Shopify vs Elementor — Choose The Best One for YOU [2024]

The world of eCommerce has some big players.

But you simply can’t neglect the two big names — Shopify and WooCommerce. WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin for an eCommerce solution. Within the WordPress ecosystem, Elementor is one of the most popular page builder plugins that also offers eCommerce hosting plans.

So, let’s compare Shopify vs Elementor.

In this blog post, we’ll take you through a detailed comparison of Shopify and Elementor and help you decide which one is the best eCommerce solution for you.

Let’s get started.

TL;DR — Final Verdict on Shopify vs Elementor

Shopify or Elementor? What’s best for you?

Well, the short answer is — it depends.

Shopify is best for you if you’re planning to start an eCommerce store for retail online business, dropshipping, print-on-demand, or merge your online business with a brick-and-mortar store with POS (Point of Sale).

Elementor is best for you if you’re planning to start a service business, blogging site, or personal branding website. It can also help you with an eCommerce business but Shopify is a more robust solution with advanced infrastructure, built specifically for commerce — online as well as offline.

Overall best: Shopify for security, advanced features, and its giant ecosystem.

Now, let’s check the G2 ratings of both of these platforms:

While both platforms have the same average rating (4.4 out of 5 stars), Shopify has over 10 times more number of reviews than Elementor.

Shopify: 4.4 Out of 5 Stars — 4,589 Reviews

Elementor: 4.4 Out of 5 Stars — 361 Reviews

Key Features of Shopify and Elementor

Feature	Shopify Basic Plan	Elementor Sell Pro+ Plan	Winner
Monthly Bandwidth	Unlimited	150GB	Shopify
Built-In Email Marketing	Yes	No	Shopify
Native CMS (Content Management System)	Yes	No	Shopify
Workflow Automation	Shopify Flow	No	Shopify
Uptime SLA	99.99%	99.9%	Shopify
Native Fraud Detection System	Yes	No	Shopify
POS (Point of Sale)	Yes	No	Shopify
PCI Compliance	Yes	No	Shopify
Pricing	$29/month	$24.99/month	Elementor
Free trial	Yes — 3-day free Trial & just $1 per month for 1 month	30-Day moneyback guarantee	Shopify
Free Domain	No	Yes	Elementor
Automatic Daily Backup	No	30 days	Elementor

Key Statistics About Shopify & Elementor

According to Built with, a total of 4,949,244 live stores are built with Shopify.

On the other hand, 10,090,290 live websites are powered with Elementor.

Important Note: The number of websites built with Elementor may not necessarily be eCommerce stores though. Elementor is mainly a WordPress website builder plugin. So, these websites could be any type of website.

The following market share data points may give you a more clear picture:

The market share of Shopify's eCommerce platform is 26%. WooCommerce market share is 20.1%. But again, all WooCommerce stores may not necessarily be built with Elementor.

According to W3Techs, Elementor is used by just 11.4% of all websites.

Detailed Comparison of Shopify and Elementor

Advantages of Shopify Over Elementor

First-Party Solution

Shopify is an all-in-one solution that's suitable for businesses of all sizes. Shopify offers hosting, native website builder, blog, sales channels, automations, and marketing solutions — everything with a centralized platform.

Elementor was originally built for WordPress websites. It has launched its eCommerce hosting plans as well. However, it’s a kind of third-party solution that relies on WordPress and WooCommerce.

Complete eCommerce Infrastructure

Shopify originally started an eCommerce website building platform and it keeps advancing its eCommerce technology with time. Shopify also has support from its huge ecosystem covering Shopify app developers, theme developers, Shopify Partners, Shopify integration service providers, and content creators.

Elementor is more focused on freelance professionals, personal brands, and agencies. Elementor has eCommerce hosting plans; however, it’s a relatively new offering.

Easy & Robust Integrations

Shopify has more than 8,000 apps that can be integrated with the store to enhance its features and performance. Whether you’re looking for store design, marketing, SEO, speed optimization, or anything else — the Shopify App Store is full of high-quality solutions.

For example, if you want to create stylish or high-converting landing pages, you can use GemPages to build stunning store and landing pages. Want to create product bundles? Install a product bundling app like Bundler.

Elementor offers integrations with many popular tools but keep in mind — Elementor itself is a plugin that’s integrated with WordPress and WooCommerce to build an eCommerce store.

Workflow Automations

Automation plays a crucial role in scaling an eCommerce business, especially when you have limited resources.

Shopify Flow — Shopify’s free workflow automation app — can help you enhance your operations and minimize manual tasks. For example, if you want to hide and republish products based on inventory level, you can do so using a simple Shopify Flow template.

You can also use Shopify Flow to merge operations between multiple Shopify stores.

Elementor lacks such automation capabilities. Of course, you could find and use other workarounds to create workflow automation using third-party tools; however, it’s not a built-in function in Elementor as of now.

Community of Merchants & Experts

Community is Shopify’s one of the strongest points. And when we talk about the Shopify community, it covers several micro and big communities around the world and across different social media platforms.

Shopify’s official community platform itself has over 900k members. With thousands of members online, you can get solutions to almost any of your store or business related issues.

We, at GemPages, also believe in helping merchants in any way possible. You’ll find GemPages as one of the top contributors to the Shopify community forum.

Elementor has a Facebook community with over 151.7K members, and the page suggests that they’ll be launching a Discord community too.

Uptime SLA

Uptime SLA (Service Level Agreement) is an official statement published by a technology company regarding the percentage of time you could expect the service to be operational.

In simple terms, it gives a guarantee that your website will remain up and running without outages for a certain percentage of time.

Shopify offers a 99.99% uptime SLA, whereas Elementor offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee.

While this might sound like no significant difference, it actually makes a lot of difference. For context, even a 0.01% uptime SLA can make a big difference. 

99.9% uptime SLA means a website could observe a downtime of 1 minute and 26 seconds per day. 99.99% uptime SLA means the downtime would be less than 9 seconds per day.

Merchant Feedback:

Shopify has a 4.4 out of 5 stars rating on G2 with more than 4,500 reviews. Overall, merchants have shared positive feedback on the following aspects of Shopify:

• Ease of Use
• Easy Integration
• E-commerce Services
• Online Sales
• Quick Setup

Elementor also has a 4.4 out of 5 stars rating on G2; however, it has only 361 reviews. Thus, Shopify comes out as the winner here as well. 

• Ease of Use & Intuitive
• Drag-and-Drop Functionality
• Customization

As you can see, merchants love Shopify for a variety of reasons in relation to eCommerce and sales. On the other end, Elementor is mainly loved for its ease of use and design features.

Free Trial

Choosing your eCommerce platform is a big decision. You don’t want to keep jumping from one platform to another once you get started.

So, before starting a new eCommerce business, you may want to try your hands on the platform and then finalize it after testing it out properly. 

Shopify offers a 3-day free trial. On top of that, the first month is priced at only $1. This allows you more than a month’s time to test the platform and its capabilities.

Elementor does not offer a free trial. That said, it does offer a 30-day money-back guarantee. But you may have to go through the refund process and feel guilty when you do so.

Reports & Analytics:

Shopify Analytics makes it easy to monitor and analyze the performance of your business. Shopify helps you with about 80 different types of reports related to the online store, sales, customers, discounts, taxes, and so on.

On top of that, you can also use Google Analytics 4 and other third-party apps for analytics.

Elementor has Google SiteKit pre-installed on all sites. Thus, you can use Google Analytics to measure the performance of your website.

Learn more: 10 Best Shopify Analytics Tools

Customer support:

Shopify offers excellent live chat support 24/7. You can reach out to the support team for any technical challenges and they can help you with general business advice as well.

Elementor also offers 24/7 support; however, Shopify’s customer support quality has the upper hand here.

Advantages of Elementor over Shopify

Design Flexibility & Customizations

Elementor offers great flexibility for customizations. It has a drag-and-drop editor which is easy to use. Also, you can use motion and animations that can help you add movable elements.

Shopify however is a bit limited in terms of customizations. That said, Shopify does offer many different free as well as paid theme options. You can customize your theme using Shopify’s native visual editor.

Pro tip: You can eliminate Shopify’s customization challenges by installing a powerful page builder app like GemPages. GemPages can help you build a Shopify store with professionally designed templates and an easy-to-use visual editor.

Pricing

Elementor’s Sell Pro+ eCommerce hosting plan costs $24.99 per month — which is relatively cheaper than Shopify. The plan includes a premium WooCommerce theme and Pro Builder (Advanced Plan).

Side note: Elementor also has “Sell Core” and “Sell Pro” eCommerce hosting plans priced at $4.99 per month and $14.99 per month respectively. However, these plans have limitations on monthly visitors (50K Monthly Visits and 75K Monthly Visits respectively).

Shopify’s Basic plan starts at $29 per month (when billed annually) OR $39 per month (when billed monthly). Thus, it is relatively more expensive than Elementor.

With all that said, you may want to consider the suite of features offered by both platforms to see the real value for money. You can run an eCommerce store with Shopify without any additional subscription as it covers most advanced features with its Basic plan. On top of that, you can install many highly-rated apps for free.

Payment provider options

Shopify has its own payment processor — Shopify Payments. Apart from that, it also supports other PayPal and other third-party payment providers.

However, the downside is that Shopify has payment processing fees ranging from 2.5% + 30¢ USD to 2.9% + 30¢ USD.

Since Elementor uses WooCommerce, it does not have its own payment processor. WooCommerce offers a wide range of payment providers including WooPayments, PayPal, Stripe, etc.

WooCommerce does not charge payment processing fees.

Ease of Use

While both platforms are easy to use, overall, Shopify has tons of features and thus it can take some time to get used to the entire platform.

Neutral Factors

Mobile App

A mobile app can help you manage store transactions even when you’re not at the desk.

Shopify offers a free iOS/Android mobile app to manage your store admin. The mobile app lets you manage your store's products, orders, and marketing campaigns and allows you to follow up with customers as well.

The Elementor eCommerce Hosting plans also offer iOS/Android apps.

Technological Updates

Shopify keeps evolving and the platform gets upgraded automatically as it brings new updates or bug fixes.

Since Elementor is built for WordPress, you must consider all the constant updates you’ll need to maintain your WordPress website. However, you can set them up to be updated automatically.

Staging Environment

A staging environment is an important function that lets you test changes before making them live on your website. Both Shopify and Elementor help you with the staging environment function. 

On Shopify, you can make a copy of your published theme and make all the changes while your current theme remains live. Once all the changes are good to go, you can publish the latest version.

Elementor also allows you to safely test any new changes without impacting your live website. You can get a staging environment for each website.

Final Thoughts on Shopify vs Elementor

Both Shopify and Elementor are used by hundreds of thousands of users worldwide. It shows these platforms are loved by many.

However, choosing the best platform between Shopify and Elementor comes down to the specific use case or the types of business. If you’re looking to build an eCommerce brand and scale it big, Shopify is the best option.

However, if you’re just looking for a website to showcase information about your services, create a personal brand and portfolio, or grow a content business, building an Elementor website with WordPress can serve the purpose.

For eCommerce marketing strategies and best practices, check out more resources on our Blog. Join the GemPages Facebook community to network and learn from like-minded entrepreneurs and experts.

FAQs about Shopify and Elementor