WooCommerce vs BigCommerce: Which one is better?

If you are trying to decide between WooCommerce and BigCommerce in 2026, you’re in a strong position. Both are great e-commerce platforms, so it’s hard to go wrong. But determining which platform is better for you depends on your business, your particular needs, and how your business is growing.

Selecting an e-commerce platform is a big decision. While it is possible to move an online store from one platform to another, it’s a huge undertaking — it’s much simpler if you choose the right platform from the start. WooCommerce and BigCommerce are two of the major contenders, and it’s worth understanding what each one brings to the table so you can decide which one is a better fit for your business.

Whether you’re an e-commerce store owner, a developer working with clients, a startup founder, or someone just setting up an online store, WooCommerce and BigCommerce both have plenty to offer. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at how they compare on pricing, flexibility, scalability, and integrations with the other platforms you already use.

So, let’s get started: WooCommerce vs BigCommerce. We’ll explore all you need to know to decide which one is right for you.

WooCommerce at a glance

WooCommerce is a free WordPress plug-in that turns any WordPress site into a fully featured online store. This is the single most important thing you need to understand about WooCommerce, and it’s why it’s so popular.

Because WooCommerce is built on top of WordPress, it ticks a lot of the same boxes. It’s incredibly flexible and endlessly customizable, and you can find plug-ins that add almost any feature imaginable. If you can build a WordPress site, you can build a WooCommerce store.

WordPress’s content management system (CMS) also makes WooCommerce especially useful for content marketing and SEO, while its open-source ecosystem gives developers a huge amount of power.

That said, WooCommerce inherits some of WordPress’s baggage as well. Unless you subscribe to a managed service (like WordPress.com), you have to set up WordPress hosting yourself. While this offers flexibility and scalability, it does make things a bit more complicated. 

Pricing: WooCommerce is free, though you do have to pay for hosting and plug-ins. 

BigCommerce at a glance

BigCommerce is a hosted e-commerce platform, providing online stores through its software-as-a-service (SaaS) model with a few options for the front end. You can build a fully hosted store using BigCommerce’s low-code/no-code builder or use its headless platform to add store functionality to any front end you like. There’s also a WordPress plug-in that allows you to add BigCommerce to any WordPress site.

But BigCommerce is really known for what it brings to the backend. Many features that require a plug-in on WooCommerce, like managing multiple inventory locations, are baked right into BigCommerce. It’s also set up to scale with your business, so you don’t have to worry about changing hosts to support higher traffic volumes.

Of course, you do lose some flexibility and customizability with BigCommerce since you are operating on its platform rather than hosting your own WordPress site. Available features will also depend on whether you’re using the BigCommerce Essentials platform, which is aimed at small and medium enterprises (SMEs), or the full BigCommerce, which is aimed at scaling and larger enterprises.

All this makes BigCommerce a popular option for companies looking for serious commerce infrastructure without having to hire a development team to maintain it. BigCommerce offers enterprise-grade stability and support, which isn’t always available for WordPress or WooCommerce.

Pricing: BigCommerce offers price tiers starting from $29 per month (paid annually), with a 15-day free trial.

WooCommerce vs BigCommerce: Key differences 

WooCommerce and BigCommerce both allow you to sell your products to your customers — but they don’t do everything in the exact same way. The right platform for you depends on the size of your business, your technical skills, the features you need, your budget, and more. Let’s break it down: 

	WooCommerce	BigCommerce
Ease of use	Easy, if you understand WordPress	More complex to get started, but great onboarding and support
Features & functionality	More basic, but has a strong plug-in ecosystem	More advanced native functionality
Design & themes	Unlimited — built on WordPress	Limited number of themes, though headless architecture allows you to integrate it anywhere
Scalability & performance	Depends entirely on your WordPress host	Enterprise-grade; hosting scales with your needs
Security & compliance	Merchant responsibility	Platform responsibility
SEO-friendliness	Best in class — built on WordPress	Strong, but depends on how you build out your content
Pricing model	Complex; WooCommerce is free, but hosting, plug-ins, and services all cost extra	SaaS subscription; cost varies by plan
Support & community	Massive open ecosystem; support may be available through your host	Some vendor support, depending on plan

Features comparison: Which is more comprehensive?

While the previous table should give you a big-picture view of how WooCommerce and BigCommerce stack up, let’s dive a little deeper into some major e-commerce features.

Storefront design

WooCommerce has a nearly infinite range of themes and designs for your storefront. It has the entire WordPress ecosystem to work from and countless tools that let you create your own designs. There’s also a huge WordPress community and plenty of online tutorials, so even if you’re just starting out, you should be able to put something together.

With BigCommerce, you can either use the clean and modern built-in themes and store builder or create your own storefront in another platform, using BigCommerce as a headless e-commerce backend. While the first option is similar to WordPress, albeit with far fewer options, the headless option gives you total control —though it does require technical expertise to deploy.

Product management

WooCommerce and BigCommerce are excellent at handling both physical and digital products. They can manage different SKUs, product variations, shipping classes, taxes, and fulfillment logic competently. The main difference comes in how each platform adds advanced features.

WooCommerce relies on plug-ins to add specialty features and more advanced versions of existing features. For example, if you’re setting up a subscription box service, you will most likely lean on a WooCommerce plug-in to get the setup you want.

BigCommerce comes with most advanced features already built-in. It’s a complete enterprise e-commerce platform, so as long as you’re on the right tier, you shouldn’t have to rely on apps to add any core features to your store. There is a BigCommerce app store, but it’s more for integrating other services than adding features.

Analytics

With WooCommerce, setting up analytics is a matter of deciding what platform and plug-in you want to use. There is a native WooCommerce analytics plug-in currently in beta, as well as plug-ins for Google Analytics, Segment.com, and other analytics platforms.

BigCommerce includes more detailed e-commerce analytics as a core feature, though you can also use Google Analytics and other platforms too.

Neither platform will leave you short — but the setup process is definitely different. 

SEO

WooCommerce means WordPress, which offers one of the best and most popular content management systems available. Whatever SEO strategy you are pursuing, WordPress and WooCommerce can be tailored to suit your needs. There are thousands of plug-ins that allow you to add any additional features you need. In short, it’s best in class.

BigCommerce is also excellent, but it doesn’t have quite the same edge. There’s no getting around the fact that BigCommerce’s site builder CMS isn’t as complete as WordPress’s, and if you’re running it as a headless backend, SEO is going to be tied to whatever front end you build.

Omnichannel selling

Both WooCommerce and BigCommerce support omnichannel selling. You can connect either platform to Amazon, eBay, YouTube Shopping, Instagram Shopping, TikTok, and more. With WooCommerce, you’re once again relying on plug-ins, while BigCommerce offers more built-in support. 

WooCommerce also integrates with Jotform’s AI Chatbot for WordPress. The Jotform AI Chatbot for WordPress plug-in lets you train a chatbot and publish it to your WordPress site with no code. It integrates with WooCommerce to answer product questions, assist with orders, and reduce cart abandonment. All your WooCommerce data stays on your site — it’s only routed through Jotform’s servers to generate responses when your customers need them.

Here are some of the handy things you can do with the Jotform AI Chatbot:

• Answer product questions about availability or functionality, and help customers select the right products for them.
• Assist with orders, like looking to see if an order has shipped or a return has been processed. (This works with safe identifiers provided by the customer, so it respects their privacy.)
• Provide cart recovery nudges and contextual upsell suggestions based on your customers’ actions and conversations.
• Offer multilingual support so international customers are able to use your store.

Perhaps best of all, the Jotform WordPress chatbot trains itself on your site’s content. Whenever you update your site, add new products, or create a new FAQ, it automatically crawls your site and learns from the new content to stay current.

BigCommerce also integrates with Jotform. Using Jotform’s BigCommerce integration, you can create and embed forms or surveys in your online store with just a few clicks. Build bespoke forms to collect customer details and order information, and interact directly with your customers.

Performance and scalability

WooCommerce is used by some of the largest online stores in the world. From a technical standpoint, it is more than capable of enterprise-level performance and can scale to meet the needs of any business. However, this depends entirely on how you host your WooCommerce site.

If you use a budget host, a few hundred visitors trying to buy something at once will crash your site. On the other hand, if you use an enterprise-grade managed host or have a good developer who understands your hosting stack, WooCommerce can scale to any size you want.

BigCommerce, by contrast, solves this problem right out of the box. The only thing you need to do to scale your BigCommerce store as it grows is upgrade to the next subscription tier.

Pricing comparison: Which is more affordable?

WooCommerce is technically free, but hosting and plug-in costs can add up quickly. BigCommerce offers a free trial and then tiered monthly pricing — you pay a fixed fee per month, though costs can vary if you use a different front end. In both cases, you will also have to pay payment gateway fees.

When it comes to pricing, the choice between platforms is relatively clear. For small businesses just starting out, WooCommerce is generally more affordable. With a budget host and a handful of free plug-ins, you can operate a WooCommerce store for less than $20 per month before card processing fees, while the cheapest BigCommerce plan starts at $29 per month.

For larger stores and growing businesses, price is less of a differentiating factor. WooCommerce and BigCommerce may each have an advantage in specific situations, but for the most part, your store will cost $100 to $400 per month while gateway fees will cost about the same. 

At enterprise scale, BigCommerce probably edges out WooCommerce, simply because it includes more for a fixed price. Your store can cost anywhere from a few hundred to thousands of dollars per month, but you won’t need to manage your own hosting architecture. With WooCommerce, on the other hand, you need someone on staff with the technical understanding to keep your store running smoothly.

Who should use WooCommerce?

WooCommerce is a natural fit for a few different kinds of e-commerce businesses.

The first category is businesses that already use WordPress. It’s easy to add WooCommerce and turn a regular WordPress website or blog into an e-commerce site without having to migrate everything to a new platform.

Similarly, if you want WordPress’s deep customization options and incredible flexibility, then WooCommerce makes a lot of sense. The platform gives you access to endless themes, plug-ins, and other options. Whatever kind of site or store you want to build — or products you want to sell — you’ll find the support to make it happen.

The third category is developers (or companies with developers) who are willing to manage their own tech stack and hosting. This also allows for a massive amount of customizability and flexibility, though at a deeper level.

Who should use BigCommerce?

BigCommerce is a better fit if you want an all-in-one hosted solution. If you’re happy with the low-code builder and selection of tools, you can operate your online store with a single subscription.

BigCommerce is also a great option for fast-growing businesses with multiple products. With its reliable performance and ease of scaling, BigCommerce can accommodate rapid growth, big product launches, and high-sales periods without any issues.

Finally, BigCommerce is ideal for those who don’t want to take on a lot of the security, payment card industry (PCI) compliance, and technical overhead that you are otherwise responsible for if you use WooCommerce. BigCommerce updates its platform whenever new vulnerabilities are discovered — you don’t have to worry about it or make sure your WordPress instance is up-to-date.

Pros and cons of WooCommerce vs BigCommerce

This article has provided a lot of information to take into consideration, so let’s break things down a little more and look at some pros and cons of each platform. This list should help you decide which solution is right for you. 

Tool	Pros	Cons
WooCommerce	Flexible and highly customizable Best-in-class CMS and SEO Massive plug-in ecosystem that adds any feature you can imagine Technically free with no fixed costs	Hosting and maintenance costs are extra Store owners are responsible for security and compliance Plug-in cost creep is real Requires technical competency
BigCommerce	All-in-one hosted platform Strong native features with app store Highly scalable Built-in management for security, maintenance, and compliance	Offers less flexibility and advanced customization Headless option introduces technical overhead Pricing tiers are revenue-based

Use cases: When to choose WooCommerce or BigCommerce

Any e-commerce platform comparison really comes down to deciding which one better suits your own particular use case. So, let’s look at a few scenarios where WooCommerce or BigCommerce is clearly the better option.

Tool	Choose if…
WooCommerce	You already have a WordPress site. Content marketing is a huge driver of your traffic and sales. You want maximum flexibility for designing the user experience (UX) and user interface (UI). Your developers want to be in control.
BigCommerce	You’re solely focused on e-commerce. You are an omnichannel retailer. You want a robust and scalable infrastructure with minimal tech overhead. You want enterprise-level support.

Making your choice: WooCommerce or BigCommerce?

WooCommerce and BigCommerce are two of the best e-commerce platforms available. For many businesses, either one would be a great choice. But for some businesses, the choice can be a bit more important. Depending on your technical resources, growth plan, and budget, one solution might be a better fit than the other. 

WooCommerce wins on flexibility and the fact that it’s built on top of WordPress. It combines content and commerce in a really powerful way.

BigCommerce wins on scalability and enterprise-grade support and stability. It’s ready to grow along with your store, and the vendor handles all security and updates.

In either case, you can also use Jotform to level up your store. For WooCommerce, the Jotform WordPress AI Agent can help teams save time, capture leads, and deliver service — all without enterprise-level complexity. For BigCommerce, you can deploy Jotform’s best-in-class forms to gather data from your customers.