Most platform comparison posts are written by people who've never run a store past $10k/month. They parrot feature lists from press kits and call it research. I've migrated stores twice — once off Magento 2, once off a custom Laravel build — and both times I wished someone had just told me the actual cost of ownership before I signed anything.
This e-commerce platform comparison 2024 is written from an operator's chair, not an affiliate dashboard. I'll cover Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and Medusa.js — the four platforms I see SMB founders seriously evaluating right now. I'll tell you who each one is actually for, what it costs when you include the stuff they don't put on the pricing page, and where each one will eventually make you miserable.
If you're doing under $500k ARR and haven't launched yet, the decision matters less than you think. But if you're at $1M–$5M ARR and feeling the ceiling, the platform choice becomes a real constraint. That's who I'm writing this for.
The Real Cost Breakdown Nobody Shows You
Platform pricing pages are fiction. Here's what you actually pay in 2024:
Shopify starts at $39/month (Basic) but the moment you use a third-party payment processor, you pay a 2% transaction fee on top of your payment processor's own cut. On $100k/month revenue, that's $2,000/month in pure tax. Shopify Payments removes the fee, but it's not available in every country and it's been known to hold funds for 30+ days with minimal explanation. The plan most growing stores actually need — Shopify Advanced at $399/month — plus a theme ($300–$400 one-time), a few essential apps averaging $30–$80/month each, and you're at $700–$900/month before you've sold a single item.
BigCommerce charges $299/month on their Plus plan and $599/month on Pro. No transaction fees, which is genuinely good. But they have annual sales thresholds: if you exceed $400k/year on Plus, they auto-upgrade you to Pro. That's not a feature — it's a pricing trap. BigCommerce also has a smaller app ecosystem than Shopify, which means more custom development work for edge cases.
WooCommerce itself is free. The hosting, the plugins, the developer time — that's where the money goes. A properly configured WooCommerce store on managed WordPress hosting (Kinsta or WP Engine) runs $50–$200/month for hosting alone. Add WooCommerce Subscriptions ($279/year), a page builder, a serious SEO plugin, payment gateway fees, and you're at $400–$600/month easily. The hidden cost is your time or a developer's time. WooCommerce breaks in interesting ways during major WordPress updates, and debugging it at 11pm before a sale event is a special kind of miserable.
Medusa.js (v2.0 launched October 2024) is open-source and free to use. Your costs are infrastructure — a $20–$50/month VPS or a managed deployment on Railway or Render — plus significant developer time upfront. If you don't have a developer or can't afford one at $80–$150/hour, Medusa is not your platform. If you do, the ceiling is essentially unlimited.
Shopify in 2024: Still the Default, Still Expensive
Shopify's market position is unambiguous. They process over $235 billion in merchant sales annually (their 2023 annual report). The ecosystem is mature: 8,000+ apps, thousands of agencies, documentation that actually works. For a founder who wants to move fast and outsource platform complexity, Shopify is still the right default.
What's changed in 2024 is the cost pressure. Shopify raised prices in January 2023 — Basic went from $29 to $39, Shopify plan from $79 to $105 — and the platform hasn't gotten meaningfully cheaper since. Their push into enterprise with Shopify Plus ($2,300/month) is real, but the gap between Advanced ($399) and Plus ($2,300) is brutal for stores in the $2M–$5M ARR range.
The checkout is still the best in the business for conversion. I've seen A/B tests where moving from a custom checkout to Shopify's native checkout improved conversion by 0.4–0.8 percentage points. On $3M ARR, that's $12k–$24k/year in recovered revenue. That number alone justifies a lot of the platform cost.
Where Shopify frustrates operators: content management is an afterthought, the theme system (Liquid) is a dead-end for complex UI requirements, and any serious customization requires either an app (monthly fee) or a developer who knows Liquid (increasingly rare and expensive).
BigCommerce: The Underdog With a Genuine Niche
BigCommerce doesn't get enough credit for one thing: native B2B features. Price lists, customer groups, quote management, purchase orders — these are built in, not bolted on. If you're selling to both retail and wholesale customers, BigCommerce's out-of-the-box B2B toolkit saves you $200–$400/month in apps compared to Shopify.
Their headless story is also more mature than Shopify's for mid-market. BigCommerce's Stencil framework and their GraphQL Storefront API are genuinely usable. I've seen agencies build performant Next.js storefronts on top of BigCommerce's backend in 6–8 weeks, which is fast for a headless project.
The problem is momentum. Shopify has 4.6 million merchants (2024 estimate). BigCommerce has around 60,000. That gap shows up in the app ecosystem, in the talent pool, and in how quickly bugs get fixed. If you hit an obscure edge case on BigCommerce, the community forum might have three posts about it from 2019. On Shopify, someone's written a Medium post, a Reddit thread, and a YouTube tutorial.
I'd choose BigCommerce over Shopify specifically if: (a) B2B is more than 30% of my revenue, (b) I'm in a country where Shopify Payments isn't available and the transaction fee math is brutal, or (c) I need multi-storefront management without paying Plus prices.
WooCommerce: Maximum Control, Maximum Responsibility
WooCommerce powers roughly 39% of all online stores globally (BuiltWith, Q3 2024). That number is both impressive and misleading — a huge chunk of those stores are tiny, low-traffic sites where the platform choice barely matters.
For an SMB doing $500k–$2M ARR, WooCommerce is viable but demanding. You own the infrastructure, which means you own the outages. A misconfigured caching plugin or a plugin conflict during a flash sale can take your store down, and you're the one calling the hosting support line at 2am.
The economics work if you have in-house development capacity or a reliable agency relationship. A developer who knows WordPress/WooCommerce deeply can build almost anything — custom pricing logic, complex product configurators, deep ERP integrations — faster and cheaper than the equivalent Shopify app work. The plugin ecosystem is enormous: WooCommerce alone has 900+ official extensions.
Content-commerce integration is WooCommerce's genuine superpower. If your business is content-first — a blog or media property that sells products — the WordPress CMS underneath WooCommerce is still the best content management layer available. Nothing else comes close for SEO flexibility and editorial workflow.
If you're considering WooCommerce, read our breakdown of headless WooCommerce setups before committing. The architecture decision you make at launch will either give you flexibility or haunt you at scale.
Medusa.js: The Serious Headless Option for 2024
Medusa v2.0 is a different animal from the v1.x releases. The new module system means you can swap out core commerce logic — cart, pricing, inventory — without forking the entire codebase. That's genuinely useful for stores with non-standard business models.
Here's the honest picture: Medusa is not a Shopify alternative for most SMBs. It's a platform for teams that have outgrown what hosted platforms can do and have the engineering resources to own their stack. If your store has standard products, standard checkout, standard shipping — use Shopify and spend your energy on marketing.
Where Medusa makes sense: subscription boxes with complex billing logic, marketplaces with split payments, B2B portals with custom pricing per account, or any store where the commerce logic itself is a competitive differentiator. I've seen Medusa deployments running on $40/month in infrastructure costs serving $2M+/year in GMV. The unit economics are excellent once you've absorbed the setup cost.
The setup cost is real. Expect 4–8 weeks of a senior developer's time to get a production-ready Medusa storefront live. At $100/hour, that's $16k–$32k before you've made a sale. But you own it outright, forever, with no transaction fees and no platform risk.
For a deeper look at building with Medusa, see our Medusa.js storefront tutorial which walks through a complete Next.js + Medusa setup.
Side-by-Side: What Actually Matters
| Shopify | BigCommerce | WooCommerce | Medusa.js | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost (mid-tier) | $399 + apps | $299–$599 | $100–$600 | $20–$50 infra |
| Transaction fees | 0.5–2% (without Shopify Payments) | None | None | None |
| Time to launch | 2–4 weeks | 3–5 weeks | 4–8 weeks | 8–16 weeks |
| Developer required? | No | No | Recommended | Yes |
| B2B features | App-dependent | Native | Plugin-dependent | Custom |
| Headless-ready | Partial | Yes | Yes (with work) | Native |
| Hosting ownership | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Best for | Fast launch, DTC | B2B + multi-store | Content-commerce | Custom logic |
How I'd Actually Decide
Here's the decision tree I'd use in 2024, based on real constraints rather than feature checklists:
If you're pre-revenue or under $200k ARR: Use Shopify Basic. The $39/month is cheap relative to your time. Don't over-engineer it.
If you're $200k–$1M ARR with standard DTC products: Stay on Shopify or move to BigCommerce if transaction fees are killing you or B2B is significant. The switching cost is real — budget 2–3 months of parallel running and $5k–$15k in migration work.
If you're $1M–$5M ARR and hitting Shopify's walls: Evaluate WooCommerce (if content is core) or start a Medusa proof-of-concept with a 6-week timeline and a fixed budget. Don't migrate production until the POC is running real transactions.
If you have complex commerce logic that no hosted platform handles well: Medusa.js is worth the investment. The $20k–$30k setup cost pays back in 12–18 months of avoided app fees and transaction costs at meaningful GMV.
For more on the migration decision specifically, our Shopify to headless migration guide covers the operational checklist I use with stores making that jump.
The Bottom Line
Every e-commerce platform comparison 2024 you'll read will hedge. I won't. Shopify is the right default for most SMBs. BigCommerce is underrated for B2B. WooCommerce is powerful and exhausting in equal measure. Medusa.js is the right answer for a specific, engineering-capable operator who needs to own their commerce logic.
The worst decision isn't picking the wrong platform — it's picking the right one for the wrong reasons and rebuilding 18 months later. Figure out your actual constraints (developer access, B2B ratio, content needs, transaction volume) before you read another comparison post, including this one.
Tomorrow: pull up your last 3 months of platform fees — including apps, transaction fees, and developer time — and put a real number on what your current stack costs. That number will make the comparison table above a lot less abstract.