WooCommerce vs Freemius:
Who Sells Plugins & Themes Better?

WooCommerce alternative for selling plugins and themes

All from a highly trusted platform in the WordPress community built by developers for developers.

Struggling to break through stagnating sales? We’ve helped many of our partners hit over $5k, $10k, $30k, $50k … per month and more. We’re happy to schedule a free advising call and see if we can help your business grow.

If you’re selling with WooCommerce, you’re familiar with how much extra work it is to maintain the “backend” of your plugin or theme business.

Self-host and manage everything

You’ ll have to buy all the extensions, set them up, customize, and optimize them yourself, using your own expertise on the best practices for marketing and sales automation.

Taxes, legal, compliance, and security requirements

When selling with WooCommerce, sales taxes, EU VAT, fraudulent transactions, credit card chargebacks, and compliance to regulations like GDPR and SCA are not handled for you.

Manage your own payment gateways

Whether it’s PayPal, Stripe, 2Checkout, or any gateways, they all have different configurations and take time to set up and manage.

Handle credit card disputes and chargebacks

If you lose a dispute, you’ll generally have to pay a fee of between $15-$20 and handle the dispute process by yourself, and it’s not easy to win disputes with high success rates.

Downtime & Reliability Issues

If your site or server goes down for even a few moments – even for basic updates – any licenses, activations, renewals, or payments that occurred in that time may not be recorded or, even worse, might get corrupted without warning.

Update, update, update

When updates come around, it’s up to you to oversee the entire process, from taking backups to testing the changes – all requiring valuable time that could be spent on development or marketing.

Manual freemium deployment

You have to maintain two separate versions of your plugin or theme if you’re offering a free and paid version – instead of maintaining both in a single codebase with intelligent licensing.

Lack of Sales & Marketing Support

Platforms like WooCommerce don’t have a vested interest in your business, so they don’t care how much money you make.

No Community Behind You

The WooCommerce community is so big that carving out your piece as a plugin or theme developer isn’t easy, and it’s really important to have an opportunity to learn from others in order to grow.

Why should you trust Freemius?

Some of the biggest names in the ecosystem are selling with us. They trust the backend of their businesses to Freemius because we’ve proven over and over again that we’re reliable, trustworthy, and can help WordPress developers innovate for growth.

Moving from WooCommerce and their licensing API extension to Freemius made our lives so much easier. The seamless EU VAT handling streamlined our UK-based business and we can now focus more on our products. The guys at Freemius have been really responsive and we love their vision.

Jamie Marsland

Pootlepress

THE BRANDS THAT SELL WITH FREEMIUS

How Freemius Delivers

Built for Scale

When you’re scaling your business, you need a platform that can grow with you. Freemius does all the work in the backend, so you don’t have to worry that subscription renewals won’t go through or that your customers might have some kind of problem on checkout. With a team of experts constantly optimizing the platform to maximize conversion rates, you can rest easy that you’ll be able to provide an optimal checkout experience that can handle thousands of sales.

With the sales and marketing automation tools built into the Developer Dashboard and WordPress SDK, plugin or theme shops struggling to break the $5k – $10k/month barrier can much more easily make the leap to $20 – $50k/month or more.

Don’t take our word for it – just listen to what our partners have to say.

Plugin or theme shops have ZERO scaling limitations with Freemius in the long-term.

Managed Software-as-a-Service Platform

Every aspect of the platform is managed by the Freemius team, and we are constantly adding new features to ensure that the platform is automating your sales and maximizing growth as much as possible.

Freemius is an opinionated platform that’s focused on growing recurring subscription revenues for our partners. That means that we regularly analyze mass quantities of data and run multivariate tests – all with the goal of optimizing conversion rates based on each change we make to the platform.

Your Monetization Team

Our revenue share pricing model ties the success of our partners together with the success of our platform. At the end of the day, we don’t rest until our partners are maximizing their sales as much as possible – it’s deeply ingrained within the DNA of our organization.

As a monetization team, we provide unfettered access to the latest tools of the trade to sustainably grow your plugin or theme business, and we share free advice on all aspects of selling digital products through our blog, YouTube channel, DEV Slack, and email support channels, so you have an extensive network of resources that will make growing your business much easier.

Developer Dashboard

Manage your digital product shop with a fully-featured Developer Dashboard, including analytics and insights that allow you to make actionable data-backed decisions. Stats include:

Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) Growth
Licenses distribution
Lifetime Customer Value (LTCV)
Installations, opt-ins, deactivations, and more
Top languages & countries of sites using your product
PHP, plugin, and WordPress versions
Deactivation feedback

SDK integration & Licensing

Highly advanced, yet simple enough to implement within minutes, the Freemius WordPress SDK allows you to specify free and paid features within a single codebase of your plugin or theme with a few simple lines of code.

With unique paid plans attached to licensing, you can ensure that only certain features are accessible based on the customer’s plan.

Deployment Mechanism

Using the freemium model to get more users? Manage a single, premium code base and streamline your development with the Freemius deployment mechanism. Along with licensing, Freemius Deployment allows you to “strip” the premium code from your product, leaving you with both paid and free versions ready for distribution.

For releases, you can offer a Beta version or use Staged Rollouts, which releases your new update in “buckets” to your users.

Customize your Plans and Pricing

We know complete flexibility is a must for plugin and theme shops of all kinds. We’ve made it easy to enter your pricing details and start selling immediately with the Freemius Checkout & Buy Button.

You can manage every aspect of your product pricing, from monthly, annual, or lifetime plans, to free trials for 7, 14, or 30 days with or without requiring a payment method upfront (not to mention coupons, renewal discounts, and more…)

User Dashboard

With a hosted and embeddable User Dashboard, you’ll be able to give your users and customers full control of their purchases, including licenses, subscription details, payment method changes, a dynamic contact form to get in touch with you for a variety of different reasons, and more.

Affiliate Platform

Freemius includes a fully featured affiliate platform out-of-the-box – no extra setup or additional costs. All you need to do is activate the affiliate program, and you can start onboarding affiliates through the WP Admin Dashboard or through a contact form on your website.

Painless Migration

We’ve created a simple, phased process to move your business over to Freemius while giving you full control over every step of the process. Work directly with our team to answer all your questions.

There’s no question that Freemius has made it a very real way for plugin developers to offer and sell their products. And Freemius isn’t just solving the problem of software license keys. They take care of checkout, taxes, software updates, license keys, and even support an affiliate program. Read the Full Article…

Chris Lema

VP Product at LiquidWeb

The Freemius Advantage

Software Licensing

$129-$299 / year

Specifically Built for Selling WordPress Plugins and Themes

Recurring Payments & Subscriptions

$199-$399 / year

Free Trials

Paid Trials

$199-$399 / year + Subscriptions Extension

EU VAT Handling

Deactivation Feedback Form

Sell From WP Admin Dashboard

Sell from any Website Platform

Selling Bundles

$49-$149 / year

Selling Memberships

$149-$249 / year

Single Version Management

Seamless Upgrade Process

Account Management in WP Admin Dashboard

Help Scout Integration

$79 / year

PDF Invoices

$79-$199 / year

A monetization team supporting your business

Pricing

All-inclusive
7%* rev-share

Get started at
$883/year minimum

The Freemius Advantage

Software Licensing

$129-$299 / year

Specifically Built for Selling WordPress Plugins and Themes

Recurring Payments & Subscriptions

$199-$399 / year

Free Trials

Paid Trials

$199-$399 / year + Subscriptions Extension

EU VAT Handling

Deactivation Feedback Form

Sell From WP Admin Dashboard

Sell from any Website Platform

Selling Bundles

$49-$149 / year

Selling Memberships

$149-$249 / year

Single Version Management

Seamless Upgrade Process

Account Management in WP Admin Dashboard

Help Scout Integration

$79 / year

PDF Invoices

$79-$199 / year

A monetization team supporting your business

Pricing

All-inclusive
7%* rev-share

Get started at $883/year minimum

Plugin and theme developers that have chosen Freemius as an alternative to WooCommerce for selling plugins and themes increased their monthly revenue by an average of 97% in 12 months.

After moving our theme shop from WooCommerce to Freemius, our conversion rate immediately increased by 15%. Also, we now have more time to focus on creating better themes.

Duke Devidze

Co-Founder at WP Royal

"Isn't Freemius more expensive than WooCommerce?"

From a cost perspective, Freemius is a more expensive solution when it comes to hard numbers if you make over $15k per year. However, due to automated marketing mechanisms and our proactive advisory to your business, we are the highest performing solution in town and the costs are far outweighed by the benefits when it comes to profitability and long-term growth.

EVERY single shop that has migrated from competing platforms like WooCommerce are now making more than what they made after deducting our revenue-share.

Therefore, we encourage you to think about the opportunity cost of sticking with your current platform and missing out on growth. It’s not about how much money you can save today – it’s about how much money you can make with the power of Freemius and our monetization team behind your plugin or theme business.

"How much more money can I really make by utilizing the power of Freemius and working closely with your expert monetization team?"

Here’s a few stats to show you what we’ve achieved for our partners after moving from WooCommerce to Freemius:

Automated Cart Abandonment Recovery - 7.5% increase in sales
In-dashboard checkout - ~12% increase in conversion from sales that initiated in the WP Admin - very powerful for freemium products that rely on WordPress.org for distribution.
Trials - 20-30% increase in sales after a month.
Buy Button with modal Checkout - ~11% increase compared to WooCommerce default checkout.

57% increase in revenues on the first month says it all. Freemius is a real business partner, not just a company you buy some plugins from. They genuinely care about my success. I was underestimating my plugin’s value, but after moving from WooCommerce to Freemius, the team has helped me with the pricing structure, which immediately changed everything.

Abdelfatah Aboelghit

WooCommerce Builder for Divi

High Volume Pricing

We understand that our relationship with you must be a win-win – also at scale. If you process high-volumes, get in touch with our team to check if you are eligible for a rates review. See our pricing for details.

SaaS or Self-hosted?

The difference between SaaS vs Self-hosted solutions for selling plugins and themes is whether you prefer to have most aspects of the platform managed or you want to set up and manage your entire licensing and sales solution yourself.

Let’s break down some of the key differences, and see how you might spend your time and resources using either type of platform.

Managed SaaS

Self-Hosted

Freemius is a managed Software-as-a-Service platform that works like a super-powered engine to automate your plugin or theme sales.

WooCommerce is a package of plugins that lets you self-host and customize your own digital software licensing and sales solution.

Build for WordPress Product People

Freemius was built for plugin and theme developers using best practices for marketing and selling digital products in the WordPress ecosystem.

Built for eCommerce People

WooCommerce was built for anyone who wants to sell physical goods, and only later 3rd party developers created extensions for selling software.

Revenue-sharing

Our reseller model ties together our success with your success – so we are highly motivated to help you make more money.

Pay for Essentials

For running a subscription-based business that licenses software, you’ll have to pay for extensions that let you accept recurring payments, manage license keys, and release software updates.

Insights & Analytics Out of the Box

Start collecting valuable data within minutes using the WordPress SDK to help you improve customer service and your product.

Add-ons Required for Analytics

For any kind of data collection or insights about how users are actually using your plugin or theme, you’ll need to buy add-ons or customize the solution yourself.

Reseller Model

Freemius acts as the merchant of record for transactions, which means we handle all tax and regulatory requirements, including EU VAT, GDPR, and much more.

You’re the Merchant of Record

Selling plugins or themes directly to customers? You’ll need to comply with all the tax requirements and legal regulations where your customers and/or your business are located.

Hosted Reliably

Your business keeps running smoothly all the time, no matter if your website is up or down – Freemius servers have the licensing and transactions handled.

Customize Everything, Yourself

You’ll need to customize every piece of the checkout logic, flow, and design for maximizing conversions.

Constantly Maintained

You don’t have to deal with any maintenance yourself, and we take care of the “backend.” All features are designed and maintained by a single cohesive team.

A House of Cards

A bug in any of the third party extensions you use can take down your whole store. Plus, all extensions must be compatible so everything can play well together.

Easily Convert Free Users

With the WordPress SDK, your pricing plans show up right in the WordPress Admin Dashboard – and they sync with the Freemius Developer Dashboard, so you don’t have to update your plugin to change your pricing.

No Freemium Conversion Flow

WooCommerce doesn’t provide an SDK that includes an ability for users to upgrade for your paid product versions directly through the WordPress Admin Dashboard – you’d have to build that yourself.

Simple Setup

After you’ve integrated the 10-min WordPress SDK and made your first sale, you get full access to all of the powerful marketing automations Freemius has to offer.

Complex Setup

When you’re setting up your own store and self-hosting everything, there’s a ton of variables to manage, and when things go wrong – it will all be on you to resolve.

Peace of Mind with Security & Reliability

Every line of code is triple-checked by the Freemius team with the best security practices in mind, not to mention thoroughly reviewed for bugs to ensure the proper handling of data.

Vulnerable to Hackers or Misconfiguration

Just like any self-hosted solution, it’s vulnerable to hacking or other security issues if you’re not careful, as well as misconfiguration errors that may lead to downtime.

Freemius has unlocked a way to let WordPress devs focus on developing plugins and themes. Everything e-commerce and licensing-related is handled for them.

Carl Alexander

WordPress Developer & Educator

Migration Process

1

Create a Migration Plan

We create a migration plan after learning about your current eCommerce setup and business needs.

2

We prepare the integration for you

We integrate the SDK and customize the checkout buttons on your WooCommerce site to override the old buy buttons, which offers a seamless Checkout experience for your customers.

3

Start making new sales through Freemius

Easily integrate the User Dashboard into your site, which offers a Single-Sign-on (SSO) legacy account management tool for your existing and new user accounts to access both your old and new platform with one login based on their license. If the user has a Freemius license, they will see the new experience. If your previous platform license, they will see the old experience.

4

Learn how Freemius works for 2-3 weeks and collect data

This is where you start to experience the power of the platform first-hand.

5

Import all existing licenses, subscription details, and more

Migrate customers from the previous platform to the new one after you approve everything.

Release a new version of your plugin or theme, which notifies users that they can use Freemius – and it’s not required to opt-in to data collection.

Release a blog post or announcement to make it clear about the benefits to your users and why using Freemius helps you help them.

With a phased migration process in place, you’ll start automating and growing sales without any risk to your current customers or subscription revenue – there is only opportunity for growth.

Join the Tribe!

WooCommerce targets sellers of all kinds – from mom and pop shops that sell physical goods like t-shirts to plugin and theme businesses with advanced licensing and pricing needs. The community is widespread, but it can be hard to find the people you need to talk to.

Freemius was built for WordPress plugin and theme developers. Our partners meet in the Freemius DEV Slack – a 700+ strong, highly active community of successful developers.

When you join Freemius, you’re not just signing up for some extensions that you have to manage and install yourself (like you do in the case of WooCommerce), you’re joining a community of like-minded individuals who are all learning from each other about the best practices for selling plugins and themes.

WooCommerce vs Freemius: Who Sells Plugins & Themes Better?

WooCommerce alternative for selling plugins and themes

Why should you trust Freemius?

Jamie Marsland

Pootlepress

THE BRANDS THAT SELL WITH FREEMIUS

How Freemius Delivers

Built for Scale

Managed Software-as-a-Service Platform

Your Monetization Team

Developer Dashboard

SDK integration & Licensing

Deployment Mechanism

Customize your Plans and Pricing

User Dashboard

Affiliate Platform

Painless Migration

Chris Lema

VP Product at LiquidWeb

The Freemius Advantage

Software Licensing

$129-$299 / year

Specifically Built for Selling WordPress Plugins and Themes

Recurring Payments & Subscriptions

$199-$399 / year

Free Trials

Paid Trials

$199-$399 / year + Subscriptions Extension

EU VAT Handling

Deactivation Feedback Form

Sell From WP Admin Dashboard

Sell from any Website Platform

Selling Bundles

$49-$149 / year

Selling Memberships

$149-$249 / year

Single Version Management

Seamless Upgrade Process

Account Management in WP Admin Dashboard

Help Scout Integration

$79 / year

PDF Invoices

$79-$199 / year

A monetization team supporting your business

Pricing

All-inclusive7%* rev-share

Get started at $883/year minimum

The Freemius Advantage

Software Licensing

$129-$299 / year

Specifically Built for Selling WordPress Plugins and Themes

Recurring Payments & Subscriptions​

$199-$399 / year

Free Trials

Paid Trials

$199-$399 / year + Subscriptions Extension

EU VAT Handling​

Deactivation Feedback Form​

Sell From WP Admin Dashboard​

Sell from any Website Platform

Selling Bundles​

$49-$149 / year

Selling Memberships

$149-$249 / year

Single Version Management​

Seamless Upgrade Process

Account Management in WP Admin Dashboard​

Help Scout Integration​

$79 / year

PDF Invoices​

$79-$199 / year

A monetization team supporting your business​

Pricing​

All-inclusive7%* rev-share

Get started at $883/year minimum

Duke Devidze

Co-Founder at WP Royal

"Isn't Freemius more expensive than WooCommerce?"

"How much more money can I really make by utilizing the power of Freemius and working closely with your expert monetization team?"

Abdelfatah Aboelghit

WooCommerce vs Freemius:
Who Sells Plugins & Themes Better?

All-inclusive
7%* rev-share

Get started at
$883/year minimum

Recurring Payments & Subscriptions

EU VAT Handling

Deactivation Feedback Form

Sell From WP Admin Dashboard

Selling Bundles

Single Version Management

Account Management in WP Admin Dashboard

Help Scout Integration

PDF Invoices

A monetization team supporting your business

Pricing

All-inclusive
7%* rev-share