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EDD vs Freemius vs Gumroad vs WooCommerce: Which is Best

If you need customization support for EDD, you can hire one of their trusted consultants to help you build out your platform.

Freemius

To really start using Freemius for its full value, you’ll need customers. You won’t need to spend too much time customizing the Freemius platform except for optimizing the settings to the business and pricing model you’ve chosen for selling.

Since Freemius is managed solution (not self-hosted), they handle all the hard work for you. Freemius manages the platform, regularly and seamlessly release updates, and handle all payments on your behalf. You do have the option of embedding a fully-featured Users Dashboard on your website using a Freemius plugin, so customers can manage their account and purchases through your own branded page instead of the Freemius website. You can also customize the look and feel of the in-dashboard pricing, checkout, and users dashboard with custom CSS.

The main thing you should focus on when customizing Freemius includes testing different marketing strategies related to pricing, free-trials, affiliation, and more. You can start doing that in the Sellers Dashboard pretty much right after registering. Remember that the Freemius SDK also automatically collects feedback when users deactivate your product, so you can use that information to learn more about your customer needs and improve your product.

Freemius Developer Dashboard

Freemius takes the customization focus away from the platform and gives you the time you need to focus on building your business and the data you need to make more informed decisions.

For those who need greater customization, Freemius has a lot of options available, such as the WordPress SDK and events and custom webhooks that can be used to automate your marketing efforts. Freemius offers MailChimp integration to help you deliver automated emails and integration with WPfomify to offer FoMo popup notifications on your website when buyers interact with your product.

Overall, the main reason companies see success after moving to Freemius is that they fully take advantage of all the customization options Freemius has to offer. Freemius makes it really easy to test different pricing models for your product, like selling premium vs. add-on plugins, offering free trials for your product, and bundles of multiple products sold together. Because of this, you – as a decision maker for your business – can strategically determine the best pricing options for your products and figure out what works best for your customers. Using this information properly can allow you to have a positive impact on conversion rates.

Gumroad

Gumroad’s documentation is pretty clear on what they allow you to customize and what they don’t. There are a wide variety of features that correspond to the diversity of products that can be sold on their platform. The basics are that you’ll have to upload information about your product, branding materials, pricing information, and all those other standard details.

When you sell with Gumroad, they do give you Product, Profile, and Audience landing pages that can be customized with CSS, so you wouldn’t have to build your own website when using their platform. However, neglecting your own website might be a big mistake because with your own site you get to have micro-control over marketing your business, and you can therefore make your website a much more effective marketing tool.

Gumroad Customization

As a side note, we should mention that Gumroad’s features aren’t geared toward plugin and theme developers like the other platforms in this article.

WooCommerce

Similar to EDD, WooCommerce is highly customizable. They offer a useful guide to best practices on customizing WooCommerce, so it wouldn’t hurt to start your customization efforts there. One of the easiest ways to expand the default functionality of the WooCommerce plugin is to use WooCommerce extensions. Although a lot of WooCommerce extensions come at a cost, you can build out a great deal of useful functionality with them. There are also a wide variety of 3rd-party extensions available on the WordPress.org repository and by googling around.

WooCommerce extensions

Pretty much anything under the sun is available for WooCommerce if you can afford to put it all in your platform and/or you have the coding skills. Also like EDD, you can custom code WooCommerce all you want. There are consultants you can hire to help you out too.

Who offers the most customizable platform for selling plugins and themes?

We think it’s a tie between EDD, WooCommerce, and Freemius because even though EDD and WooCommerce can be completely customized, their features aren’t built specifically for selling WordPress plugins and themes. This is unlike Freemius – which is far less customizable – but the main difference is that Freemius’ features and customization options are built to help plugin and theme businesses maximize conversion rates.

? Customer support

EDD

All EDD packages come with standard email support. You can also buy priority support (which is faster than standard support) for $299/year or $99 for 45 days. Priority support allows EDD reps to login to your website to help troubleshoot problems when necessary.

EDD does not support customization, which you’ll need to do yourself or hire a consultant to help, as mentioned above.

Freemius

Freemius provides customer support in a number of ways. Mainly, their docs go through how to set up the Freemius SDK, use different features of the platform, and implement various customizations. The Freemius team provides email support for all sellers who have joined their platform, whether indie-developers who are starting a new plugin or theme business or well-established plugin and theme businesses that want to take their business to the next level.

One of the biggest areas where Freemius provides support is for migration to the Freemius platform. The CEO of Freemius personally oversees the onboarding process for new sellers who already have EDD or WooCommerce stores that meet certain criteria. Freemius will handle the migration process, import all existing customer data and licenses (whether in EDD, WooCommerce, or marketplaces like ThemeForest and CodeCanyon), and help make the migration process as easy as possible. The Freemius migration docs also include some of the most up-to-date processes for migrating to Freemius from self-hosted eCommerce platforms or marketplaces.

For support using Freemius features (besides via email), Freemius has a community Slack available to Sellers on their platform. To join, you just have to start integrating your plugin or theme with their SDK and you can make a request to their support team. The community is full of other plugin and theme sellers who are working on growing their businesses on a daily basis.

Freemius Top Notch Support and Community

Additionally, Freemius supports their partners through the We Got Your Back Club, which is all about giving sellers a leap forward on marketing and overall business strategy for their product. The We Got Your Back Club is an additional benefit for all sellers who use their platform and shows just how much Freemius really cares about it’s partners.

Gumroad

Gumroad’s docs are pretty extensive and seem well-written and easily understood. Although their features are less customizable than WooCommerce, EDD, and Freemius, the support structure in place seems more than enough to meet the needs of their sellers (which must be pretty diverse). They also have a nice contact button available on their help page, which is available for anyone to ask questions and they have useful page that shows options for contacting Gumroad.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce provides docs, pre-sales support, and – if you’ve purchased a plugin or theme – premium email support. Their support policy states that they cover their products “as-is” and do not offer customization support. This is all around a pretty fair policy.

Most readers of this article have probably used WooCommerce before, and you may even be familiar with their support channels. If one of their products doesn’t work – they’ll definitely take care of you and figure out why it’s happening (and fix it if it’s a failure or bug in one of their products). Here’s a nice little guide they provide on How to Get Help. Since WooCommerce is the most widely used eCommerce platform on WordPress, major bugs are worked out all the time due to the very high number of support tickets they’ve received.

Who gives customers that “red-carpet” customer service feeling?

Although WooCommerce provides comprehensive support at no extra cost for their products, Freemius seems to offer the best support overall. The approach to working with customers as partners is second-to-none in the WordPress ecosystem, and the customers have given sterling reviews to prove it. The added benefit of becoming part of Freemius’ plugin and theme selling community makes the experience that much better because you can build relationships with fellow sellers while learning the best ways to sell your products.

? Features

No matter what type of product you sell online, it’s critical that your selling platform meets the unique needs of your product niche. If you’re a WordPress developer, you need features that are ready to help your plugin or theme business grow. Many of the platforms in this article have features that are meant for businesses that sell all types of products, so the table below compares the platforms strictly based on features that are found to be some of the most effective for selling plugins and themes and for building a large user base in the WordPress ecosystem.

To help understand the chart below, here are some hints:

  • Some platforms offer features and benefits that can augment or support your marketing and sales efforts out-of-the-box, so there won’t be any configuration or customization needed of these features ✅.
  • Some features can be implemented with extensions, add-ons, 3rd party integrations, or extensive customization ?.
  • Other features are completely missing from some platforms even though they’re proven to be really successful at increasing revenue for plugin and theme sellers and they’re really difficult to customize on your own ❌.
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