I’ve Tested and Reviewed Wix vs Shopify: Which Is My Winner?

In this side-by-side comparison, I’ll review pricing, sales features, ease of use, and more. But you can view the table below for a top-level overview:

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Wix	Shopify
Overall rating 4.8	Overall rating 4.8
Starting Price $29 $26.10 with code “TAKE10”	Starting Price $29
Free plan or free trial Free plan	Free plan or free trial 3-day free trial, then 1 month for $1
Number of templates 900+	Number of templates 200+

Wix is best for small businesses looking to build an online presence and sell a few products, whereas Shopify is better for large and expanding businesses, particularly if you have an extensive inventory.

You can take our quick four-question quiz to receive a personalized website builder recommendation based on your needs.

When it comes to value for money, Wix is the more cost-effective option of the two. Wix’s pricing ranges from $17 to $159 per month (billed annually). There are four premium plans to choose between, but you’ll need the $29 per month Core plan or above if you want to sell online.

You can get 10% off your Wix plan with the code “TAKE10”.

Wix also offers a free plan that you can stay on forever, but it comes with ads and limited storage – not ideal for a small business looking to build a professional brand.

Shopify’s plans are generally more expensive than Wix, but you can sell across all plans – with Wix, you’ll need to choose an appropriate ecommerce plan. Shopify’s pricing ranges from $29 to $299 per month (billed annually), but you can get your first month for just $1, softening the cost at the start.

Shopify also has a three-day free trial – this provides a much shorter window than Wix’s free plan to get familiar with the platform, so I’d argue that it’s not a very effective trial period.

Shopify’s $29 per month Basic plan is good for businesses finding their feet – it includes unlimited products and up to 10 inventory locations. However, I recommend the standard Shopify plan ($79/mo) for larger businesses because of its additional staff accounts, so you can delegate work to multiple people, and its reduced processing fees with Shopify Payments.

Unfortunately, neither builder is really great value for money, so I wouldn’t recommend Wix or Shopify if you’re a budget-conscious business. Instead, opt for GoDaddy or Squarespace which offer affordable plans and quality features for a lower price point.

The Winner

Wix’s range of ecommerce plans are more affordable

You can start selling online with Wix for just $29 per month with its Core plan, the same as Shopify’s cheapest Basic plan. But, Wix’s most expensive $159 per month Business Elite plan is roughly half the cost of Shopify’s Advanced plan which costs $299/mo. So, upgrading through Wix’s plans is cheaper in the long-run than Shopify.

Shopify is our top-rated ecommerce website builder for a reason – it has the best sales features on the market, scoring an impressive 4.8 out of 5 in our research. Shopify is ideal for online stores with substantial inventories, whereas I’d only recommend Wix if you’re looking to sell a small handful of products.

Multichannel Selling

Want to broaden your reach beyond your website? Shopify has the best multichannel integration options, allowing you to connect your store with marketplaces and social media channels. This is a great way to target customers on platforms that they’re already engaged with.

Wix offers fewer options than Shopify in this regard. You can sell to customers via similar marketplaces, such as Amazon, but considerably fewer social media platforms. For example, Shopify lets you sell with TikTok, whereas Wix sticks to the classics, like Facebook and Instagram. If you want to connect your Wix store to TikTok, you’ll need to download the TikTok Shop app in the app market.

It’s also worth noting that Shopify has a cheap Shopify Starter plan which costs $5 per month – this plan is designed to help you start selling across social media and messaging apps. If you want to start selling quickly and don’t need a fully polished storefront, the plan is a good alternative to Shopify’s more expensive website builder packages.

Payment Options

Both Wix and Shopify provide a variety of payment options, giving you flexibility when serving customers at the checkout stage.

Shopify offers 100+ payment methods, such as PayPal and Apple Pay. Comparatively, Wix lets your website connect with over 70 providers. In addition to these third-party options, you can choose Shopify or Wix’s native solution to simplify the process. Wix doesn’t charge any transaction fees, whereas Shopify charges 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction (pay less in fees if you upgrade beyond Shopify’s cheapest plan).

Shopify Payments automatically accepts payments from all major providers, and it removes third-party transaction fees. Wix Payments also charges no transaction fees. The easiest way to take payments online is by using either of these payment gateways, designed by the builders themselves.

Shopify also rolled out the Buy with Prime button in late 2023, allowing merchants to sell directly to Amazon Prime customers with all of the benefits of Prime, such as free delivery.

Security

A website needs dependable and robust security in place to protect your business and customers from malicious attacks. Wix and Shopify offer free SSL certificates, two-step verification to keep your account secure, and built-in fraud detection to help businesses flag untrustworthy orders.

App Market

Both Wix and Shopify have app markets so you can add further functionality to your website, but the difference in scale is notable. Wix’s App Market features around 500 third-party apps, whereas Shopify offers over 8,000 apps to merchants, such as Linkpop which lets you add ecommerce links to your social media bios.

Unfortunately, Shopify is more reliant on its app store to enhance a website’s capabilities than Wix – Wix provides a lot more features in-house so you don’t need to waste additional time searching for the right apps. For example, you’ll need to download a tool like Easy Appointment Booking to take appointments or set events online with Shopify. Wix offers scheduling software as a built-in feature.

The Winner

Shopify has the best sales features on the market

As our top-rated ecommerce website builder, it’s not surprising that Shopify has the best sales features for business owners. All plans include unlimited products, multiple sales channels (such as TikTok or Amazon), abandoned cart recovery, discount codes, localized selling tools, and more.

Selling isn’t the only consideration when setting up an online store. Wix has the best website features to help you promote your business online, from email marketing tools to keyword support.

You can watch our detailed Wix review video to learn more about Wix’s high-quality features:

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Marketing Tools

Wix offers a robust marketing suite that improves as you upgrade plans. The Light marketing suite is available on Wix’s cheapest plan – this includes automated workflows, four lead-capture forms, and up to 10 fields in forms, such as contact details or payment information. Once you upgrade to the Core plan or above, you’ll get additional forms and fields, as well as a site chat functionality so you can engage with website visitors directly through your website.

Shopify lets you seamlessly integrate marketing into your website through apps like Facebook and Instagram, helping you identify and reach your target audience. I was particularly impressed by the Shopify Inbox functionality when testing the builder since this lets you answer customer questions quickly and efficiently, increasing the likelihood of sales.

Both Wix and Shopify offer great email marketing tools as well. With diverse templates, customization options, and automations, you can easily set up email campaigns to reach out to your market or reengage customers with abandoned cart recovery emails. You can also connect your store to popular email marketing solutions, such as Mailchimp.

SEO

Improving and optimizing your website for search engines is important when building an online presence – SEO helps direct the right customers to your store and product pages.

Since Wix and Shopify are highly-rated website builders, it’s no surprise that they excel in this category, both scoring 5 out of 5 in our SEO testing. You can expect the standard SEO features from either option, such as sitemaps and mobile optimization.

When testing Wix’s SEO, I loved the personalized SEO checklist it created for my test website – this is a useful tool to get real-time feedback on your site’s content and settings. And, the AI Meta Tag Creator (available for premium plan owners only) helps businesses optimize their pages by automatically generating meta titles and descriptions for you.

Internationalization

If you’re looking to expand your online store internationally and connect with customers from different regions, you need to consider a website builder’s internationalization features. Wix supports 180 languages and automatically translates your site’s content for visitors from around the world. This is something Wix handles for your business, whereas you’ll need the Translate & Adapt app to translate your Shopify content into one of its 30+ supported languages.

Shopify is set to remove its Geolocation app as of December 2024 – this is because Shopify has made some recent improvements to its ecommerce localization features, such as automatically redirecting visitors to a localized site based on their browser language.

Wix continues to make advancements in this area as well, announcing a new partnership with Global-e in February 2024 to help businesses sell products across multiple markets.

The Winner

Wix’s features are the best to help promote your site

Wix provides a suite of impressive tools to help boost your site’s visibility and encourage customers to shop with you, such as custom SEO support, auto-translation, and email automation.

It’s pretty closely tied but Shopify is slightly easier to use than Wix. When it comes to building an online store, you have to take a few factors into account: the setup process, designing your website, and how easy it is to oversee and manage your store from the backend.

With Wix, I was presented with a couple of setup options – an AI chatbot (Wix’s AI website builder) or choosing a template. I recommend using Wix’s AI chatbot to get a customized website for your business needs. When testing it myself, I was impressed by how it picked up on my fake slime company’s target audience just from my answers about the brand.

To get started with Shopify, the builder asks if your business is in the early stages of life or if it’s already an established business. From there, you simply answer a few more questions based on your needs.

If you’re a new business:

• Where would you like to sell?
• What do you plan to sell first?
• Where will your business be located?

If you run an existing business already, you’ll be asked the additional question of where you’re currently selling (e.g. Amazon, eBay, Wix).

Once you’ve got through the setup process for either Wix or Shopify, you can start designing your website. Wix uses an easy drag-and-drop editor which is incredibly beginner-friendly – you get total creative freedom since you can drag elements anywhere you’d like on the page. Wix has also recently introduced an AI Theme Assistant to support you at the design stage and share suggestions.

As soon as you have more than a few products to sell, building your inventory is much easier with Shopify, especially if you sell multiple variants of the same product.

Lucy Carney Deputy Editor

Shopify takes a different approach with a section-based editor. While this is more restrictive creatively, it does make it easy to add and reorder sections as you simply stack them on top of each other.

Shopify also recommends adding your products first, before editing your template. From my experience with Shopify, this makes complete sense since you’ll benefit from having the products in the backend to display on your website’s pages. Plus, you can use AI tools like Shopify Magic to generate product descriptions and simplify the process of adding new items or variants to your inventory.

The Winner

Shopify’s editor and simple product backend are user-friendly

There’s a lot to do when setting up an online store, and Shopify’s editor and dashboard are simple to navigate. You can easily add products or tweak information, such as sizing, with Shopify’s inventory management tools, and Shopify’s section-based editor lets you build your pages from the ground up.

First impressions matter, and Wix has the best templates for your online store. Choose from over 900 Wix templates, covering a wide range of business needs, such as “Arts and Crafts” and “Pets and Animals”. While Shopify offers more dedicated ecommerce support and features, Wix effortlessly combines sales features with high-quality designs so you can create a unique website.

Shopify, in comparison, has a limited number of free templates available. At the time of writing, there are currently 13 free template options. Most of Shopify’s templates come with a price tag, ranging from around $100 to $500 – this is an additional one-time cost on top of your core plan. They’re aesthetically pleasing and designed by professionals, but you can get a similar quality of templates from Wix for free.

The Winner

Wix has over 900+ templates for a variety of industries

I was impressed by the sheer number and variety of Wix’s templates. Not only are they modern and stunning to look at, but businesses of all kinds can find a suitable match for their site, whether you’re running a restaurant or selling clothes online. And, the best part is every Wix template is free to use.

If you think you’ll need a helping hand with setting up your online store or managing your business website, Wix has better help and support than Shopify. With Wix, you can use the following support channels:

• 24/7 phone support
• Live chat, available Monday to Friday
• Engagement from social media accounts
• A knowledge center and SEO Learning Hub full of expert guides

Unfortunately, Wix doesn’t offer email support so if you prefer that style of communication, we’d recommend choosing Shopify which includes this support option.

The only reason Shopify is let down in this testing area is because of its lack of tutorials when editing – I found it took some time to feel confident and comfortable with the Shopify editor and backend dashboard because of this.

The Winner

Wix offers responsive 24/7 support to businesses

Wix offers more help options for businesses, such as 24/7 phone support and guidance from within the website editor itself. This level of support, especially for beginners or business owners who don’t know where to start when building a site, is incredibly useful.

We want to make sure our comparisons are fair and reflective of the website builders in their current state, which is why we carry out regular testing and data collection.

Our thorough research process assesses an ecommerce website builder’s ability to support your online store – we review seven core areas of investigation to do this:

• Sales Features
• Website Features
• Help and Support
• Design Functionality
• User Experience
• Customer Score
• Value for Money

Each category has a unique weighting based on what our readers value the most. For online stores, we know that sales features are incredibly important so this makes up the majority of the website builder’s overall rating alone. Wix and Shopify both receive a star rating out of five for each category – when combined, this creates their overall score.

After comparing the two website builders in areas like pricing, sales features, and ease of use, Shopify is my top choice for online stores because of its unbeatable ecommerce capabilities, including an extensive app store and 100+ payment options.

That said, it’s a close call between the two. Shopify is ideal for established businesses looking to grow online, and I highly recommend it if you’re managing a large inventory. Wix, on the other hand, is better for smaller businesses looking to take their first step online.

If you’re still not sure which to choose, take a look at our list of the best ecommerce website builders to see how Wix and Shopify compare with other platforms.