Shopify vs Magento (Adobe Commerce)
Magento was the default for serious ecommerce for a decade. For most brands that is no longer true, but there are still cases where it is the right answer — and we will tell you if yours is one.
Choose Shopify unless you have genuinely complex B2B or ERP requirements, an existing Magento investment worth preserving, and the engineering budget to maintain it. For most mid-market D2C brands, Magento's total cost of ownership is no longer justified.
Side by side
| Shopify | Magento (Adobe Commerce) | |
|---|---|---|
| Total cost of ownership | Plan plus apps. Predictable. Shopify Plus is a step up but still bounded. | Licence (Adobe Commerce), hosting, and a development team. Typically several times Shopify's total. |
| Hosting & infrastructure | Managed entirely. Not your problem. | Yours to architect, scale and secure — or Adobe's, at Adobe Commerce Cloud pricing. |
| Security patching | Handled by Shopify. | Yours, and non-negotiable. Unpatched Magento is a well-known target. |
| B2B capability | Strong on Plus — company accounts, price lists, payment terms. Weaker below it. | Genuinely excellent. Still Magento's strongest argument. |
| Customisation ceiling | High but bounded. Checkout is fixed below Plus. | Effectively unlimited if you have the engineering to reach it. |
| Time to launch | Weeks. | Months, realistically, for anything non-trivial. |
| Developer availability | Large and growing talent pool. | Shrinking pool, and increasingly expensive. |
| Upgrade burden | Continuous and invisible. | Major version upgrades are projects in their own right. |
Which one is actually right for you
Pick Shopify if…
- Your Magento upgrade and security bill has stopped making sense
- You want to launch or replatform in weeks rather than quarters
- Your team is marketing-led rather than engineering-led
- Your B2B needs are real but fit within Shopify Plus's company-accounts model
- You would rather spend budget on acquisition than on infrastructure
Pick Magento (Adobe Commerce) if…
- You have deeply custom B2B logic that Plus genuinely cannot express
- You run tight ERP, PIM or WMS integration that would be expensive to rebuild
- You have an in-house Magento team already and the cost is sunk
- Your catalogue is very large with complex, attribute-driven merchandising
- Regulatory requirements demand full control of hosting and data residency
If your situation is in the right-hand column, we will tell you so on the call. We would rather lose the project than move you onto the wrong platform.
Moving from Magento to Shopify
Magento migrations are the most involved kind we run, and the complexity is rarely in the products — it is in the custom field mapping, tiered and customer-group pricing, order history, and whatever the ERP handshake looks like. We scope those explicitly rather than discovering them mid-build, and we write the URL map and 301 plan before any data moves.
How our migrations workQuestions we get asked
Is Magento dead?
No, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. Adobe Commerce is actively developed and remains genuinely strong for complex B2B and large attribute-driven catalogues. What has changed is that the mid-market default moved — a brand doing a few crore or a few million a year in D2C revenue no longer needs what Magento offers, and pays a great deal for capability it will not use.
What does a Magento to Shopify migration actually involve?
Catalogue, customers and order history are the routine part. The work that decides the timeline is custom attribute mapping, customer-group and tiered pricing, any ERP or PIM handshake, and the URL map. We scope those four explicitly before quoting. A typical migration runs two to three weeks for a straightforward catalogue and longer where the B2B logic is deep.
Will we lose our B2B functionality?
It depends on how custom it is, and we will tell you honestly during scoping. Shopify Plus handles company accounts, multiple buyers per company, customer-specific catalogues and price lists, and payment terms — which covers most B2B requirements we see. If your logic goes beyond that, we would rather say so than migrate you into a corner.
We're on Magento 1. What now?
Magento 1 reached end of life in 2020 and has had no official security support since. If you are still on it, you have an urgent problem rather than a strategic choice — an unpatched Magento 1 store is a known target. The realistic options are migrating to Shopify or to Magento 2, and for most mid-market brands the total cost comparison now favours Shopify by a wide margin.
Not sure which fits your business?
Send us your store URL or your brief. We will come back with a written view — including which platform we would actually put you on and why.