We build on both, so there's no house favorite to defend. The question isn't which platform wins. It's which one matches how your business actually runs, because the wrong fit shows up as friction every single week.
What Shopify is good at
Shopify is a commerce engine first. Checkout, payment processing, taxes, shipping rates, fraud screening, abandoned cart recovery, and inventory all work on day one and keep working without you thinking about them. Security and updates are handled. When something breaks at nine on a Friday night, there's a support line.
That reliability is the product. You're renting a system that a large team maintains, and for a store where orders are the business, that trade is usually worth making.
What WooCommerce is good at
WooCommerce is WordPress, so it inherits WordPress's strengths: total control over design, far better content and blogging, and no platform sitting between you and your data. You own the whole thing and can move it anywhere.
It fits businesses where the store is one part of a larger website. A contractor with twenty service pages, a busy blog, and a small parts store is better served by WooCommerce than by bending Shopify into a content website.
The trade nobody mentions until later
Shopify charges every month forever, and takes a cut of each sale unless you use their own payment processing. That's fine while sales cover it, and it's a real cost when they don't.
WooCommerce has no platform fee, but you're responsible for hosting, updates, backups, and security. That responsibility is manageable — it is not zero. Unmaintained WooCommerce stores are how the horror stories start. Budget for either a maintenance plan or the time to do it yourself.
Three questions that usually settle it
How many products, and how often do they change? Hundreds of products with variants and frequent inventory movement point to Shopify. A dozen stable products point either way.
Who maintains this in a year? If the answer is nobody in particular, Shopify. Someone has to keep WooCommerce patched.
Is content or commerce the main job? A website that's mostly articles, services, and local search with a small shop attached is a WordPress website with WooCommerce on it. A website whose entire purpose is selling is a Shopify store.
The hybrid that works
Plenty of businesses run WordPress for the main website and Shopify for the store, linked so cleanly that customers never notice the seam. Content and local search live where they're strongest, commerce lives where it's safest. It costs a little more to set up and removes the compromise from both sides.
What we'd tell you on a call
If selling products is the business, start with Shopify and don't overthink it. If the store supports a business that makes its money another way, WooCommerce keeps everything under one roof. If you're genuinely split, the hybrid is the honest answer rather than a dodge.