7 Best Shopify Alternatives You Should Know

If you wanted to build an online shop and run it from your garage around 20 years ago, it wouldn’t be just complex, it would be near impossible. It’s only recently that just about anyone can affordably create a sleek & modern website that can handle payments and so much more. After being founded in 2006, Shopify made an exceptional name for itself and is now one of the best e-commerce platforms in the world. 

If you want to create your own e-commerce website, Shopify would definitely be an excellent option. But if you want to know what else is out there, you should definitely learn about some Shopify alternatives. To help you choose between all the Shopify competitors, here are the top 10 best Shopify alternatives from WooCommerce to Big Cartel vs Wix.

Wix

Best for: Small businesses, creative brands, and beginners

As one of the best Shopify alternatives, Wix is a high-level e-commerce solution that offers tons of features. Wix gives free web hosting to all its users starting from 500MB bandwidth and 500MB storage, which can be upgraded with premium plans. It’s known to be very user-friendly and intuitive. Featuring 3 different interfaces for different level users, Wix is comfortable both for those who don’t know how to code and those who want to build a custom site.

Websites that are built on Wix are fast and perform well under regular conditions. Some users complain that the websites lag on mobile versions. Sites that have more than 30 pages may start loading slower, but the problem can be solved by upgrading to higher bandwidth plans. And if anything else comes up, Wix has 24/7 customer support for all its users. VIP and Premium Business VIP users get extra special treatment and have priority support.

For businesses that want to sell both online and offline, Wix may not be the best solution. It has no POS (Point of Sale) system, which can cause discrepancies in inventory management. Another disadvantage you get with Wix is a lack of SEO capabilities. Nevertheless, Wix websites are extremely secure and comply with all necessary security standards, so you don’t have to worry about the privacy of your clients. Plus, you get some marketing automation features. 

Price: One of the advantages of Wix over Shopify is that it offers a completely free plan, so you can start using it even without any credit card information but with Wix branding. Wix also offers packages for individuals and small businesses ranging from $4 to $24.50 per month with limited functionality. These smaller packages are best for personal use and don’t offer payment processing features. If you want a solution for businesses that can sell online, Wix offers premium e-commerce plans ranging from $17 to $35.

WooCommerce

Best for: People with coding knowledge, beginners with a small budget, WordPress users

Unlike Shopify, WooCommerce is not an e-commerce website builder. It’s an open-source plugin that you can add to your WordPress website to give it the features of an e-commerce site. WooCommerce is easy to set up and use for those who have some experience with WordPress. Although you need to select the best WooCommerce hosting provider suitable for you, the plugin helps create fast and well-performing websites.

WooCommerce works much better and allows for so many more features, thanks to the plugins available on the platform. Although it has some security measures built into the platform, you’re still going to need to purchase an SSL certificate, PCI compliance, and other things by yourself. Because your website will be running on WordPress, the WooCommerce support team may not solve your issues and blame it on the host, theme, or other plugin providers. 

WooCommerce is famous for being one of the best platforms for SEO. As for inventory management features, you can enable relevant WooCommerce plugins to make your store management simple and smooth. If you also want to include some marketing tactics in your strategy, the WooCommerce marketing plugins will do an excellent job.

Price: The most basic features of WooCommerce are available for free, but if you want more advanced functionality, you may need a small budget for it. Unless you already have a hosting plan, you should add around $15/month to your budget for a hosting service. You can choose to use a free theme or one of the paid WooCommerce themes ranging from $20-$100. Don’t forget to count the security costs starting at around $5, and leave yourself some $200 room for on-time plugins. 

Overall, WooCommerce can cost you anywhere from $0 to as much as you like.

BigCartel

Best for: Solopreneurs, artists

This option is one of the best free Shopify alternatives. Their website building platform is easy to use and has very straightforward features of e-commerce websites. They prioritize their customer support and do their best to solve their customer’s problems, but sadly, they don’t do it 24/7 or through live chat/phone. Nevertheless, the platform gives shop owners the space to be creative about how they present their products.

Using BigCartel is safe with full SSL encryption. They provide you with hosting, ensure that your website loads fast & perform well. This also means that websites built on their platform also rank well on search engines, so you don’t have to get too worried about SEO. If we look at Shopify and BigCartel vs Wix, BigCartel is the best of both worlds. It offers extremely useful features at an affordable price. If you’re an artist or a creator, this is definitely the option for you.

Being one of the many Shopify competitors, they provide their users with both online and offline selling options, inventory & shipment tracking features, and much more. They even give you tools to run promos and discounts. Plus, they have built-in Google Analytics, Facebook, and PayPal integrations, so you’ll have all the essentials ready, waiting for you to use them,

Price: The pricing plans of BigCartel vary based on the number of products you’re going to sell. For up to 5 products, the service is free. If you want to feature up to 50 products, you’ll need to subscribe to their $9.99/month Platinum Plan. If you really want to scale up and feature up to 500 products, their $19.99 DIamond Plan is the one for you. It is definitely on the more affordable side of the spectrum.

Magento

Best for: Medium & Large online businesses looking to scale

Magento is one of the highest-level Shopify alternatives. It’s made for large businesses that need complex e-commerce sites and have in-house IT expertise. Magento is self-hosted and open-source, so you have the freedom to play around with it as much as you want. This means that the choice of servers and security measures is in your hands, so you’ll need to upgrade as needed to keep your site fast and well-performing. 

Magento has a steep-ish learning curve, and you need to have a programmer who can set it up. Regardless of user-friendliness, Magento is extremely flexible and provides its customers with the customizable solutions they need. If you ever run into any issues, they have a massive community of experts, Magento-certified specialists, and developers ready to help you. Visit forums, ask questions, or even talk to a Magento partner agency to get help.

As a one-stop-shop scalable alternative to Shopify, Magento has an enterprise-grade inventory management system that can handle heavy loads of products. You can feature different colors or sizes and implement third-party integrations if you ever need an internal distribution network. In addition, Magento also provides you with a series of valuable extensions to optimize your stores, such as Magento 2 auto-related products, SEO Extension, and Quickbook accounting extension.

To top all of this off, Magento features advanced SEO features like permalink and meta content modifications, no-follow links, redirects, and much more. It allows you to implement your digital marketing strategies, find the perfect SEO strategy for your design, etc.

Price: Since Magento is made for medium and large businesses that are looking to scale and need a beefy platform, this Shopify competitor always gives custom quotes to their clients. In general, pricing starts at $2000/month. It also requires you to supply the hosting service, so add that to your budget. Your yearly expenses with Magento could reach $50,000, so take the leap when you’re ready.

BigCommerce

Best for: Small businesses on a budget

BigCommerce is one of the more similar platforms when it comes to Shopify. They provide free hosting, which ultimately limits your control over your shop, but also minimizes the risk of running into issues. Websites that are built on this Shopify competitor’s platform are highly secure. Your website will be hosted on AWS, so you’ll get good loading speeds and high performance. Unfortunately, this means that you can’t tweak your website, which will affect your user experience. The platform is also extremely user-friendly, but there are almost no customization options, so the friendliness is limited. 

Just like Shopify, BigCommerce offers a standard inventory management system for unlimited items, but the sizes per product vary between pricing plans. The platform is also built for small and medium-sized businesses, so it can’t handle too big of an inventory. Luckily, if you ever run into issues, they have 24/7 customer support through live chat, phone, and email.

Since BigCommerce is built for small businesses, it offers some basic SEO features to help your website rank on search engines. They take care of keyword optimization, MD, MT, and much more.

Price: BigCommerce, similar to Shopify, has subscription-based pricing plans. Starting at $29.95, you get almost everything you would need to get your online business off the ground. They also offer plans that cost $79.95 and $299.95 for larger businesses that have over $180K sales per year and want lower fees.

Volusion

Best for: Startups, solopreneurs, and small businesses with some tech knowledge

As a golden-middle solution, Volusion is one of the best Shopify alternatives. Just like Shopify, this platform is also a cloud-based SaaS product. As a client, you don’t need to worry about hosting or additional integrations. Many users find the interface of Volusion to be even better than Shopify.

This platform has no transaction fees and an inventory management system that’s better than Shopify’s. Volusion provides more shipping options for its clients, including UPS, USPS, FedEx. Although it requires some coding expertise and loads slower than other alternatives to Shopify, Volusion is still secure and offers more valuable features than Shopify.

Depending on the plan you choose, you can get online, phone, priority, and VIP customer support options. Plus, you get basic SEO tools and social media integrations with all pricing plans.

Price: Volusion and Shopify have very similar pricing plans. All their plans range from $29 to $299, but their contents have major differences. The real kicker with Volusion is their 0% transaction fees vs 2.4-2.9% fees that Shopify takes. If you’re not planning to hit over $100K online sales this year, their $79 Professional plan is the one for you. On the other hand, you can increase your budget and get one of their enterprise plans meant for businesses with up to and over $500K annual sales. E-commerce is booming, so be prepared.

Squarespace

Best for: New & small businesses on a budget

Squarespace is, again, one of the best Shopify alternatives. They feature fully managed cloud hosting, which means that your website will always be up and running. Most users find it to be very intuitive and easy to use. Squarespace is known for its amazing templates that look like enterprise-grade custom designs. Sadly, these designs compromise the speed of loading. The Squarespace mobile loading speed is the lowest one on this list.

All Squarespace websites come with a custom domain name, SSL certificate, plus unlimited bandwidth and storage. Security is not something you will worry about if you choose to work with them. Still, if you ever run into problems, their 24/7 customer support will be there to solve them.

Squarespace offers premium inventory management systems like advanced shipping through USPS, UPS, and FedEx for their Advanced Commerce users. You can compare real-time shipping dates and find your best option each time. These users also receive advanced discount features that are limited in use, which means you get complete control of your promos.

Finally, you get the ability to sell through Facebook and Instagram shops, giving you yet another sales channel. Get analytics, gift cards, site visibility with SEO features, and sell unlimited products with one of the best Shopify alternatives – Squarespace.

Price: Perfectly in their customer’s budget, Squarespace’s pricing plans range from $16 to $54. The lower price point is a better fit for personal use. At the same time, the bigger packages offer standard and premium e-commerce features like POS, checkout on an internal domain, abandoned cart recovery, etc. In general, Squarespace is giving maximum value for its price points. If you’re on a budget and want to get your business off the ground, this is definitely something you should check out.

Final thoughts

As one of the most popular e-commerce platforms in the world, Shopify has a massive number of alternatives. There are platforms like BigCommerce, Wix, and Squarespace that are more similar to Shopify, and there are ones like Magento and BigCartel that have a different target niche. No matter the category you are in, it’s still crucial to go over all your alternatives to find your perfect match.

Depending on your budget, needs, and skills, you may want to choose one of these Shopify alternatives after all. Do you have coding knowledge? Do you need web hosting services? How many products will you be selling? These and so many more questions need answers before you can choose. 

In this Shopify alternatives review, we discussed 7 websites like Shopify along with their pricing, hosting, ease of use, speed & performance, customer support, inventory management, security, SEO & marketing features. We put the cherry on top and mentioned who perfectly fits each platform. If you find your category, pay closer attention. Check out these Shopify competitors, and your choice will become easier.