Strip away the feature grids and the choice is one question: is how you sell ordinary, or unusual? Ordinary selling — products, variants, a cart, cards — is a solved problem, and hosted platforms solve it better than custom builds. Unusual selling — configured products, quoting, memberships, wholesale tiers, selling tangled up with content — is where self-hosted platforms earn their keep.

If your selling is ordinary: hosted

Shopify and its class (BigCommerce and kin) run the servers, the security patching, and most of the PCI burden for you. That last part matters more than the pretty themes: an unmaintained hosted store stays patched anyway, which makes hosted platforms the right default for any store without a standing developer relationship. The trade is a monthly fee, transaction economics, and their walls — customize past what the platform intends and you’re fighting the tool.

We build on the self-hosted platforms below, so read this as against interest: if a hosted platform fits your selling, take it. Honest advice is the brand, and half of good guiding is saying which lake not to paddle.

If your selling is unusual: self-hosted

WooCommerce — the pragmatic middle. WordPress underneath, enormous ecosystem, fine for stores that are mostly ordinary with a twist or two. The trade: plugin sprawl, and it needs real maintenance — an abandoned WooCommerce store ages badly.

Drupal Commerce — for stores that are really applications: complex pricing logic, products configured per order, commerce woven through content and user roles. The most flexible of the three and the most dependent on professional upkeep. When the fit is right, nothing else comes close; when it’s wrong, it’s a lot of canoe for a pond.

Magento 2 / Adobe Commerce — big-catalog, multi-store territory, with hosting and development costs to match. Right at a scale most Midwest stores never need.

The honest tiebreaker

Platform migrations cost real money, so the expensive mistake isn’t picking the “wrong” tier — it’s picking for the business you hope to be instead of the one you are. Start where today’s selling fits; the order history moves with you when the unusual day actually comes.