WooCommerce vs Medusa: when WordPress holds the shop back

WooCommerce powers a huge number of webshops across Europe, often because the website was already running on WordPress. That is a logical starting point. The question usually comes later: the shop has grown, it runs twenty plugins, the ERP integration breaks with every update and nobody dares touch the checkout any more. Is Medusa the next step then, or is it better to clean up WooCommerce?

In this article we compare the two on licence and transaction costs, extensions, hosting, cost over three years and flexibility for B2B and multiple stores. Our own project for Shingyo is covered too: twelve separate WooCommerce shops that became one Medusa engine.

The comparison in one table

Licence and transaction costs

WooCommerce itself costs nothing. It is a free plugin for WordPress. There is no platform fee on your revenue. You only pay your payment provider. If you choose WooPayments, WooCommerce's own payment service, the rates in the Netherlands on 5 November 2026 are: 1.50% + €0.25 for cards, €0.29 for iDEAL | Wero, 2.99% + €0.35 for Klarna and 1.40% + €0.25 for Bancontact (WooPayments fees). Rates differ per country. Mollie charges €0.32 per iDEAL payment (Mollie pricing).

Medusa is free to use as well: the core is under the MIT licence, apart from some Enterprise features such as RBAC. Medusa Cloud costs €26, €88 or €266 per month for Develop, Launch or Scale, with no fee on your revenue (Medusa pricing). On transaction costs the two are therefore equal: in both cases you only pay your payment provider. The difference lies elsewhere.

Extensions: where the WooCommerce bill grows

A WooCommerce shop becomes a real shop through extensions. A few official extensions, with the annual price on woocommerce.com on 5 November 2026:

Source: the product pages on woocommerce.com/products, read on 5 November 2026.

On their own those are not large amounts. A B2B shop with subscriptions, bundles, pricing rules and add-ons already spends about €650 a year on official extensions alone, plus premium themes and SEO, translation and integration plugins from other vendors. The bigger cost is not the licence but the time it takes to keep all those plugins working after every update.

That problem appears in several of Medusa's customer stories. Patyna, Poland's largest vintage marketplace, migrated from WooCommerce to Medusa with partner Rigby. According to Medusa, the intertwined logic in WooCommerce meant that overriding parts of the system and its plugins could cause problems elsewhere. After the move Patyna cut time-to-market for new features by 30%, halved the time spent on maintenance and debugging, and traffic rose by 34% (Medusa: Patyna). Foraged first tried a customised WooCommerce shop for its marketplace. It had performance problems during traffic peaks because the application was overloaded with integrations (Medusa: Foraged).

Hosting and operations

WooCommerce runs anywhere WordPress runs. That is cheap and familiar, and there is a large supply of hosts and freelancers. The downside is that shop, CMS and theme are one application. A heavy page, a slow plugin or an update affects the whole site, including the checkout.

Medusa separates those layers. The commerce backend runs separately, and usually so does the storefront, for example a Next.js storefront on Vercel. That makes the shop faster and an update less risky, but there are more parts to monitor. You need a developer or agency for that.

What does it cost over three years?

An honest three-year comparison looks at four items: platform, extensions, hosting and development.

For a small shop WooCommerce is almost always cheaper over three years. Medusa only becomes interesting when maintenance and workarounds in WooCommerce are the real cost, or when you manage several shops that each have their own installation, plugins and updates.

Multiple shops: the Shingyo project

That last point was exactly the situation at Shingyo, which supplies packaging and promotional products across Europe (including via shingyo.nl and shingyo.se). Shingyo ran twelve separate WooCommerce shops. Alpha Digital brought them together into one Medusa B2B engine, built on Medusa, Supabase and Vercel.

That engine contains features that would be separate plugins or manual work in WooCommerce:

• a fully automated engine for approving print proofs for printed products;
• a B2B quote engine;
• an integration with the Picqer warehouse software;
• an AI search engine for customers, powered by Supabase and Algolia.

The details are in the case Shingyo: from twelve WooCommerce shops to one Medusa engine. We only publish result figures once they have been measured and verified.

Flexibility for B2B and international

In WooCommerce you build B2B with extensions: prices per customer group, quotes, hidden prices for guests. That can work well, but every rule is a plugin that has to work with the others. For multiple countries you usually choose between a translation plugin, WordPress Multisite or separate installations.

Medusa has regions, currencies, sales channels, customer groups and price lists in the core (Medusa documentation). Tekla, a Danish textile brand, started on WooCommerce and switched because it needed a more composable architecture to grow. According to Medusa, conversion rose by 70% compared with the WooCommerce solution, Tekla grew from two to more than fifty markets and was able to switch ERP within a month (Medusa: Tekla). For Mitsubishi Netherlands, Webbers migrated an existing WooCommerce setup to Medusa; according to Medusa the backend was in place within two weeks (Medusa: Mitsubishi).

These are Medusa customer stories, with their own figures. They are not Alpha Digital projects, except Shingyo.

When should you choose WooCommerce?

WooCommerce remains the better choice if:

• your site is mainly content and the shop is one part of it;
• your assortment and pricing rules are simple and you sell B2C;
• your budget is limited and you want to launch quickly with an existing theme;
• your team knows WordPress and you do not want your own developer;
• the problems in your current shop can be solved by cleaning up: fewer plugins, better hosting, a clean theme.

We say that last one more often than you might think. A migration does not solve a problem that would also disappear with an update and a tidied-up plugin list.

When should you choose Medusa?

Medusa fits if:

• you manage several WooCommerce shops side by side, per country or per brand;
• B2B prices, quotes or approval steps currently live in plugins, spreadsheets or emails;
• integrations with your ERP, WMS or PIM break with every update;
• the checkout or admin slows down during traffic peaks or with a large catalogue;
• you want to extend the shop without fearing the next update.

Where Medusa is not the best choice

• Content. Medusa has no CMS. For a blog or content pages you connect a headless CMS, or keep WordPress for content.
• Ecosystem. There is a WooCommerce plugin for almost every wish. With Medusa it is more often custom work.
• Start-up costs. A Medusa shop with its own storefront costs more to build than a WooCommerce theme.
• Expertise. There are many more WordPress developers than Medusa developers. Choose a partner you can still call in two years.

From WooCommerce to Medusa

How a migration works, with data mapping, redirects and a phased go-live, is described in Migrating to Medusa and on our service page Migrating to Medusa. Where exactly WooCommerce starts to pinch is covered in From WooCommerce to Medusa: when a migration pays off. Other comparisons: Shopify vs Medusa and PrestaShop vs Medusa. Request a callback or book an intro call.

Sources

Dollar amounts from the sources are converted to euros at the ECB rate of 5 November 2026 (1 euro = 1.1224 US dollars) and rounded.