BigCommerce and WooCommerce are big names in the Online store builder industries. WooCommerce is an open-source extension that can be installed on WordPress, or on web development software. BigCommerce is a fully developed eCommerce solution.
What is BigCommerce?
BigCommerce is an online store builder which provides hosting & storage for websites. It is an eCommerce solution for small to enterprise-level businesses, It is considered a competitor to Shopify for its similar business models and pricing which they offer.
What is WooCommerce?
Wooommerce is an open-source extension that can be installed on WordPress. This is been developed by WordPress to facilitate the creation & management of the online store. As the platform is open source it’s required to be self-hosted and managed. WooCommerce provides all those files that can be customized extensively.
Quick Summary: BigCommerce vs WooCommerce
BigCommerce and Woocommerce are well-known and famous E-commerce platforms, Below is a quick summary of both platforms.
BigCommerce is easy to get started with built-in hosting features, WooCommerce has more setup time and is also not so easy platform to get started. Winner: BigCommerce
2. Domain and Hosting
BigCommerce includes built-in hosting, storage, bandwidth, and SSL. Users can buy domains from big commerce domains or transfer to bigcommerce from another domain provider. WooCoommerce doesn’t offer hosting. Winner: BigCommerce
3. Themes & Editor
WooCommerce offers plenty of themes and also offers greater customization, Whereas BigCommerce offers 30+ free themes and lots of paid themes. It has very basic customization features. Winner: WooCommerce
4. Cart Features:
WooCommerce is flexible, it’s a WordPress plugin that can be hosted on platforms like Wix, WordPress, etc. Whereas the BigCommerce plugin can be hosted on sites like Wordpress with limited features. Winner: WooCommerce
5. Pricing:
BigCommerce plans range from $29.95-$299.95, Whereas WooCommerce is free but it needs hosting. Recommended hosting – Bluehost (starts from $3/month). Winner: WooCommerce
6. Payments and Charges
Both BigCommerce and WooCommerce offer more than 70+ payment providers. BigCommerce offers lower credit card rates with PayPal. WooCommerce has its own Payment system “WooCommerce Payments”. Winner: Tie
7. App store
Apps help in automation and adding new features to the store. BigCommerce has over 1000+ apps to assist in online business, Whereas WooCommerce has 10k+ plugins. Winner: WooCommerce
Ease of Use
BigCommerce
WooCommerce
Inbuilt Hosting
✔
❌
Domain Provides
✔
❌
Storage & Bandwidth
Unlimited
❌
BigCommerce is easy to get started, it comes with inbuilt hosting with storage & bandwidth. It provides SSL security for customer data protection. WooCommerce is open-source software that doesn’t come with hosting so it needs to be self-hosted and managed. There is also a need for maintenance for the platform which has to be done self or can be done by hiring a developer.
BigCommerce provides a 15-day free trial to try & test the platform before choosing to one of their premium plans. Once after signing up big commerce provides options on the left dashboard to customize the store, products, settings, help, etc. There is also an active help center where users can seek help from Bigcommerce support staff. WooCommerce is a decentralized platform that doesn’t provide hand to hand support so there is plenty of things that need to be solved by yourself. If you have prior knowledge working with WordPress then it will be a cakewalk for you.
Key Takeaways: BigCommerce is an easier platform to operate & manage as it comes with built-in hosting whereas in WooCommerce all these things need to be manually managed.
The winner of the Ease Of Use Feature: BigCommerce
BigCommerce: 1-0 :WooCommerce
Themes & Customization
BigCommerce
WooCommerce
Themes
80+
1k+
Free Themes
10+
100+
Mobile-Friendly
Yes
Yes
Theme Customization level
Basic
Very Good
Prebuilt Sections
No
No
BigCommerce has provided 30+ free themes and plenty of Paid themes starting from $150. Each theme has more than 3 Styles, They also organized these theme collections according to the size of the business and Industry.
WooCommerce has a theme library where it has free and paid themes also there are third-party websites like Themeforest , Templatemonster which offer thousands of themes. These themes can be downloaded and uploaded to the WooCommerce store. All of the WooCommerce themes can be customized extensively with good Knowledge of HTML, CSS, and Javascript.
BigCommerce themes
WooCommerce themes
BigCommerce theme customization options are available at storefront options. The basic customization features allow drag & drop of widgets in the theme home pages. All of these widgets have design options like adding colors, styles, fonts, etc.
To customize WooCommerc themes head over to the WordPress editor and In the appearance section the themes, footer, header, background, additional CSS, and storefront can be customized & designed for different colors, fonts, and styles.
BigCommerce editor
WooCommerce editor
Key Takeaways: WooCommerce offers more themes and offers a greater extent of customization than BigCommerce.
The winner of the Themes & Customization Feature: WooCommerce
(Prices in the Bracket are applicable when you buy a year plan)
WooCommerce is an open-source platform which means it’s freeware. Though it is free to download but needs a hosting platform where the site can be hosted. The hosting, storage, and SSL charges are mandatory.
BigCommerce plans andpricing
——————— Complementary costs —————————
Both the platforms have complementary costs in form of themes & plugins these costs can be by choice as there are plenty of free themes & plugins to fill the business requirements, if they don’t then you have paid themes & plugins to fill those requirements.
Users might need to hire WordPress developers, and support staff as they might be required most of the time, also hosting costs can vary as per the business requirements. If you can manage all these things then you can save plenty of money.
Key Takeaways: WooCommerce is free of cost but can be more or less costly based on choice, but in BigCommerce the plans are fixed and also carry some complementary prices.
The winner of the Pricing & Plan Feature: WooCommerce
BigCommerce: 1-2 :WooCommerce
eCommerce
Ecom Features
BigCommerce
WooCommerce
Products
1. Sell physical, and digital products & services 2. upload images & videos 3. Import/export products 3. Giftwrapping, Purchasbility settings of products
1. Provide tags, Categories/subcategories 2. Create various product options through the plugin, Create multiple custom fields 3. Create Upto 50 variations 4. Bulk editing is possible.
Payment options
BigCommerce offers 80+ payment options with multicurrency checkout and single-page checkout options for the easiness of placing orders.
WooCommerc Provides Over 100+ payment Processors. It also has its own payment method called WooCommerce payment, which charges a processing fee of 2% on every transaction.
Shipping Option
BigCommerce provides all kinds of shipping methods and displays real-time checkout rates. Printing of shipping labels can be done through third-party services like endica, ship stations, etc.
For US users WooCommerce has Provided displaying of shipping rates of DHL, and USPS at checkout. The shipping labels can be printed directly from checkout.
Fees
The debit/credit rates range differently for payment processors. BigCommerce offered special Braintree offers for Paypal which can be as low as 2%.
The Credit card rates differ for different payment processors. The credit card rates also differ by country.
POS
Bigcommerce has plenty of Third-party apps like Vend, hike POS, etc. These apps let you sell in person or offline store.
WooCommerce built a POS that costs $199/year. There are various other third-party POS services available in the WooCommerce Plugin store.
Key Takeaways: Both BigCommerce and WooCommerce provide essential eCommerce features. BigCommerce offers most of them as inbuilt features whereas WooCommerce has a dependency on plugins.
The winner of the eCommerce Feature: BigCommerce
BigCommerce: 2-2 :WooCommerce
Marketing
Features
BigCommerce
WooCommerce
Email Campaigns
BigCommerce has provided various email marketing tools like Omnisend, Klaviyo, Constant Contact, etc. There are free and paid apps available in the BigCommerce app store.
WooCommerce also provides various plugins for Creating email marketing campaigns. These tools also can be found either free or paid.
Multichannel selling
BigCommerce has integrations with plenty of multi-channels like Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Wish, Google shopping, etc.
WooCommerce has integrations with plenty of multichannel like Amazon, ebay, and Walmart. These integrations can be accessed through WooCommerce plugins.
Social Media
BigCommerce offers various social media integration to sell on Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, etc. There are social media plugins to automate the process of posting on social media.
WooCoomerce integrates with Facebook, and Instagram to run & track ads directly from the WooCoomerce dashboard. There are plenty of other plugins to facilitate social media marketing.
Multilingual & MultiCurrency
In BigCommerce multicurrency can be kept as a display(not supported at checkout) or transactional (supported at checkout). The multilingual facility is provided on a certain theme.
In WooCommerce to access multilingual/multicurrency features plugins are needed. There are plenty of plugins that can facilitate the above features.
Apps
Apps integration helps in adding new functionalities to the store. BigCommerce offers 1000+ apps which include all categories.
WooCommerce probably has more plugins among site builders. It supports built-in WooCommerce plugins & also third-party plugins.
Key Takeaways: Both BigCommerce and WooCommerce have provided pretty good integration for Marketing features but WooCommerce has more open-source integration than BigCommerce
The winner of the Marketing Feature: WooCommerce
BigCommerce: 2-3 :WooCommerce
SEO & Blogging
SEO
Both BigCommerce and WooCommerce have good SEO features. They allow editing of titles, descriptions, permalinks, alt-text, etc. They also provide sitemaps, robots.txt, schema markup, etc. Both BigCommerce and WooCommerce have SEO-friendly themes. WooCommerce has an edge over BigCommerce as it has plenty of SEO plugins like Yoast, rank math, etc.
Blogging
Both BigCommerce and WooCommerce have provided decent blogging features to write blogs on their platform. These blogs can be separated by tags, category, authors, allow, etc. WooCommerce has plenty of blog editors like Guttenberg, and Elementor to provide more functions.
Key Takeaways: WooCommerce has more advanced SEO & blogging features than BigCommerce.
The winner of the SEO & blogging Feature: WooCommerce
BigCommerce: 2-4 :WooCommerce
Analytics & Reports
Both BigCommerce and WooCommerce have really good analytics and graph representation. BigCommerce has a Good dashboard that provides key insights, graphs, purchase funnel, etc. There are statistical details around sales, orders, revenue, customers, etc. BigCommerce provides lists of top-performing products.
WooCommerce has a very basic & simple dashboard that provides insights into orders & it’s metrics. It also provides data on orders, customers, stocks, taxes, etc. This data can be imported into CSV files and later it can be used for remarketing. There are plenty of plugins that can be used to get better insights & reports in WooCommerce.
BigCommerceAnalytics
BigCommerce Reports
WooCommerce analytics
Key Takeaways: BigCommerce has graphs, a funnel mode of representing data, It provides key reports on products. WooCommerce has basic analytics & reports.
The winner of the Analytics & Reports Feature: BigCommerce
BigCommerce: 3-4 :WooCommerce
Support & Resources
BigCommerce
WooCommerce
Email
✔
✔
Live chat
✔
❌
Phone
✔
❌
BigCommerce provides all forms of support 24/7 live chat, mobile, and email. WooCommerce is an open-source platform, Although they claim to provide support through chat, and email they don’t have a support system like BigCommerce. To get support from BigCommerce executive users need to provide a pin that is unique for different users.
Both platforms have resources in form of blogs, articles, and videos. WooCommerce has a huge user base with plenty of online community forums.
BigCommerce Support
WooCommerce support
Key Takeaways: BigCommerce provides one-to-one support in all 3 modes whereas WooCommerce has basic support.
The winner of the Support & Resources Feature: BigCommerce
BigCommerce: 4-4 :WooCommerce
Pros and Cons: BigCommerce vs WooCommerce
BigCommerce Pros
BigCommerce Cons
1. Inbuilt hosting and storage.
1. Minimum Sales cap on each plan
2. Beginner Friendly
2. Costly plans
3. Live view & Advance Reporting
3. Paid apps are expensive
4. Easy to set up and manage
4. limited themes & very basic apps
WooCommerce Pros
WooCommerce Cons
1. Plenty of themes & plugins
1. No inbuilt hosting & storage
2. Developer-friendly
2. Basic Analytics & Reports
3. Freeware open-source platform.
3. Too much dependency on plugins.
4. Possibility of endless Customization
4. Not so beginner-friendly.
Conclusion: BigCommerce vs WooCommerce:
Use BigCommerce over Woocommerce,
If you don’t want the hustle of setting up & managing to host, maintain, and store then BigCommerce is the right choice.
If you are just starting or planning to start a business then BigCommerce is better as it is easy to set up and has plenty of inbuilt features.
If you are looking for a hand to hand support in the journey of building & managing a store then BigCommerce is better.
Use Woocommerce Over BigCommerce,
If you want a greater extent of flexibility, scalability, greater Customization, and design freedom then WooCommerce is best.
If you already have experience working on WordPress then WooCommerce will be easy for you.
If you are promoting services by writing blogs, and articles then WooCommerce is better.
Declan Kingston mainly works around strong Data to create powerful visuals, complex graphs to make the right decision for companies. He has been working in this field for over 8 years, has a strong knowledge of eCommerce platforms and website builders. He has worked with Ethereum and Looker Data Sciences, Inc. (now part of Google Cloud).
