WordPress vs Shopify vs Wix in Singapore: Total Cost and Lock-In
Every comparison of these three platforms asks which one is best. That is the wrong question, and it is why so many Singapore businesses end up rebuilding two years later.
All three will produce a decent website. The differences that actually bite are financial and structural: what the platform costs over three years once transaction fees and apps are included, who is responsible for keeping it alive, and — the one almost nobody prices in — what it costs to leave when your business outgrows the choice.
This guide is about those three things. If you want the search-visibility comparison instead, that lives in building a website for SEO in Singapore; we are deliberately not re-arguing it here. And if you are still deciding what a site should cost in total, start with our Singapore website cost guide.
The one structural difference that explains everything else
Shopify and Wix are hosted software: you rent access to a system that runs on their servers. WordPress is self-hosted software: the code is free and open source, and you (or your agency) put it somewhere and look after it.
Almost every practical difference downstream — cost shape, maintenance burden, flexibility, exit options — falls out of that single distinction.
| WordPress (self-hosted) | Shopify | Wix | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What you pay for | Hosting, domain, plugins, maintenance | A subscription to the whole stack | A subscription to the whole stack |
| Who patches it | You or your agency | Shopify | Wix |
| Who can break it | You, via a plugin conflict | Rarely you | Rarely you |
| Ceiling on customisation | Effectively none | High for commerce, lower elsewhere | Lower; you work within the editor |
| Can you move the whole site elsewhere? | Yes — files and database are yours | Data yes, storefront no | No — see below |
| Share of all websites (W3Techs, Aug 2026) | 40.8% | 5.3% | 4.2% |
That last row is worth a moment. As of mid-August 2026, W3Techs puts WordPress on 40.8% of all websites and 59.0% of the CMS market, with Shopify at 5.3% and 7.7% and Wix at 4.2% and 6.1%. Popularity is not quality, but it is a proxy for two things that matter commercially: the size of the developer pool you can hire from in Singapore, and the likelihood that the platform still exists, unchanged in its essentials, in ten years.
Sticker price in 2026
Published rates, checked directly against each vendor. Note the currencies: Shopify quotes Singapore dollars for Singapore, Wix quotes US dollars as a reference and states plainly that “prices and currency vary by location” and that the displayed prices are for yearly subscriptions paid in full.
| Platform | Entry | Mid | Upper | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shopify (SG pricing) | Basic S$39/mo monthly, S$29/mo on annual | Grow S$132/mo, S$99 annual | Advanced S$531/mo, S$399 annual | Plus starts around US$2,300/mo |
| Wix (USD reference, annual prepay) | Light US$17/mo | Core US$29/mo, Business US$39/mo | Business Elite US$159/mo | Free tier exists but carries Wix branding |
| WordPress | Software: S$0 | Shared/managed hosting commonly S$3–S$150/mo by tier | Premium theme + plugins, often S$100–S$800/yr | Plus a domain, commonly around S$40–S$45/yr for .sg |
Two honest caveats before anyone builds a budget on that table. First, the advertised monthly figure is the smallest number in the eventual invoice on every one of the three. Second, hosting and plugin ranges are market observations, not a quotation — they move, and they vary enormously by how much traffic and support you need.
What it actually costs over three years
Here is the same three scenarios, modelled on published rates, GST at 9% excluded for clarity. These are illustrative ranges to show the shape of the cost, not quotations.
| Scenario | WordPress | Shopify | Wix |
|---|---|---|---|
| A. Brochure site 8 pages, contact form, no store |
Hosting ~S$15/mo, theme S$80 once, domain S$45/yr, light maintenance ~S$1,000–2,000 over 3 yrs |
Overkill; you are paying for commerce you do not use ~S$1,400–4,800 |
Core plan, domain included yr 1 ~S$1,100–1,500 |
| B. Service site Booking, blog, several forms, 2 languages |
Managed hosting ~S$40/mo, 3–5 paid plugins, agency retainer or in-house time ~S$3,000–8,000+ |
Possible, but you are fitting a service business into a commerce tool ~S$4,800–7,000 |
Business plan, some app subscriptions ~S$1,700–3,000 |
| C. Small store 200 SKUs, ~S$40,000/mo revenue |
WooCommerce, hosting ~S$60–150/mo, payment gateway fees, plugin renewals ~S$5,000–12,000 + gateway fees |
Grow annual ~S$99/mo, plus card fees at 3.1% + S$0.50, plus apps ~S$3,600 platform + ~S$45,000 card fees |
Business Elite plus apps; ceilings appear as catalogue grows ~S$5,700 + payment fees |
Scenario C is the one that surprises people, so read the arithmetic rather than the totals: on roughly S$1.44m of card revenue over three years, a 3.1% + S$0.50 rate is around S$45,000 in processing. The subscription is a rounding error next to it. Anyone comparing these platforms on monthly plan price alone, for a store, is optimising the smallest line in the budget.
The transaction layer, and Shopify’s gateway fee
Shopify publishes Singapore card rates by plan: online standard card rates of 3.2% + S$0.50 on Basic, from 3.1% + S$0.50 on Grow and from 3% + S$0.50 on Advanced, with in-person rates of 3%, 2.9% and 2.75% respectively.
The detail that catches Singapore merchants is separate from those rates. If you use a third-party payment gateway instead of Shopify Payments, Shopify charges an additional fee on top of whatever the gateway charges: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced, 0.2% on Plus. On S$40,000 a month, the Basic-plan version of that surcharge is S$800 a month before your gateway’s own cut. It is a genuine structural cost of choosing Shopify, and it is the mechanism that makes leaving Shopify Payments expensive rather than merely inconvenient.
On WordPress and WooCommerce there is no equivalent platform surcharge — you pay your gateway and nothing else. For reference, published Singapore rates in this market have run around 3.4% + S$0.50 for domestic cards on major processors and roughly 1.3% for PayNow, but these move, so confirm with the provider before you model margin. Remember GST at 9% applies to the services you buy, and factor it into the comparison consistently rather than on one platform only.
If payments are the deciding factor for you, the wider e-commerce mechanics are covered in e-commerce conversion rate optimisation and in our e-commerce marketing guide for Singapore.
The gateway you pair with the platform matters as much as the platform fee itself. Our guide to payment gateways in Singapore compares the published rates side by side and works through why moving orders onto PayNow changes the arithmetic more than any card rate does.
The exit cost nobody prices in
Here is where the three platforms genuinely diverge, and it is worth reading the vendors’ own words rather than an agency’s summary.
Wix
Wix is explicit that a site cannot be lifted off the platform. In its own help documentation: “Your Wix site is a standard HTML5 site, and is built with Wix’s technology. In order for your site to work properly, it needs to be hosted and operated on Wix’s servers.” Wix also states that “the content you build on Wix belongs to you” — and both statements are true at once. You own your words and images and can extract them; you cannot take the site.
Practically, leaving Wix means rebuilding. Content can be copied out, product and contact data can be exported, but the design, the layout logic and any Wix apps do not travel. Budget a rebuild, not a migration.
Shopify
Shopify exports the commercial data properly — products, customers, orders as CSV — but the exports have edges that matter on a migration day. Shopify’s own documentation notes that “when you export your products, the images associated with each product aren’t included in the CSV file”, and that on import the images will only appear if they “remain viewable on a publicly accessible website”, which means keeping the old store alive until the new one has finished pulling them. Customer passwords cannot be migrated at all, so every customer has to reset on the other side.
What does not export is the storefront itself: themes are written in Shopify’s own Liquid templating language, and any functionality you bought as an app disappears with the subscription.
WordPress
The files and the database are yours and can be moved to any host. That is a genuine advantage, and it comes with a genuine catch: portability is not the same as painlessness. A site with thirty plugins moves fine technically and still needs testing, and a badly-built WordPress site can be harder to inherit than a tidy Shopify one. Ownership removes the wall; it does not do the work.
The maintenance question, answered honestly
The strongest argument for hosted platforms is not features. It is that somebody else is awake at 3am when a security patch ships.
On WordPress, updates to core, theme and plugins are your responsibility. A neglected WordPress site is a genuine liability: outdated plugins are the most common route into a small business site, and a compromised site can lose search visibility as well as data. A maintained one is completely fine — but “maintained” means someone is being paid, in money or in hours, to do it every month.
That cost is the honest counterweight to WordPress’s lower sticker price. Budget it explicitly:
- Updates and backups, checked monthly, with a rollback that has actually been tested.
- Uptime and form monitoring, so you find out before a customer does.
- An annual review of every plugin: is it still maintained, still needed, still worth its attack surface?
On Shopify and Wix, that entire line disappears from your budget and reappears as a subscription you cannot stop paying. Neither arrangement is free; they differ in who carries the risk.
Grants: what is and is not claimable
The Productivity Solutions Grant supports specific pre-approved solutions on the official list, at up to 50% of qualifying cost, capped at S$30,000 per company per financial year, with standard SME eligibility (registered and operating in Singapore, at least 30% local shareholding, group turnover not more than S$100m or group employment not more than 200). You apply yourself through the Business Grants Portal, and you should have approval before committing to the purchase.
Three things to be clear-eyed about: only listed solutions qualify, so “a website” in the abstract does not; ongoing platform subscriptions, ad spend and general retainers are not claimable; and the vendor cannot apply on your behalf. SDM is a pre-approved PSG vendor, which means our listed solutions can be used in an application — it does not mean everything we do is grant-funded. The EDGE scheme is expected in the second half of 2026; wait for the published terms before planning around it.
So which one, for whom
| If you are… | Choose | Because |
|---|---|---|
| A sole proprietor who needs a credible site this month and will not touch it again | Wix | Fastest to a good-looking, maintained result. Accept that leaving means rebuilding. |
| A retailer whose business is selling online, with real order volume | Shopify | The commerce operations are genuinely better. Negotiate the processing rate; it is the real cost. |
| A service business that publishes, ranks and generates enquiries | WordPress | Content flexibility, no ceiling, full ownership. Budget the maintenance honestly. |
| B2B with integrations to a CRM, ERP or booking system | WordPress | Custom integration is a project, not an app-store search. |
| Selling a handful of products alongside a content business | Wix or WooCommerce | Shopify’s strengths are wasted; you are paying for order operations you do not run. |
| Expecting to be acquired, audited, or to move markets in 2–3 years | WordPress | Portability becomes a due-diligence question, not a preference. |
One boundary worth stating plainly: none of these platforms will rescue an unclear proposition. A site that does not say what it sells, for whom, at roughly what price will underperform on all three — which is the subject of website conversion rate in Singapore and, for campaign pages specifically, landing page best practices.
If you already chose wrong
Switching is a project with three costs: rebuilding, moving the data, and protecting the search visibility you already have. The third is the one that gets skipped and the one that hurts.
The essentials: map every existing URL to its new equivalent before launch, use server-side 301 redirects with no chains, update internal links to point at final destinations rather than through redirects, submit the new sitemap, and keep the redirects in place for at least a year. Google’s own site-move guidance is the reference. Expect a medium-sized site to take a few weeks to fully reindex, and do not panic at week two. The full procedure is in website migration without losing SEO, and the pre-flight list in our redesign checklist.
The sequencing lesson from every migration we have run: decide the platform before the design, and price the exit before you sign.
Frequently asked questions
Is WordPress really free?
The software is free and open source. The website is not. You will pay for hosting, a domain, usually a premium theme and several plugins, and — the part most budgets omit — someone’s time to keep it patched. For a small Singapore business, a realistic all-in running cost is in the low hundreds of dollars a year plus maintenance, which is often still less than a comparable Shopify or Wix subscription over three years.
Can I move my Wix site to WordPress?
You can move the content; you cannot move the site. Wix states that a Wix site “needs to be hosted and operated on Wix’s servers”. In practice you rebuild the design on the new platform and carry across text, images and any exportable data. Budget for a rebuild plus a proper redirect map so the search visibility survives.
Is Shopify worth it for a small Singapore store?
If selling online is the business, usually yes — the order, inventory and checkout operations are strong and you are not maintaining anything. Just model the total honestly: on Basic, online card rates run 3.2% + S$0.50, and using a third-party gateway adds a further 2% platform fee. On meaningful revenue, those percentages dwarf the subscription.
Which platform is best for SEO?
All three can rank; the platform is rarely the limiting factor compared with content, site structure and speed. We have written that comparison properly in building a website for SEO in Singapore rather than repeating it here, and the underlying technical requirements are the same everywhere — see technical SEO basics.
Do I own my domain name on these platforms?
You should, and it is worth checking. If the domain was registered by an agency or bundled by a platform, make sure the registrant details name your company and that you can access the registrar account. A domain you cannot control is the fastest possible version of lock-in, and it is the single most common nasty surprise we find when taking over a Singapore site.
Can I claim PSG for a Shopify or Wix subscription?
Ongoing platform subscriptions are not what the grant is for. PSG supports pre-approved solutions on the official list at up to 50% of qualifying cost, capped at S$30,000 per company per financial year, applied for by you through the Business Grants Portal before you commit. Check the current listing rather than assuming; the list changes.
Where to start
Work in this order. Write down what the site has to do in three years, not three months. Model the three-year total including transaction fees and maintenance, not the monthly plan price. Then ask what leaving would cost, and treat that number as part of the purchase price — because it is.
Choose Wix for speed and simplicity, Shopify if commerce operations are the business, and WordPress if content, integration or ownership matter more than convenience. Any of the three is defensible. Only one of them is right for your particular next three years.
If you would like that modelled against your actual numbers before you commit, our web design team does it as a paid discovery piece, our e-commerce build service covers the store side, and the Singapore web design guide is the wider map. Real examples of the outcomes are in our case studies.
Written by Adrian Tan, SDM.
