If you’re looking for a way to sell WordPress plugins or themes, sooner or later you’ll come across Easy Digital Downloads. EDD has been around for years and powers thousands of digital product stores. It’s flexible, reliable, and gives developers complete control over their business. I’ve used EDD myself. In fact, before building WPBay, I seriously considered going fully self-hosted and running everything myself.
The problem is that selling products is only part of the equation. You also need customers. That’s where the biggest difference between WPBay and EDD becomes obvious.
What Is Easy Digital Downloads?
Easy Digital Downloads is a WordPress plugin that lets you build your own digital product store.
You install WordPress, install EDD, configure payments, licensing, updates, subscriptions, and you’re ready to start selling. The biggest advantage is ownership. You control your website, your branding, your pricing, your customer data, and your entire business. Nobody can change the rules overnight because you own the platform.
What Is WPBay?
WPBay is a marketplace built specifically for WordPress plugins and themes. Instead of building and maintaining your own store, you can list your products on WPBay and start selling through an existing platform designed for WordPress developers.
WPBay includes:
- Product listings
- Licensing
- Automatic updates
- Subscriptions
- Seller profiles
- Customer support tools
- Payment processing
- Product discovery
The goal is to remove the technical overhead while helping developers reach customers.
WPBay vs EDD – The Biggest Difference
This comparison is really about one question: Do you want to run a store, or do you want to sell products?
With EDD, you’re running a store. With WPBay, you’re selling products through a marketplace. Neither approach is wrong. They’re just different.
Traffic
This is where many developers underestimate the challenge. Setting up EDD is relatively easy. Getting customers is not.
You still need to build a website first, than create landing pages which look good, handle SEO for them, run ads, grow your email list, doing all of this by building trust and continuing generating traffic… I told you here the formula of success… But it requires a ton of work and also (believe me or not), a good portion of luck…
So, without visitors, even the best plugin store won’t generate sales. WPBay provides a marketplace where customers are already browsing WordPress plugins and themes. You’re not starting from zero.
Setup Time
Launching an EDD store can take days or weeks depending on how much customization you need.
You’ll likely need:
- Hosting
- Security
- Backups
- Payment gateways
- Licensing software
- Subscription management
- Updates infrastructure
- Email systems
Some developers enjoy managing all of that. Others would rather spend their time building products. With WPBay, most of the infrastructure already exists. You create your seller account, upload your product, and start selling.
Maintenance
This is the part many people forget. A self-hosted store isn’t something you set up once and forget about.
You’ll need to maintain all of handling updates, server maintenance, security monitoring, payment integrations and verifications, tax payments, performance optimizations and the list can go on and on… Over time, that becomes a significant investment. WPBay handles the platform so developers can focus on development.
Customer Ownership
EDD wins here. It’s your website. Your domain. Your database. Your customer relationships. Nobody can argue with that.
If complete ownership is your highest priority, a self-hosted store will always provide the most control. WPBay still allows developers to build their own brand through seller profiles and direct customer interaction, but it remains a marketplace rather than a self-hosted solution.
Cost
Many developers assume self-hosting is free. It isn’t!
While EDD itself may appear affordable initially, running a professional plugin business requires: premium extensions, hosting, licensing systems, email services, security tools + marketing all the way!
The total cost depends on the size of your business, but it’s rarely as cheap as people expect. WPBay removes much of that infrastructure cost because the platform already exists.
Scaling
As sales increase, your infrastructure requirements increase too: more downloads, more support requests, more update checks, more traffic and as a result: more maintenance. With EDD, scaling is your responsibility. With WPBay, scaling the marketplace is our responsibility.
Which One Should You Choose?
EDD is a great choice if:
- You want full ownership
- You already have traffic
- You enjoy managing websites and infrastructure
- You want complete control over every aspect of your business
WPBay is a great choice if:
- You want exposure through a marketplace
- You want less technical overhead
- You want licensing and updates already handled
- You want to focus on building products instead of running a store
- You want another sales channel alongside your own website
Why Many Developers Use Both
The truth is that this isn’t always an either-or decision. Many successful developers maintain their own EDD store while also listing products on marketplaces. That’s often the smartest approach. Your website becomes your primary sales channel. WPBay becomes an additional source of traffic, visibility, and customers. The more places customers can discover your products, the better.
My Take
EDD is probably one of the best self-hosted solutions available for selling digital products on WordPress.
If you want complete ownership and don’t mind handling the technical side, it’s a solid choice. But if you’re looking for a way to reach more customers without building and maintaining an entire ecommerce business from scratch, that’s exactly where WPBay fits in. I built WPBay because I know how difficult it is for WordPress developers to get discovered. Creating a plugin is hard. Finding customers is often even harder. WPBay exists to help bridge that gap. Come join and check it yourself.