The wrong question
“Which is best?” has no answer, because these platforms optimise for different businesses. The useful question is: who is going to update this in eighteen months? Pick for that person, not for the feature list.
WordPress
Right for content sites, brochure sites, small e-commerce via WooCommerce, and businesses whose site is mostly words. Huge ecosystem, cheap hosting, and a theme plus a handful of plugins. The cost is ongoing: plugins need updating, and a stack of ten plugins is ten things that can break. Best when somebody on your side is comfortable edoring pages themselves.
Laravel
Right when the site is really an application: accounts, subscriptions, custom reporting, integrations with something nobody else has. You get exactly the behaviour you specify, and you own it. The trade is honest: it costs more to build and it needs a developer for changes, because there is no admin screen to click. If your business logic is the product, this is the correct answer.
Shopify
Right when the primary job is selling products and the team should not be running web software. Checkout, payments, tax and mobile storefront are handled. You pay monthly, per-transaction fees apply, and you own less of the stack. For straightforward retail this is usually the cheapest total cost even when the platform fee looks expensive.
Where WooCommerce fits
WooCommerce is WordPress plus e-commerce, which makes it the natural fit when you want to own your content and your store together and your catalogue is not enormous. It is a poor fit if you need very large catalogues, complicated subscription logic, or nobody who can maintain a plugin stack.
A decision rule that holds up
- Content-first, small catalogue, someone will edit it: WordPress.
- Selling is the whole job, team is not technical: Shopify.
- The site has rules no template can express: Laravel.
- Content and a modest store together: WordPress + WooCommerce.
We work across all of them, so this is not a sales preference — see the our services.
Next step
Tell us what you sell and who will update the site. Honest recommendation, fixed price if it needs building: Who ends up doing the updates on your current site — and are they still around to do it?