Features Comparison
Freemius vs. WooCommerce vs. EDD vs. CodeCanyon / ThemeForest
| / |
|---|
| / | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $50 / year | $50 / year | Free |
| Free | Free | $50 / year | Free |
| Free | Free | Free | Free |
| Free | $129 / year | $199 / year | Free |
| $199 / year | $199 / year | ||
| $199 / year Subscriptions Extension |
$199 / year Recurring Revenues Extension |
||
| Hours | Weeks | Weeks | Hours |
| $79 / year | |||
| Free | $199 / year | $147 / year | |
| Monthly | Immediate | Immediate | Monthly |
| SaaS | Self-hosted | Self-hosted | Marketplace |
| Free | $600 / year | $600 / year | Free |
| Free | $199+ / year | ||
| On you | On you | ||
| Free | $65 / year | $65 / year | Free |
| Free | $999 / year | ||
| Free | $300 / month | $300 / month | |
| Free | $100 / month (for 10,000 users) |
||
| 7% (*) | > $1,400 / year | > $1,500 / year | 30% - 70% |
| On you (with option to ride on WP repo distribution) |
On you | On you | Inside the marketplace |
$1k, $5k - aggregated gross, not monthly
Enabled
Partially
Not available
There’s much more to selling a product online than a checkout form & gateway fees!
The day you turn to a product-based business strategy is the day you realize how many 3rd party products and services you need to use to get your product out there doing its thing for the people who like it - your clients. That’s because when you’re selling a digital product there’s more to it than a checkout form & gateway fees.
The 3-Step Process
Sowing Your Seed
Host Your Digital Product
You're going to need to find a secure hosting service to serve your product form. There's bad hosting, there's good hosting and there's great hosting. All depends on your budget and priorities.
Purchase an SSL Certificate
To secure your data and transactions you'll need to obtain an SSL certificate for your website with one of the trusted sellers.
Gateway Fees
Online sellers have to pay a fee for the services that pass transaction data around the internet to either authorzie or deny a deal. There's a bunch of these services available for you to choose from, according to your specific needs.
Software Licensing
In order to control the number of sites your product is valid for, as well as what happens after a purchased license expires - you're going to need to handle software licensing. This capability usually comes with a price tag on it.
Nurturing & Caring
Support System Integration
Your customers are the ones writing the check (or making the $ transaction, in your case), and one way they measure the quality of the product you are selling is the support you provice for it. You'll need a way for your customers to communicate with you, and for you to manage that communication in an efficient manner.
Enabling Growth
Customer Data - Insights
Who are the people who chose to use and maybe purchase your product, out of all products in the world? If you don’t know that how will you be able to get more of them onboard?
Segmentation of Users
After you collect all of that data about the people who use your product you want to organize it in a smart manner so it is actually usable, rather than just piles upon piles of raw data reports. Segmenting your users according to their profiles is vital if you ever want to use it.
Analytics & Usage Tracking
So after you know your users and have their related data segmented elegantly - you need to know how are they using your product, especially if we’re talking about a digital product. There are many tools to help you learn that so make it a habit to regularly consult at least one.
Marketing Automation / Email
Having data is awesome, but what do you do with it? Enter marketing. When you have all of your user-base data figured out and segmented by profiles and by the actions they take - it’s time to put that into use and start marketing to them in order to increase your sales. But wait, there’s one thing that’s even better than marketing, and that’s automated marketing. Simply stated it’s marketing so smart it is done automatically, without you having to lift a finger. Now that’s scaling!
CRO - Conversion Rate Optimization
With all of these processes in place you’ll naturally want to perform improvements and tests in order to optimize them, to make sure they are performing at their best for you and for your product sales.
Your Time Is Valuable
Let us not forget that Time = Money. The time you spend researching, choosing & setting up all of the different services is valuable and expensive. There are a gazillion other good things you could be doing instead, so you should probably be trying to use that resource wisely.
Making Your Decisions Easier
Let's examine a classic case of a plugin/theme owner who wants to put their product out there and start making revenue off of his/her product. That plugin/theme owner is you, by the way, and your product will be a WordPres plugin/theme. Here are some important facts about your product:
Freemium
Business Model
10,000
Active Users
2%
Conversion Rate
$100
Annual License
Your Annual Gross Sales
200
Sales / Year
$ 20 K
Gross Revenue / Year
It's important to note that those numbers are here to simplify the idea and to make it easier to grasp. It's always easier when you have a specific example with round numbers in mind, BUT, even if those numbers do not precisely represent your current product’s situation you should still keep on reading this, and you'll see why in just a little bit. We promise.
So Which Of The Options Is Right For You? How Are You Going To Sell Your WordPress Plugins & Themes?
It's easy to see that each of the compared options carries its own set of pros & cons. When making a commitment to a platform to sell your products on - it is important to try and think ahead about what may be your future needs, and how each solution handles them for you.
As mentioned above - "There's much more to selling a product online than a checkout form & gateway fees" and that's why you should choose carefully. That said, it might be worth to check what are your migration options out of each platform, if the need ever arises. If a platform "locks you in" and does not provide comfortable data export - maybe that's a reason to think twice.
We do hope that after reading this comparison (Oh, and here's another one) you are able to make a wiser decision about which of the services suits best for your needs, and not less important - your budget!