WooCommerce vs Magento at 10k SKUs — does Woo really break?

"Break" is too strong, but it does become operationally painful. Specifically:

• Database: WooCommerce stores products in wp_posts + wp_postmeta, which is fine for blog posts but a poor fit for a 10k-row catalog. Variant SKUs explode the meta table. By 10k SKUs the meta table is often 5M+ rows, making attribute filtering slow.
• Search: default WP search is LIKE %term% on titles. Past a few thousand products you need ElasticPress or Algolia — both are paid plugins or external services.
• Admin: the products list pagination starts choking at 5k. Bulk-edit, bulk-import, and even category-tree operations get slow. Operators feel it daily.
• Indexes: there’s no Magento-style indexer. Woo recomputes things on the fly, so each cart-rule, tax-rate change, or attribute update slows query response.

Magento was built for catalogs. EAV plus dedicated tables for inventory, prices, and search keep query times stable from 10k to 200k SKUs. The platform-architecture difference is real — not marketing.