Magento was the platform ambitious brands reached for when they wanted control. Open architecture, deep customisation, a serious developer community behind it. For years that was the right call. The ground has moved since then, and the question most merchants are now asking is no longer whether Magento can do something, but whether the cost and complexity of getting it to is still worth paying.
This guide compares Shopify and Magento (now Adobe Commerce) across the things that actually decide a platform: cost of ownership, performance, customisation, B2B, SEO and the practical reality of running a store day to day. We migrate brands to Shopify from platforms like WooCommerce, BigCommerce, WordPress, Salesforce and Visualsoft, so the view here is shaped by projects rather than spec sheets.
Click the chapter heading in the list below to take you directly to the relevant section of the article.
Shopify vs Magento Chapters
1: Where Magento Actually Stands in 2026
3: Pricing and Total Cost of Ownership
6: Customisation and Flexibility
15: Multi-Channel and International Selling
16: Sales Tools, POS and Fulfilment
18: Developer Experience and Talent
20: When to Migrate From Magento to Shopify
At a Glance: Shopify vs Magento
The full reasoning sits below. If you want the summary first, here is how the two platforms compare on the factors that come up most often in a platform decision.
1: Where Magento Actually Stands in 2026
Before comparing features, it helps to be clear about what Magento is today, because the name now covers three quite different things.
Magento 1 reached end of life in June 2020. Brands still running it receive no security patches and carry a growing compliance and fraud risk with every month that passes. If that's you, this stops being a platform comparison and becomes a security problem. Migration is the priority, and it's urgent.
Magento 2 Open Source is still available and still free to download, but community investment in it has thinned. Adobe Commerce, the enterprise edition, has moved firmly upmarket. Pricing now scales with your gross merchandise value and starts at a level that puts it out of reach for most mid-market brands before a single line of development is costed in.
BuiltWith data shows Magento's market share declining steadily since 2020 while Shopify has grown to power millions of stores worldwide. That decline reflects something real: brands deciding the platform's complexity and cost no longer match the return they get from it.
Source: https://builtwith.com/
2: Hosting and Infrastructure
Shopify: Managed For You
Shopify is fully hosted SaaS. It runs on global infrastructure with a built-in CDN, automatic scaling and 99.99% uptime. You don't source servers, configure environments or maintain infrastructure at any point. Updates ship at platform level, so when Shopify improves checkout speed or releases a new capability, every store gets it at once with no upgrade project and no developer time.
Magento: You Own The Stack
Magento Open Source means you source, configure and maintain your own hosting. That involves choosing between cloud providers or specialist Magento hosts, then managing servers, load balancers, databases and caching layers yourself.
Adobe Commerce Cloud includes managed hosting, but it's costly, and you remain responsible for deployment pipelines, environment management and performance tuning. For a mid-sized brand, Magento hosting alone typically runs £500 to £2,000 a month for infrastructure that holds up under load. Add the DevOps time to keep it healthy and the real figure climbs well beyond that.
Internationalisation
The two platforms approach selling across borders differently at infrastructure level. Shopify uses a more decentralised model through Shopify Markets, letting you manage regions, currencies, languages and domains from a single store and tailor the experience by market. It's built to reduce the operational load of cross-border selling.
Magento uses a centralised multi-store architecture. Multiple storefronts, regions or brands run from one instance with shared infrastructure and granular control over catalogues, pricing and customer experience. For large enterprises with heavily customised regional operations, that flexibility is genuinely powerful. For brands that want faster international rollout with less to manage, Shopify's model is the more accessible one.
AI
AI is becoming a second layer of commerce infrastructure rather than a bolt-on. On Shopify, much of it is being built into the platform: AI-generated content, automated product recommendations, intelligent search, customer segmentation, workflow automation and conversational commerce are increasingly part of the core rather than separate builds. Shopify is positioning for agentic workflows, where AI systems don't just suggest an action but execute it across the commerce stack.
Magento can support advanced AI too, but the route is more modular and developer-led, leaning on external providers, middleware and custom integration. That offers control for enterprises with specific requirements, at the cost of more to implement, maintain and keep in sync.
3: Pricing and Total Cost of Ownership
This is the clearest line between the two platforms, and the one most likely to be misread, because the sticker price and the real price are very different things on Magento.
Shopify Pricing
- Basic: £19/month
- Shopify: £49/month
- Advanced: £259/month
- Shopify Plus: from £1,800/month
Shopify Plus includes Flow, Functions, Checkout Extensibility, B2B and a dedicated success manager. For the difference between the top two tiers, our Shopify Plus vs Advanced guide breaks it down.
Magento / Adobe Commerce Pricing
- Magento Open Source: free to download, with significant hosting, development and maintenance costs underneath it
- Adobe Commerce: licence fees from roughly $22,000/year, scaling with GMV to $190,000+ for high-revenue stores, with total cost of ownership typically running two to three times the licence once hosting, development and extensions are included
What It Actually Costs (Mid-Market Brand, £1M to £5M Revenue)
Headline pricing hides the real comparison. Set the platforms against each other on a like-for-like annual basis and the picture sharpens.
Magento's free edition routinely costs more than Shopify Plus once hosting, development and maintenance are counted, and Adobe Commerce sits in a different bracket entirely. Shopify carries one nuance worth naming: if you use a third-party payment provider instead of Shopify Payments, Shopify adds a transaction fee, typically between 0.5% and 2% per sale. For most brands that's a reason to run Shopify Payments, not a reason to discount the platform.
4: Ease of Use
Shopify: Built For Merchants
Shopify's admin is designed for non-technical users. Updating products, managing inventory, building discount codes, editing content and reviewing analytics all happen without a developer. The theme editor works in drag-and-drop sections and blocks, so marketing teams can launch landing pages, swap banners and adjust navigation on their own. For a growing brand, that operational autonomy is worth a great deal.
Shopify also offers a large library of professionally built, mobile-optimised themes that can be installed, customised and launched with limited technical knowledge. Magento has no equivalent native theme ecosystem out of the box. Third-party Magento themes exist, but implementation leans on deeper frontend skill to reach a polished result, which pushes most Magento stores towards custom design and development and the maintenance that comes with it.
Magento: Built For Developers
Magento's admin is more complex by design. Routine tasks like editing a CMS page or configuring a promotion often require an understanding of the internal structure. More involved work, like changing checkout flows, adjusting product attributes or building custom functionality, needs developer support as a matter of course.
Magento also draws on a smaller, more specialised developer pool than Shopify. Experienced Magento developers are harder to find and command higher rates, while Shopify benefits from a larger and faster-growing talent base. Every change on Magento moves through a development queue, which adds cost and slows time to market.
5: Time to Market
Speed to launch matters, and the two platforms sit at opposite ends of it. A Magento build runs to around three months once you account for scope, complexity and customisation, and that assumes a developer who already knows the platform, because the learning curve is steep even for experienced PHP teams.
A Shopify store can be live in days at the simple end. A bespoke Shopify Plus build takes longer, since design and development time is real work, but the floor is far lower and the path far more predictable.
6: Customisation and Flexibility
Magento's Historical Advantage
Magento was built for customisation. Its modular architecture lets developers modify almost any part of the platform. For brands with highly specific, complex requirements, particularly in B2B or multi-brand setups, that flexibility has long been the strongest argument for the platform.
Shopify's Closing Gap
Shopify has invested heavily in extensibility. Functions, Checkout Extensions and the Storefront API now deliver depth that wasn't possible on the platform a few years ago. Shopify Plus merchants can customise checkout, automate with Flow, apply custom pricing logic through Functions and build headless storefronts with Hydrogen. For the large majority of ecommerce use cases, that's enough.
Where Magento still holds an edge is in deeply bespoke, multi-layered B2B: complex pricing matrices, custom procurement workflows, deep ERP integration. Even there, Shopify Plus B2B is catching up quickly, and the gap is narrowing with each release.
Headless and Frontend Flexibility
Both platforms support headless commerce, but with different philosophies. Magento has long suited highly customised enterprise builds because of its open architecture. Developers can decouple the frontend entirely, build in React, Vue or Next.js and use Magento purely as the commerce engine. That offers near-unlimited flexibility alongside significant development complexity, infrastructure overhead and ongoing maintenance.
Shopify has moved hard into headless through Hydrogen and Oxygen, its React-based framework and hosting platform. Developers get to build highly customised storefronts while keeping Shopify's managed infrastructure, APIs, checkout and app ecosystem. The difference is as much philosophical as technical. Magento's approach is build anything, manage everything. Shopify's Hydrogen ecosystem gives you modern frontend flexibility inside a more controlled, opinionated platform.
7: Performance
Shopify: Consistently Fast
Shopify delivers strong Core Web Vitals out of the box. Every store benefits from the CDN, optimised checkout through Shop Pay and platform-wide performance work. Shop Pay loads in milliseconds and converts up to 50% better than standard checkouts, and it comes with the platform rather than as a build.
Magento: Fast If You Invest
A well-tuned Magento store running Varnish, Redis, Elasticsearch and a quality CDN can perform well. Reaching and holding that level takes continuous investment in infrastructure and DevOps. Out of the box, Magento is resource-heavy, and without proper optimisation, page load times of three to five seconds and beyond are common, particularly on collection and search pages.
8: Security
Shopify: Handled at Platform Level
Every Shopify store is PCI DSS compliant across all six categories of the standard, with SSL included and security maintained by Shopify. Payment and customer data is protected without you managing any of it, and there are no patches to schedule, test or pay a developer to deploy. For most merchants, security stops being a line item and becomes something the platform simply takes care of.
Magento: Yours to Maintain
Security on Magento is largely your responsibility rather than the platform's. Magento 2 has solid foundations: a token-only payment architecture that keeps card data off your server, mandatory two-factor authentication on the admin, and encryption built in. What it doesn't hand you is certification. Neither Magento Open Source nor Adobe Commerce is PCI certified out of the box, so you own the compliance scope, the configuration, the quarterly scans and the annual self-assessment. Adobe Commerce on Cloud eases this with a pre-scoped environment and compliance documentation, at a price. On Shopify, that whole burden sits with the platform.
The harder reality is patching. Magento is aggressively targeted, and Adobe now ships security patches monthly alongside one major release a year. Each patch needs testing and a controlled deployment, which costs money and demands developer time you have to keep on tap. Miss a cycle and you carry the exposure. This is the single biggest reason any brand still on Magento 1, which receives no patches at all, should treat migration as urgent rather than optional.
9: SEO Capabilities
Both platforms can rank. The effort each demands to get there is where they part.
Shopify SEO
Shopify handles clean URL structures, auto-generated sitemaps, canonical tags, editable meta titles and descriptions, image alt text and structured data. Most technical SEO is taken care of automatically, which gives you a solid foundation from day one. The constraints are minor: URL paths like /products/ and /collections/ are fixed, and a few advanced configurations need an app or a workaround, but these rarely hold a store back at scale. For brands serious about organic growth, our ecommerce SEO service covers technical audits, site architecture, content and ongoing optimisation.
Magento SEO
Magento offers flexible URL structures, layered navigation controls and extensive meta tag management. It also carries well-known SEO issues: duplicate content from layered navigation, pagination handling and URL rewrites that need careful configuration. Getting it right usually means specialist development time. On Shopify, the defaults are sensible before you touch anything.
10: Content Management
Content is where a surprising gap opens up. Shopify ships with a blog as standard, alongside flexible page and content management, so you can build out the editorial and landing-page content that drives organic traffic without bolting anything on. Marketing teams manage it directly in the admin.
Magento has no native blog. Adding one means a third-party extension and the testing and maintenance that comes with every Magento extension. For a brand that treats content as a growth channel rather than an afterthought, starting without native blogging is a real limitation, and one that quietly raises the cost of doing SEO well on the platform.
11: B2B Ecommerce
Adobe Commerce B2B
Magento's B2B module is mature and feature-rich, with company accounts, custom catalogues, quote management, purchase orders, credit limits and approval workflows supported natively. For complex B2B operations running hundreds of buyer accounts and bespoke pricing, Adobe Commerce remains a strong option.
Shopify Plus B2B
Shopify launched its B2B channel in 2022 and has expanded it aggressively. It now covers company profiles, custom price lists, payment terms, draft orders, volume pricing and a dedicated B2B storefront inside the same Shopify Plus store. For brands running B2C and B2B from one platform, that unified setup is compelling. It isn't as feature-deep as Adobe Commerce at the most complex end, but it handles the majority of wholesale and B2B use cases, and it's far simpler to manage.
12: Ecosystem and Extensions
Shopify's App Store
The Shopify App Store carries more than 13,000 apps, all vetted by Shopify. The controlled ecosystem means fewer compatibility issues and a more stable store, and the popular categories of reviews, subscriptions, loyalty and marketing integrate cleanly.
Magento's Marketplace
Magento Marketplace offers around 4,700 extensions. Quality varies and extension conflicts are a persistent problem, so installing something new usually means staging-environment testing and developer oversight. The ecosystem has also contracted as Magento's share has fallen, with some developers shifting focus to Shopify and reducing the range of actively maintained options.
13: Support
Shopify
24/7 support across all plans via chat, email and phone. Shopify Plus adds a dedicated Merchant Success Manager for strategic guidance and escalation. The documentation is extensive, current and actually useful.
Magento
Magento Open Source relies on community forums and documentation, with no official support line. Adobe Commerce includes support, though response times and quality vary. For anything urgent, most brands fall back on their development agency, which means paying for support separately.
14: Checkout Experience
Shopify: The Best Checkout in Ecommerce
Shopify's checkout has been refined across hundreds of millions of transactions. It's fast, mobile-optimised and supports accelerated options including Shop Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay and PayPal Express. Shop Pay matters most here: it securely stores customer shipping and payment details for one-tap checkout on return visits, and Shopify reports conversion rates up to 50% higher than standard guest checkout, built in with no development required. Shopify Plus merchants can take it further with branded design, custom fields, post-purchase upsells and logic-based rules through Checkout Extensions and Functions.
One thing worth flagging if you're comparing platforms in 2026: Shopify has moved checkout customisation fully onto Checkout Extensibility. The old checkout.liquid approach is gone, and Shopify Scripts reach end of life on 30 June 2026, with Shopify Functions as the replacement. For brands already on Shopify this is a migration to plan for now if you haven't. For brands weighing up the move from Magento, it's a point in Shopify's favour: customisations now run in a sandboxed, upgrade-safe framework rather than as raw code injected into the highest-converting page on your site, which is exactly the fragility Magento checkout still carries.
Magento: Flexible But Complex
Magento's checkout is customisable at every level, which is both its strength and its weakness. You can build precisely the flow you want, but doing so takes real development investment. Out of the box it's functional rather than optimised, and most implementations need custom work to reach conversion rates comparable to Shopify's default. Every customisation adds code to maintain, test and update with each platform patch.
Payment Gateways
Payment flexibility is another clear differentiator, especially out of the box. Magento natively integrates a small set of core providers such as PayPal, Braintree and Authorize.Net. Additional gateways are possible but usually need custom development or third-party extensions to implement and maintain. That suits enterprises with very specific payment requirements, at the cost of more complexity and overhead.
Shopify offers a much broader native payment ecosystem through Shopify Payments and pre-built integrations across global and alternative methods, including Apple Pay, Google Pay, Amazon Pay, Shop Pay and region-specific wallets, with support for accelerated checkout and emerging payment options. The result is a real difference in speed and accessibility. Shopify favours plug-and-play checkout that reduces setup friction and lifts conversion, while Magento offers deeper customisation at the price of more development and integration work.
15: Multi-Channel and International Selling
Shopify Markets and Channel Integrations
Shopify is strong on multi-channel. From one admin you can connect Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Google Shopping, Amazon and eBay, syncing inventory and orders automatically. Shopify POS unifies online and in-store, and Shopify Markets handles multi-currency pricing, language translation, duty and tax calculation, local payment methods and regional domains. For brands expanding globally, that single setup takes a great deal of operational weight off the team.
Magento's International Capabilities
Magento supports multi-store setups with separate store views for different regions, languages and currencies. It's powerful but complex to configure and maintain, since each store view needs its own content management and infrastructure costs scale with every additional store. Adobe Commerce adds advanced international features at a significant premium. For most mid-market brands, Shopify Markets reaches the same outcome with a fraction of the complexity.
16: Sales Tools, POS and Fulfilment
Both platforms sell beyond the storefront. Shopify offers native multi-channel selling across Amazon, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest, handles physical and digital products, and integrates with fulfilment partners like DHL, UPS and USPS so you're not sourcing couriers yourself. Shopify POS unifies online and in-store with inventory tracking, analytics and staff management, supporting local pickup, local delivery and buy-online-pickup-in-store, with hardware available for physical retail.
Magento matches the multi-channel basics through extensions for Facebook, Instagram and eBay, and offers abandoned cart recovery, checkout customisation and flexible discounting. POS comes through extensions rather than natively. Its strength here is the integrated B2B functionality that ships with Adobe Commerce: company accounts, buyer tiers, quote logging and credit management inside the platform. The pattern repeats, Shopify native and unified, Magento capable through extension and configuration.
17: Shipping and Inventory
Shopify handles shipping and inventory in the core platform. Real-time carrier rates, label printing, multi-location inventory and order management are built in, with Shopify Shipping offering discounted rates on major carriers and the app store covering more specialist logistics needs. Stock syncs automatically across every sales channel you connect.
Magento offers capable shipping and inventory management, including multi-source inventory for brands fulfilling from several locations, but more of it depends on configuration and extensions to reach the same out-of-the-box convenience. For a complex enterprise operation with specific logistics requirements, that flexibility has value. For most brands, Shopify's native tooling does the job with less to set up and maintain.
18: Developer Experience and Talent
Shopify's Developer Ecosystem
Shopify has a fast-growing developer ecosystem backed by a modern, well-documented toolset. Theme development uses Liquid, a Ruby-based templating language, alongside JavaScript, with React for headless builds via Hydrogen. The APIs are thoroughly documented and built for relatively smooth integration. Finding skilled Shopify developers is straightforward as a result, whether through the Shopify Partner ecosystem, established agencies like Eastside, or a broad freelance market.
Magento's Shrinking Talent Pool
Magento is built on PHP with a complex, layered architecture. PHP developers are common, but Magento-specific expertise is increasingly scarce, and the steep learning curve means even experienced PHP developers need months to become productive. As market share declines, fewer developers invest in the platform, which pushes rates up and lengthens hiring. For a brand planning the next five to ten years, building on a platform with a growing talent base lowers long-term risk.
19: Migration in Practice: Three Scenarios
The platform comparison only matters once you map it onto a real business. Here is how the decision tends to play out, with two of our own migrations to show what the move looks like in practice.
Scenario 1: Mid-Market Fashion Brand on Magento 2
A fashion brand turning over £2M, running Magento 2 Open Source at around £60,000 a year in development and hosting. Moving to Shopify Plus brings platform costs to roughly £21,600 a year, with a simpler stack and far less developer dependency. The saving lands between £20,000 and £30,000 annually, alongside better performance and faster changes. Cutler and Gross, the heritage British eyewear brand, sits squarely in this pattern. Their ageing Magento 2 site was costly to maintain and converting poorly. We replatformed them to Shopify Plus with multi-market support across the US, EU and UK and a full SEO migration strategy. Ranking keywords grew 29%, more than 4,000 existing keywords improved in position, and UK clicks rose 5% on relevant category queries.
Scenario 2: B2B and International Brand on Magento 2
A brand running complex international operations and subscriptions on Magento 2, paying heavily for development and carrying real risk from a platform that no longer served the team. Gold Collagen (MINERVA Research Labs) is a clear example. We migrated them from an outdated Magento 2 platform to Shopify Plus with a fully bespoke build, multi-entity Shopify Markets across 15+ countries, advanced subscription and bundling through Recharge, and custom SAP ERP integration. The new store cut their reliance on developers and gave them room to grow. Against the previous period, organic performance rose sharply: a 79% increase in users, a 124% rise in new users and a 40% uplift in sessions, with SEO migration protection built in from the start.
Where B2B requirements are genuinely complex, with custom procurement workflows and deep approval chains, the move needs careful evaluation rather than an assumption that Shopify covers everything. In most cases it does, and the saving against Adobe Commerce is substantial. In the hardest cases, the right answer is an honest assessment first.
Scenario 3: Brand Still on Magento 1
Any brand still on Magento 1 should migrate immediately. There is no security support, so you're operating exposed, and the question is how quickly the move can be done safely rather than whether to do it at all. Our Shopify migration service can assess your situation and build a priority plan.
20: When to Migrate From Magento to Shopify
The signs that the equation has tipped are usually consistent. Any one of these is worth taking seriously.
You're on Magento 1. Security support is gone, so you're carrying risk every day the store stays live.
Maintenance costs are climbing. When more of your budget goes on keeping the platform running than on growing the business, the model is working against you.
Development is slow and expensive. Simple changes shouldn't take weeks or cost thousands. If they do, the platform is the bottleneck.
Performance wobbles under load. If the store slows during peak traffic, the infrastructure isn't serving you when it matters most.
You're paying for Adobe Commerce features you don't use. Plenty of brands pay enterprise prices for capability they never touch. It's worth reviewing what you actually need before the next renewal.
We migrate brands from Magento to Shopify with a strong focus on SEO preservation, data integrity and a better experience for the customer. Our Shopify migration service supports the whole project, from planning and data transfer through launch and post-migration optimisation. As a Shopify Plus agency, we also help established and enterprise brands get more from the platform once they're on it, from performance to conversion across complex storefronts.
21: Frequently Asked Questions
Is Shopify better than Magento in 2026?
For most ecommerce brands, yes. Shopify is more cost-effective, more reliable and easier to run. Adobe Commerce can still suit brands with deeply complex B2B requirements and the budget to match, but its advantages have narrowed considerably over the past few years.
How much does Magento really cost?
Magento Open Source is free to download, but a realistic annual figure for a mid-market store sits between £40,000 and £120,000 once hosting, development, security and extensions are counted. Adobe Commerce licence fees start at roughly $22,000 a year before the rest of the stack.
Can I migrate from Magento to Shopify without losing data?
Yes. Products, customers, orders and content all migrate. The work sits in careful planning around URL redirects and SEO preservation, which is exactly what an experienced migration partner manages as standard.
Is Magento more customisable than Shopify?
At code level, Magento goes deeper. Shopify Plus has closed most of the gap with Functions, Checkout Extensions and the Storefront API, and for the majority of use cases its customisation is more than sufficient.
What about Magento's B2B capabilities?
Adobe Commerce has more mature B2B features for the most complex enterprise scenarios. Shopify Plus B2B is newer but growing quickly and covers most wholesale and B2B operations. The right call depends on the specifics of your B2B requirements.
Is Magento dead?
No, but the trajectory is clear. Market share is falling, the developer community is shrinking and Adobe's focus has moved to premium enterprise positioning. For mid-market brands, the platform is increasingly hard to justify.
How long does a Magento-to-Shopify migration take?
Typically 8 to 16 weeks, depending on store complexity, data volume and customisation. Complex multi-store or B2B migrations can run longer, which is something to scope early with your partner.
Will I lose my search rankings if I migrate?
Not if it's handled properly. Comprehensive URL mapping, 301 redirects, metadata transfer and sitemap submission preserve your SEO equity. Our recent migrations have grown organic performance post-launch rather than dented it.
22: The Verdict
Magento earned its reputation, and for a stretch it was the right platform for ambitious brands. In 2026 the calculation is different. Shopify matches it on capability for most use cases while carrying less complexity, faster implementation and lower ongoing overhead, and the migrations we run keep proving the point in organic performance and operational headroom.
The real question isn't whether Shopify can replicate what Magento does. It's whether Magento's added complexity still earns its place for the outcomes you actually need. If you want to work through that against your own numbers, talk to our team. We'll help you find the path that makes sense for your business.