Wix vs. WooCommerce: Pros, Cons, and Key Differences

There are many e-commerce platforms to choose from if you want to construct a professional website. Although, depending on your needs, you’ll want to find the right website builder that meets your business goals.

To make your decision a little easier, in this post, we'll be looking at two popular platforms: Wix and WooCommerce. Let’s compare these two popular platforms head-to-head and break down the pros and cons of each.

What Is WooCommerce?

The online e-commerce platform, WooCommerce is an open-source e-commerce plugin for WordPress that helps people conduct business using their own self-hosted WordPress websites. The WooCommerce plugin quickly became widely popular because of its easy installation and customization options.

WooCommerce Pros

• Open-source and free to use
• It has a large community of support and add-ons, allowing it to create complex sites
• Highly flexible, allowing you to add several features that are not available on other e-commerce platforms

WooCommerce Cons

• WooCommerce is a WordPress only plugin
• Not the best option if you want to build a large, custom e-commerce website
• Difficult to customize your website using advanced programming languages like PHP

What Is Wix?

Wix is an easy-to-use website builder that makes use primarily of intuitive drag-and-drop tools and doesn't require any prior coding experience.

Wix Pros

• Great and user-friendly interface
• Great social media integration

Wix Cons

• The free plan forces in-house branding on your website
• Tracking Google analytics requires a paid plan
• Like Shopify, once you set up a website with Wix, it’s not transferable to any other platform

Compare the Ease of Use

While there is a bit of a learning curve for WooCommerce, the trade-off is versatility. Most people choose WooCommerce for its flexibility, but the difficulty lies in understanding how to harness this flexibility. It's possible to change almost anything, but because of this, to create complex sites, you’ll need to understand code and programming to get the job done. The upside to this flexibility is that WooCommerce has over 55,000 compatible plugins that can be used to customize a site’s aesthetic and functionality.

Wix is easy to use and designed so that anyone can work with it, its overall learning curve being much flatter. You're able to move articles, images, or shopping cart buttons anywhere on your website by dragging and dropping them. This allows your entire web presence to be created much faster on Wix than WooCommerce.

Compare the Customer Support

Customer support is one of the most important features you can offer your customers.

WooCommerce offers basic support with its core feature set. There is plenty of helpful content from the WooCommerce Company that is quite impressive and geared toward solving common problems that many new users may have. Furthermore, they're clearly defined into categories such as “Getting Started” and “Security,” making them easy to search through when looking for a specific problem.

On the other hand, Wix offers one of the best support experiences on the web. Wix offers a wide variety of products and services designed to help anyone get immediate help with any technical issues they might encounter. Apart from the forums, blogs, and video tutorials, Wix also has specialized email and telephone support services to help customers who need it most.

Compare the SEO Features

To gain SEO features for WooCommerce, you’ll need to install a plugin like Yoast SEO. It's the number one recommended plugin for WooCommerce, and over five million websites make use of it to optimize their internet presence.

Wix offers several SEO solutions, with the most widely used being Site Booster. Site Booster is free, but it will cost users $3.44/month for Wix’s Unlimited, Pro, and VIP Plans. The Site Booster also has a lot of SEO options, such as integrating your company address in search engine results, which helps with local business optimization strategies.

Compare the Pricing

Aside from WordPress hosting costs, which are often less than $10 USD per month, WooCommerce is basically free to use.

Wix has a free plan available. However, for a website that is free of Wix branding and has a set of full functionalities, you’ll need to pay a monthly cost. Wix’s pricing plans are:

• Combo Plan - $14/month
• Unlimited Plan - $18/month
• Pro Plan - $23/month
• VIP Plan - $39/month

Which Platform Is the Best for Your Online Store?

With the popularity of Wix and WooCommerce, it is only natural for e-commerce owners to wonder if they should migrate their store to one of these platforms. This decision will depend on your current needs, your future goals, and the budget you have up your sleeve.

If this doesn't help you make up your mind, perhaps you should consider other platforms as well, such as Shopify. Visit our WooCommerce vs. Shopify or Wix vs. Shopify posts to learn more.