Aelia Currency Switcher vs CURCY vs WPML Multi Currency: A Side-by-Side Test
TL;DR
- Only need shoppers to see their own currency? CURCY does it free.
- Already running WPML? Use its built-in multi currency. You have paid for it.
- Need to take the money properly? Aelia Currency Switcher, £89.00 ex. VAT: fixed prices per currency, gateway routing, correct tax, subscriptions that renew in the original currency.
- Running WPML and Aelia together? Disable WPML’s currency feature first, or they fight over the price.
Most WooCommerce store owners do not set out to compare multi-currency plugins. They set out to stop losing cross-border sales, notice that the checkout still charges in pounds when the shopper is in Germany, and end up on a plugin directory with four tabs open and no way to tell the options apart. The feature lists all look the same. The prices do not.
This is a side-by-side test of the three options that come up most often: the Aelia Currency Switcher for WooCommerce, CURCY by VillaTheme, and the multi-currency feature built into WPML’s WooCommerce Multilingual. Diego has maintained the Aelia Currency Switcher since 2013, so read the section on where Aelia is the wrong choice before you buy anything.
What a WooCommerce Multi Currency Plugin Actually Has to Do
WooCommerce ships with one currency. That is the whole of it. You set a currency in the settings, every price is stored against it, and every gateway is handed that figure at checkout. A multi-currency plugin has to bolt four separate jobs onto that single-currency foundation, and the plugins differ far more in the last two jobs than the first two.
The Four Jobs, in the Order They Get Harder
- Display. Show the price in the shopper’s currency. Every plugin here does this competently.
- Selection. Let the shopper pick a currency, or pick one for them from their location. Also well covered across the board.
- Pricing control. Decide whether a price is converted at today’s rate or set deliberately per currency. This is where the plugins separate.
- Taking the money. Charge in that currency, through a gateway that accepts it, with the right tax, and keep it consistent on renewals. This is where most free plugins stop.
Job one is a presentation problem. Job four is an accounting problem. A plugin that is excellent at the first and vague about the fourth will look fine in a demo and cause monthly reconciliation arguments a year later. If you want the underlying mechanics rather than a product comparison, the complete WooCommerce multi-currency guide covers how conversion, rounding and gateway handling actually work.
Aelia Currency Switcher for WooCommerce: What the £89.00 Buys
The Aelia Currency Switcher lets a store hold real prices in several currencies at once, rather than displaying a converted version of one price. You can let it convert automatically from a rate provider, or type the exact figure you want charged in each currency, per product. Version 4.15 is current, the plugin has been in continuous release since 2013, and it holds a 4.94 average from 91 customer reviews.
It costs £89.00 ex. VAT per year for a single site. There is no free tier.
What It Does That the Free Options Do Not
- Fixed prices per currency. Charge exactly 99,00 € rather than whatever 89.00 GBP converts to this morning.
- Gateway routing per currency. Send euro orders to one merchant account and dollar orders to another, so you are not paying a conversion fee twice.
- Currency-aware tax. Works alongside Tax Display by Country so a German shopper sees prices inclusive of VAT and a US shopper sees them net.
- Subscriptions and bookings that hold their currency. A renewal three years from now bills in the currency the customer signed up in, via the free Subscriptions Integration add-on.
- Per-currency rounding rules. Stops converted prices arriving as 87,43 € when you wanted a clean number.
Being plain about the limits, because they matter more than the feature list. The Currency Switcher is not a translation plugin and never will be; if you need multilingual content you still need WPML or an equivalent. It does not set different prices per country on its own either, which is a genuinely different job handled by Prices by Country. And there is no free version, so if your requirement really is display-only, you would be paying for capability you will not use.
CURCY Multi Currency for WooCommerce: The Free Route
CURCY, published by VillaTheme as “Multi Currency for WooCommerce”, is the most widely used free option in this comparison after WPML’s. It runs on 20,000 active installations with a 4.3 out of 5 average from 226 reviews. Version 2.2.16 arrived in August 2026 and is tested to WordPress 7.1, so it is actively maintained rather than abandoned.
The free tier covers the first two jobs properly: it adds a currency switcher as a widget, block or shortcode, converts prices from a rate provider, detects the visitor’s country to pick an opening currency, and lets you control the price format and symbol position. For a store that wants shoppers to browse comfortably and is content to settle every order in the base currency, that is a complete answer at zero cost.
The premium version adds checkout in the selected currency, per-currency payment method control and fixed per-currency pricing. The honest summary is that CURCY Premium and the Aelia Currency Switcher overlap substantially on paper. Where they differ is depth on the awkward cases: extension product types such as subscriptions, bookings, composite and bundled products, where prices are assembled from several components and each component has to convert correctly.
WPML Multi Currency (WCML): Multilingual First, Currency Second
WPML Multilingual and Multicurrency for WooCommerce, usually shortened to WCML, is the largest of the three by adoption: 100,000 active installations and a 4.2 out of 5 from 454 reviews, with version 5.5.7 current. The plugin itself is free but useless alone, because it requires a paid WPML licence to function.
Its multi-currency feature is genuinely capable. It supports manual prices per currency as well as automatic conversion, offers a currency switcher as widget, block or shortcode, shows different payment gateways per currency, and auto-switches based on visitor location. WPML also recommends manual prices per currency rather than live conversion, for exactly the reason Aelia does, which is that customers expect clean numbers.
If You Run WPML and Aelia Together, Read This First
WPML and the Aelia Currency Switcher are compatible, and plenty of stores run both. But you must disable WPML’s own multi-currency feature before enabling the Currency Switcher. Leave both active and two plugins will each try to rewrite the same product price, which produces intermittent wrong totals that are miserable to diagnose. Use WPML for languages and Aelia for money, or use WPML for both. Do not use both for money.
The catch with WCML is not the feature set, it is the dependency. You are adopting a full multilingual stack to get a currency feature. If the store is already on WPML, that is free capability you have paid for and should use. If it is a single-language store, WPML is a large amount of machinery to install for currency alone.
Side by Side: Currency Switcher for WooCommerce Feature Comparison
| Capability | Aelia Currency Switcher | CURCY (VillaTheme) | WPML Multi Currency |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | £89.00 ex. VAT / year | Free tier, paid premium | Free plugin, paid WPML licence required |
| Active installs | Sold direct from Aelia | 20,000 | 100,000 |
| Rating | 4.94 from 91 reviews | 4.3 from 226 reviews | 4.2 from 454 reviews |
| Automatic exchange rates | Yes | Yes, free tier | Yes |
| Fixed manual price per currency | Yes | Premium only | Yes |
| Checkout in selected currency | Yes | Premium only | Yes |
| Gateway per currency | Yes, plus multi-account routing | Premium only | Yes |
| Geolocation auto-switch | Yes | Yes, free tier | Yes |
| Per-currency rounding rules | Yes | Partial | Partial |
| Subscriptions renew in original currency | Yes, via free add-on | Limited | Supported |
| Bookings and composite products | Yes, via free add-ons | Limited | Supported |
| Translation included | No | No | Yes, that is the point |
| Different price per country | Add Prices by Country | No | No |
Read that table as three different shapes rather than three scores. CURCY is the cheapest way to solve display. WPML is the obvious choice if you are already multilingual. Aelia is the one built for the money layer, and it expects you to bring your own translation plugin. For a wider field including the free FOX switcher and WooPayments, see our comparison of the best WooCommerce multi-currency plugins.
Exchange Rate Conversion vs Manual Prices per Currency
This is the decision that matters most and the one most store owners make by accident. Automatic conversion takes your base price, applies today’s rate, and shows the result. Manual per-currency pricing means you decide the number in each currency and it stays there until you change it.
Automatic conversion is correct for large, fast-moving catalogues where nobody could realistically maintain thousands of per-currency figures. It is wrong for considered purchases, because it produces prices like 103,47 € that read as careless, and because your margin moves every day without you deciding that it should. A 4% swing in sterling against the euro is a 4% swing in your gross margin on every euro order.
How to Choose Between Them
- Use automatic conversion when your catalogue runs to thousands of SKUs, margins are wide, and nobody will ever audit the euro price list.
- Use manual per-currency prices when you sell a considered product, when price is part of your positioning, or when finance needs a predictable figure per market.
- Use both in practice: automatic as the fallback across the catalogue, manual overrides on your top sellers. All three plugins support this pattern, Aelia and WPML in their standard versions, CURCY in premium.
- Add rounding rules either way. Without them, automatic conversion is the single biggest source of prices that look wrong.
How Automatic Currency Detection Works in WooCommerce
All three plugins can open the store in a currency that matches the visitor rather than waiting to be asked, and all three do it the same way: read the visitor’s IP address, look it up against a GeoIP database, map the country to a currency. The differences are in what happens next.
Three practical points. First, geolocation and page caching fight each other, because a cached page is by definition the same for everyone; if your first visitor from Berlin warms the cache in euros, the next visitor from Leeds may get euros too. Aelia’s approach is a dedicated cache handler and per-currency cache variants, and this is the single most common cause of “the currency is wrong” reports on any plugin.
Second, detection should be a default and not a cage. The shopper must always be able to override it, and the choice must survive across pages. Third, a shared GeoIP library can collide: geo-blocking plugins such as Geo Redirect and iQ Block Country load the same library, and loading it twice crashes the request unless the Currency Switcher loads second. If you run a geo-blocking plugin alongside a currency plugin, test that combination specifically.
Payment Gateways, Subscriptions and Bookings in Multiple Currencies
This is job four, and it is where a comparison stops being about features and starts being about whether your accounts reconcile.
Gateways. Not every gateway accepts every currency, and those that do will often convert for you at a rate you did not choose, then charge a fee for the privilege. Showing a gateway that cannot settle the selected currency produces a failed payment at the last step, which is the most expensive place to fail. All three plugins can hide gateways per currency. Aelia goes further with multi-account routing, via the Aelia Currency Switcher and the PayPal Multi-Account gateway at £39.00 ex. VAT, so euro takings land in a euro account.
Subscriptions. A subscription signed in euros must renew in euros in 2029, at the agreed figure, regardless of where the exchange rate has gone or which currency the customer’s browser suggests today. Aelia handles this through the free Subscriptions Integration add-on, which requires Currency Switcher 3.3.11 or later; WPML supports it natively; CURCY’s coverage is thinner. If you sell subscriptions across borders, test a renewal on staging before you commit, because this is the failure that surfaces a month after launch rather than on day one.
Bookings and assembled products. Bookings, composite products and bundles build a price from parts: a nightly rate, an extra person, a chosen add-on. Each component has to convert, and the rounding has to happen once at the end rather than on every component, or the total will not match the sum of the lines. Aelia supports these through free integration add-ons rather than core, so the install order matters: activate both plugins first, then the add-on.
Common WooCommerce Multi Currency Pitfalls, and Which Plugin Avoids Them
| Pitfall | What the customer sees | Best handled by |
|---|---|---|
| Cached pages serving the wrong currency | Prices in a currency they did not choose | Aelia, via a dedicated cache handler |
| Ugly converted prices | 103,47 € instead of 99,00 € | Aelia or WPML, with manual prices |
| Cart total changes after switching currency | A different total at checkout than on the product page | All three, if rounding is configured once |
| Gateway rejects the currency | Payment fails at the final step | Aelia, CURCY Premium, WPML |
| Renewal bills in the wrong currency | An unexpected charge, then a refund request | Aelia or WPML |
| VAT shown wrongly to EU shoppers | Gross prices to a market expecting net, or the reverse | Aelia, with Tax Display by Country |
| Two plugins both rewriting the price | Intermittent wrong totals with no pattern | Nothing: disable one of them |
The last row is the one worth reading twice. Most “multi-currency is broken” tickets are not a plugin defect, they are two plugins competing for the same job. Currency belongs to exactly one plugin on any store.
Which WooCommerce Multi Currency Plugin Should You Choose?
Step 1: Do You Need to Take Money in the Other Currency, or Only Show It?
Only show it: CURCY free tier. Take it: continue.
Step 2: Is the Store Already Running WPML?
Yes: use WPML’s multi-currency feature, it is already paid for. No: continue.
Step 3: Do Any of These Apply?
Fixed prices per currency; a separate merchant account per currency; EU VAT handled correctly per country; subscriptions or bookings that must hold their currency on renewal. If yes to any, that is the Aelia Currency Switcher. If no to all, CURCY Premium will likely do it for less.
Step 4: Do You Need Different Prices per Country Rather Than Converted Prices?
That is a different job. Add Prices by Country at £69.00 ex. VAT, and read regional pricing versus multi-currency before deciding.
What Aelia Customers Say About the Currency Switcher
“The plugin itself is working great but what surprised me is the level of support you get for being an Aelia customer. I had an issue and received a 1000-word reply from Diego with a full explanation.”
Georgios Floropoulos
The Currency Switcher holds a 4.94 average from 91 reviews, and that support point comes up more often than any single feature. It is worth weighing when you compare a paid plugin against a free one: with the free options, your escalation path is a public forum thread. You can read more in our customer testimonials.
Frequently Asked Questions About WooCommerce Multi Currency Plugins
How Do I Change Currency in WooCommerce?
For the store’s single base currency, go to WooCommerce, then Settings, then General, and set the currency option. That changes the number’s label, not the amount, and every price stays as stored. To let shoppers choose their own currency you need a multi-currency plugin, because core WooCommerce supports exactly one.
What Is the Best Currency Switcher for WooCommerce?
There is no single best one, which is why the decision tree above asks about taking payment rather than displaying prices. CURCY is the strongest free option for display only. WPML’s feature is the right pick on a store already running WPML. The Aelia Currency Switcher is built for stores that need fixed per-currency prices, gateway routing, correct per-country tax and reliable subscription renewals.
Is There a Free Currency Switcher for WooCommerce?
Yes, several. CURCY by VillaTheme has a free tier on 20,000 active installations, and FOX by RealMag777 runs on around 50,000. Free tiers generally cover display, switching and automatic conversion, then charge for checkout in the selected currency and per-currency payment methods. Check that limit before you build a plan around a free plugin.
Does WPML Support WooCommerce Multi Currency?
Yes. WPML Multilingual and Multicurrency for WooCommerce, or WCML, includes multi-currency with manual prices per currency, gateway control per currency and location-based switching. The plugin is free but requires a paid WPML licence, and it is designed for multilingual stores rather than single-language ones.
What Is CURCY for WooCommerce?
CURCY is VillaTheme’s multi-currency plugin, listed as “Multi Currency for WooCommerce”. It runs on 20,000 active installations with a 4.3 out of 5 average from 226 reviews, at version 2.2.16. The free tier handles display, switching and conversion; premium adds checkout in the selected currency and fixed per-currency prices.
Can I Use the Aelia Currency Switcher and WPML Together?
Yes, and many stores do, but disable WPML’s own multi-currency feature first. Both plugins write to the product price, so running both currency engines at once causes intermittent wrong totals. Use WPML for languages and the Currency Switcher for money.
Do I Need a Multi-Currency Plugin or a Currency Converter?
A currency converter estimates, usually as a widget, and the customer still pays in your base currency. A multi-currency plugin changes the price the store actually charges. If the goal is fewer abandoned carts at checkout, you need the second one, because a converter leaves the surprise in place at the final step.
Try the Aelia Currency Switcher for WooCommerce
If the decision tree pointed at Aelia, you can test it against your own catalogue rather than a demo store. As the WooCommerce internationalisation experts, we would rather you found the edge cases during a trial than after launch.
Aelia Currency Switcher for WooCommerce
£89.00 ex. VAT, annual, single site. Single-site licence, a year of updates, direct support from the team that builds the plugin, a 14-day free trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Keep Reading on WooCommerce Multi Currency
- WooCommerce Multi-Currency: The Complete 2026 Guide for how conversion, rounding and gateways work.
- Best WooCommerce Multi-Currency Plugins in 2026 for the wider field, including FOX and WooPayments.
- WooCommerce Regional Pricing vs Multi-Currency if you need different prices per country, not converted ones.
- WooCommerce Checkout Localisation Checklist for currency, language and tax as one job.
- Aelia Currency Switcher for WooCommerce for the plugin itself.
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