Full disclosure: this uses Stackra's own website corpus, and Stackra sells a website audit. The counts below come from automated detection across real storefronts, so they describe what is installed, not what anyone recommends.
Most platform comparisons argue about features and pricing tiers. A more useful question is what stores on each platform actually end up running. That tells you what the platform expects you to buy separately, and what it handles for you.
Four stacks, 285,803 stores
| Squarespace | Wix | Shopify | WooCommerce | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stores measured | 86,983 | 71,162 | 67,525 | 60,133 |
| Marketing automation | 8% | 6% | 54% | 27% |
| 64% | 59% | 68% | 61% | |
| Reviews | 0% | 1% | 34% | 7% |
| Live chat | 2% | 2% | 29% | 9% |
| Third-party payments | 1% | 1% | 93% | 27% |
| Analytics | 50% | 55% | 85% | 79% |
| Tag manager | 13% | 14% | 19% | 34% |
| SEO plugin | 0% | 0% | 3% | 75% |
| Confirmed-good CWV | 81% | 89% | 90% | 56% |
Source: Stackra analysis of stackra_us_corpus, US ecommerce sites, May 2026 crawl vintage. WooCommerce counted as WordPress sites with WooCommerce detected.
Shopify stores buy the most
Shopify leads on nearly every add-on category: marketing automation at 54%, reviews at 34%, live chat at 29%. That is the app-ecosystem effect. Shopify makes installing a paid app a two-click decision. The app store is the first place a merchant looks when they want a capability. If you pick Shopify, budget for the stack, because your competitors are running it.
WooCommerce stores build it themselves
WooCommerce is the mirror image. It leads on SEO plugins at 75% and tag manager at 34%, both the highest in the set. It trails badly on the commerce add-ons: reviews at 7%, chat at 9%. WooCommerce attracts people who are willing to assemble things. That buys flexibility and costs time, and it shows up as strong search plumbing next to a thin customer-facing stack.
Squarespace and Wix stores run almost nothing extra
Both sit near zero on marketing automation, reviews, chat and third-party payments. Read that carefully, because the obvious interpretation is wrong.
Squarespace and Wix handle payments, reviews and much of the rest natively. A 1% third-party payments reading does not mean those stores cannot take money. It means the platform already does it, so there is no separate product to detect. Absence of a detected add-on is not absence of the capability.
The genuine finding for these two is the measurement gap rather than the feature gap. Analytics sits at 50% and 55%, well below Shopify at 85% and WooCommerce at 79%. Roughly half of these stores are running without any analytics at all. They are selling without knowing which pages bring buyers.
The bigger difference is which vendors, not how many
Counting categories understates this. When you look at the actual products behind those percentages, the four platforms are running almost entirely separate rosters.
| Shopify | WooCommerce | Squarespace | Wix | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Marketing automation | Klaviyo (19,925) | MailChimp (8,196) | MailChimp (2,710) | Mailmunch (1,144) |
| Reviews | Judge.me (13,347) | Trustindex (3,077) | Trustindex (79) | Fera (400) |
| Live chat | Shopify Chat (11,918) | WhatsApp Business (1,437) | Facebook Chat (451) | WhatsApp Business (880) |
Source: Stackra analysis of stackra_us_corpus, US ecommerce sites, May 2026 crawl vintage. Counts are detected installs.
Klaviyo is effectively a Shopify product in practice. It has 19,925 installs there and does not reach the top three on any other platform. Judge.me runs the same way for reviews, with 13,347 on Shopify against 37 on Squarespace. WooCommerce answers with Trustindex instead. Wix runs a roster that barely appears anywhere else, including Mailmunch and Fera.
MailChimp is the only vendor in this data that is genuinely cross-platform, ranking top three on all four. Everything else is ecosystem-bound. Picking a platform is closer to picking which vendor catalogue you shop from than most comparisons admit.
That has a practical consequence when you switch platforms. Moving a store from Shopify to WooCommerce is not only a migration of products and content. The review widget, the email platform and the chat product usually do not come with you. The versions you were using were built for the ecosystem you are leaving.
About that speed column
WooCommerce shows 56% confirmed-good Core Web Vitals against Shopify at 90%, and the tempting explanation is that WooCommerce stores run more plugins. The data does not support that conclusion. WooCommerce is self-hosted, so the store owner picks the hosting, while Shopify, Squarespace and Wix are managed platforms with one infrastructure. Hosting quality is the uncontrolled variable and it is a far more likely explanation than plugin count.
- •The speed figure counts only stores with real-world field data, so it is a confirmed-good floor and not a pass rate.
- •Managed platforms remove hosting as a variable, which is worth real money if you do not want to think about servers.
- •Self-hosting can beat managed hosting comfortably, but only if somebody chooses the host deliberately.
Choosing with this in mind
Pick Shopify if you want the ecosystem and will spend on it. Pick WooCommerce if you want control and have someone willing to own hosting and assembly. Pick Squarespace or Wix if you want the platform to handle the machinery. Then fix the one thing most of those stores get wrong, and connect analytics on day one.