Shopify vs WooCommerce vs Squarespace is the choice standing between you and your first sale, and all three will sell the same product. This page compares them on what changes your week: who does the technical work, who takes a slice of every order, and what you get on day one. We cover how each is built, ease of use, fees, selling features, free trials, then a verdict per store type.
Shopify vs WooCommerce vs Squarespace at a Glance
The quickest way to tell these three apart is to ask who is responsible for the machine your store runs on. Two of them take that problem off you and bill a subscription for it. The third hands you the software for nothing and leaves the server, the updates and the security sitting on your desk.
| Platform | Who runs the hosting | Who takes a cut on top of card processing | What you manage yourself |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shopify | Shopify, included in the plan | Nobody extra while you use Shopify Payments; an added percentage if you bring another gateway | Your products, your theme settings and your orders |
| Squarespace | Squarespace, included in the plan | A 2% transaction fee on Basic, and none on Core, Plus or Advanced | Your products, your site content and your orders |
| WooCommerce | You, through a hosting company you pick and pay separately | No platform cut of its own | Hosting, WordPress updates, backups, security and every extension you add |
Scale is worth a glance before you commit to one. W3Techs measures what live sites actually run, independently of any vendor, and its September 2026 snapshot puts WooCommerce at 48.1% of all ecommerce systems and Shopify at 31.7% on that same measure.
Squarespace has no figure in that ecommerce ranking, so W3Techs counts it a different way: 3.6% of all sites running a known CMS. Set that against Shopify’s 7.7% on the same known-CMS measure, because 3.6% and 48.1% are not counting the same thing. Popularity is not advice, but it does tell you how much community help exists when something breaks at 11pm.
Wix sells an ecommerce plan too, and it sits outside this comparison.
How Each Platform Is Built, and Why It Decides Everything Else
Shopify vs WooCommerce vs Squarespace turns on one structural split, and almost everything below follows from it. Shopify and Squarespace are fully hosted, so your subscription covers the servers, the software updates and the security patching. WooCommerce is a free, open-source plugin for WordPress, which means it needs a WordPress site running on hosting you buy and look after yourself.
That hosting is a real server with technical floors under it. You need PHP 8.3 or newer with MySQL 8.0 or MariaDB 10.6 or newer before WooCommerce will run, so part of the job is picking a host that meets those versions and keeping it there as they move.
Security follows the hosting. Any store handling card data has to meet PCI DSS, the payment card industry’s data security standard, and on a hosted platform the vendor’s own setup carries most of that weight for you. Run the store yourself and you are responsible for your own security setup, which is one more job sitting alongside the backups:
- A hosted platform handles for you: the servers, software updates, security patching, uptime and backups of the store itself.
- A self-hosted store leaves with you: choosing and paying a host, updating WordPress and every plugin on it, taking your own backups, and keeping the whole environment secure.
Ease of Use for a Beginner: Shopify vs WooCommerce vs Squarespace
What you meet on day one comes straight out of how each one is built. Sign up to Shopify and you land in a store admin, because selling is the entire job of the product. Sign up to Squarespace and you land in a website builder that also sells, so the shop is one part of a larger site tool.
Start with WooCommerce and you meet a hosting decision first, then WordPress, then the plugin, then a theme, before there is a store to look at. “Easiest” here, the way we read it, is a count of how many separate decisions stand between signing up and adding your first product.
- Shopify: one signup, one admin, and selling is the whole point of it.
- Squarespace: one signup, and a website builder with selling switched on inside it.
- WooCommerce: a hosting account, a WordPress install, the plugin and a theme, before a product exists.
Where WooCommerce earns that setup cost back is scope. The same WordPress install runs your pages, your posts and your shop behind one login, which is a different proposition from bolting a blog onto a store.
What You Actually Pay: Shopify vs WooCommerce vs Squarespace Fee Structures
Every platform here sits on top of card processing, and the processor charges its own rate whoever you sign up with. The question that actually separates the three is who adds a further cut to that rate, and on which plan they add it.
Shopify’s answer is the shorter one. Use Shopify Payments and Shopify adds no cut of its own. Everything else that changes as you climb the tiers is laid out on Shopify’s pricing page.
Squarespace’s answer depends entirely on which plan you are on, and its support docs list the transaction fee and the processing rate for each of the four plans. The percentages below are its Squarespace Payments rates, in USD, on standard domestic cards. Connect Stripe, PayPal or Square instead and the processor you pick sets the rate.
| Plan | The platform’s own cut | Card processing on standard domestic cards |
|---|---|---|
| Shopify, any tier, using Shopify Payments | None | Falls as you move up the tiers |
| Shopify with a third-party gateway | 2% on the entry tier, down to 0.2% on the top tier | Set by the gateway you bring |
| Squarespace Basic | 2% transaction fee | 2.9% + $0.30 |
| Squarespace Core | None | 2.9% + $0.30 |
| Squarespace Plus | None | 2.7% + $0.30 |
| Squarespace Advanced | None | 2.5% + $0.30 |
Two extras are worth knowing on the Squarespace side. Digital products carry their own transaction fee, which starts at 7% on Basic and reaches 0% on Advanced. Anyone still sitting on a legacy Personal plan carries a flat 3% transaction fee instead of any of the above, and a legacy Business plan 2%.
Squarespace lists its four plans and the 14-day free trial in one place.
Where WooCommerce’s Real Costs Sit
WooCommerce is absent from that table because it charges no platform fee at all. The core plugin is free and open source, and there is no monthly subscription for the software itself, on any size of store.
The money moves somewhere else instead. Hosting becomes a separate monthly bill paid to a hosting company you choose, and it scales with how much traffic and how many orders the store has to carry. Paid extensions are typically billed per year, per extension, so your total tracks how many you bolt on, with no tier to climb.
Processing is the one rate WooCommerce publishes itself. Its own pricing page puts WooPayments at roughly 2.50% to 2.90% + 30 cents per transaction, the clearest statement of where the money goes once the free plugin is installed.
Note: free software does not mean a free store. WooCommerce removes the platform subscription and replaces it with a hosting bill and a set of renewals you now manage, which is a trade, and whether it saves you money depends on what your store needs.
Selling Features Compared: Shopify vs WooCommerce vs Squarespace
Squarespace’s current plans are Basic, Core, Plus and Advanced, and those four have replaced the older Personal, Business, Commerce Basic and Commerce Advanced plans. All of them sell physical products, so the choice between them is a question of what else is bundled in, and a support article on selling across the four current plans lists it tier by tier.
Most of what a first store needs is already on the cheapest of them.
- Basic includes: selling unlimited products, local and regional shipping, Squarespace point of sale, abandoned checkout recovery, customer reviews, subscription products, automatic tax rate calculations, and selling content and memberships.
- Core adds: the 2% transaction fee drops away, and you gain unlimited contributors, custom code and third-party integrations.
Shopify puts selling on all four of its plans, Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus, so nothing about your catalog forces you up a tier before you can take an order.
WooCommerce works from the opposite direction. The plugin gives you a store on your WordPress site for nothing, and anything past what it ships with arrives as a separate extension you install and usually renew each year. Nothing appears that you did not choose to install, which keeps the store lean and makes the feature list your own responsibility.
Can You Sell Products on the Squarespace Basic Plan?
Yes. Every one of the four current Squarespace plans sells physical products, and Basic is a working store rather than a preview of one. The tier you pick changes what surrounds the store, not whether you have one.
The catch on Basic sits in the fee column. It carries the 2% transaction fee that Core, Plus and Advanced do not, on top of the 2.9% + $0.30 processing that Basic and Core both pay. That 2% is the entire fee difference between the two, and it grows in step with your sales.
Free Trials: 14 Days on Squarespace, 3 Days on Shopify
Shopify vs WooCommerce vs Squarespace becomes a lot easier to settle once you have poked around inside one, and only two of the three let you do that before paying. Squarespace runs a 14-day free trial, while Shopify offers 3 days with no credit card required to start.
WooCommerce has no trial because there is nothing to trial. The plugin is free to download and install permanently, and the meter only starts running when you buy the hosting it needs.
Three days is enough to decide whether you like how it works. Fourteen days is enough to build a page, list a handful of products and show the result to somebody whose opinion you trust before any money leaves your account.
Should You Use Shopify or Squarespace?
Use Squarespace when the store is a small part of a site that is mostly content or portfolio work, and use Shopify when selling is the point of the site existing at all. Both are fully hosted, so neither choice costs you time in maintenance, and the decision comes down to whether the catalog or the content does the selling.
Squarespace began as a website builder and added selling to it, so a site built around pages, images or writing keeps its shape when a shop appears in the menu. Shopify begins from the store, and when the catalog is the business that orientation is worth more to you than any single fee line.
Do You Need Coding Skills to Run a Store on These Platforms?
No coding is required to open a store on any of them, so Shopify vs WooCommerce vs Squarespace is not a decision about your programming ability.
The genuine split is maintenance. Shopify and Squarespace update the software underneath you and you never see it happen. On WooCommerce you own the WordPress updates, the plugin updates, the backups and the server environment, whether or not you ever open a code editor. The PHP and MySQL versions named earlier move on too, so the environment is something you keep revisiting.
That is a time commitment with no end date, and no amount of coding skill removes it.
Our Verdict: Shopify vs WooCommerce vs Squarespace by Store Type
Five situations cover most people opening a first store, and we name one platform for each.
- Selling a handful of products beside a portfolio or blog: Squarespace. The site is the main event, the shop rides along on the same plan, and every current tier allows physical products.
- The store is the entire business: Shopify. Signing up puts you straight into a store admin instead of a site builder, the servers and the patching stay Shopify’s problem, and the processing rate falls as you grow into higher tiers.
- You already run a WordPress site: WooCommerce. The hosting, the login and the theme exist already, so the setup cost that makes it the hardest start for everyone else is one you have paid.
- You want the lowest software cost and will manage a server for it: WooCommerce. The plugin is free and open source, and the bill moves to hosting plus extensions billed per year instead of a platform subscription.
- You want to test an idea this week: Squarespace. Fourteen free days beats three, and there is no hosting to buy before a product can go on a page.
If two of those lines describe you, weigh the maintenance one hardest. Who patches the server is the part of this choice you live with every month, long after the fee percentages have stopped surprising you.
Conclusion
Shopify vs WooCommerce vs Squarespace comes down to who maintains the store. Shopify suits sellers whose whole business is the catalog. Squarespace fits a small shop attached to a content or portfolio site. WooCommerce is for anyone already running WordPress who will manage hosting, updates and backups themselves.
