takes payments.

• Pros: the easiest builder on this list; bookings, events and services alongside products; hosting and security handled for you.
• Cons: suits small catalogues better than large ones; fewer selling features than a dedicated store platform; leaving means rebuilding, because Wix designs don't move to other platforms.

4. Squarespace

Squarespace is known for its templates, and it's the choice of many photographers, designers, restaurants and creators who want a site that looks considered without hiring a designer. It sells physical products, digital downloads, services and memberships from one place, which suits businesses that sell more than goods in a box.

Its plans run from about $16 to about $99 a month paid yearly. The cheapest plan takes a transaction fee on sales, around 2%, which the higher plans drop.

• Pros: the best-looking templates; products, services, memberships and content in one place; simple to run.
• Cons: fewer apps and integrations than Shopify; fewer tools for big catalogues; a transaction fee on the cheapest plan.

5. Square Online

If you already take payments in person with Square, Square Online is the shortest path to an online store. Your products, stock and sales live in the same system as your till, so a sale online and a sale at the counter come off the same stock. It has a free plan, and pickup, local delivery and ordering ahead are built in, which is why so many cafés and bakeries use it.

There's no platform fee beyond Square's card fees, which are lower on the paid plans. It's only available in the countries Square operates in, mainly the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, France, Spain, Australia and Japan, and it's designed for local businesses more than for brands shipping around the world.

• Pros: a genuinely free plan; one stock count for shop and website; pickup, delivery and order-ahead built in.
• Cons: only in Square's countries; fewer design and growth tools; you're tied to Square for payments.

6. Ecwid

Ecwid, owned by Lightspeed, is a store you add to a website you already have, whether that's WordPress, Wix, Squarespace or a site you built yourself, as well as to your social media. One catalogue then sells in all of those places at once, and you manage it from one dashboard.

Ecwid changed its plans in 2025 and 2026. Its long-standing free plan has been replaced by a low-cost starter plan of about $5 a month, with higher plans for more products and features.

• Pros: keeps the website you already have; one catalogue across your site and social media; cheap to start.
• Cons: product limits and features vary a lot between plans; the store sits inside another site's design.

7. Big Cartel

Big Cartel was built for artists and makers, and it shows. It's simple, it's cheap, and it doesn't pretend you're a department store. The free plan covers up to five products, and the paid plans, about $15 and $30 a month, go up to 50 and 500 products.

• Pros: free to start; very simple; made for independent creative businesses; no platform fee on sales.
• Cons: 500 products is the ceiling; far fewer features and integrations than Shopify; basic reporting.

8. Medusa

Medusa is an open-source commerce platform for teams with developers. It's headless: Medusa runs the products, carts, orders and payments, and your developers build the storefront however they like, usually with Next.js. You can host it yourself for free or pay for Medusa Cloud, which starts at about $29 a month before usage.

Choose it when the store itself is part of what makes you different: an unusual way of selling, several brands or countries run from one back end, or deep links into your own systems. It also suits teams who would rather own the code than fit inside someone else's.

• Pros: free and open source (MIT licence); no platform fee; any payment provider; complete control of the storefront and the data.
• Cons: you need developers to build and maintain it; no themes to install and go; hosting and security are yours unless you pay for Cloud.

9. Shopware

Shopware is a German platform, popular across Europe, with a free, open-source Community Edition and paid plans for larger businesses. The Community Edition includes a visual page builder, product and order management and Shopware Payments. It's strong on content-rich storefronts and on selling to businesses, and it has a large network of agencies, especially in German-speaking countries.

• Pros: a capable free edition; serious B2B tools on the paid plans; strong in Europe, with many experienced agencies.
• Cons: the paid plans are priced for established businesses; usually needs an agency to set up; a smaller community outside Europe.

Also worth knowing

A few names didn't make the nine because they suit fewer of the shops reading this. Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento) is for large enterprises with big budgets. PrestaShop is a free, open-source option popular in France and Spain. Webflow suits design studios that want pixel-level control. Etsy is a marketplace rather than a store platform, but it's worth running alongside your own store if you sell handmade or vintage.

What a year costs: a worked example

Monthly prices don't tell you much on their own, so here's one shop priced across the platforms. It sells $5,000 a month, $60,000 a year. The table counts the plan and any fee the platform takes on sales. It leaves out card processing, which every platform charges in some form, and apps or extensions, which depend on the shop.

Two things stand out. Where Shopify Payments works, Shopify is now one of the cheapest options on this list. Where it doesn't, Shopify's fee on sales outweighs the plan itself, and that's when the alternatives start to make sense. If you stay on Shopify with another provider, compare Basic and Grow: above about $4,100 a month in sales, Grow's lower fee makes it the cheaper plan.

Taking payments where you sell

For many shops outside North America, Western Europe and a few other markets, payments decide the platform more than features do. Before anything else, check that your preferred way of being paid works on the platform, in your country, and what it costs.

• Shopify: Shopify Payments in some countries; elsewhere, many third-party providers, with Shopify's fee on top and no local currencies or local payment methods.
• WooCommerce and Medusa: almost any provider, including local card processors and mobile money, through plugins or code, with no platform fee.
• BigCommerce: a wide choice of providers, with no BigCommerce fee on its embedded ones.
• Wix and Squarespace: a shorter list of supported providers that varies by country; check yours before you build.
• Square Online: Square only, in Square's countries.
• Shopware: Shopware Payments in its markets, plus other providers through plugins.

How to move from Shopify

1. Price it properly: the plan, the apps or extensions you'd need, hosting if you host it yourself, and payment fees, at the sales you expect in 2027 rather than today's.
2. Export your products: Shopify exports products, variants and image links as a CSV file. WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Wix and Squarespace all import product CSVs, though the columns differ, and paid migration services can move products, customers and orders in one go.
3. Export customers and orders: customers come out as a CSV too. Decide which order history you need on the new platform and keep a full export either way.
4. Rebuild the design: themes don't move between platforms. Use the move to fix what didn't work.
5. Keep your search rankings: redirect every old product and collection address to its new one, so links and Google results keep working.
6. Run both side by side: keep Shopify open until test orders, emails, taxes and shipping work on the new store, then move your domain.
7. Check AI shopping: find out how the new platform will get your products into ChatGPT, Google's AI features and other assistants.

Your product photos move with you

Whichever platform you choose, your photos do most of the selling, and they're the one part of your store that moves anywhere unchanged. A move is a good moment to fix the ones holding you back: uneven backgrounds, creased clothes, poor light, or no photo of the product being worn.

Clara edits product photos for any platform: you download the results and upload them wherever your store lives. Its virtual try-on button, which lets shoppers see clothing and jewellery on a photo of themselves, works with WooCommerce through a plugin, with Shopify through a theme block, with Medusa through a storefront component, and on any other site that lets you add a script and a button to your product pages.

Questions people ask

The bottom line

Shopify is a stronger choice for 2027 than it was a year ago, especially now its entry price has dropped, and especially if Shopify Payments works where you are. If it doesn't, or you want to own your store, or your business has a shape Shopify doesn't fit, one of these nine will likely serve you better. Pick the platform that fits how you sell today and where you want to be by the end of next year, and price it at the sales you're aiming for, not the sales you have now.