Shopify vs Wix: The Real Cost and Feature Comparison

Shopify and Wix get compared constantly, and the comparison usually collapses into a single misleading question: which one is cheaper. The honest answer is that they are not really selling the same thing at a similar price – one is a commerce platform that also lets you design a site, the other is a website builder that also lets you sell. Figures below reflect list pricing as published in September 2026; check each vendor directly before you commit, since plans and fees do change.

Two different products wearing similar price tags

Wix started as, and still fundamentally is, an all-in-one website builder – drag-and-drop design first, with online stores added as a capability rather than the reason the platform exists. Shopify started as, and still is, commerce-first – every plan assumes you are running a store, and the admin, the checkout, and the app ecosystem are all built around that single job. Neither approach is wrong, but it means a side-by-side price comparison between the two is comparing a general-purpose tool against a specialised one, not two versions of the same thing.

That distinction matters more the larger a store gets. A small catalogue with modest traffic can genuinely feel similar on either platform. A growing store selling on subscriptions, running promotions across multiple markets, or needing checkout customisation will find Shopify's commerce-first design doing work that Wix, built outward from a page editor rather than a checkout, was never structured around.

What Shopify actually costs

Shopify's current plans list at $39 a month for Basic, $105 a month for Grow, and $399 a month for Advanced, each discounted somewhat if paid annually. On top of the plan fee, Shopify charges a card transaction fee if you use its own Shopify Payments – 2.9% plus 30 cents on Basic, dropping slightly on the higher tiers – and an additional fee if you route payments through a third-party processor instead. Apps are billed separately on top of all of this, same as on any platform.

What Wix actually costs

Wix's plans capable of running a store currently sit at three tiers: Core, priced in the region of $29 to $36 a month depending on billing term, covers basic ecommerce with a five-figure product limit and abandoned-cart recovery; Business, roughly $39 to $46 a month, adds full ecommerce features including subscriptions, memberships and automated tax calculation; and Business Elite, around $159 to $172 a month, adds priority support, a much higher dropshipping product limit, and unlimited storage. Wix does not charge its own commission on top of any of these plans – you pay standard payment-processor fees instead, commonly cited around 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction through Wix Payments, Stripe or PayPal, which lands close to Shopify's own rate. Wix's entry-level Light plan, well below Core in price, does not support online payments at all, so it is not a real option for a store.

Third-party app costs on Wix are frequently cited in the $10 to $50 a month range per app for anything beyond what a plan includes natively, which is the same kind of stacking cost that applies to any platform's app store, Shopify's included.

Where the two plans actually land side by side

At the entry level, Wix's Core plan undercuts Shopify's Basic plan by a meaningful margin, and for a very small, simple catalogue that gap is real money. The middle tiers converge faster than the headline numbers suggest: Wix Business and Shopify Basic sit within a few dollars of each other once billing terms are compared like for like, and both expect a handful of paid apps to fill in gaps their base plan does not cover. At the top end, Wix's Business Elite and Shopify's Grow plan are again broadly comparable in price, though what each unlocks differs more than the number does – Shopify's higher tiers lean into deeper checkout and market customisation, while Wix's lean into support level and catalogue size limits.

None of these figures are exact for your specific store – they move with billing term, app choices and whichever plan a vendor happens to be promoting this month. Treat this as the rough shape of the comparison rather than a quote. What the numbers do show fairly reliably is that neither platform is the clearly cheap option once you compare a real, appropriately-sized plan on each side rather than the lowest headline figure either one publishes.

The cost that isn't on either pricing page: changing your mind later

This is the part most comparisons skip, and it is worth knowing before you commit rather than after. Wix's own support documentation states plainly that you cannot switch an existing site's template in place – the process is to build a new site from a different template and manually copy over pages, media and content, since business features including Wix Stores, contacts and site members do not transfer between sites at all. In practice, changing your Wix site's design after it has real store data in it means substantially rebuilding it.

Shopify's theme model works differently by design: your store, its products, its orders and its customer data live independently of your theme, so switching themes is a matter of installing a new one and rebuilding the storefront design around data that never moves. We cover exactly how to do this safely in a separate guide. It is a structural difference worth weighing against the sticker price on either platform, particularly for a store that expects to redesign more than once as the brand grows.

This is not a reason to avoid Wix if a website builder is genuinely what you need – plenty of small sites never touch a template switch after launch. It is a reason to think about the decision as choosing a design for the life of that particular site, rather than a design you expect to swap out the way you might change a Shopify theme two or three years into running the same store with the same order history behind it.

Which one actually fits your store

Lean toward Wix if you want one tool to build a broader website – a portfolio, a booking page, a blog – with a store as one section of it, and you are comfortable that a future redesign may mean starting a new site rather than reskinning the existing one. Lean toward Shopify if selling is the actual business, not a feature of a wider site, and you want a platform, an app ecosystem and a theme model all built around commerce specifically, with the freedom to change your storefront's design later without rebuilding the store underneath it.

Once you're on Shopify, the theme is the next decision

If Shopify is the platform you land on, the plan fee gets you the engine; your theme is the entire storefront a customer actually sees. Kiosk builds numbered Shopify editions with no required third-party apps – wishlist, quick view, subscriptions and bundles included in the build rather than sold back to you piece by piece. Two editions, FLYER and LUMIERE, are free to try with no Shopify plan commitment required to look at the code. See the full range at Kiosk.