If you’re interested in WooCommerce alternatives, we’d like to share a few options. More importantly, we’ll explain why you’d go with these options over WooCommerce. Each plugin is intended for different uses, so let’s take a look at when you’d use them instead of WooCommerce.
WooCommerce has become the defacto e-commerce plugin for WordPress. In fact, WooCommerce is used more than any other shopping cart platform or plugin on the web. And that is honestly for good reason. It has tons of features, is very extendable, and has a massive community.
Quick Payment Forms. Done Simply.
If you use Elementor on your WordPress website, you can now spin up payment forms anywhere you want, quickly and easily. No bloated e-commerce plugin necessary.
This is not an article about bashing WooCommerce. We actually love WooCommerce! We even built our Content Protection and Dripping modules to integrate with WooCommerce Memberships. It’s a great solution for many requirements.
However, e-commerce solutions are not, nor should they be, one-size-fits-all deals. There are different tools for different uses and requirements, and some tools handle different use cases more efficiently than others. Let’s look at some WooCommerce alternatives, and when you might want to consider them over WooCommerce.
Ideas for WooCommerce Alternatives
- Easy Digital Downloads
First up is one of the most common WooCommerce alternatives, and one of our favorite plugins for WordPress, Easy Digital Downloads. EDD was created for, and focuses on, one thing: selling digital products. It’s what we use on Elegant Modules to sell our own plugins.
What we like about Easy Digital Downloads is that it’s geared toward selling digital products specifically for WordPress – plugins and themes. Its Software Licensing extension includes all the features you need to get started selling paid licenses for your products. WooCommerce has similar extensions, but we find EDD provides a cleaner experience. It’s also easier to style.
EDD also offers many of the same premium features that WooCommerce does. For example, EDD Recurring Payments allows you to set up recurring subscriptions to repeatedly bill customers on regular intervals, similar to WooCommerce Subscriptions. If you want to protect or drip content to your subscribers, we offer our content protection and dripping features for EDD Recurring Payments.
Where EDD and WooCommerce differ is mainly with the types of products to sell. Although you could hack your way to selling physical products, Easy Digital Downloads is not intended to handle them. It doesn’t include shipping features, like product dimensions and weight.
Lastly, depending on what features you need, Easy Digital Downloads may or may not be more expensive to start with than WooCommerce. For example, WooCommerce includes support for Stripe out of the box, while Stripe for EDD costs $89 for single site license.
- Payments for Elementor
If you’re using the most popular page builder for WordPress, Elementor, then we may just have the solution for you. Our Payments for Elementor plugin is free to download from the WordPress plugin repository.
Payments for Elementor is a lightweight, flexible, and minimal solution for accepting payments on your website. It integrates seamlessly with Stripe right out of the box. There’s no product management, no cart, no complex shipping settings, and no bloat. If you need those kinds of things, Payments for Elementor may not be the right choice unless you’d like to build those features on top of it.
However, you do get an intuitive way of adding payment forms anywhere on your website using the Elementor page builder. You can also configure the payment forms how you need them. Also included is a payments overview in the admin, where you can view payments, issue refunds (partial and full), etc.
The biggest differences between WooCommerce and Payments for Elementor are in the number of features. Payments for Elementor is meant to be minimalistic for simple needs. WooCommerce is meant to do all the things. Therefore, WooCommerce may overkill if you just need to accept payments. Adding WooCommerce to a website that doesn’t need all of what WooCommerce offers can effect the performance of the site, so consider you need to consider your requirements.
On the flip side, if you need taxes, memberships, shipping, product management, or multiple payment gateways, WooCommerce will be better suited.
- Gravity Forms
In our opinion, Gravity Forms has been the gold standard for WordPress form builders for a long time, and still is. We’ve used other form plugins, but always end up going back to Gravity Forms. Spinning up new forms is so quick and easy. When you consider how long it would take to code complex forms with conditional logic, Gravity Forms really pays off because it can save you hours, days, or weeks on development.
Available for Gravity Forms are a number of payment gateway add-ons that are used to integrate your forms with your payment processor of choice, such as Stripe and PayPal. This allows you to create payment forms, and drop them anywhere you’d like, just like our Payments for Elementor plugin.
The limitations here are also similar to our Payments for Elementor plugin: they don’t have functionality like shipping and product management. Gravity Forms also does not offer payment overviews, so you’d have to build that interface from scratch. It’s also not very easy to style. Additionally, the payment gateway add-ons for Gravity Forms are only available with their Elite license ($259), so it’s the costliest to get started (the Basic License is $59).
- LifterLMS
WooCommerce is also known for membership and LMS capability, with their Memberships and Sensei plugins. If you’re running a membership website or selling courses, though, are you really going to need everything in WooCommerce? Again, it may be overkill.
LifterLMS is our favorite learning management system. It’s simple and intuitive, and isn’t loaded with stuff you don’t need to sell courses. Chris and his team are also very dedicated to helping course creators succeed. If you haven’t already, you should totally check out their blog and podcast.
Our LifterLMS modules give you even more flexibility to protect and drip your course content.
What e-commerce features do you need?
Which solution you use should boil down to what features you need. Again, no single plugin or platform fits all needs in an efficient, performant way.
Easy Digital Downloads is great for selling digital products, especially WordPress plugins and themes.
Payments for Elementor is designed for those who just need simple payment forms and a quick, cost-effective setup (and if you’re using Elementor).
Gravity Forms will work if you already use it or can benefit from it in other ways.
WooCommerce is the most comprehensive e-commerce system. If you’re creating a full-blown e-commerce website with physical products, shipping requirements, taxes, etc., you can’t go wrong with Woo.
The best advice we can give you is to do your research before settling on a plugin just because it’s what is most widely used. The are numerous WooCommerce alternatives out there, so due diligence will help you and your website in the long run. Researching will help you land on a solution that works for your needs, does not bloat your website with unneeded features, and gives you the flexibility you need.
If you have any questions, or would like to share your thoughts on other e-commerce plugins, let us know in the comments!