Magento or Shopify?
Adobe Commerce is powerful and expensive to keep alive. Shopify is neither. The right answer depends less on features than on who maintains it on a Tuesday.
For most merchants under roughly $20M, Shopify. Magento's flexibility is real but it is paid for in hosting, security patching and a developer on call — costs that continue whether or not you use the flexibility. Magento earns its keep with complex B2B pricing, deep ERP integration, or catalogue rules Shopify cannot express.
Updated August 2026
Short answer
Choose Shopify unless something specific about your catalogue or pricing genuinely cannot be expressed in it.
The comparison people actually need
Almost every Magento-versus-Shopify comparison lists features. That is the wrong axis, because Magento wins on features and still loses for most merchants. The real question is what the platform costs you when nobody is looking at it.
Magento is self-hosted. That means you own the server, the patching, the PHP version, the extension conflicts and the 2am outage. Adobe publishes security patches on a schedule and an unpatched Magento is a genuinely attractive target — we have inherited stores compromised through exactly that gap. Budget for a developer with the store in their head permanently, not a rebuild every three years.
Shopify takes that away and charges a transaction fee for it. At low volume the fee is trivial next to a hosting bill and a retainer. At high volume it stops being trivial, which is the point where Magento's economics start to make sense — usually much later than Magento agencies suggest.
The migration itself is rarely the hard part. Products, customers and orders move reliably. What breaks is everything built around the store over the years: the ERP sync nobody documented, the custom pricing rules, the integration a former developer wrote directly against the database.
Side by side.
| Magento / Adobe Commerce | Shopify | |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting | Yours, with the patching that implies | Included, patched without you |
| Security | You own it. Unpatched Magento is targeted | Shopify's problem, not yours |
| Cost shape | Low licence, high people cost | Predictable monthly plus transaction fees |
| B2B pricing | Deep, mature, genuinely flexible | Capable, with real limits worth testing |
| Developer availability | Fewer, more expensive, harder to replace | Large pool, easy to hire |
| Time to a change | Days to weeks through a release process | Often the same afternoon |
| Where it wins | Complex catalogues and ERP-deep operations | Almost everything else |
Stay on or move to Magento when
- Your pricing genuinely cannot be expressed in Shopify — test it, do not assume it
- You have deep ERP integration that is working and well understood
- You already employ Magento developers who are not leaving
- Volume is high enough that transaction fees exceed the full cost of self-hosting
Move to Shopify when
- Nobody currently owns patching your store
- You want changes to ship in an afternoon rather than a release cycle
- Your team would rather think about merchandising than infrastructure
- You want a predictable bill and a large pool of people who can work on it
What goes wrong
Comparing licence cost to licence cost
Magento Open Source is free and Shopify is not, which makes Magento look cheaper until you add hosting, a CDN, patching, and someone who can fix it. Compare total annual cost including the person, or the comparison is meaningless.
Migrating the customisations too
Years of Magento extensions usually encode decisions nobody remembers making. Porting them wholesale rebuilds the complexity you were escaping. Most should be dropped and the few that matter rebuilt properly.
Assuming Shopify cannot do B2B
It can — company accounts, price lists, payment terms. Whether it does the specific thing you need is a question with a real answer, and it is worth getting that answer before assuming either way.
Treating SEO as automatic
A migration without a URL map costs rankings that took years to build. This is the single most expensive mistake on this page and the easiest to avoid.
Four questions that settle it
If three point the same way, that is your answer.
Who patches your Magento today?
If the honest answer is nobody, or a developer you no longer work with, you are running unpatched commerce software. That is a security decision, not a platform preference.
Does your pricing depend on rules Shopify cannot express?
Customer-specific catalogues, quantity break tables per account, approval workflows. Write down the two hardest rules and test them against Shopify B2B before deciding.
What is your annual platform spend including people?
Hosting, licences, patching, and the retainer. Compare that to Shopify's plan plus fees at your volume. The gap is usually larger and in the opposite direction from what people expect.
How many integrations touch the database directly?
Anything reading Magento's tables rather than its API has to be rewritten. Counting these early is the difference between a three-month project and a nine-month one.
What the migration actually costs
Data moves in days. Products, variants, customers and order history are well-trodden and the tooling is mature. If someone quotes months for the data alone, ask what they are including.
The URL map is where rankings live or die. Every indexed Magento URL needs a 301 to its Shopify equivalent, and category structures rarely map one to one. We build this before anything else and treat it as the migration's actual deliverable.
Integrations are the real timeline. An ERP sync written against Magento's database has no Shopify equivalent and must be rebuilt against an API. Scope those first — they usually decide the date.
What people ask next.
Only if the URL map is done badly, which is the most common way these migrations go wrong. Every indexed URL needs a 301 to its equivalent. Done properly, rankings dip briefly and recover; done carelessly, years of work disappears.
The data is fast. Integrations decide the timeline — an ERP sync written against Magento's database has to be rebuilt against an API. We scope those first because they set the date, and we would rather tell you nine months up front than discover it in month four.
Yes, though it is rarely the best use of the budget. If the design is working, port it. If it was built around Magento's constraints, rebuilding is usually cheaper than recreating those constraints in a platform that does not have them.
Adobe Commerce is the paid, supported edition; Magento Open Source is the free one. The hosting, patching and developer costs are the same in both — the licence buys support, not maintenance-free operation.
— other comparisons
Tell us the constraint.
Budget, timeline, or who maintains it after launch — whichever is hardest to change. We will tell you which option fits, including when it is not us.