Most ecommerce platform comparisons are written for the person paying the invoice. This one is for the person who gets the call when checkout breaks on a Saturday, because the trade offs look different from that seat.
Hosted Or Self Hosted Is The Only Decision That Is Hard To Undo
Everything else about a store can be changed later. Themes, apps, payment providers, even the domain. Where the code runs cannot, not cheaply.
Hosted platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce and Squarespace run on the vendor's servers. Security patches, uptime, SSL renewal and capacity during a traffic spike are all their problem. What you give up is control: you get the extension points the vendor decided to expose, and when your requirement falls outside them you are buying an app or writing a workaround.
Self hosted, which in practice means WooCommerce or Magento, hands you the code, the database and the server configuration. Anything is possible because you own the whole stack, and everything is your responsibility for the same reason. If nobody on the team owns the server, that ownership becomes an outage nobody predicted.
What You Actually Pay Per Month
The plan price is the smallest line. Payment processing runs roughly 2.4 to 2.9 percent plus a fixed fee on every order regardless of platform, and hosted platforms add a surcharge on top when you use an outside gateway, which is why the "just use your own processor" advice quietly costs more than it saves.
On the self hosted side the invoice moves rather than disappears. Managed WordPress hosting that can survive a real traffic day, a backup service, a staging environment, and the paid extensions that supply what the core does not. It is usually cheaper at small scale and closer than people expect once traffic is serious.
Migration Is The Hidden Cost
This is the part that turns a platform choice into a five year commitment.
Moving a live store means exporting and remapping product data, rebuilding the storefront, writing a redirect for every URL that changed so your search rankings survive, and reconnecting each integration by hand: the ERP, the email platform, the reviews widget, the shipping rate calculator. A store with a few hundred products and years of accumulated search history can spend months on that, and the rankings do not always come back.
So the question is not which platform is best today. It is which one you would still be content to run in five years, since the cost of being wrong is paid at the exit rather than at signup.
Picking By Business Type, Not By Hype
A first store with a straightforward catalogue is usually happiest on a hosted platform, where the ceiling is high enough and the ongoing maintenance is nearly zero. A store with unusual pricing rules, a bespoke fulfilment pipeline or content that carries the traffic tends to justify self hosted, because the workarounds a hosted platform demands would cost more than the maintenance. Mid market sellers with B2B requirements have their own bracket, where built in wholesale features matter more than the theme marketplace.
We keep a full comparison of the major platforms with per plan pricing, the feature differences that actually change day to day work, and a breakdown by business type here: Best Ecommerce Platform: Complete Comparison Guide
The Takeaway
Pick for the ceiling and the exit, not the entry price. Ask what happens when the catalogue triples, what happens when a requirement lands outside the platform's model, and what it would cost to leave. Whichever answer you can live with for five years is the right platform, and the monthly plan is close to noise next to that.
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