Headless WooCommerce vs Shopify Hydrogen: Developer's Comparison

If you're a developer evaluating headless WooCommerce vs Shopify Hydrogen, you're making an architectural decision that will shape every day of your working life on this project. Both stacks deliver decoupled, React-based storefronts backed by a commerce API. But the frameworks, data models, deployment stories, and long-term tradeoffs are materially different — and most comparison articles skim over the parts that actually matter to engineers.

This guide is written for developers, not store owners. (If you want the business-level comparison, read our Shopify headless vs WooCommerce guide instead.) Here we'll go deep on framework design, API surface area, deployment infrastructure, developer experience, and the real cost of each stack when you factor in lock-in.

Architecture at a Glance

Both stacks follow the same high-level pattern: a JavaScript frontend application fetches commerce data from a backend API, renders pages server-side (or at the edge), and hydrates on the client. The differences live in which framework handles routing, how the API is structured, and who controls the infrastructure.

Shopify Hydrogen is built on Remix (now under the React Router v7 umbrella). It adds a layer of commerce-specific components, hooks, and utilities — things like <Money>, <Image>, useCart(), and useShop() — that abstract away the Storefront API. Oxygen deploys it to Shopify's edge infrastructure using V8 isolates.

Headless WooCommerce (as implemented by WPBundle) uses Next.js as the frontend framework, communicating with WordPress/WooCommerce via the REST API or WPGraphQL. The frontend deploys to Vercel, Cloudflare Pages, or any Node-compatible host. WordPress runs on any PHP host — managed WordPress hosting, a VPS, or even a $5/mo Hetzner box.

Framework: Remix vs Next.js

This is probably the most consequential technical difference between the two stacks, and it's the one most articles ignore entirely.

Hydrogen uses Remix (React Router v7 with framework mode). Remix's mental model centres on web standards: loader functions for data fetching, action functions for mutations, nested routes with parallel data loading, and progressive enhancement via HTML forms. It's an elegant model that produces fast, resilient applications. Shopify chose Remix because its loader/action pattern maps cleanly onto commerce flows (load product → add to cart → checkout).

WPBundle uses Next.js, which takes a different approach. Next.js gives you React Server Components, the App Router with nested layouts, server actions, streaming SSR, and a massive ecosystem of middleware, adapters, and deployment targets. It's the most widely adopted React meta-framework by a considerable margin.

The pragmatic question: which framework does your team already know? If your developers live in Next.js (and statistically, most React developers do), WooCommerce lets you stay there. If your team prefers Remix's mental model, Hydrogen is a natural fit — just understand that you're coupling your framework choice to your commerce platform.

API Design: Storefront API vs WooCommerce REST/GraphQL

The API is the contract between your frontend and your commerce backend. It defines what data you can access, how you query it, and what operations you can perform. Both platforms offer GraphQL; both offer reasonable developer ergonomics. The differences are in scope, ownership, and flexibility.

Shopify Storefront API

Shopify's Storefront API is a purpose-built, commerce-specific GraphQL API. It's well-documented, versioned quarterly, and exposes a clean type system for products, collections, carts, customers, and checkout. Rate limits are generous (based on a calculated query cost, not raw request count). The API is read-heavy by design — mutations exist for cart operations and customer actions, but you can't create products or manage inventory through the Storefront API. That requires the Admin API, which is a separate surface.

Hydrogen provides typed hooks and utilities that wrap this API, so in practice you rarely write raw GraphQL queries. The DX is genuinely good.

WooCommerce REST API & WPGraphQL

WooCommerce ships with a comprehensive REST API out of the box. It covers products, orders, customers, coupons, shipping, taxes, and settings — both read and write. For GraphQL, the community-maintained WPGraphQL plugin (with the WooGraphQL extension) exposes a full GraphQL schema.

The WooCommerce API is broader in scope than Shopify's Storefront API. You get full CRUD on every resource, not just storefront reads and cart mutations. This matters when you need to build admin tooling, integrate with ERPs, or automate operations — you don't need a separate API surface.

Developer Experience

Credit where it's due: Hydrogen's developer experience is excellent. The CLI scaffolds a working storefront in minutes. TypeScript types are generated from your store's schema. Hot module replacement works reliably. The commerce primitives (<CartForm>, <Money>, <ShopPayButton>) handle edge cases you'd otherwise spend days debugging. Shopify has invested heavily in making the first-run experience smooth.

The WPBundle approach trades some of that scaffolding for broader flexibility. You're working in a standard Next.js project — meaning every Next.js tutorial, plugin, and pattern applies directly. There's no commerce-specific abstraction layer to learn (or fight against when it doesn't do what you need). You fetch data from the WooCommerce API using whatever HTTP or GraphQL client you prefer, and you build your components with standard React patterns.

Deployment: Oxygen vs Vercel (and Everything Else)

Oxygen is Shopify's edge hosting platform for Hydrogen storefronts. It runs on V8 isolates (similar to Cloudflare Workers), deploys automatically from GitHub, and is included with Shopify Plus. The integration is tight: environment variables are injected from your Shopify admin, preview deployments are linked to your store, and cache invalidation triggers automatically when products change.

The catch: Oxygen is only available on Shopify Plus ($2,300/mo minimum). On lower-tier plans, you can use Hydrogen but must deploy to Vercel, Cloudflare, or another host — which somewhat defeats the purpose of the integrated stack. And even on Plus, Oxygen only runs Hydrogen apps. You can't deploy arbitrary workloads, cron jobs, or microservices.

Headless WooCommerce deploys to anything. WPBundle storefronts are standard Next.js applications, so they deploy to Vercel, Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, AWS Amplify, or a self-hosted Node server. WordPress itself runs on any PHP host. This separation means you can optimise each layer independently: put WordPress on cheap managed hosting and the frontend on Vercel's edge network.

Data Ownership and Vendor Lock-in

This is the elephant in the room, and it's where the two stacks diverge most sharply.

With Shopify, your product data, customer records, order history, and analytics live on Shopify's infrastructure. You access them through Shopify's APIs, subject to Shopify's rate limits, terms of service, and pricing decisions. You can export data, but migrating away from Shopify means rebuilding integrations, rewriting API calls, and hoping your export captures everything you need. Shopify is a SaaS platform — you're renting access to your own data.

With WooCommerce, your data lives in a MySQL database that you own and control. You can query it directly, back it up however you like, migrate it to another host in minutes, or even fork the application layer entirely. WordPress is GPL-licensed software. If Automattic disappeared tomorrow, your store would keep running.

Pricing Model: SaaS vs Open Source

The cost structures are fundamentally different, and they compound over time in ways that aren't immediately obvious. For a thorough breakdown, see our headless WooCommerce cost guide.

Shopify Hydrogen requires Shopify Plus at $2,300/month minimum for the full Oxygen experience. That's $27,600/year before you've paid for custom development. You also pay Shopify's transaction fees unless you use Shopify Payments exclusively. Lower-tier plans ($39–399/mo) give you API access but not Oxygen hosting.

Headless WooCommerce with WPBundle involves a one-time licence fee, commodity WordPress hosting ($10–50/mo), and frontend hosting on Vercel's free or Pro tier. Total ongoing cost is typically under $100/month for infrastructure that handles significant traffic.

Ecosystem and Extensibility

Shopify's app ecosystem is large and well-curated, but it's a walled garden. Apps must go through Shopify's review process, pay revenue shares, and conform to Shopify's API surface. In headless mode, many Shopify apps don't work at all because they inject frontend code via Liquid templates. You'll need to check each integration carefully for Storefront API or headless compatibility.

WordPress's plugin ecosystem is the largest in the world — over 60,000 plugins, many of which work perfectly in a headless context because they operate on the backend (SEO, caching, email, analytics, CRM integrations). WooCommerce alone has thousands of extensions for payments, shipping, taxes, and subscriptions. Because WordPress is open source, you can modify any plugin or write your own without platform approval.

When Hydrogen is the Right Choice

Hydrogen genuinely makes sense in specific scenarios. Being fair about this matters — it's a well-engineered product.

Choose Hydrogen if: you're already on Shopify Plus and your team wants a first-party headless framework with tight platform integration. If you're building a storefront for a brand that will always be on Shopify, Hydrogen removes friction. The commerce primitives, TypeScript codegen, and Oxygen deployment pipeline are genuinely time-saving.

It also makes sense if your client has a large Shopify app ecosystem dependency and needs headless on top of it, or if your team strongly prefers Remix's loader/action pattern over Next.js's App Router.

When Headless WooCommerce is the Right Choice

Headless WooCommerce — particularly with WPBundle's pre-built stack — makes sense when you need control, flexibility, or cost efficiency.

Choose headless WooCommerce if: you want to own your data and infrastructure outright. If you're building for a client who can't justify $2,300/month in platform fees. If you need WordPress's content management alongside commerce. If you want to deploy your frontend wherever you like. If you're building a product that might outlast any single SaaS platform's pricing decisions.

It's also the stronger choice when your project needs deep customisation — custom checkout flows, complex product configurators, multi-vendor marketplaces — where Shopify's opinionated abstractions become constraints rather than conveniences. See our headless ecommerce platforms comparison for a broader view of the landscape.

Side-by-Side Summary

Here's how the two stacks compare across the dimensions that matter most to developers making an architectural decision.

What WPBundle Gives You

WPBundle is a production-ready headless WooCommerce stack that removes the setup overhead of building a decoupled architecture from scratch. Instead of spending weeks wiring up Next.js to WooCommerce, configuring ISR, setting up SEO, and building reusable components, you get a battle-tested starting point.

If you're evaluating headless WooCommerce as an alternative to Hydrogen, WPBundle is the fastest way to get a production-quality storefront running without building infrastructure from scratch.

The Bottom Line

Both stacks are technically competent. Hydrogen is a well-engineered, opinionated framework with excellent developer experience — within Shopify's boundaries. Headless WooCommerce with Next.js gives you broader control, lower costs, and the freedom to make architectural decisions without asking permission from a platform vendor.

For developers who value ownership, flexibility, and long-term independence, headless WooCommerce is the stronger foundation. For developers embedded in the Shopify ecosystem who want a streamlined, batteries-included experience, Hydrogen delivers. The right choice depends on your constraints, your team, and what you're optimising for.