Best Shopify alternatives in 2026

Shopify runs a catalog store, point of sale and a huge app ecosystem from one admin. People look elsewhere when the monthly bill stops matching what they use: a transaction fee because they bring their own payment provider, paid apps for upsells and tests they assumed were built in, or a checkout they can't change much below the Plus plan.

Those complaints come mostly from one kind of seller: the brand that runs ads to one or a few offers, sells through a presell page and a checkout, and makes the margin on the upsells. I spent nine years as CTO of a direct-response company building that stack, and ElasticFunnels is what I built after it. That seller is who this list puts first.

The best Shopify alternatives at a glance

Monthly prices on monthly billing unless marked, from each vendor's US pricing page on 29 September 2026 (Wix only publishes prices billed yearly). Card processing is charged on top everywhere.

Where paid-traffic sellers get stuck on Shopify

Four complaints come up again and again from brands that sell through ads. The first comes from sellers on Shopify's own forum; the other three are written into Shopify's pricing page and developer docs.

Payouts held for weeks, sometimes months. Sellers describe Shopify Payments pausing payouts for a risk review, or keeping the balance long after it closes an account, often with a form-letter reply. ElasticFunnels is not a payment processor. You connect your own merchant accounts, high-risk NMI MIDs included, and first-sale charges split by weight across them, filtered by card brand, product and amount, with a daily cap per MID. A processor can still hold funds on its own account, but no single account carries your whole volume.

Source: 6 user posts on the Shopify Community forum, Apr 2025 to Jun 2026

A fee for bringing your own payment provider. Shopify adds a third-party transaction fee of 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus, and its help center says the fee applies "even when Shopify Payments is activated". Businesses Shopify Payments won't take pay it on every order. ElasticFunnels charges 0.5% on orders through an EF-run gateway on every plan, and nothing on Shop Pay, Shopify Checkout or network orders. On Plus, Shopify's fee is the lower one.

Source: Shopify's pricing page (checked 12 Oct 2026) and help center (checked 29 Sep 2026)

Upsells that need an app. Post-purchase offers are built by apps on a checkout extension that Shopify's developer docs still mark as beta. A buyer can accept at most three offers, the page doesn't show for Apple Pay, Google Pay or buy-now-pay-later payments, and pixel-based analytics report only the first purchase. In ElasticFunnels, one-click upsells and downsells are steps in the funnel on Stripe, NMI and PayPal, and each upsell reaches the Meta Conversions API as its own event. Set one up step by step.

Source: Shopify's developer docs, checked 12 Oct 2026

A checkout you can't redesign below Plus. The pricing page lists checkout customization as limited on Basic, Grow and Advanced and full on Plus, from $2,300 a month, and script tags on checkout and thank-you pages have been retired. An ElasticFunnels checkout is a page you build like any other, on every plan, and your tracking scripts can go on any page, the thank-you page included.

Source: Shopify's pricing page and developer docs, checked 12 Oct 2026

App charges are added to your Shopify invoice, so the plan price is rarely the whole bill. Before you move, add up the plan, the apps and the fees for last month, then compare that total with one plan that includes all of it.

How we picked

No star ratings and no "we tested 40 platforms". We read each vendor's US pricing page, feature pages and help center on 29 September 2026, and compared:

1. The full monthly cost. Plan price, transaction fees on your own payment processor, card rates on the vendor's own payments, and the hosting or apps you would add.
2. What the plan caps. Products, annual sales, locations or seats, and what happens when you pass the cap.
3. The checkout. Which payment providers it connects, and whether order bumps and one-click upsells are built in or added.
4. Where you sell. Paid traffic to a funnel, a browsing catalog, in person, marketplaces and social channels.

Where a vendor doesn't state something publicly, we say "not stated" instead of assuming it's missing. We make ElasticFunnels; every competitor fact comes from the vendor's own pages.

The best Shopify alternative for brands that sell through ads

A buyer who clicks an ad for one product doesn't browse. They read a presell page or watch a VSL (video sales letter), go to a checkout, and then see an upsell or two. That path is a sales funnel, and it is judged on the conversion rate of the page the ad points at, the take rate on each upsell, and the approval rate at the checkout. ElasticFunnels is built for exactly that path, and it runs the rest of the business around it.

1. ElasticFunnels: the best Shopify alternative overall

ElasticFunnels replaces Shopify and the apps you would add to it for a funnel: the landing-page app, the upsell app, the testing app, the subscription app and the tracking tool. The pages, the checkout, the product catalog, the subscriptions, the CRM, the call center, the affiliate program and the ad data share one account and one customer record.

Best for: DTC, ecom, supplement and info brands running Meta, Google or TikTok ads to a presell, VSL or quiz funnel, and vendors and media buyers who want the whole funnel and the billing in one system.

Pages and tests built for ads:

• Funnels with split tests under one URL. Presell, VSL, quiz, product, checkout and upsell pages as one funnel. 2 to 5 variants of a page, a funnel branch, a single element or an order bump run behind the address your ad already uses, so the ad never changes and Meta and Google never re-enter learning.
• Pages fast: a visual builder or code, an AI page builder that builds any page you describe, and a page cloner that turns your Shopify product page into an editable copy.

A checkout with the upsells built in:

• Every processor in one checkout: Stripe, NMI, PayPal, Klarna and Authorize.net, on your domain, with the same 0.5% checkout fee whichever one you use, instead of a surcharge for bringing your own.
• Order bumps, then one-click upsells and downsells charged to the saved card on Stripe, NMI and PayPal, with Apple Pay and Google Pay on NMI and Stripe, and no app to add.
• A product catalog with variants, CSV import, coupons, shipping profiles, bundles and inventory that decrements on each sale, restores on refunds and alerts you before a product runs out; TaxJar, Avalara or TaxCloud for sales tax.
• Subscriptions with intro-to-full price steps, prepaid discounts, dunning and save offers at cancellation, and MRR, churn and LTV reports.
• Routing across merchant accounts. With several NMI MIDs, each order goes to one of them by weight, filtered by product, card brand and amount, with a daily cap per MID and a load balancing report of sales, revenue and refunds per MID.

The rest of the business, on the same record:

• Attribution per ad. Each order is tied to its ad, UTM and variant, ad spend sits next to revenue per campaign, ad set and ad, and the sale is sent server-side to Meta, Google Ads and TikTok.

• A built-in CRM and call center: a recovery queue of abandoned checkouts and failed payments, phone orders and agent commissions, through ViciDial, Five9 or Ytel.
• An affiliate program with commission groups, a portal, payouts and per-affiliate postbacks.
• Email: order and subscription emails from your own SMTP, automations that send email on a purchase, refund or tag, and native connections to Klaviyo and others for campaigns.
• Or keep Shopify behind the funnel. Replacing the store is optional. You can leave it in place and let ElasticFunnels hand each paid order to the Shopify admin, one order per buyer with the upsells inside. Shop Pay or Shopify Checkout can collect the payment instead, and ShipOffers and Jetpack ship direct if Shopify goes. See the Shopify integration.

Pricing: Starter $97, Growth $197 and Scale $497 a month, metered on page views and brands. Every feature is on every plan: upsells, split tests, subscriptions, routing and the call center are not add-ons. A 0.5% fee applies only to orders through the EF-hosted checkout. 14-day free trial. See pricing.

Pros: the funnel, upsells, testing, subscriptions, routing and tracking are built in rather than assembled from apps; one customer record from the ad to the rebill.

Choose it if your ads send buyers to one or a few offers and the upsells carry the margin. The head-to-head is on Shopify vs ElasticFunnels, and funnels for ecommerce shows the setup.

A word on the routing, because it gets oversold. Extra merchant accounts are for capacity and for not having all your revenue stop when one account goes under review. They won't hide a chargeback problem, and anyone selling them to you for that reason is selling you trouble.

Store builders: if you need a browsing catalog

If your business depends on shoppers browsing, searching and filtering a large catalog, selling in person or listing on marketplaces, that is a store platform's job. These six do it; each is shorter here because it solves a different problem from a paid-traffic funnel.

2. BigCommerce: the closest catalog-store replacement

BigCommerce is the closest platform to Shopify in scope: a hosted store with a catalog, multiple storefronts, B2B tools and feeds to ad channels and marketplaces. Its plans were renamed this year to Core, Growth, Scale and Performance.

Best for: catalog stores that want to grow without running their own hosting.

• No transaction fee when you pay through one of its embedded providers, which include BigCommerce Payments, Stripe, PayPal/Braintree, Adyen and Klarna.
• Extra storefronts on the same account, up to 3, 5 or 8 by plan.
• Product feeds to ad channels through Feedonomics Surface, on every plan.

Pricing: Core $39, Growth $105 and Scale $399 a month ($29, $79 and $299 billed yearly); Performance from $1,499 a month, billed yearly. Card processing starts at 2.89% + $0.29. 15-day free trial, no card needed.

Limitations: plans are capped by annual sales ($30K a year on the entry plan, $100K on the next) with an automatic upgrade above the cap; a provider outside the embedded list pays 2%, 1% or 0.6%; sales above the monthly allowance of BigCommerce Scale carry an extra 0.9%.

3. WooCommerce: a store you host yourself

WooCommerce is a free plugin that turns a WordPress site into a store. You own the code and the hosting, which is its biggest strength and its biggest cost.

Best for: stores with a developer (or a patient owner) who want to change anything and avoid a platform's revenue share.

• Free software with "0% revenue share" and no platform fees.
• Any payment gateway or buy-now-pay-later provider, and several at once.
• Unlimited products and orders, and a built-in product CSV importer.

Pricing: the plugin is free. Woo's own estimates put hosting at $25 to $350 a month for most stores and paid extensions at $29 to $299 a year each. WooPayments charges 2.9% + $0.30 on US cards.

Limitations: you run the hosting, updates and security; extensions add yearly costs one by one.

4. Wix: a store inside a website

Wix is a website builder with a store. It suits businesses whose website matters as much as the shop: services, bookings, content and products on one site.

Best for: small businesses that want one easy builder for the whole site.

• An AI site builder and a large template library.
• Scheduling and bookings alongside the store.
• Wix Payments at 2.9% + $0.30 on US cards.

Pricing: Wix shows reference US prices for plans paid yearly: Light $17, Core $29, Business $39 and Business Elite $159 a month. Light can't accept payments, so Core is the entry point for a store. Prices vary by country. No trial, but a 14-day money-back guarantee on the first upgrade.

Limitations: monthly-billing prices aren't published; advanced ecommerce is on Business Elite.

5. Squarespace: a template-led store

Squarespace is known for its templates. Its commerce plans add unlimited products, invoicing and automated tax, and a fee structure that rewards moving up a plan.

Best for: brands where the look of the site sells the product.

• Unlimited products on every plan.
• No store transaction fee from Core up.
• Automated tax in over 100 countries, and free invoicing.

Pricing: Basic $25, Core $39, Plus $65 and Advanced $139 a month ($19, $29, $49 and $99 billed yearly). Squarespace Payments card rates run from 2.9% + $0.30 down to 2.5% + $0.30 by plan. 14-day free trial, no free plan.

Limitations: Basic adds a 2% store transaction fee; the listed card rates need Squarespace Payments.

6. Square Online: for shops that also sell in person

Square's online store comes with any Square plan, on the same system as its card readers and point of sale. Pickup, local delivery and shipping are built in.

Best for: shops, cafés and makers that sell across the counter and online.

• Online and in-person sales, stock and customers in one place.
• Pickup, local delivery and shipping.
• Selling on search and social.

Pricing: Square Free costs nothing a month, with an online card rate of 3.3% + 30¢. Plus is $49 and Premium $149 a month per location, with online cards at 2.9% + 30¢. 30-day free trial on Plus and Premium.

Limitations: the free plan has the highest online rate; paid plans are charged per location.

7. Ecwid: a store widget for an existing site

Ecwid by Lightspeed adds a store to a website you already run, on any platform, and syncs it with social and marketplace channels.

Best for: small catalogs where the website already exists.

• Embeds in an existing website instead of replacing it.
• Instagram and Facebook selling from Venture up.
• No setup or transaction fees on any plan.

Pricing: Starter $5, Venture $35, Business $65 and Unlimited $149 a month ($29, $49 and $119 billed yearly for the top three), capped at 10, 100, 2,500 and unlimited products. No free plan and no trial on the pricing page.

Limitations: product caps per plan; abandoned-cart recovery starts on Business.

8. Checkout Champ: a checkout bolted onto a store

Checkout Champ is a direct-response checkout, funnel builder and CRM that plugs into Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce or Magento. In its own words it is "designed to enhance your existing store, NOT replace it". It has one-click upsells and order bumps, A/B/C split tests, subscription billing on your own merchant accounts, and gateway routing profiles (round robin, weighted or "intelligent") with monthly caps per gateway.

Pricing: Growth is $300 a month plus 1% of sales, aimed at stores with 50k+ in monthly sales; Enterprise lowers the percentage with scale. Add-ons such as 3DS (3-D Secure) and fraud tools are billed separately. No trial stated.

Limitations: a percentage of gross sales on top of the monthly fee, routing that its help center says is for credit cards only, and it still needs a store underneath. More in Checkout Champ vs ElasticFunnels.

Shopify alternatives compared

Shopify in the first row for reference. "Not stated" means the vendor's public pages don't say. Checked on 29 September 2026.

If you only read one column, read the third. A fee on your own gateway looks small on the pricing page and very large on a year of revenue.

How to switch from Shopify

First decide whether you are replacing Shopify or putting ElasticFunnels in front of it. Many paid-traffic brands keep Shopify for fulfillment and shipping and move only the pages and checkout the ads point at. If that is your plan, track stock in ElasticFunnels: the orders it sends carry your SKUs but aren't linked to your Shopify products, so Shopify's counts stay where they are.

1. Export products and customers. In the Shopify admin, Products and then Export gives a CSV of products, variants and prices; Customers and then Export gives customers, with tags if you tick them. Images aren't in the product file, but their URLs are, so an importer can fetch them while the old store is online.
2. Import them. ElasticFunnels imports products from a CSV with a preview before import. Check the column format before you rely on any importer.
3. Rebuild the pages. Store themes don't move between platforms. Rebuild the page the ads point at first; in ElasticFunnels you can paste its URL into the AI cloner and edit the copy it builds.
4. Set up payments and place a test order. Connect your processor, add bumps and upsells, then buy and refund one real order, upsell included.
5. Plan subscriptions separately. Ask both platforms how active subscriptions and saved cards can move before you promise customers anything.
6. Redirect old URLs, then move the domain. Map old product and collection URLs to their new addresses with 301 redirects so search traffic and old links still land, then point DNS at the new platform.
7. Move ads last. Send one ad set to the new funnel, compare it on sales, then move the rest.

Keep Shopify active until the new setup has taken real orders. The migration step people rush is the test order, and it's the one that finds the missing tax setting or the receipt email that never sends.

Which Shopify alternative is best?

For brands that sell through ads, the answer is ElasticFunnels: the funnel, split tests under one URL, built-in upsells, subscriptions, routing across merchant accounts and per-ad tracking in one account, with Shopify kept for fulfillment if you like. The store builders answer a different question.

• You run paid traffic to one or a few offers: ElasticFunnels.
• You want to keep Shopify and change only what happens at checkout: ElasticFunnels in front of Shopify, with orders synced back.
• Your business is a large browsing catalog: BigCommerce, or WooCommerce if you want to host it yourself.
• The shop is part of a bigger website, or you sell in person: Wix, Squarespace, Square or Ecwid.

The question behind every Shopify alternative is whether you need a store at all, or a path from an ad to an order with the upsells after it. If it's the path, ElasticFunnels is built for it: clone the page your ads point at, run it on your own checkout, and let a week of orders show you what the apps were costing you.