BigCommerce vs WooCommerce Comparison 2026
Both cover digital products & storefronts. Here is what separates them on price, billing, what you can take with you, and coverage.
A hosted store priced against how much you sell
A free store plugin that takes no cut at all
At a glance
- Only WooCommerce has a free tier.
Side by side
BigCommerce | WooCommerce | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | From $29 | Free |
| Pricing model (they differ) | Free trial, then paid | Free |
| Free tier (they differ) | No | Yes |
| Billing | Not stated | Not stated |
| Free trial | Not stated | Not stated |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Data export | Not stated | Everything, in an open format |
| Their cut | Not stated | None |
| Runs on |
Shaded rows are where the two answers disagree and both listings have answered. A row where one side has not stated a fact is left plain, because silence is not a difference.
BigCommerce
A hosted store priced against how much you sell
BigCommerce is a hosted storefront whose tiers are drawn around sales volume rather than around features, so the question at signup is what a shop turns over rather than which capabilities it needs. Crossing a tier's ceiling moves the account up on its own, which is worth knowing before the first busy quarter. The platform adds no transaction fee of its own on top of the payment provider's. Anybody below the first threshold is paying for headroom they will not use for a while.
Our note
The automatic upgrade is the thing to plan for, because a good quarter moves you a tier without anybody approving it and the jump from $29 to $79 arrives at $30,000 of sales. Compare with Shopify on the card rate rather than the subscription, since that is where the two platforms actually differ.
Only on this side
- Covers monetization & payments
WooCommerce
A free store plugin that takes no cut at all
WooCommerce turns a WordPress site into a shop and states plainly that it charges no platform fee and takes no share of sales. The software is free and open source; the money goes on hosting and on whichever extensions a shop actually needs. That makes the total cost a range rather than a number, and the range depends on traffic more than on features. Running it means owning the hosting, the updates and the security, which is the trade against a platform that does all three and bills monthly.
Ratings are the average of reviews readers left. The facts are stated by each tool’s own listing and are not verified by CloutStack. How we make money.