Shopify Plus vs Magento Adobe Commerce.

Shopify Plus starts at $2,300 a month on a 3-year term or $2,500 a month on a 1-year term, and Shopify may charge a variable platform fee instead for complex businesses. Magento Open Source has no licence fee; its code is published on GitHub under OSL 3.0. Adobe Commerce is sold through Adobe sales, so its price comes as a quote. On Magento you also pay separately for hosting, extensions and the people who apply patches.

It depends on what you pay today for hosting, extensions and upgrade work. Shopify Plus folds hosting and platform updates into the subscription, so those lines mostly disappear. Magento leaves them with you, and they grow when a version leaves support. To compare fairly, list the last 12 months of Magento invoices next to 36 months of the Plus fee plus the apps you would add. Our replatforming cost calculator walks through the same lines.

Yes. Shopify lists a 0.2% third-party transaction fee on the Plus plan when orders go through a gateway other than Shopify Payments. Magento charges no platform fee per order, whichever processor you use, so you pay only the processor. If you plan to keep an existing Adyen, Braintree or Authorize.Net contract, add that 0.2% of revenue to your Plus cost model before comparing.

Shopify lists Plus online standard card rates from 2.25% + 30¢, premium cards at 2.95% + 30¢, and an extra 1% for international cards. In-person card rates on Plus are 2.3% + 10¢. On Magento, rates come from the processor contract you sign, so pull your current effective rate from last quarter’s statements and compare it with these figures before you decide.

Shopify’s pricing page lists unlimited web hosting, a free SSL certificate, unlimited staff accounts, POS Pro with 20 locations included, and unlimited B2B catalogs on Plus. On Magento Open Source you add these through your host, extensions or custom code. Adobe Commerce ships its own B2B module, so the gap is smaller there, but hosting and certificates still sit with you or Adobe’s Cloud plan.

Yes. Adobe released Adobe Commerce 2.4.9 on May 12, 2026, with standard support until May 31, 2029. Adobe gives each version three years of standard support from its release date. Older lines are closing: 2.4.6 standard support ended August 11, 2026, and 2.4.4 extended support ended April 14, 2026. Magento 2 itself is current software. Stores stuck on old 2.4.x lines are the ones at risk.

The biggest one is upkeep. You own the server stack, which for 2.4.9 means PHP 8.5, MariaDB 12.3, OpenSearch 3, Valkey 9 and RabbitMQ 4.3 at the versions Adobe tests. Every release line must be upgraded inside its support window. Extensions run inside the same codebase, so one module can break checkout after an upgrade. Teams with in-house PHP developers cope well. Small teams usually struggle.

No. Magento is older, but it is still active, with a 2026 release and a public GitHub repository. What has changed is the effort to run it. Shopify Plus moves hosting and core updates to Shopify, while Magento keeps them with you. Brands that need deep code changes still pick Magento. Brands that want fewer moving parts and a smaller technical team tend to pick Plus.

Adobe says that from June 1, 2027 it will stop maintaining Cloud environments that run unsupported Commerce versions and may suspend traffic, which takes the storefront offline. If you run 2.4.4 through 2.4.6 on Adobe’s Cloud, you must upgrade, move to Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service, or replatform before your line’s deadline. Self-hosted Open Source stores are outside this rule but still lose security patches.

On Shopify Plus, Shopify patches the platform and there is no version for you to install. On Magento, Adobe publishes cumulative security patches and isolated patch files, and your team or agency applies and tests them. Adobe also states it does not fix third-party dependencies such as PHP and MySQL that reach end of life, so those upgrades fall to you as well.

Yes. Adobe still ships releases and runs Adobe Commerce on Cloud, and the open-source edition is maintained on GitHub. Many merchants with heavy B2B rules or custom PHP stay put. The pressure on them comes from version deadlines, not from the software going away. Check which 2.4.x line you run and find its end date in Adobe’s lifecycle table before planning anything.

Ownership is the main one. Magento is software you host and change at the code level. Shopify Plus is a hosted service you extend through apps, Shopify Functions and checkout UI extensions. Magento gives full code access and charges no platform transaction fee. Plus gives managed hosting, Shop Pay, and POS Pro with 20 locations included. The right pick depends on how much engineering you want to own.

Up to a point. Shopify allows 2,048 variants per product and three options per product. Magento configurable products are built from attributes you define, so an item with four or five option axes, such as size, colour, length and finish, needs a different model on Shopify. Common fixes are split products linked by metafields or Shopify’s Combined Listings app. Check your largest product before choosing.

Both cover the basics. Adobe Commerce B2B includes company accounts, shared catalogs, negotiable quotes, requisition lists, purchase orders and pay on account. Shopify includes companies, catalogs and net payment terms on all plans, and Plus lifts the 3-catalog cap to unlimited B2B catalogs. Negotiated quotes are built into Adobe Commerce. On Shopify, quote haggling usually runs through draft orders or an app.

Both can run headless. Shopify Plus offers the Storefront API and says you can deploy its React-based headless stack, Hydrogen, at no extra cost. Magento exposes GraphQL and REST APIs, and you host both the front end and the PHP back end. Headless on Magento therefore means two stacks to run. On Plus it means one front end plus Shopify’s hosted back end.

Shopify says its checkout is load-tested at 10K+ checkouts per minute and reports 99.99% average uptime across Shopify during the biggest sales events of the year. Those are Shopify’s own figures, published on its Plus pricing page. On Magento, peak capacity depends on your hosting, full-page cache and database setup, so run a load test at least a month before peak season.

Yes. Shopify Plus connects to ERPs through the Admin API, webhooks and middleware, and Shopify’s pricing page lists up to 500% higher API call limits on Plus than on other plans. We have built links to Odoo, NetSuite, SAP Business One and ERPNext. Agree which system owns price, stock and customer records before the build starts, because that choice shapes every sync rule.

Upgrade if your store depends on custom PHP modules, Adobe B2B quoting or hosting you control, and your team can keep pace with releases. Move if most of your budget goes to keeping the stack alive rather than shipping features. A quick test: add up the hours spent on upgrades, patches and extension conflicts in the last 12 months, then compare that with the Plus fee.

We plan advanced builds, which include migrations, at 5 to 8 weeks, and headless or custom builds at 8 to 14 weeks. The main drivers are product data clean-up, the number of Magento extensions to replace, and ERP links. You see a working demo on your own data before you sign, and the price is fixed per phase and agreed in writing.

Magento URLs often end in .html and sit at the site root, while Shopify uses fixed paths such as /products/ and /collections/. Every old URL needs a one-to-one 301 redirect to its new page, in a single hop. Plus stores can hold up to 20 million redirects. We crawl the live site, build the map, and test each redirect on staging first. Rankings can still move for a few weeks while Google re-crawls.

Most extensions map to a Shopify app or a built-in feature: layered navigation to Search & Discovery filters, custom checkout steps to checkout UI extensions, custom pricing rules to Shopify Functions. Extensions that rewrite core Magento classes have no direct match and need a fresh design. List every module in app/code and composer.json, then mark each one keep, replace or drop.

Yes. Shopify lets you export products, customers and orders as CSV files or through the Admin API, and Magento can import them. Themes and apps do not carry over, and customer passwords cannot be exported, so customers reset them on first login. Keep your redirect map on file so the 301s can be reversed, and you own any custom code we write.

Ideally a team that builds on both, so the advice is not tied to one platform. FactoryJet works on Shopify as a registered Shopify Partner and also does Magento development, so we can scope an upgrade and a move side by side. Book a 30-minute call with founder Bhavesh Barot and we will compare both paths for your store.