WooCommerce vs BigCommerce: A Comprehensive Comparison (Cost, Features and more)

Choosing the right e-commerce platform is one of the most critical decisions for any online store. WooCommerce vs BigCommerce represents two of the most prominent solutions available today, each offering unique strengths in functionality, scalability, and ease of use.

In this blog, we’ll dive straight into how these platforms compare—so you can determine which one best supports your business goals and growth strategy.

WooCommerce vs BigCommerce: Overview

WooCommerce transforms an existing website into a fully customized online store, while BigCommerce delivers an all-in-one hosted platform equipped with built-in tools to simplify your sales operations.

Though both can significantly enhance your online presence, the best fit depends on your business needs, technical capabilities, and long-term vision.

Each platform brings a unique approach to building and managing a successful e-commerce business, earning them a strong reputation in the digital marketplace.

What is WooCommerce?

As a WordPress-based solution, WooCommerce offers merchants a budget-friendly way to launch online stores with complete creative freedom. This versatile plugin currently powers more than 25% of all e-commerce sites worldwide, making it the leading option for businesses seeking affordable scalability.

The platform’s extensive ecosystem includes thousands of plugins and extensions that enhance SEO capabilities, streamline inventory tracking, and diversify payment options. This flexibility has made WooCommerce particularly attractive to entrepreneurs and expanding companies looking to create distinctive digital shopping experiences that align perfectly with their brand vision.

Read more: Step-by-step guide to set up WooCommerce and launch your online store

What is BigCommerce?

As a comprehensive cloud-based solution, BigCommerce streamlines the process of setting up and operating an online retail presence. The platform includes extensive functionality for catalog management, search engine optimization, data protection, and selling across multiple channels without requiring additional extensions or coding.

BigCommerce differs from self-hosted solutions by managing all backend operations, from server maintenance to software updates and regulatory compliance. Featuring intuitive visual design interfaces and real-time customer service, the platform appeals to merchants seeking powerful e-commerce capabilities without technical overhead.

WooCommerce vs BigCommerce: Key Differences

Before diving into our WooCommerce vs BigCommerce analysis, let’s cover the key factors to consider when selecting your e-commerce platform:

• Ease of Use: Choose a platform with an intuitive interface that’s friendly for beginners, allowing you to manage your store smoothly, even in urgent situations.
• Costs: If you’re launching with limited funds, consider not only the setup costs but also ongoing fees like monthly or yearly subscriptions.
• Payment Methods: Ensure the platform supports your preferred payment gateways. Opting for one with a wide range of options gives you greater flexibility.
• Scalability: Pick a solution that can grow with your business, handling increased traffic, products, and features as your store expands.
• Customer Support and Community: Reliable customer support is crucial for quick issue resolution. Platforms offering multiple support channels will give you added peace of mind.
• SEO – Friendliness: A good platform should support customizable URLs, meta tags, and SEO tools to help your store rank higher and attract organic traffic.
• Inventory Management: Look for built-in tools to manage stock, track inventory, and handle product variations efficiently as your catalog grows.
• Integration and Plugins:  Choose a platform with a rich ecosystem of integrations and plugins to easily connect with marketing, shipping, or CRM tools.
• Customization: The platform should allow you to tailor both design and functionality to match your brand and business needs, whether through templates or code.
• Security: Ensure the platform includes SSL, PCI compliance, and regular security updates to keep customer data safe.
• Market Focus: Some platforms cater better to specific regions or business sizes. Make sure it supports your target market in terms of currency, tax, and local payment options.
• Mobile Optimization: Your store must perform well on mobile devices with responsive design, fast load times, and a smooth mobile checkout experience.

Let’s see how WooCommerce and BigCommerce compare in these key areas

Ease of Use

For anyone managing an e-commerce store, particularly beginners, the platform’s simplicity is a deciding factor in their overall experience.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce provides users with complete autonomy over their online store. This level of control, however, requires a more hands-on setup process. You are responsible for securing your own web hosting, integrating the plugin with your WordPress site, and then customizing functionality through various extensions.

Despite these initial technical steps, this approach is highly valued by those seeking deep personalization, as it enables the creation of a bespoke shopping experience that precisely mirrors a brand’s identity.

BigCommerce

Conversely, BigCommerce offers a comprehensive, all-in-one solution. It comes with native functionality, including drag-and-drop editing, payment processing, and product catalogs, available immediately upon signup. This approach eliminates the need to manage third-party extensions or technical configurations, streamlining the launch process for new users.

Ultimately, the choice comes down to your priorities. For those who value a simplified, fully-hosted setup, BigCommerce is the superior option. However, users already familiar with the WordPress ecosystem and who desire deeper creative control will find WooCommerce’s capacity for personalization to be unmatched.

Costs

When choosing an e-commerce platform, consider both current costs and long-term scalability to avoid expensive changes down the line.

WooCommerce

The core WooCommerce software, along with its underlying CMS, WordPress, is entirely free of charge, reflecting their open-source principles. This model grants you the freedom to use and modify the code without incurring licensing fees or forced plan upgrades as your business scales, with costs only arising from optional premium extensions.

However, it’s crucial to distinguish between free software and zero operating costs. As a plugin, WooCommerce does not include web hosting. You are responsible for purchasing a hosting plan to power your WordPress site, which typically ranges from $3 to $15 per month for basic shared services. Naturally, this expense can increase substantially for more robust solutions like VPS or Cloud hosting.

BigCommerce

In contrast, BigCommerce is an all-inclusive website builder. It operates on a subscription basis, bundling everything required to build and run an online store—including hosting, security, and SEO tooling—into a single monthly fee.

BigCommerce offers a clear pricing ladder designed to grow with your business:

• Standard: For $29/month (billed yearly), this entry-level plan provides core features and supports sales up to $50k annually.
• Plus: At $79/month, this tier adds powerful marketing tools like abandoned cart recovery and increases the sales cap to $180.
• Pro: For $299/month, you unlock advanced functionality such as custom product filtering, suitable for stores reaching up to $400k in sales.
• Enterprise: This is a custom-quoted solution for large-scale businesses, offering bespoke features and priority support.

Payment Methods

The ideal platform offers a wide range of payment gateways to cater to customer preferences, while also presenting a clear and fair fee structure to protect your profit margins.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce’s open-source nature extends to its payment options, offering unparalleled flexibility. Rather than having a single built-in processor, it integrates with virtually any payment gateway through extensions. This includes major players like PayPal, Stripe, and Square, as well as hundreds of other regional and specialized providers.

While most core integrations are free, some niche gateways may require a premium plugin. Critically, WooCommerce does not charge its own transaction fees; you only pay the standard rates charged by your chosen payment processor.

BigCommerce

BigCommerce takes a more integrated, “out-of-the-box” approach. It comes pre-configured with leading payment gateways like PayPal, Stripe, and Apple Pay, allowing you to start accepting payments immediately without complex setup.

Furthermore, it offers its own solution, BigCommerce Payments (powered by Stripe), which provides competitive, pre-negotiated processing rates. A significant advantage is that BigCommerce charges no additional transaction fees on any of its standard plans, regardless of which major gateway you use. This transparent pricing means your costs are solely determined by the processor you choose, making budgeting simpler and more predictable.

Scalability

As your business grows, your e-commerce platform should scale smoothly to support more traffic, products, and orders—without slowing you down.

WooCommerce

The scalability of WooCommerce is theoretically limitless, but it is entirely in your hands. As a self-hosted platform, your store’s performance is bound by the hosting plan you choose. A cheap shared hosting plan might suffice at launch, but as traffic and sales increase, you will need to proactively upgrade to more robust solutions like a VPS, a dedicated server, or a flexible cloud environment like AWS or Google Cloud.

The advantage of this model is ultimate control and uncapped performance potential. The disadvantage is that the responsibility is entirely yours. You must monitor performance and know when it’s time to upgrade, which requires either technical expertise or the budget for a managed hosting provider or developer.

BigCommerce

BigCommerce is engineered for scalability out of the box. As a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform, it manages all the backend infrastructure for you. You never have to worry about servers crashing during a major sales event or as your business grows. Their architecture is designed to handle high-traffic volumes and ensure consistent uptime.

Its scaling model is structured around its subscription plans, which are tied to annual revenue limits. As you hit the sales threshold of your current plan, you are prompted to upgrade to the next tier. This creates a clear, predictable growth path. For very large businesses, the Enterprise plan offers custom infrastructure and limitless potential to handle the most demanding requirements.

Customer Support and Community

When technical issues arise, fast and effective support can prevent revenue loss and provide peace of mind for business owners.

WooCommerce

As an open-source platform, WooCommerce relies on community-driven support rather than a centralized team. Users have access to extensive resources such as detailed documentation, tutorials, and developer blogs. For interactive help, the official WooCommerce forums and various WordPress communities offer peer-to-peer advice on common issues.

Furthermore, many plugin developers and hosting companies provide dedicated support for their own products and services.

BigCommerce

In contrast, BigCommerce provides a centralized, professional support system. All plans include 24/7 live chat, email, and phone support, making it particularly helpful for store owners who want quick answers or are less technically inclined. This presents a clear choice for users: opt for BigCommerce if you prefer immediate, real-time help from a dedicated team, or choose a community-driven platform if you prefer to find solutions yourself.

While BigCommerce also offers a knowledge base and user community, its primary value lies in its direct support channels.

SEO – Friendliness

A platform with strong SEO capabilities gives you the tools to optimize your store, rank higher in search results, attract valuable organic traffic, and ultimately drive sales.

WooCommerce

Through its native integration with WordPress, WooCommerce offers complete SEO flexibility. Users can leverage powerful plugins like Yoast SEO to gain granular control over meta tags, URLs, sitemaps, and content readability across the entire site, including the store, blog, and product pages. This allows for a precisely tuned site structure that aligns with a keyword strategy, which is essential for achieving higher search engine rankings.

BigCommerce

In contrast, BigCommerce includes built-in SEO tools like customizable URLs and automatic sitemaps, which are ideal for beginners and cover most SEO basics. However, this simplicity creates limitations for advanced strategies, as it lacks the extensive plugin ecosystem and deep site-level customization found in WooCommerce.

Ultimately, the choice depends on your desired level of control: BigCommerce simplifies the process for faster execution, while WooCommerce provides the flexibility for more in-depth optimization.

Inventory Management

Strong inventory management prevents overselling, ensures customer satisfaction and supports smart restocking as your store grows.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce handles basic inventory needs like stock tracking and low-inventory alerts out of the box, but its capabilities are meant to be expanded through extensions. Simply by adding a plugin, you can enable advanced features like syncing with third-party marketplaces, integrating with POS and warehouse systems, and creating customer waitlists.

BigCommerce

BigCommerce offers robust inventory management, starting with built-in tools to set stock levels for each product and automate low-stock notifications. For multi-channel sellers, it automatically syncs inventory across marketplaces like eBay and Amazon. More advanced capabilities, such as integrating with third-party warehouse systems, can be unlocked through available add-ons.

Integration and Plugins

Seamless integration with tools like marketing, shipping, and CRM systems is key to automation and operational efficiency

WooCommerce

This is the area where WooCommerce’s open-source philosophy shines brightest. It benefits from the entire WordPress plugin repository, granting access to tens of thousands of free and premium plugins. You can find a plugin for nearly every conceivable function, from marketing automation (like Mailchimp), advanced SEO (Yoast), shipping management, to niche payment gateways and CRM tools.

This freedom allows you to build a deeply customized store with unique functionalities. However, this freedom comes with responsibility. You must personally vet the compatibility, quality, and security of each plugin, and managing too many can impact site performance.

BigCommerce

BigCommerce takes a more selective and controlled approach, prioritizing quality over quantity. It features a carefully curated App Marketplace where each app is vetted by the BigCommerce team to ensure compatibility and quality. While the sheer number of options doesn’t match WooCommerce, the marketplace covers critical integrations with the most popular industry services.

Furthermore, the platform is built with an API-first philosophy, providing robust and flexible APIs that allow developers to build deep custom integrations if a pre-built app doesn’t fit the need. This approach minimizes the risk of conflicts and ensures that integrations work reliably.

Customization

Your store is the face of your brand, not just a sales channel. The ability to customize its look and functionality helps you create a unique shopping experience that builds recognition and long-term customer loyalty.

WooCommerce

When it comes to customization, WooCommerce is nearly limitless. As it’s open-source, you have full access to modify every line of code.

• Design: You have access to a vast universe of themes, from thousands of free options on WordPress.org to premium themes on marketplaces like ThemeForest. More importantly, you can leverage powerful page builders like Elementor or Beaver Builder to visually design every page without needing to code. If you have the skills, you can build a completely unique theme from scratch.
• Functional: Any feature you can imagine can be added via a plugin or custom code. From creating complex checkout flows and membership systems to specialized booking features, if it doesn’t exist, you can build it.

BigCommerce

BigCommerce offers a more structured and user-friendly approach to customization.

• Design: The platform has a Theme Store with modern, professional, and mobile-optimized templates. Its key strength is the built-in Page Builder, which allows you to customize your homepage and other pages by dragging and dropping widgets without touching code. While it doesn’t offer the absolute freedom of a WordPress page builder, it’s very powerful and easy to use.
• Functional: Most core functionality is already built-in. For everything else, you use apps from the App Marketplace. For deeper customizations, developers can use BigCommerce’s “Stencil” framework to edit themes at the code level and use its APIs to create custom functionality.

Security

In e-commerce, security is essential. Customers must trust their data is safe, as even one breach can seriously damage your brand and business.

WooCommerce

As a self-hosted, open-source platform, WooCommerce gives you full control over your store’s security, which also means you are responsible for managing it. This involves choosing a secure hosting provider, installing an SSL certificate, setting up firewalls, performing regular backups, and staying on top of all WordPress and plugin updates.

While this hands-on approach requires more effort, it provides the flexibility to implement custom security measures perfectly suited to your specific needs.

BigCommerce

BigCommerce provides a hands-off approach to security, making it perfect for small businesses or those who want to avoid technical maintenance. As a fully hosted platform, it automatically takes care of everything, including a free SSL certificate, PCI compliance, and all updates, to ensure your store is secure and meets industry standards right out of the box.

Market Focus

Each platform has its own market focus, which can influence feature sets, payment options, and overall user experience.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is used globally and does not target any specific market. Its flexibility means that it can be adapted to suit any market or region, provided the store owner implements the necessary localizations and integrations. WooCommerce’s massive plugin ecosystem makes it possible to integrate payment and shipping solutions specific to virtually any country worldwide.

BigCommerce

BigCommerce, on the other hand, is largely designed with the North American and Western markets in mind. This is evident in its native integrations with the payment gateways, shipping carriers, and marketing tools most popular in these regions. For businesses whose primary audience is in the US, Europe, or Australia, this focus is a significant advantage, as everything works seamlessly out of the box.

Mobile Optimization

Most shoppers use smartphones, so a smooth, fast mobile experience is crucial. A platform with strong mobile optimization helps you convert and retain more customers.

WooCommerce

When it comes to mobile optimization, WooCommerce offers a playground of unlimited potential. Instead of being confined to a pre-built framework, you are given complete control to forge a truly unique and distinct mobile experience. The real power lies in its massive ecosystem: you can pair a hyper-lightweight, speed-optimized theme with powerful page builders like Elementor, allowing you to fine-tune every pixel of the mobile interface—a level of customization that closed platforms can hardly match.

Furthermore, you have the freedom to choose a top-tier hosting provider that specializes in speed to ensure superior mobile performance. This means you aren’t just creating a “mobile-friendly” store; you are capable of crafting a perfect mobile brand experience, unbound by any restrictions.

BigCommerce

BigCommerce offers a safe and simple solution, but this comes at the cost of flexibility. All of its themes are guaranteed to be responsive, and the platform manages performance for you. While this removes the technical burden, it also means you are using a “one-size-fits-all” solution. You cannot choose the best hosting provider for speed, nor can you deeply customize performance elements.

Moreover, while its Page Builder is useful, its customization capabilities are limited to the widgets and structures that BigCommerce allows. It’s a fine choice for convenience, but not for those who want to maximize performance and brand uniqueness on mobile.

Looking to discover more options? Check out our other platform comparisons below:

WooCommerce vs Shopline

WooCommerce vs Shopify

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Which e-commerce platform is best for a big business?

For enterprise businesses, WooCommerce offers unparalleled flexibility and scalability. Its open-source nature means there are no built-in limits on sales, products, or site traffic; you simply choose a hosting provider that can handle your scale and add any required functionality through extensions. This allows for endless customization, though fully harnessing this potential requires advanced web development skills.

2. Which is better, WooCommerce or BigCommerce?

Your ideal platform really comes down to your goals and workflow. BigCommerce is great if you prefer a ready-to-use solution with built-in tools and minimal configuration. On the other hand, WooCommerce stands out for those who value flexibility and scalability, particularly if your site is already running on WordPress.

3. What is the advantage of WooCommerce?

WooCommerce offers several standout advantages. It’s free and open-source, meaning you don’t pay monthly fees and retain full control of your store. Its high level of customization lets you choose from thousands of themes, plugins, and integrations to tailor your site. Plus, it’s versatile enough to support all types of businesses, whether you’re selling physical goods, digital products, or subscriptions.

4. How does WooCommerce compare to BigCommerce in flexibility?

When it comes to flexibility, WooCommerce and BigCommerce take very different approaches. WooCommerce gives you full creative and technical freedom through a wide range of extensions and highly customizable themes. Meanwhile, BigCommerce provides many built-in features but offers more limited design flexibility. For businesses that prioritize deep customization and control over their store’s look and functionality, WooCommerce tends to be the more suitable choice.

Conclusion

Choosing the right e-commerce platform goes beyond features and pricing—it can make or break your online business. A well-matched platform sets the foundation for growth, reduces ongoing maintenance costs, and ensures a smooth shopping experience for your customers. Whether you’re a startup or scaling up, aligning your technical setup with your business strategy is essential for sustainable success.

Both WooCommerce and BigCommerce are powerful e-commerce platforms, each with its own strengths. WooCommerce stands out for its flexibility, scalability, and tight integration with WordPress, making it ideal for businesses that want full control and customization. BigCommerce, on the other hand, is perfect for those looking for a fully hosted, out-of-the-box solution with built-in features and minimal setup.

At Arestós, we specialize in WooCommerce development and consultancy. Our team is committed to building tailored WooCommerce solutions that align with your business goals, ensuring flexibility, scalability, security, and a smooth user experience. Whether you’re launching a new store or optimizing an existing one, we’re here to support you at every stage of your e-commerce journey.

Contact us today to discover the solution that fits your business best—and unlock stronger, smarter, and more sustainable e-commerce growth.