Most Magento versus Shopify comparisons are written by an agency that builds on one of them. You can usually guess the conclusion from the logo in the corner. We build on Shopify and we are a Shopify Partner, so treat this the same way, and judge it on whether the reasoning holds up rather than on who wrote it.
What follows is the comparison we actually give brands on calls, including the situations where we tell people to stay on Magento. Those calls happen more often than you would expect.
| The short answerShopify is software you rent. Magento is software you own and have to run. Shopify handles hosting, security, patching and platform updates, and constrains what you can change in return. Magento gives you control over almost everything and hands you the bill for maintaining it. Most UK brands are better served by Shopify because their real constraint is team capacity rather than platform capability. Magento remains the better answer when your catalogue, pricing logic or B2B requirements are genuinely unusual, and you have the budget to keep a developer relationship running permanently. |
Magento vs Shopify at a glance
| Shopify | Magento | |
|---|---|---|
| Model | Hosted SaaS, subscription | Self-hosted, or licensed as Adobe Commerce |
| Hosting and servers | Included and invisible | Your responsibility and your cost |
| Security and patching | Shopify’s problem | Yours, on an ongoing schedule |
| Customisation depth | Broad, but bounded | Effectively unlimited |
| Checkout control | Locked on standard, customisable on Plus | Fully editable |
| B2B and trade | Native on Plus, apps otherwise | Strong native B2B on Adobe Commerce |
| Complex catalogues | Good, with limits on variants and attributes | Built for it |
| Time to launch | Weeks | Months |
| Ongoing developer need | For projects | Permanent |
| Best for | Most UK brands, including complex ones on Plus | Unusual requirements with the budget to sustain them |
The row that decides most of these projects is the second from bottom. Not what the platform can do, but what it asks of you every month once the build is finished.
What you are actually choosing between
The feature comparison is a distraction, because both platforms can build almost any store you can describe. The real choice is about who carries the operational burden.
With Shopify you are renting a managed system. Hosting, uptime, security patches, PCI compliance and platform updates are handled without you knowing they happened. The price is a boundary: there are things you cannot change, and on standard Shopify the checkout is the main one.
With Magento you own the stack. Magento Open Source is free to download, which is where the misunderstanding starts, because the licence is the cheapest part. You provide the hosting, the server configuration, the patching schedule, the upgrade path and the developer who understands all of it. Adobe Commerce, the licensed tier, adds enterprise features and a support relationship, and a licence fee to go with it.
Neither is wrong. But one of them requires a permanent technical relationship and the other does not, and that is the difference brands underestimate.
The cost comparison nobody does properly
Comparing a Shopify subscription against a free Magento download is the single most common mistake in this decision, and it is not close.
| Cost | Shopify | Magento |
|---|---|---|
| Licence or subscription | Monthly, published | Free on Open Source, licensed on Adobe Commerce |
| Hosting | Included | Significant, and it scales with traffic |
| Build | Lower, faster | Higher, longer |
| Security and patching | Included | Ongoing developer time |
| Major version upgrades | Automatic | A project in its own right |
| Apps and extensions | Monthly subscriptions, add up quietly | Often one-off, but need maintaining |
| Making a change | Often in-house | Usually a developer ticket |
The last row is the one that shows up in a budget as something else entirely. On Shopify a marketer can change a landing page, launch a campaign or restructure a collection without raising a ticket. On Magento many of those become small development jobs, and the cost is measured in delay as much as money.
None of this makes Magento expensive in a bad way. It makes it a different shape of expense: predictable subscription against variable project cost. If you are costing up a Shopify build rather than just a subscription, our Shopify fee calculator covers the platform side, and our Shopify development team can scope the rest.
Customisation and control
Magento wins this outright, and it matters less often than people assume.
Because you own the codebase, there is very little you cannot change. Pricing logic, catalogue structure, the checkout flow, the way inventory behaves across warehouses. If your business rules are genuinely unusual, Magento can model them where Shopify would need workarounds.
The question worth asking is whether your requirements are actually unusual, or whether they are simply what you are used to. A lot of the complexity we find on ageing Magento builds is not a business requirement, it is accumulated custom work that solved a problem in 2019 and has been carried forward ever since. Replatforming is a chance to test which is which, and brands are often surprised by how much of it nobody needs any more.
B2B and wholesale
This is Magento’s strongest argument, and the comparison is closer than it used to be.
Adobe Commerce has mature native B2B: company accounts, hierarchies, quote negotiation, custom catalogues and pricing per customer. It has been doing this for years and it does it well. Magento Open Source needs extensions to get there.
Shopify’s answer is Shopify Plus, which now has native company accounts, price lists, payment terms and self-serve trade ordering from the same store as your consumer site. It is younger than Adobe Commerce’s B2B, and for the most intricate requirements it is still behind. For the majority of UK trade businesses we speak to, it does what they need at a lower operational cost.
The honest test is specificity. If you can describe a pricing or approval rule that Shopify Plus genuinely cannot express, Magento is the right answer and we would tell you so. If the requirement is company accounts, agreed price lists and stopping customers emailing spreadsheets, Plus handles it. Our guide to B2B eCommerce covers what a trade platform actually needs to do.
Security, patching and who carries the risk
On Shopify, platform security is not your problem. PCI compliance, patching and infrastructure are handled and you will rarely think about them.
On Magento they are entirely your problem. Security patches are released and must be applied, by someone, on a schedule. Miss enough of them and a self-hosted store becomes a genuine liability rather than a theoretical one. This is the cost most often left out of the comparison, because it does not appear on any invoice until something goes wrong.
If you are running Magento without a retained developer or agency applying patches, that is not a cost saving. It is an unpriced risk, and it is the thing we would want to know first on any Magento audit.
Who can work on it, and what that costs you
A practical point that rarely makes these comparisons and probably should.
Magento is a specialist skill set. Shopify is a common one. That is not a criticism of either platform, but it has consequences you feel commercially rather than technically: specialist skills cost more per day, take longer to recruit, and leave you with fewer options if a relationship ends badly.
The test is simple and worth doing before you need the answer. If your Magento agency or your one developer who understands the build stopped working with you next month, how long would it take to replace them, what would it cost, and how much of the reasoning behind your customisations exists only in their head? On Shopify that answer is usually weeks. On a heavily customised Magento build it is often months, and the handover is the hard part rather than the hiring.
None of that makes Magento the wrong choice. It makes it a choice that assumes continuity, and continuity is worth pricing.
What we usually find when we audit a Magento store
The comparison above is the theory. This is what tends to be true in practice when a brand asks us to look at an existing Magento build before deciding anything.
Custom work nobody can explain. Functionality built years ago, by a developer who has since moved on, to solve a problem that may or may not still exist. It is rarely documented. Working out what is load-bearing and what is vestigial is often the first fortnight of any migration, and it is why honest scoping takes longer than brands expect.
Extensions doing what the platform now does natively. The same pattern as Shopify app sprawl with a different bill attached. Each one was reasonable when it was installed. Collectively they are a maintenance surface and an upgrade obstacle.
An upgrade that has been deferred. Very common, and the single biggest hidden number in this comparison. A deferred major upgrade is a project sitting on the balance sheet that nobody has costed. Brands often find the upgrade they have been putting off costs a meaningful fraction of a replatform, which changes the decision entirely.
Content and category pages carrying more organic value than anyone realised. This is the one that catches people out during migration. Layered navigation URLs, category filters and old CMS pages quietly accumulate rankings over years, and they are also the pages most likely to be cut from a migration scope because nobody checked what they were earning first.
None of these are arguments against Magento. They are arguments for auditing properly before choosing, because two brands on the same platform can be in completely different positions, and a platform comparison tells you nothing about which one you are.
Three scenarios, and the honest verdict for each
| The brand | The verdict |
|---|---|
| Ageing Magento build, small team, no retained developer | Move. This is the clearest case there is. You are carrying the cost and risk of ownership without the capacity to use the control it buys you. |
| Trade and consumer sales, complex pricing, in-house dev team | It depends, genuinely. Write your pricing and approval rules down and test them against Shopify Plus honestly. If they fit, move. If two or three genuinely do not, staying is defensible. |
| Large catalogue, heavy ERP integration, working Magento setup | Stay, for now. A working integrated Magento store is not a problem to be solved. Revisit when the next major upgrade is due, because that is when the real cost surfaces and the comparison changes. |
When Magento is still the right answer
Worth saying plainly, since we sell Shopify builds.
Magento is the better choice when your catalogue or pricing logic is genuinely exceptional rather than merely large, when Adobe Commerce’s B2B does something you have tested and Shopify Plus cannot, when you have in-house development capacity that makes ownership an advantage rather than an overhead, or when you have recently invested in a Magento build that works. In that last case, replatforming is spending money to arrive roughly where you already are.
The wrong reasons to move are that your site looks dated, that it feels slow, or that changes take too long. The first is a design problem, the second is usually a hosting and front-end problem, and the third is often an agency problem. All three are fixable on Magento for considerably less than a replatform, and if that is the whole list, replatforming will disappoint you.
Migrating from Magento to Shopify
If you have decided to move, the migration is where the value is either protected or lost, and it is rarely the build that causes the damage.
Magento and Shopify structure URLs differently. Category paths, product URLs, layered navigation and CMS pages rarely map one to one. Every one of those addresses may have accumulated years of organic visibility, and a replatform that treats redirect mapping as a launch-week task is how brands lose a quarter of organic revenue and spend six months getting it back.
Handled properly it is a controlled process: crawl and baseline the existing store before anything moves, map every indexed URL to its destination, rebuild templates and structured data rather than assuming they carry across, then monitor rankings against the pre-migration baseline so anything that slips is caught in weeks. The product data is the easy half. The search visibility is the half that pays for the project.
Our Shopify migration team plans the search side before the design side, for that reason.
The mistakes we see most often
- Comparing a subscription to a free download. Magento Open Source is free. Running it is not. Hosting, patching and developer time belong in the comparison.
- Replatforming to fix a design problem. A rebuild fixes that, on either platform, for far less than a migration.
- Assuming your requirements are unusual. Most are not. Write them down and test them properly before concluding a platform cannot handle them.
- Leaving redirects to launch week. This is the single most expensive mistake in a Magento to Shopify move, and the most avoidable.
- Migrating and redesigning and relaunching marketing at once. When something dips you will not know which change caused it.
- Ignoring the patching bill. An unpatched self-hosted store is not cheaper, it is uninsured.
Frequently asked questions
Is Shopify better than Magento?
Not inherently. Shopify is better for most brands because it removes operational burden they do not want. Magento is better where control genuinely earns its cost. The right question is not which platform is stronger, it is which set of trade-offs matches how your business is run.
Is Magento cheaper than Shopify?
The licence for Magento Open Source is free, and that is where the saving usually ends. Once hosting, security patching, upgrades and developer time are included, total cost of ownership is typically higher than a comparable Shopify setup. Compare the whole cost over three years rather than the monthly line.
Is Magento better for large catalogues?
It handles catalogue complexity extremely well, particularly deep attribute structures and unusual product relationships. Shopify has limits on variants and attributes that occasionally bite. For most catalogues the limits never come up, but if yours is genuinely complex it is worth testing against them specifically rather than assuming either way.
How long does a Magento to Shopify migration take?
Most run in the region of two to four months, driven by catalogue size, how many integrations need rebuilding and how much custom functionality has to be replaced rather than moved. The crawl and redirect mapping happen first and are not the part to compress.
Will migrating from Magento to Shopify hurt our SEO?
Not if it is planned properly, and this is the most common way replatforms go wrong. Redirect mapping, template structure, structured data and internal linking need handling before launch rather than after. Expect some short-term fluctuation on any migration. Expect it to recover.
Can Shopify handle B2B like Magento?
Shopify Plus has native company accounts, price lists, payment terms and self-serve trade ordering, which covers what most UK trade businesses need. Adobe Commerce still goes deeper on the most intricate B2B requirements. The test is whether you can name a specific rule Plus cannot express.
Do we need to rebuild the site to move to Shopify?
Effectively yes. Magento themes do not transfer, so the front end is rebuilt. That is usually welcome, since brands moving off Magento are often on a build that is several years old, but it should be in the budget from the start rather than arriving as a surprise.
What happens to our customer and order history?
It migrates. Customers, order history, products, variants and content can all move across, though customer passwords cannot be transferred between platforms and customers will need to reset them at first login. Worth planning the communication around that rather than letting people discover it.
Is Magento being discontinued?
No. Magento Open Source continues, and Adobe Commerce is Adobe’s commercial version of the same lineage. What did end was Magento 1, which reached end of life in 2020 and should not be running anywhere today. If you are still on Magento 1, that is not a platform comparison, it is an urgent security problem.
Should we move to Shopify or Shopify Plus?
Most brands leaving Magento have the complexity that makes Plus worth it, particularly if trade sales or multiple regions are involved. But not all do, and the upgrade should be justified on what you will actually use. Our Shopify vs Shopify Plus comparison sets out that decision.
Related reading: Best eCommerce platform in the UK, Shopify vs Shopify Plus and What is B2B eCommerce?
| Weighing up a move off Magento?A 30 minute call with a senior eCommerce specialist. No pitch, and a straight answer on whether replatforming is worth it for your store, or whether you are better off staying put. Book a growth call. |
If you have decided Shopify is the right direction, our Shopify migration agency team handles the crawl, the redirect mapping, the build and the monitoring that follows.