Top 10 Programs Better Than Shopify

Looking for an alternative to Shopify? Here are 10 worth considering.

Why Look Beyond Shopify

Shopify is popular because it works, but it has real limitations that push some store owners toward alternatives for building and managing their online shop. Plenty of solid options exist, and picking between them comes down to comparing what each one actually offers against what you need. None of these alternatives are inferior to Shopify, they’re just built around different priorities.

Shopify doesn’t cover every use case. If you already pay for a CMS like WordPress, paying again for a second platform on top of it gets frustrating fast. If you’re a creative artist running a small shop, you may end up paying for features you’ll never touch.

Fortunately, other providers fill the gaps Shopify leaves open, and depending on your situation, one of them may genuinely be the better fit. Several of the alternatives below offer a drag-and-drop editor and a complete website solution, plus content marketing features to help promote products and improve conversion rates. Multi-channel selling is also common across this list, letting you manage listings on Amazon, eBay, Facebook, and Pinterest from a single dashboard.

Top 10 Programs Better Than Shopify

1. Prestashop

A solid option for entrepreneurs on a tight budget. The software itself is free, though you’ll still need web hosting and a domain, similar to Magento. It also offers a hosted version through partnerships with 1&1, WebHostingHub, TMD, Microsoft Azure, and other providers. Its theme and template selection doesn’t quite match Shopify’s, but it’s a genuinely capable free platform. There are no additional transaction fees, and it supports 25 languages, multiple currencies, international sales, unlimited products and attributes, and abandoned-cart tracking.

2. Squarespace

If you’re short on technical skills and plan to keep your product catalog relatively small, Squarespace is worth a look. It’s a robust website builder with a wide range of templates, and with a bit of effort you can put together a store that looks genuinely polished. Pricing starts at $26 a month for unlimited pages, galleries, blogs, bandwidth, storage, contributors, checkout, a free domain, and SSL security. A $100 Google Ads credit is included, along with order, tax, and discount management, customer accounts, label printing through ShipStation, and accounting integration via Xero. Abandoned-cart auto-recovery is available for an extra $40 a month.

3. Wix

Wix covers most of what you’d want from an easy-to-use platform, backed by affordable plans. You get more than 100 polished templates, a large app library, fully customizable theme options, and an editor built for both beginners and advanced users. There are two ways to build a site: ADI, an automated assistant that suggests a layout based on a short questionnaire, or the Wix Editor, which gives you full drag-and-drop control to place content anywhere on the page.

4. Magento

Magento is free, open-source, and feature-rich, best suited to small and large businesses with in-house developers and the resources to tailor the platform to their needs. It allows deep customization if you’re comfortable with code, but it isn’t a plug-and-play solution for beginners without technical skills. Given the right development resources, it covers flexibility, optimization, scalability, and high traffic handling about as well as anything on this list.

5. BigCartel

Popular with artists for its affordability, unlimited bandwidth, inventory tracking, and HTML/CSS customization. It doesn’t match Shopify’s feature depth, but it’s noticeably cheaper and works well for solopreneurs and small businesses. Integration with Google Analytics, Facebook, and PayPal makes setup easy even without coding skills. BigCartel charges no additional transaction fees, though PayPal may apply its own fees to orders. One drawback: there’s no live chat or phone support, so it’s worth testing the free plan before committing to a paid tier.

6. 3dcart

A cloud-hosted shopping cart platform packed with features at reasonable prices. Generous product storage makes it a good fit for growing businesses. Plans run $19 to $229 a month and include basic SEO tools, abandoned-cart email, coupons, subscriptions, personalized products, drop shipping, order tracking, Facebook sync, and more. If you’re just starting out, 3dcart’s flexible functionality and web design service, which can tailor your store’s UI/UX and SSL setup, are worth a look at a reasonable price.

7. Ecwid

If you already have a website and just want to sell a few items on it, Ecwid is a cheaper option than Shopify. It’s an ecommerce widget that drops into virtually any existing website: add your products to the admin panel, paste a short code snippet into your site, and your store is live shortly after. Selling ten items or fewer is free. Paid or not, you get unlimited bandwidth, automatic updates, digital product sales, real-time shipping rates, and more.

8. Volusion

One of the stronger Shopify alternatives, serving over 200,000 businesses. Volusion is a cloud-based shopping cart popular with small businesses and solopreneurs who have basic technical skills. Hosting and app integration are handled for you, so you mainly connect plugins and add-ons based on your plan. A one-page checkout and eBay integration are available as a premium add-on. Every plan includes a solid template library. You may pay more if you exceed the bandwidth allocated to your plan.

9. WooCommerce

One of the strongest ecommerce options here: free, open-source, and built with a solid user experience out of the box. You’ll pay for advanced functionality once you need it, but the free version alone is enough to build a store that holds up against pricier carts. It builds mobile-friendly sites easily, and hosting is the only real recurring cost. Premium extensions start around $49, and add-ons like WooCommerce Freshdesk ($7) let you embed a support ticketing system directly into your store.

10. BigCommerce

A strong pick if you want a smooth drag-and-drop editor and a complete website solution in one package. BigCommerce ships with just seven free themes across all industries, so budget for a premium theme if the free options don’t fit your brand. Its content marketing features make it easier to promote products and improve conversion rates, and a lot of functionality comes prebuilt, which means less time and money spent shopping the app store, a real difference from Shopify.

12 Best WooCommerce Payment Gateway Plugins

Start Your Online Store Now

Any of these platforms will get you building and managing an online store, even without coding skills. Several of them build mobile-friendly sites where hosting is the only ongoing cost. Set Shopify aside for a moment and give one of these alternatives a real look before deciding.