I build WooCommerce. So you would expect me to tell you Shopify is bad. It is not bad. It is very good at a specific thing, and if that thing is your thing, go use it and I will help you pick a theme.
Here is the actual decision.
Go Shopify if
You sell straightforward physical products with sizes and colors and you want to be live in three weeks. Shopify is built for exactly that and it is very hard to beat.
You never want to think about hosting, updates, security, or PCI compliance. That is genuinely worth money and they handle all of it.
You are testing whether the business works at all. Do not spend seven thousand dollars finding out if people want the thing. Spend a few hundred, find out, then build properly.
Go WooCommerce if
Your products are weird. Custom quotes, made to order, per foot pricing, wholesale tiers, service plus product bundles, anything where the shape of the sale is not a t shirt. Every one of those is an app subscription on Shopify and a field on WooCommerce.
You are doing real volume. Shopify takes a cut. At a certain revenue that cut is larger than the entire cost of owning your own store, and it never stops.
You care about owning it. Your product data, your customer list, your layouts, your files, on hosting you control, in a database you can export. That matters to some people a lot and to some people not at all, and both are fine as long as you chose on purpose.
The cost comparison people get wrong
Everybody compares the base plan to hosting and stops there. Then the real bill shows up.
Reviews app. Subscriptions app. Upsell app. Bulk editor. Advanced shipping rules. Loyalty. Each one is somewhere between ten and eighty a month and they stack. I have seen stores paying more in apps than in the platform.
Add all of it up over three years before you decide anything. The number usually surprises people.
What I actually tell people
If you are not sure yet, start on Shopify. Seriously. Prove the business, then come back and we will build you something you own once it is worth owning.
A store from me starts around 6,800 dollars. That is not a number you should spend on a maybe.