Last updated: September 6, 2026. Some links on this page are affiliate links — if you sign up through one, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. It never changes what we recommend. See our Affiliate Disclosure.
How we know: we tested Systeme.io hands-on in our own free-plan account. We do not run a Shopify store: our first-hand Shopify experience is limited to the payments side, years ago, and is flagged as such where it appears. Everything else about Shopify here comes from its published pricing page and documentation, checked on the date shown.
Our verdict
If you ship a physical object, this comparison is already over: use Shopify. Systeme.io has no inventory, no shipping rules, and no fulfilment — and no amount of price advantage fixes that. If what you sell is digital — a course, a membership, a download, access to you — then Shopify is an expensive way to run a checkout you could have for $0, and Systeme.io gives you the funnel and the email list in the same account. The tie-breaker is not price. It’s whether anything leaves a warehouse.
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Shopify is a commerce platform: products, inventory, shipping, tax, and a checkout that has been optimised harder than almost anything else on the web. Systeme.io is a funnel and email platform that happens to be able to charge people. Put like that the choice sounds obvious, and for physical goods it is. The reason this comparison gets searched at all is that a lot of people selling digital things end up on Shopify by default, and pay for a warehouse they never use.
A note on Shopify’s prices before we get to the table
Shopify does not publish one global price, and we are not going to pretend it does. Its pricing page serves a different currency and a different number depending on the country you open it from. When we checked on September 6, 2026, shopify.com/pricing served us Japanese yen: ¥3,650/mo for Basic on annual billing, ¥10,100 for Grow, ¥44,000 for Advanced. Your country’s page will show something else, and converting our figure at today’s exchange rate would not give you your number either.
So this comparison uses what doesn’t change by country: the structure. That turns out to be where the real differences live anyway.
Structure, side by side
| Systeme.io | Shopify | |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | Yes, permanent — 3 funnels, 2,000 contacts, unlimited emails, custom domain | None |
| Trial | Not applicable — the free plan doesn’t expire | 3 days free, then an introductory rate for 3 months |
| Entry price | $17/mo (Startup) — unlimited funnels, 5,000 contacts | Basic — priced by country (see note above) |
| Platform’s cut of a sale | 0% on every tier, free included | Card rates from 3.55% (Basic) to 2.9% (Plus) via Shopify Payments |
| Penalty for using your own processor | None — connect Stripe or PayPal, Systeme.io takes nothing | +2% on Basic, +1% Grow, +0.6% Advanced, +0.2% Plus |
| Physical products | No inventory, shipping, or fulfilment | Native — inventory, shipping rates, tax, POS |
| Email marketing | Unlimited sending on every tier | Shopify Email, metered, with an app ecosystem around it |
The row people get wrong: “0% transaction fees”
This is the line that comparison articles routinely mangle in Systeme.io’s favour, so here it is straight. Systeme.io’s 0% means Systeme.io takes nothing. You still pay Stripe or PayPal their normal rate — the money does not become free. And Shopify’s 3.55% is a processing rate, the equivalent of Stripe’s fee, not an extra layer on top of it. Comparing 0% to 3.55% as though they measure the same thing is simply wrong.
The genuine extra charge on Shopify is the row underneath: if you use any processor other than Shopify Payments, Basic adds 2% to every order. That is a platform fee on top of whatever your processor already charges, and it is the one number in this table that has no counterpart on Systeme.io at all. On $5,000/month in sales it’s $100/month, for nothing you can point at.
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Where the money actually goes
What Shopify has that Systeme.io does not
- Everything about physical goods. Inventory counts, variants, shipping rates, tax calculation, labels, returns, POS hardware. Systeme.io has none of it and is not trying to.
- A checkout that has had a decade of optimisation spent on it, plus wallet payments and a saved-details network most shoppers already have an account in.
- An app store deep enough to cover almost any edge case — subscriptions, bundles, wholesale, local delivery. You pay per app, but the answer usually exists.
- Staff accounts and roles that assume more than one person touches the business.
What Systeme.io has that Shopify does not
- A permanent free tier that can take money. Shopify has no free plan at any level — three days, then you are paying.
- Courses and memberships as native objects, with drip scheduling and access control. On Shopify these are apps with their own monthly fees.
- The email list in the same account as the checkout, with unlimited sending on every tier. The sequence that follows a purchase is not a separate subscription.
- Funnels with order bumps and one-click upsells built in, plus an affiliate program you can run without another tool.
What I can tell you first-hand, and what I can’t
I used Shopify in the early days and later moved to a different provider. I want to be careful about what that does and doesn’t tell you, because “I left Shopify” is exactly the sentence someone uses when they are about to sell you an alternative.
I did not leave because of a disaster. There wasn’t one. And I did not leave to escape fees — where I ended up, card processing ran around 3%, which is roughly what staying would have cost. If you are hoping the fee comparison will make the decision for you, my honest experience is that it won’t. At the volumes most people are actually at when they ask this question, the difference between platforms is a rounding error next to the difference in what you spend your evenings doing.
What I do remember clearly is the app store: it makes automation feel mandatory long before it actually is, and the crossover point where an app starts paying for itself arrives much later than the app’s landing page implies. That is a general Shopify impression, not a claim about any one feature or paywall — I am not going to dress up a vague memory as a specific one.
What I cannot tell you first-hand is what Shopify is like at scale, with a team, or with a complex catalogue. I haven’t run that, and the internet has enough people describing businesses they don’t have. Everything above about Shopify’s current plans comes from its own pricing page on the date at the bottom of this article; everything about how it felt to use comes from the paragraph you just read, and no further.
Three questions that actually decide it
- Does anything physical leave a building? If yes, Shopify, and stop reading. Inventory and shipping are not features you can work around with a clever funnel.
- Is the thing you sell actually access? A course, a membership, coaching, a community, a download. If so, Shopify is a store built for parcels being used to deliver a login, and you are paying for the parcels.
- Who owns your email list? On Shopify the list, the sequences, and the automation usually end up in a separate paid tool. On Systeme.io they are in the same account as the checkout that created them. If email is how you actually sell, that consolidation is worth more than any line in the pricing table.
Frequently asked questions
Does Shopify have a free plan?
No. Shopify offers 3 days free and then an introductory rate for the first 3 months, but there is no permanent free tier at any level. Systeme.io’s free plan does not expire and can take payments on day one.
Can I sell physical products on Systeme.io?
Not realistically. There is no inventory management, no shipping rate calculation, no tax engine, and no fulfilment workflow. You can technically charge someone for an object, but you would be running the entire operation outside the platform. This is the single clearest dividing line between the two.
Is Systeme.io really 0% transaction fees compared to Shopify’s 3.55%?
Those two numbers do not measure the same thing, and treating them as equivalent is the most common mistake in this comparison. Shopify’s 3.55% is its card processing rate — the job Stripe does. Systeme.io’s 0% means Systeme.io adds nothing to whatever Stripe or PayPal already charges you. The real like-for-like extra is Shopify’s third-party transaction fee: 2% on Basic if you use a processor other than Shopify Payments. Systeme.io has no equivalent to that.
Can I use Shopify and Systeme.io together?
Yes, and for a business with both physical and digital products it is often the right answer: physical goods stay on Shopify, while courses, memberships, and the email sequences live on Systeme.io. Since Systeme.io’s free plan is permanent, you can run the second half at $0 until it earns its own upgrade.
Which is better for selling online courses?
Systeme.io, by a wide margin on cost. Courses, drip scheduling, and membership access are built in at every tier including free. On Shopify a course is an app subscription bolted onto a store designed for parcels, and you pay a monthly platform fee for infrastructure your product never touches.
I’ve been building and maintaining websites for about ten years. The first one is still online a decade later, and I still fix it when something breaks — which is how I learned that the interesting part of any platform is not the launch, it’s year three. I co-owned that site’s business, though I am not a co-owner today; the business itself has since closed. Separately, I have also run an online store on Shopify, until the fees pushed me onto a different payment system. Today I choose the host, the theme and write the plugins that run this site, and I pay for the tools I test out of my own pocket. More on the About page, and exactly what we did and did not test in how we test.
Plans and fees verified against each company’s public pricing page on September 6, 2026. Shopify prices by country; the figures shown are what its pricing page served us on that date and are not a global price. Vendors change terms without notice — check before you buy, and tell us if you find something out of date.
Try it yourself: Systeme.io’s free plan is permanent, not a trial — 3 funnels, 2,000 contacts, unlimited emails, a custom domain, and 0% platform fees. Start on the free plan and find out in a weekend whether it covers what you need. (Affiliate link — see our disclosure.)