Magento vs Shopify

Magento vs Shopify: full control of the code, or a platform someone else runs

Magento suits businesses with a very complex catalog, a development team (in house or on retainer) and a real need to own and change the code. Shopify suits most other stores, including many large ones, because hosting, security, checkout and upgrades are handled for you. Between Adobe Commerce and Shopify Plus, the choice turns on B2B depth, hosting requirements and how much custom code you want to maintain. We are a Shopify Plus Partner that migrates stores to Shopify, so read this with that in mind.

At a glance

Comparison point	Magento (Open Source and Adobe Commerce)	Shopify
Pricing	Open Source is free to download. Adobe Commerce is licensed, quoted by Adobe and scaled mainly by annual sales volume; Adobe does not publish prices.	Basic $39, Grow $105, Advanced $399 a month ($29, $79, $299 billed annually). Plus from $2,300 a month on a three-year term, $2,500 on a one-year term, or a variable fee for complex businesses.
Transaction fees	No platform fee; you pay your payment gateway.	None with Shopify Payments. With a third-party gateway: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced, 0.2% on Plus.
Hosting and maintenance	You host, patch and upgrade, except on Adobe’s managed cloud options, where Adobe runs the infrastructure.	Hosting, security, PCI compliance and upgrades are included on every plan.
Ease of use	Powerful admin with a steep learning curve; most changes need a developer.	Designed for merchants; most day-to-day work needs no developer.
Design and themes	Luma, Hyvä or a custom theme; changes need a developer.	Free and paid themes in the Theme Store, edited in a visual editor; custom work in Liquid.
Apps and extensions	Large market; extensions live in your codebase and need updating each release.	Shopify App Store; apps run outside your store’s core code and update themselves.
SEO	Highly configurable URLs; duplicate URLs are easy to create.	Solid defaults, fixed URL prefixes (/products/, /collections/), editable metadata and built-in redirects.
Speed	Depends on your hosting, caching and theme; can be very fast when tuned.	Global CDN and hosted infrastructure; theme and app choices decide the rest.
Payments	Any gateway with an integration; you maintain the checkout.	Shopify Payments, Shop Pay and 100+ third-party gateways; Shopify maintains the checkout.
B2B	Deep native B2B in Adobe Commerce only, not Open Source.	Companies, catalogs, net terms, quantity rules and quick order on all plans; non-Plus plans are limited to 3 catalogs.
POS	No native POS; third-party integrations.	Shopify POS: POS Lite free, POS Pro $89 per location per month.
Scalability	Scales as far as your infrastructure and team can take it.	Scales without infrastructure work; Plus adds higher API limits and 9 expansion stores.
Ownership and control	Full source code access (Open Source and on-premises Adobe Commerce).	You own your data and theme code, not the platform.
Support	Open Source: community and your agency. Adobe Commerce: Adobe support under the license.	24/7 Shopify support on all plans; Plus adds priority support.

Prices checked September 2026, in US dollars.

First, which Magento?

• Magento Open Source. The free, self-hosted edition, formerly Community Edition. No license fee, no Adobe support.
• Adobe Commerce. The licensed edition, formerly Magento Commerce and Enterprise Edition. It adds B2B, content staging, customer segments and Adobe support, and runs on-premises, on Adobe Commerce on cloud infrastructure (managed hosting where you still own the code), or as Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service, a newer versionless SaaS option.
• Mage-OS. An independent, nonprofit community distribution of Magento Open Source; Mage-OS 3.0 (May 2026) is built on 2.4.9. For a merchant it is a variation of the Open Source choice, not a different category.
• Magento 1. Both editions reached end of life on June 30, 2020, with no further security patches from Adobe. A Magento 1 store still trading is running unsupported software, a PCI problem as well as a security one.

Magento 2 also has a support clock. Adobe’s lifecycle policy gives each 2.4.x release line three years of standard support from general availability: 2.4.6 ended standard support on August 11, 2026 (with a free extra year to August 31, 2027), 2.4.7 runs to May 31, 2027, 2.4.8 to May 31, 2028, and 2.4.9, released May 12, 2026, to May 31, 2029. From June 1, 2027, Adobe says it will enforce upgrades on cloud environments running unsupported versions, and PHP 8.2 reaches end of life on December 31, 2026. Expect a significant upgrade every year or two.

Pricing and total cost of ownership

Magento Open Source costs nothing to license, but nothing else about running it is free. Shopify has a visible monthly fee, and most of the running costs are inside it.

What you pay for on Magento

• License. None for Open Source. For Adobe Commerce, an annual license quoted by Adobe, tied mainly to gross merchandise value (and on cloud infrastructure, to the resources included). Adobe publishes no figures, so numbers online are estimates.
• Hosting. PHP, MySQL, OpenSearch, Redis, Varnish and usually a CDN, on hosting that scales with traffic.
• Development and maintenance. Patches, upgrades, extension updates and fixes, usually on a developer retainer and usually the largest line.
• Extensions. Often an up-front price plus a yearly fee for updates.
• Security and compliance. Malware scanning, a web application firewall, and your share of PCI compliance, because the checkout runs on your code.
• Payments. Your gateway’s rates; Magento adds no fee.

What you pay for on Shopify

The plan fee (see the table above), card processing with Shopify Payments at online US rates from 2.9% + 30 cents on Basic down to 2.25% + 30 cents on Plus, the third-party gateway fee if you keep another gateway, and your apps. Plus moves more complex, higher-volume businesses to a variable fee based on revenue.

A worked monthly example

Take a store selling $60,000 a month across 800 orders, on Shopify Grow billed annually and using Shopify Payments.

• Plan: $79
• Card processing: 2.7% of $60,000 is $1,620, plus 800 orders at 30 cents is $240, so $1,860
• Apps: whatever you choose; set your own budget here
• Hosting, security patches, PCI scope, platform upgrades: $0, included

That is $1,939 a month before apps. If the same store kept a third-party gateway instead, Shopify would add 1% ($600) on top of that gateway’s own rates, which is why most of our clients move to Shopify Payments where it is available.

For the same store on Magento Open Source, the lines to price are: hosting, a developer or agency retainer, extension renewals spread by month, security tooling, and your gateway’s processing rate (roughly comparable to the card line above). Get real quotes for each; the processing line will be similar, and the difference between the two platforms sits almost entirely in hosting and developer time. For Adobe Commerce, set the annual license quote against Plus at $27,600 a year on a three-year term, then add the hosting and development lines on the Adobe side that Plus includes.

We will not put a percentage on the saving; it depends on how much custom code the Magento store carries, and some of that code may need rebuilding as Shopify apps.

Ease of use and maintenance

Magento’s admin is thorough. Attribute sets, price rules, the website, store and store view hierarchy and hundreds of settings give a trained team precise control, but new staff need time to learn it, and changes to layout, checkout or data structure usually need a developer and a deployment. Shopify’s admin is simpler, most merchandising, content and promotion work is done by the store team, and upgrades are not a project because every store is always on the current version.

Maintenance is the reason most merchants give us for leaving Magento. Patching, upgrading, retesting extensions and watching server health are permanent jobs, and stores that skip them end up on unsupported versions with a larger catch-up project later.

Design and themes

Magento ships with Luma. Many newer builds use Hyvä, which became free and open source in November 2025 and is much lighter (Hyvä Checkout remains paid). Custom Magento themes use PHP templates, layout XML and JavaScript, so every change is a development task. Shopify themes are built in Liquid with sections and blocks that merchants rearrange without code, and the Theme Store includes free themes such as Horizon. Designs never carry across: moving to Shopify always means a new storefront build.

Apps and extensions

Magento’s extension market is large and mature, and a developer can build almost anything as a module. But extensions install into your codebase, can conflict with each other, must be updated for each release, and one abandoned extension can hold a store on an old version. Shopify apps run on the developer’s infrastructure and connect through APIs and app blocks, so they update without touching your theme and uninstall cleanly. When we plan a migration, we map every Magento extension to a native feature, an app, a custom app, or nothing, because some are no longer needed.

Catalog structure: EAV against options and metafields

Magento stores product data in an entity-attribute-value (EAV) model. You can create as many attributes as you need, group them into attribute sets per product type, scope values to a website or store view, and use them for layered navigation, search and pricing. Simple, configurable, grouped, bundle, virtual and downloadable products are native. For a technical catalog, this is a genuine strength.

Shopify’s model is simpler. A product has at most 3 options and up to 2,048 variants. Extra specifications go into metafields with definitions, and structured content goes into metaobjects; both can drive storefront filters through the Search & Discovery app. Most catalogs fit; products with four or more options, or options that add to the price, need redesign rather than copying.

Multi-store, store views and international selling

Magento’s website, store and store view hierarchy lets one installation run several brands, catalogs, currencies and languages, each with its own settings.

Shopify handles most international selling inside one store with Markets: local currencies, translated content, market-specific pricing and domains or subfolders per market. Domain per market is available on every plan. Where a business needs separate stores, Plus includes 9 expansion stores in the platform fee. Per-market theme customization needs Advanced or Plus.

SEO and content

Magento gives fine control over URL keys, category paths, suffixes and canonicals, and its layered navigation can generate large numbers of duplicate URLs if nobody manages them. Shopify’s URL structure is fixed (/products/, /collections/, /pages/), which some SEO teams dislike but which rarely causes indexing problems; metadata, sitemaps, canonicals and redirects are built in, and so is a blog. The real SEO risk is the move between them, covered below.

Performance

A Magento store on good hosting with full-page caching, Varnish, a CDN and a light theme such as Hyvä can be very fast; one on underpowered hosting with Luma and a stack of extensions is often slow, and fixing it is your team’s job. Shopify’s infrastructure absorbs traffic spikes without anyone resizing servers, and speed depends mostly on the theme and how many apps add scripts. In our experience Shopify is consistently fast with less effort, while Magento can match it with sustained engineering.

Payments and checkout

On Magento the checkout is part of your application. You can change anything, integrate any gateway and build any flow, and you are responsible for keeping it working, fast and secure, including PCI compliance for the code that runs it.

Shopify runs the checkout for you, with Shop Pay and accelerated wallets built in. Checkout UI extensions on the thank you and order status pages work on all plans; on the information, shipping and payment steps they need Plus. Shopify Functions replace the old Scripts, which stopped running on June 30, 2026, for discount, shipping, payment, validation and cart logic. Public apps containing functions work on any plan, while custom apps with functions need Plus. It is more constrained than Magento’s, a fair exchange for most stores.

Selling in person and B2B

Magento has no native point of sale; Shopify POS shares products, customers, inventory and orders with the online store. POS Lite is free on all plans, and POS Pro is $89 per location per month.

B2B is Adobe Commerce’s strongest ground. Company accounts with roles, shared catalogs with company pricing, negotiable quotes, requisition lists, purchase orders with approval rules and payment on account are all native, and none of them are in Magento Open Source. Shopify B2B runs on all plans with companies and locations, catalogs with fixed prices, quantity rules and price breaks, net payment terms, vaulted cards, purchase order numbers and quick order lists. Non-Plus plans are limited to 3 active catalogs; Plus removes that limit, allows catalogs assigned to individual company locations, and adds deposits and partial payments. Shopify has no native negotiable quotes with buyer approval workflows like Adobe Commerce; draft orders and apps fill the gap, so test that process before you commit.

Scale

Both platforms run very large stores. On Magento, scale is an engineering problem solved with infrastructure, caching and a team that knows the code. On Shopify, the platform handles it, and the limits you meet are product limits (options, API rates, checkout customization). If growth means more traffic, orders and markets, Shopify scales with less effort; if it means more custom behavior, Magento gives you more room.

When Magento is the better choice

• Your catalog is genuinely complex: many product types with different attribute sets, configurable products with more than three options, store-view-level data, or pricing logic that cannot be expressed as variants, catalogs and Functions.
• You need full control of the code, including checkout, and have a development team that will maintain it properly.
• You have on-premises, data residency or contractual hosting requirements that a multi-tenant SaaS platform cannot meet.
• Your B2B process depends on negotiable quotes, requisition lists and purchase order approvals, and Adobe Commerce already delivers them well.
• Your Magento 2 store is on a supported release, performs well, and the team running it is stable. A working, maintained store is not a reason to replatform.

When Shopify is the better choice

• You are still on Magento 1, or a Magento 2 release that is out of support, and the upgrade is close to a rebuild anyway.
• Most of your budget goes to hosting, patching and upgrades rather than new features.
• Your catalog fits within 3 options per product, with the rest in metafields.
• You want a maintained, fast checkout with Shop Pay and accelerated wallets, and you do not want PCI scope for checkout code.
• You are comparing Adobe Commerce with Shopify Plus and your B2B needs are covered by Shopify’s companies, catalogs and payment terms.

What switching actually involves

We have moved stores from Magento 1, Magento 2 and Adobe Commerce, and the same issues come up each time.

• Moves cleanly. Simple products, images, categories as collections, customers and addresses, CMS pages and blog content, and order history with original numbers and dates when it is imported properly.
• Needs redesign. Configurable products with more than three attributes, custom options with price modifiers, bundle and grouped products, and tier pricing. Each is mapped to variants, metafields, bundles, B2B catalogs or an app, product by product.
• EAV attributes. Every attribute used for display or filtering becomes a metafield with a definition, and filterable ones are set up in Search & Discovery.
• Store views. Translations and store-view values move into Markets and Shopify’s translation tools, or into expansion stores where the business really is separate.
• Orders in detail. Magento keeps invoices, credit memos and shipments as separate records. We rebuild them as Shopify transactions, refunds and fulfillments with tracking numbers, so customer service and accounting can rely on the history.
• Passwords. Magento password hashes cannot be used by Shopify. Customers set a new password from an account invite or sign in with a one-time code through customer accounts.
• Extensions and integrations. ERP, PIM, 3PL and marketing connections are rebuilt on Shopify’s APIs. This work, not the product import, usually sets the timeline on larger stores.

The biggest SEO risk is URLs. Magento URLs often carry .html suffixes, category paths inside product URLs and years of custom rewrites. Every indexed URL needs a 301 redirect to its Shopify equivalent, built from a full crawl, Search Console data and the Magento URL rewrite table, not just the current catalog. Layered navigation URLs need a decision rather than a redirect each. After launch we watch for 404s.

Timelines: a smaller Magento store typically takes six to eight weeks from audit to launch. An Adobe Commerce or large Magento 2 store with B2B, multiple stores and several integrations is a Shopify Plus replatforming that usually runs three to six months. Our Magento to Shopify migration guide covers the data mapping in more depth, and the Adobe Commerce to Shopify migration guide covers B2B structures, staging and enterprise integrations.

Cost of switching

Our migrations start from $2,500 for stores under 500 products and 5,000 orders ($3,500 for larger stores). Smaller stores typically take six to eight weeks. B2B, multi-store and integrations with ERP or other systems are quoted as a fixed price after the audit. Terms are 50% to begin and 50% once the store is live and you are fully satisfied with the figures.

As a Shopify Plus Partner, we build in a free Shopify development store, so you pay Shopify nothing until the store launches. Your Magento store keeps trading throughout, and a final sync brings over orders placed during the build.

For a small, simple catalog an automated tool may be enough; our comparison of Shopify migration tools explains what each one handles and what it leaves to you.

Frequently asked questions

If you are weighing a move, start with our migration survey and we will tell you honestly whether Shopify fits your store. For the detail, read the Magento to Shopify migration guide or see the full list of platforms we migrate from.