Shopify vs Magento
Magento, now Adobe Commerce, was built for large stores with specific needs and an in-house technical team. If you have both, Magento can still be the right answer. The problem is that many stores end up on Magento because of catalogue or business size rather than because they genuinely need that level of customisation, and they end up paying for complexity they never use.
The real cost is not the licence
Magento Open Source has no licence fee, but it needs a dedicated server, since shared hosting will not give you acceptable performance. It needs a team keeping it patched for security. And it needs Magento specialists for any non-trivial change, who are neither cheap nor plentiful. Adobe Commerce, the paid tier, adds an annual licence that becomes a serious number on large catalogues.
Shopify changes that equation. You pay a predictable monthly subscription, and everything that counts as maintenance work on Magento, meaning security, updates and infrastructure, stops being your problem.
Where Magento still wins
If your business runs complex B2B logic, highly specific pricing rules by customer or region, or you need total control over every part of the backend, Magento allows things that Shopify, as a SaaS platform, does not fully match. Shopify Plus has closed much of that gap for B2B, but not all of it. And if you already have the technical team in place and the cost of running it is amortised by your volume, switching does not automatically pay off.
Where Shopify wins
Speed to market, cost predictability, and above all not depending on having or hiring a Magento specialist for every change. Most stores that migrate from Magento to Shopify do not do it because Magento does something wrong. They do it because they have spent years funding complex infrastructure for a catalogue that Shopify handles just as well with far less operational friction.
| Shopify | Magento / Adobe Commerce | |
|---|---|---|
| Infrastructure | Managed by Shopify | Dedicated server, your responsibility |
| Cost | Predictable monthly subscription | Hosting, maintenance and specialist development, plus licence on Adobe Commerce |
| Customisation | High via apps and Liquid, within platform limits | Effectively unlimited, in exchange for technical complexity |
| Technical dependency | Low, no developers needed day to day | High, most changes need a specialist |
| Advanced B2B | Good with Shopify Plus | Very mature natively |
If you already run Magento
Brands including Pompeii, Panama Jack, Toni Pons and Gobik have already made this move. If the reason you are still on Magento is the inertia of having been there for years rather than a real technical requirement, we have a dedicated page on how to migrate from Magento to Shopify without losing catalogue or rankings.
Tell us how your Magento is set up and we will look at whether the move pays off in your case.