Taberno vs WooCommerce
WooCommerce is free. Running a WooCommerce shop is not.
The plugin costs money every year, and the maintenance costs you evenings. This page lays out where that goes, what Taberno covers instead, and where WooCommerce is still the better answer.
The stack
What a working Woo shop is actually made of
Few shops run core alone. This is the shape most of them end up with, and every line is something to license, update and debug.
| To get this | WooCommerce | Taberno |
|---|---|---|
| Product reviews | Extension, annual licence | Built in |
| Upsells and bundles | Extension, annual licence | Built in |
| Abandoned basket emails | Extension, annual licence | Built in |
| Delivery dates and local pickup | Extension, annual licence | Built in |
| Wholesale and trade pricing | Extension, annual licence | Built in |
| Pre-orders | Extension, annual licence | Built in |
| Building pages without code | Page builder, plus a theme | Built in, with live preview |
| Order emails reaching inboxes | SMTP plugin and a mail provider | Configured for you |
| Staying fast | Caching plugin, often a CDN | Nothing to add |
| Not getting hacked | Security plugin and vigilance | Ours to worry about |
| Backups you can restore from | Plugin or host add-on | Nightly, off-site on Growth |
| Somewhere to test changes | A staging site you maintain | Draft and publish, with discard |
We have left the prices out deliberately. Extension pricing changes and depends on which vendor you bought from, and you already know your own renewals total better than we do. Add it up and compare it with $99 a month.
The day to day
Four things that stop happening
An update takes down checkout
With core, a theme and a dozen plugins from different authors, updates are a compatibility bet. Taberno is one codebase from one vendor. We roll updates out in batches and stop at the first sign of trouble, so a bad release reaches a handful of shops rather than all of them.
Order emails go to junk
WordPress sends through PHP mail unless you intervene, and confirmations quietly land in spam. Your shop sends through a properly authenticated domain from the day it opens, with replies going to you. There is nothing to set up.
You edit the live shop and hope
Changing a storefront layout in WordPress means changing what customers are looking at, right now. Here every edit is a private draft. Publish when you are happy, and Discard puts it back the way it was.
Nobody is responsible
When something breaks, core points at the plugin, the plugin points at the theme, and the host points at all three. There is one of us, and the shop is our software running on our servers.
Being fair
When WooCommerce is the better answer
It has had fifteen years and tens of thousands of developers. There are things it does that we do not, and if you need one of them you should stay where you are.
You need something niche
Multi-vendor marketplaces, appointment booking, complicated subscription billing, auctions. Somebody has written a Woo extension for it. We have not built it.
You have a developer who knows it
WordPress skills are everywhere and cheap to hire. If you already have someone who keeps your shop healthy, a lot of what we are selling is work they are already doing.
The site is mostly content
If you publish heavily and sell occasionally, WordPress is a better publishing tool than we are. We are built the other way round.
You want it free
Core plus free plugins on cheap hosting genuinely costs very little, if your time is not part of the sum. Ours is a paid product and we are not pretending otherwise.
Moving across
Bring the shop you already have
Products, variants, images, customers and order history come over from WooCommerce, so you open with your catalogue rather than an empty shop. Keep the old site running while you set this one up, and point your domain here when you are ready.
Nothing switches until you say so
Your shop gets a Taberno address to work on. The domain only moves when you point it, and your old site keeps serving until that moment.
Keep your payment account
You connect the same Stripe or PayPal account you use now. Customers, payouts and history stay where they are.
And you can leave the same way
Taberno is MIT-licensed. Export the whole shop and run it on your own server whenever you want. How that works.
Try it against your own catalogue
Free for 7 days with no card. Bring your products across and see whether it does what your plugins are doing, before you renew any of them.