The Shopify alternative for a site that also sells
Where Shopify ends and Aglyn begins
Shopify's ladder, as published September 2026: Basic $39/mo ($29 annual), Grow $105/mo ($79), Advanced $399/mo ($299), and Plus from $2,300/mo. Online card rates run 2.9% + 30¢ on Basic, 2.7% on Grow and 2.5% on Advanced.
The number worth reading twice is the third-party transaction fee. Use any processor other than Shopify Payments and Shopify adds 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus on top of whatever your processor already charges. Aglyn has no equivalent surcharge — bring your own processor and the only fee is your processor's.
Aglyn's own fees, stated plainly rather than buried: 2% of physical-goods sales on Starter, 0.5% on Pro and 0% on Custom; 5% of digital goods and memberships on Starter, 3% on Pro and 0% on Custom.
The real difference is not the fee table though. It is what the store sits inside. On Shopify the storefront is the product and the marketing site is a theme, a page-builder app, or a second site somewhere else. In Aglyn the pages, the CMS collections, the forms, the contact records, the email and the store are one document tree in one console.
Aglyn vs Shopify, side by side
| Aglyn | Shopify | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry paid plan | Starter $25/mo ($16 annual) | Basic $39/mo ($29 annual) |
| Mid plan | Pro $69/mo ($49 annual) | Grow $105/mo ($79 annual) |
| Platform fee, physical goods | 2% on Starter, 0.5% on Pro, 0% on Custom | 0% with Shopify Payments |
| Fee for using another processor | None | 2% · 1% · 0.6% · 0.2% by plan |
| Staff / seats | 2 on Starter · 3 on Pro | 0 on Basic · 5 on Grow · 15 on Advanced |
| Sites per plan | 1 on Starter · 3 on Pro, then $20/mo each | One store per plan |
| CMS, forms, CRM, email marketing | Included | Apps, mostly paid monthly |
| Source available | Apache-2.0 | Proprietary |
Aglyn prices and fees from aglyn.com/pricing, November 2026. Shopify prices and rates as published September 2026. Card processing is separate on both.
More than one store on one plan
Three or more brands, each with its own store, on plan prices alone (Shopify's read from shopify.com/pricing on 3 November 2026):
| Aglyn Pro | Shopify Basic | |
|---|---|---|
| Three stores | $69/mo, or $49/mo billed yearly | $117/mo, or $87/mo billed yearly, one plan per store |
| Four stores | $89/mo, or $69/mo billed yearly | $156/mo, or $116/mo billed yearly |
| Five stores | $109/mo, or $89/mo billed yearly | $195/mo, or $145/mo billed yearly |
| Stores under one plan | 3 included, then $20/mo each | Not on Basic, Grow or Advanced; Plus includes up to 9 expansion stores, from $2,300/mo |
| CRM and appointment bookings | Included | Apps |
On the bare rate line Shopify is cheaper for a single online store: Basic is $39 a month against Pro's $69, and Shopify Payments takes no platform fee where Pro takes 0.5% of physical sales and 3% of digital ones. The fee also narrows the multi-store saving: on three stores the $48 a month saved on plans ($38 billed yearly) is used up once combined physical sales pass about $9,600 a month ($7,600 billed yearly).
What Shopify does better
This is the page where the honest list matters most, because on pure commerce Shopify wins it outright.
- Commerce depth, decisively. Inventory across locations, shipping and tax at scale, B2B, international pricing, fraud analysis. If commerce is the business, this is the list that matters and Aglyn does not compete on it.
- The app store. Tens of thousands of commerce apps for problems Aglyn has not met yet.
- Checkout conversion. Shopify's checkout is among the most optimized on the internet, and Shop Pay has no equivalent here.
- Scale and operations. Black Friday at Shopify's volume is a solved problem there. Aglyn is the newer platform and does not publish an uptime SLA.
You can take it with you
Aglyn is licensed under Apache 2.0. The whole platform can be run on your own infrastructure using the Docker Compose setup in the repository and your own Firebase project, and a site's content can be exported from Pro up.
Self-hosting means building from source with the repository's Docker Compose setup. We do not currently publish prebuilt images.
Comparison researched 3 September 2026 against Shopify's own published pricing and documentation. Shopify is a trademark of Shopify Inc. Aglyn is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Shopify.