By Bogdan Rancea
Webflow vs Shopify: Which platform is right for you?
If you want my quick answer, Shopify is the better choice overall – but it is a close call. Shopify delivers convenient, yet advanced ecommerce capabilities, omnichannel selling support, and a fantastic user experience that makes it ideal for beginners and established companies alike.
Webflow definitely has some great capabilities, giving you more control over the design and appearance of your store than Shopify.
It also offers some fantastic AI tools, great fine-tuned SEO capabilities, and powerful hosting services. But the learning curve on this platform is much higher, and Webflow can be more expensive than Shopify too.
So, how do you choose? In this comparison guide, I’ll put the two platforms head-to-head, to help you make the right decision for your growing store.
Quick Verdict
After spending several hours using both Shopify, and Webflow, here’s my “quick verdict”.
Shopify is better if you want a convenient, user-friendly platform, that enables omnichannel selling, offers advanced ecommerce tools, and makes it easy to scale your business.
Webflow is better if you’re looking for a comprehensive design platform that gives you granular control over the end-to-end user experience. It also has slightly stronger SEO capabilities than Shopify, and benefits from a robust range of AI tools.
Shopify vs Webflow: Pros and Cons
Webflow Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Huge range of templates and themes
- Extensive customization options for store design
- Free plan for beginners (with some limitations)
- Excellent hosting performance and page loading times
- Strong AI functionality
- Fantastic, fine-tuned SEO capabilities
Cons:
- Steep learning curve for non-designers
- Limited number of integrations and plugins
- Missing some advanced ecommerce features
Shopify Pros and Cons:
Pros:
- Excellent ecommerce and omnichannel selling tools
- Easy-to-use platform and website design tools
- Huge app market for add-ons and integrations
- Fantastic AI capabilities
- Well-designed themes and templates
- Great bonus features available for fulfillment, delivery, etc
Cons:
- Transaction fees for people not using Shopify Payments
- Limitations to template customization
Webflow vs Shopify: Pricing and Fees
At a glance, Webflow seems like it’s cheaper than Shopify. There’s a free plan for starters – which you won’t get with Shopify, although it is extremely limited, and doesn’t support ecommerce.
Plus, there are numerous smaller plans for people who just want to build a basic website, ranging from $18 to $49 per month. However, if you’re using Webflow for ecommerce, the prices are higher.
The cheapest ecommerce plan starts at $42 per month (compared to $39 for Shopify Basic). This plan also includes a 2% transaction fee. Notably, Shopify also charges transaction fees on its plans, but you can avoid them if you use the company’s integrated payment processor, Shopify Payments.
Webflow’s more advanced plans remove the transaction fee, and they’re a little cheaper than the advanced Shopify plans. For instance, you’ll pay $84 per month for Webflow Plus (compared to $105 per month for Shopify).
Webflow Advanced costs $235 per month (compared to $399 per month for Shopify Advanced). But there are restrictions on Webflow’s advanced plans.
On Plus, you can only sell up to 5,000 ecommerce items, and on Advanced, that limit is increased to 15,000. That might not sound like a big deal, but Shopify allows you to sell unlimited products on any plan, which definitely gives you more room for growth.
Another point to note is that while Shopify’s core plans range from $39 to $399 per month, there is a “Starter” plan for $5 per month which allows you to sell through social media.
Plus, there’s an Enterprise plan (Shopify Plus) starting at $2,300 per month if you need more advanced customization options and support. I couldn’t find an “Enterprise” option on Webflow.
Webflow vs Shopify: The Core Features
So, we’ve established that Shopify potentially offers better value for money than Webflow, but how do the two platforms stack up when it comes to features? For the purpose of this comparison, I’m focusing on a few key areas, such as website design, ecommerce, marketing, AI, and integrations.
Website Building and Design
Starting with website building and design, Webflow has a definite edge. Webflow offers access to more than a thousand pre-built templates you can customize to suit your needs. You can also build your website from scratch, and implement various pre-built blocks and sections.
Shopify still gives you a huge number of themes to choose from (but there aren’t as many as you’d get from Webflow).
Additionally, while both companies allow you to make granular changes to your site’s design – particularly if you’re willing to dive into code, Webflow offers a few additional options. For instance, you can easily customize the checkout experience with Webflow.
If you want to make changes to Shopify’s world-leading checkout, you’ll need a Shopify Plus account, as well as plenty of technical knowledge.
On the other hand, actually editing themes and making changes to your design is a little more straightforward with Shopify, if you don’t want to doo anything too drastic. The Shopify Theme editor is very easy to use and provides step-by-step guidance every step of the way.
With Webflow, you’re very limited in what you can do if you don’t have any code knowledge. Although the company does offer some handy Grid solutions and AI code development tools to help you. Even with the learning curve, I’d give Webflow the crown for design capabilities.
Ecommerce and Selling Features
What Shopify lacks in general website design capabilities, it makes up for in advanced and robust ecommerce functionality. Shopify is one of my favorite ecommerce platforms of all time for various reasons. First, it makes it extremely easy to design a fantastic online store, with customizable product pages, variants, collections, and more.
It includes extensive inventory and order management tools, fantastic resources for calculating tax and shipping rates, and amazing value-added services, like Shopify fulfillment. I also love how easy Shopify makes it to integrate your store with third-party dropshipping companies.
Plus, Shopify has it’s own ultra-secure payment processing system, built-in point of sale software for in-person selling, and offers users the ability to sell through social media and marketplaces too. Basically, it’s the ultimate scalable selling toolkit.
Webflow is slightly less advanced from an ecommerce perspective, but it still has some impressive capabilities. Aside from allowing you to create customized cart and checkout pages, Webflow supports product variants and catalogs, as well as transactional emails, like Shopify.
You can sell physical and digital goods on Webflow (just like you can with Shopify), set up custom delivery and shipping rules, and monitor inventory. Plus, you can integrate with a range of payment processing solutions and fulfillment companies like Printful.
But managing and running your online store, and leveraging advanced features like cart abandonment emails, and gift cards isn’t as easy with Webflow as it is with Shopify.
Read more:
Marketing Tools and Analytics
This is where comparing Shopify and Webflow got really tricky for me. There’s a lot of overlap in what both platforms can offer from a marketing perspective.
You get built-in blogging tools for content marketing, email solutions, and the opportunity to integrate with other marketing tools, like solutions for showcasing customer reviews on both platforms.
Webflow has a slight edge from an SEO perspective, as it can provide real-time guidance on how to optimize your pages for the search engines and improve your Core Web Vitals. Shopify is still good for SEO, but it gives you less direction when you’re optimizing your pages.
Shopify is a little better for ecommerce-specific promotional strategies, allowing you to create gift cards, voucher codes, and product bundles with ease.
It also connects with a much wider variety of marketing tools for upselling and cross-selling, and email marketing. Plus, it connects directly to Google’s Ad network, and a range of social media platforms.
In terms of analytical and reporting tools, both platforms are pretty similar. Both offer valuable insights into customer purchasing behaviors and preferences, inventory, taxes, finances, and more.
However, Shopify’s AI sidekick can help you draw deeper insights from your reports in seconds, which makes it a slightly better option in my opinion.
AI Capabilities, Integrations, and Apps
Speaking of AI capabilities, both Webflow and Shopify do very well in this area. Webflow offers access to a broad range of AI tools within its platform. You can use generative AI to create content and images for your website pages in a couple of seconds, using basic prompts.
There are AI tools to assist you with the design and optimization process. You can even rely on AI to fix grammar issues for you, design alt tags for your images, and translate content into various languages.
While Shopify’s AI functionalities are pretty similar for now, the company seems to be investing more heavily in AI moving forward.
Already, Shopify Sidekick is an excellent resource for companies that need help improving their store’s performance.
The bot can guide you through the process of editing your pages, provide insights into your inventory in an instant, and more.
Shopify Magic, on the other hand, makes generating content for website extremely simple. You can use it to rapidly produce page content, generate FAQ pages, and transform product image backgrounds.
Plus, new tools are emerging from Shopify all the time, like an AI solution that can automatically turn chat-based conversations into checkout conversions.
If you’re looking for a company on the cutting edge of AI innovation, then Shopify might be the better choice – just don’t overlook the benefits of Webflow’s features.
Webflow vs Shopify: Customer Support
Finally, while both Shopify and Webflow both do their best to make it easy to build and manage your online store, (with Shopify having the lower learning curve overall), you may still need help from time to time. The good news is that both Shopify and Webflow offer fantastic self-help resources.
Both offer access to webinars and video tutorials, courses, eBooks, webinars, and tons of FAQs. They also both have their own fantastic community forums where you can source help from other users facing similar issues.
If you need direct customer support, Webflow offers 24/7 live chat and email, whereas Shopify also offers phone support (though it’s only available in some regions).
Based on the phone availability, I’d say Shopify just barely takes the win in the customer service category – but again, it’s a close call.
Webflow vs Shopify: The Verdict
So, which platform should you choose?
The easy answer is if you’re looking for a scalable, cost-effective, and easy-to-use platform for omnichannel selling, choose Shopify. It’s the better ecommerce platform overall, and I think it could take the edge away from Webflow in the AI landscape in the months to come too.
If you’re looking for exceptional design experiences, and great options to make granular changes to the overall user experience on your website, Webflow might be a better choice. However, you can expect a higher learning curve, and bigger monthly fees.
