Shopify vs Webflow

Shopify and Webflow get compared constantly, but they are not built for the same job. Shopify is a hosted commerce platform: pick a plan, and checkout, hosting, point-of-sale and order management all come with it. Webflow is a visual website builder with hosting and a CMS, where an online store is one plan type among several, not the whole product. That difference in shape decides more than either company’s marketing pages let on. Every plan price, fee and limit below comes from Shopify’s and Webflow’s own pricing pages.

Can Webflow actually run a real online store?

Yes, but ecommerce is a bolt-on plan type, not Webflow’s core identity. Ecommerce Standard costs $42 a month and caps the catalog at 500 items, and it charges a 2% fee on every sale on top of whatever Stripe or PayPal already takes. Ecommerce Plus removes that fee entirely at $84 a month and raises the cap to 5,000 items; Ecommerce Advanced goes to 15,000 items at $235. Shopify’s cheapest paid plan, Basic at $39, already undercuts Webflow’s entry ecommerce tier on price, carries no per-item cap, and adds no platform fee at all once the store uses Shopify Payments. A catalog of a few dozen products on a design-heavy brand can work fine on Webflow’s Ecommerce Plus; a catalog that keeps growing, or one built to run at the lowest possible price, has less reason to pick Webflow over Shopify.

Why is Shopify’s cheapest plan about the same price as Webflow’s?

Shopify’s Basic plan is $39 a month, and Webflow’s cheapest real store plan, Ecommerce Standard, is $42; billed yearly they land even closer, both at $29 a month. The sticker prices look almost interchangeable, but the plans are not. Shopify’s $39 already includes unlimited products, hosting, SSL, abandoned-checkout recovery and a point-of-sale system for selling in person. Webflow’s $42 caps the catalog at 500 items, still charges 2% on every sale, and covers only the site itself: a second editor is a separate seat on top, $19 a month for a Limited seat or $45 for a Full one. The prices converge, but the gap runs in different directions: Shopify buys more commerce machinery for the money, and Webflow buys more design and content control.

How does the bill change once you add a small team?

The bills above show that gap widening, not narrowing, as a team grows. Shopify’s small-team scenario needs Grow at $105 a month, which allows up to 5 staff accounts for no extra charge. Webflow’s comparable scenario reaches $167 a month for the Premium Site plan, a bandwidth add-on and two Limited seats at $19 each, because Webflow bills the site, the bandwidth and every added editor as three separate lines. By the growing scenario, Shopify’s Advanced plan covers up to 15 staff accounts at a flat $399, while Webflow’s total climbs to $732, and most of that increase is not seats at all.

What actually drives Webflow’s bill up as traffic grows?

Bandwidth. In the growing scenario, $560 of Webflow’s total is a single bandwidth add-on that raises the site to 1 TB a month, and that line alone costs more than the $399 Advanced plan Shopify charges for the same size of team. Shopify has no bandwidth charge on any plan: its price moves up only because staff-account limits and card rates change at each tier, not because of visits. Webflow’s own pricing page gives a page-view range rather than a per-visit number, so the bandwidth tier a given site actually needs is an estimate, not a guarantee; a site with heavier images, video, or a lot of bot traffic, which counts toward the limit, can need a higher tier than a simple visit count would suggest.

Does either one help you sell in person too?

If any part of the business happens at a physical counter, this section decides it by itself. Shopify’s point-of-sale system is built into every paid plan for casual in-person selling, and POS Pro adds unlimited staff roles, in-store inventory tracking and flexible pickup or delivery for $89 per location a month. Webflow has no point-of-sale system at all, built in or as an add-on; a business on Webflow that also sells in person needs to buy and integrate a completely separate system, and budget for it outside everything on this page. A store that splits its revenue between a website and a physical counter should weigh this before any of the numbers above.

Where most advice gets this wrong

Most comparisons frame this as “Shopify for stores, Webflow for portfolios and marketing sites,” as if a business has to be cleanly one or the other. The harder case, which that framing skips, is the business that wants a real blog or resource library and a real store on the same site. Webflow’s Premium plan advertises a CMS built for 20,000 items across 40 Collections; its separate Ecommerce plans advertise a cart and checkout with their own item caps instead. Webflow’s own pricing page does not spell out whether an Ecommerce plan carries that same CMS depth alongside the store or a smaller one, so a content-heavy business should confirm that specific limit with Webflow directly rather than assuming Premium’s numbers carry over once a cart is added. Shopify’s blog, by contrast, is available on every paid plan with no such ambiguity, even though it was never built to be a content-marketing engine either. Ask what an Ecommerce plan actually includes for content, not just for checkout, before assuming either platform handles a content-heavy store cleanly.

What do you give up if you switch platforms later?

More than either company likes to admit. A Shopify store runs only on Shopify’s own servers, so leaving means rebuilding the storefront and checkout from scratch on whatever comes next, Webflow included. Webflow gives back more of the raw material: a paid Workspace plan can export a site’s HTML and CSS, so the visual design does not have to be rebuilt from a screenshot. That export does not include the CMS content, which comes out one Collection at a time, or the cart, checkout and form logic, all of which need rebuilding on the new host regardless. Treat both platforms as a real commitment, not a trial you can walk away from for free.