head to head · open source
WooCommerce vs pay
WooCommerce has 10,518 GitHub stars, 10,674 forks, 1,638 open issues and last shipped today. pay has 5,366 stars, 1,052 forks, 6 open issues and last shipped 9 days ago. WooCommerce leads on adoption by 96% (10,518 vs 5,366 stars). WooCommerce is written in PHP under a custom or non-standard licence; pay is written in PHP under MIT. WooCommerce has attracted 101% as many forks as stars, pay 20%. WooCommerce was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (php), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| WooCommerce | pay | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 11K | ★ 5.4K |
| License | Custom / other | MIT |
| Written in | PHP | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-11 |
| Forks | ⑂ 11K | ⑂ 1.1K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick WooCommerce if
- You weight community size — 11K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick pay if
- You want the pay feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You evaluated both and pay fits your workflow better
About WooCommerce
WooCommerce is an open source ecommerce platform built on WordPress. It lives in the WordPress ecosystem, where a website owner can add commerce functionality through a plugin. The project is described as customizable and positioned as an open alternative to Shopify.
read the full WooCommerce overview →
About pay
Yansongda Pay is an open source PHP payment SDK that provides a unified interface to multiple Chinese payment gateways, including Alipay, WeChat, Douyin, Unipay, Jiangsu Bank, Tonglian Pay, and BestPay. It lives in the PHP ecosystem and is distributed as a Composer package under the MIT license. The project has been maintained for nine years, carries 5,367 stars and 1,052 forks, and its most recent push was on 11 September 2026. Framework specific wrappers exist for Laravel, Hyperf, and Yii, while the core package remains framework agnostic.
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Frequently asked questions
Is WooCommerce or pay more popular?
WooCommerce has 10,518 GitHub stars and pay has 5,366. WooCommerce has the larger community by that measure.
Are WooCommerce and pay free?
Both are open source. WooCommerce has no licence declared in this registry, and pay is licensed under MIT. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between WooCommerce and pay?
WooCommerce is written in PHP and pay in PHP. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, WooCommerce or pay?
Choose WooCommerce if you want the larger community (10,518 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose pay if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.