SureCart vs WooCommerce: Which Ecommerce Platform is Best for Your Online Store in 2024?

WooCommerce helps run over 38% of online stores. The free eCommerce plugin sees over 6 million active installs, powering $11 billion in sales.

But with great flexibility comes complexity. Many merchants wonder if they should consider alternatives as their store scale.

We had the same dilemma, which is why we wrote this post.

In this article, we’ll compare WooCommerce with SureCart. We’ll assess typical areas a store owner would be concerned with, including customization, scalability, pricing, and more.

By the end, you should have a pretty good idea of which platform would work best for your situation. Let’s dive right in!

What Is SureCart?

SureCart is an eCommerce plugin that allows you to sell digital and physical products on your WordPress website.

It focuses on ease of use, making it simple to set up a store, add products, optimize checkout, and build your eCommerce empire.

Key capabilities of SureCart include:

• Headless ecommerce management for less server load and faster websites
• Flexible one-time and recurring pricing
• Modern customized checkout pages
• Coupons and promotions
• Customer management portal
• Supports subscriptions and memberships
• Robust reporting
• 100% commission affiliate program

The plugin focuses on making your store as lightweight as possible, so plugin slowness never costs you sales.

Who Should Use SureCart?

SureCart excels for stores where:

• Bloggers and content creators sell digital products like online courses, subscriptions, and membership sites
• Consultants and freelancers collecting payments for their services
• Brands selling their own physical products, merch, and packages
• Ecommerce sites that want to provide a superfast checkout experience

Its comprehensive free tier is also great for nonprofits and charities collecting donations.

So basically—anyone wanting to sell products from their existing WordPress site without the total overhead of feature-laden eCommerce platforms.

What Is WooCommerce?

Chances are you’ve already heard about WooCommerce. It powers a major chunk of the eCommerce space and is one of the most feature-rich platforms out there.

When installed, it changes your site into a powerful online store with all the bells and whistles and much more.

Some of WooCommerce’s most popular features include:

• Supports physical, digital, and variable products
• Multiple payment gateways
• Hundreds of integrations
• Centralized dashboard
• Order management system
• Coupons and taxation
• Zapier and automation integrations

Everything lives on your WordPress site rather than a third-party hosted solution. This provides ultimate control when customizing your store.

However, managing a more complex ecosystem also comes with a little more work.

Who Should Use WooCommerce?

WooCommerce suits larger and more complex online stores selling higher volumes of products. Stores such as:

• Stores with large product catalogs
• Stores needing complex shipping rules and logistics
• Companies with big teams managing different aspects of the store
• Developers who enjoy tweaking and optimizing stores

It’s an incredibly flexible platform, so it has such widespread usage.

Now that we understand both platforms better let’s put them head-to-head and see how they compare across the most important criteria.

SureCart vs WooCommerce: Main Differences

Before jumping into an in-depth comparison, here is a high-level overview of how SureCart and WooCommerce differ:

Feature	SureCart	WooCommerce
Primary Focus	eCommerce platform that’s easy to use	Fully customizable online store builder
Architecture	Hosted headless	Hosted on own server
Ideal For	Any type of store	Any type of store
Customization	Modern and optimized by default	Ultimate control and customization
Complexity	Intuitive all-in-one interface	Complex but not overly difficult
Reliability	No reliability issues	Stable and time-tested
Overhead	Low overhead to run	Higher system requirements

Let’s explore this further in an in-depth feature comparison:

SureCart vs. WooCommerce Detailed Comparison

Now, let’s perform a detailed comparison across 8 of the most critical criteria people consider when choosing an ecommerce platform.

These include ease of use, customizations, support, scalability, security, pricing, and more:

1. SureCart vs WooCommerce: Ease of Use

Winner: SureCart

SureCart comes out on top for usability. After installation, you can click the setup wizard to create your store.

Through the wizard, you pick the brand color, currency, base templates for product layouts, and email for notifications. Once done, your store is ready to use.

Once the layout, checkout page, and products are set up, you can start promoting your site—it takes less than an hour to get started!

Everything you need sits conveniently under the SureCart menu rather than having configuration options throughout your WordPress dashboard.

WooCommerce throws you in at the deep end. While there is a setup wizard, you mainly have to figure things out on your own.

There’s a learning curve with deciding on payment gateways, shipping, taxation, inventory management. It’s not insurmountable by any means, but it will take time.

While you see the steps, clicking on them means you manually go to the page and make the choices, plugin setups, and individual plugin configuration.

So, if you’re looking for something straightforward that “just works”, SureCart wins for simplicity.

WooCommerce gives you ultimate control to configure your store at the cost of added complexity.

2. SureCart vs WooCommerce: Product Pages and Shop Archives

Winner: WooCommerce

WooCommerce transforms your WordPress pages and posts into highly customizable product pages. You can build shop archives sorting products by category or other taxonomies.

Considering WooCommerce’s age, it has quite a mature templating system.

SureCart isn’t too far behind.

It is built upon the WordPress core and is as customizable as WordPress. You can embed checkout forms anywhere or generate standalone landing pages.

The downside is, the custom post-type management and theming aren’t fully mature yet.

WooCommerce gives you greater flexibility to showcase your products across your site while SureCart gives you the flexibility to add checkout on any page.

3. SureCart vs WooCommerce: Checkout Customization

Winner: SureCart

SureCart wins when it comes to optimizing your checkout process. The entire platform revolves around creating a smooth purchasing experience.

Using the customizable form builder, you can create conversion-optimized checkouts tailored to your products. It uses the WordPress block editor interface which makes it easy to configure.

Here’s an example of what the SureCart checkout page can be customized to look like:

You can try something unique to your brand so the page stands out.

WooCommerce checkout pages look outdated out of the box. You’ll need to install plugins or work with a developer to customize it further.

There are plugins that can help and you could use a page builder, but there’s more work involved in getting it right.

If you want modern conversion-focused checkouts that convert, SureCart is the way to go. But WooCommerce gives developers ultimate control for high-end customization.

Also adding to the checkout experience, SureCart’s headless architecture enables all the payment processing and order processing “load” to be handled on SureCart’s servers.

That means your web host can concentrate on the user experience and fast loading rather than managing transactions as well.

4. SureCart vs WooCommerce: Marketing Capabilities

Winner: Tie

WooCommerce offers a slight edge when it comes to marketing features given its decade-old extensions ecosystem.

It lets you create shop archives showcasing your products in categorical layouts, has deeper CRM features, and integrates with popular email solutions.

SureCart takes a simpler approach focusing mainly on checkout optimization.

It can be integrated with marketing tools using SureTriggers, a service that helps you connect different WordPress plugins with other services and automate many repetitive processes.

So for sheer marketing feature depth, WooCommerce wins. But with the SureTriggers and SureCart combo, you can achieve a lot with much less effort.

5. SureCart vs WooCommerce: Subscriptions and Memberships

Winner: SureCart

Selling subscriptions and memberships is easier with SureCart. It supports a range of payment types including subscriptions by default.

If you want to create a paid membership site, you could combine SureCart with SureMembers and easily make it happen.

Support for recurring pricing allows you to create flexible subscription products out of the box.

You can charge monthly, and yearly, offer free trials, and give bulk purchase discounts.

SureCart simplifies subscription management even further with self-service portals where members can update billing themselves.

WooCommerce relies on third-party extensions like WooCommerce Subscriptions to support recurring payments.

While extensions work well, they add cost, maintenance, and potential performance drag.

For selling memberships and subscriptions, SureCart provides a smoother experience overall which is why it wins this category.

6. SureCart vs WooCommerce: Support and Documentation

Winner: WooCommerce

Given that WooCommerce powers 30% of online stores globally, it’s no surprise it offers unparalleled support and documentation.

There is thorough documentation, tutorials, videos, and a huge community forum to answer every question you could think of.

Most questions you’ll have are already answered somewhere!

SureCart also has solid documentation and a YouTube channel, but doesn’t yet have the volume or support depth WooCommerce does.

However, SureCart offers expert priority support for issues and the turnaround times have consistently been 24-48 hours.

7. SureCart vs WooCommerce: Integrations

Winner: WooCommerce

WooCommerce has the advantage of thousands of extensions that work just like WordPress plugins.

Being an open-source platform for over a decade has allowed it to nurture a thriving developer ecosystem.

Whether you need accounting, fulfillment, logistics, or marketing tools–chances are there’s a WooCommerce extension available.

SureCart is still growing its app marketplace but takes an API-driven approach with Zapier/SureTriggers support allowing hundreds of potential connections.

It comes down to flexibility vs simplicity.

WooCommerce offers endless customization possibilities through its myriad of apps. However, each installed plugin increases overhead on your servers from a security and performance perspective.

SureCart does not add integrations within its codebase—keeping the checkout plugin itself lightweight.

However, it connects seamlessly to essential business tools you already use through modern APIs. WooCommerce is the ultimate Swiss Army knife of commerce platforms.

But SureCart offers a smoother experience if you only need essential integrations using modern methodologies.

8. SureCart vs WooCommerce: Pricing

Winner: SureCart

SureCart delivers tremendous value out of the box with its free version. It contains all the core features you need to start collecting payments for products and services online.

You also get cart abandonment recovery tracking and automated sales tax collection.

Paid plans enable additional powerful features like subscriptions, advanced reporting, no SureCart branding, and more.

Plans start at $19/month.

With WooCommerce, you take on greater technical ownership in implementing and maintaining the platform.

The software is free and you only end up paying subscription fees for any individual extensions you use.

These can quickly add up to hundreds or thousands per year for any moderately customized WooCommerce implementation.

Enterprise stores spend even more on infrastructure and internal teams.

So if you want something that “just works”–start with SureCart’s free plan and go from there. If you have more experience or want to achieve more with your store, WooCommerce offers incomparable features.

The Verdict

After looking deeply across 8 major eCommerce considerations, we came to the following understanding.

SureCart is perfect for the typical small business owner starting and wanting simplicity.

WooCommerce is for businesses that want to create complex stores with ultimate flexibility.

If we had to start selling online, side-hustle style—SureCart would make that extremely smooth due to its beginner-friendliness.

If I knew I wanted to control each of the tiniest aspects of my eCommerce site, WooCommerce would be my choice.

But should you switch to another ecommerce solution if you’re already using one?

Should You Switch Your Ecommerce Solution?

If you currently have an existing WooCommerce store, should you upgrade to SureCart (or vice versa)? There likely isn’t urgency if everything already works well on your WooCommerce site. Its momentum and community support are still many years ahead.

However, as your store grows, SureCart presents several scaling benefits compared to typical WooCommerce sites:

• Fewer vulnerabilities: A well-thought-out code base helps keep vulnerabilities at bay.
• Faster load times: No checkout bloat so customers do not have to wait as they move between product -> checkout -> payment.
• Better UX: Modern customizable checkouts convert buyers more smoothly.
• Lower costs: Less developer and extension fees down the road.

The hardest part is migrating your existing products and order data over initially.

This is where Cart2Cart can help…

It offers fully managed, fixed-cost eCommerce platform migrations. We take care of everything technical so you can focus on the business!