WooCommerce
The most-installed shop software on the internet, and it runs on WordPress.
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sovereigntyWooCommerce turns a WordPress site into a shop, and its reach is the point: an enormous plugin and theme market, a hosting industry built around it, and a supply of people who already know how to work on it. GPL-3.0. For a small business that wants a shop bolted onto a site it already has, this is usually the pragmatic answer and everything else is over-engineering. The trade is WordPress itself — plugin conflicts, update discipline and performance work you will own.
OPEN SOURCEGPL-3.0SELF-HOSTLOCAL-FIRST
LicenseGPL-3.0
PricingFree and open source. Many useful extensions are paid, per year.
Open sourceYes
Self-hostableYes
Local-first dataYes
What it does well
- +Largest ecosystem in commerce — a plugin exists for almost everything
- +Easy to hire for; a huge pool of people already know it
- +No transaction fees and no platform revenue share
- +Cheap and fast to launch if a WordPress site already exists
Where it falls short
- −Inherits every WordPress problem: plugin conflicts, updates, security
- −Performance needs real work as the catalogue grows
- −The useful extensions are paid, and they recur annually
- −Not headless by default; the frontend is WordPress
WooCommerce as an alternative to
Where WooCommerce shows up in our comparisons, and how it ranked.
WooCommerce head-to-head
Straight comparisons against the tools people weigh it against.