Magento vs Shopify: A Comprehensive Comparison (2025)

For years, Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento) has been the gold standard for enterprise ecommerce business, renowned for its raw power and virtually limitless customisation. With hundreds of thousands of online stores created using Magento, its global adoption is undeniable. The platform's key benefits include extensive features, flexibility, and customisation capabilities that enhance the online shopping experience and meet specific business needs.

But the e-commerce landscape has fundamentally shifted—speed, agility, and operational efficiency now take priority. As businesses evaluate which ecommerce solution best fits their needs, these rapidly changing priorities often demand a more flexible, strategic approach to ensure long-term growth.

What to expect in this comparison between Shopify vs Magento

This is the crossroads many ambitious enterprise brands now face. Choosing the right ecommerce platform is a critical decision. While Magento offers a powerful, flexible foundation for complex business needs, brands must weigh the ongoing investment required to maintain a self-managed system against the benefits of moving to a more modern, agile, and cost-effective solution.

As a certified Shopify Plus agency specialising in complex enterprise migrations, we’ll take you through a detailed, strategic analysis of Magento vs. Shopify — as foundational business decisions that shape your brand’s competitive future.

What is Adobe Commerce (Magento) and Shopify?

Magento is an open-source e-commerce platform launched in 2008 and acquired by Adobe in 2018, becoming part of the Adobe Experience Cloud. It remains a popular choice for businesses that require deep customisation and control. Magento 2, the latest version, offers improved SEO capabilities, a more flexible theming system, and access to a vast library of extensions and themes through the Magento Marketplace. Known for its scalability, robustness, and extensive customisation options, the platform is supported by a strong developer community and an active ecosystem of plugins and integrations. Adobe Commerce products benefit from dedicated support services, troubleshooting resources, and expert assistance to help users resolve technical issues efficiently.

Magento is designed for enterprise-scale ecommerce and includes advanced features like customer relationship management, intelligent product recommendations, and powerful analytics to personalise shopping experiences across multiple brands and regions. Its robust reporting tools help merchants understand customer behaviour and optimise the site performance. The platform comes in two main versions: Magento Commerce (Enterprise), a licensed solution with advanced B2B capabilities and extensive integration support, and Magento Open Source, a free version offering high flexibility for new or growing brands. However, managing the open-source version requires technical expertise or agency support. The open-source project is continually enhanced by community-driven projects, with contributions from developers worldwide helping to evolve the platform and expand its capabilities for all users.

Shopify Plus is the enterprise version of Shopify, is a fully hosted platform built for speed, simplicity, and scalability. It allows DTC and B2B ecommerce brands to launch quickly and focus on growth without worrying about infrastructure management. Backed by a strong global community, a vast ecosystem of app integrations, and reliable support, 

Magento vs Shopify: Key Differences

Spiraling & Unpredictable Total Cost of Ownership (TCO):

Magento’s initial license or free download represents only a small part of the total cost of ownership. Enterprise businesses must also budget for premium hosting, CDN fees, developer and system admin salaries, third-party security audits, ongoing agency retainers, and the cost of upgrades and security patches. Ensuring PCI compliance and protecting customer data adds further complexity and expense. In contrast, Shopify is a fully hosted SaaS platform built for high-volume enterprise merchants, offering scalability and advanced customisation without the infrastructure and maintenance burdens of self-managed systems.

Painfully Slow Time-to-Market:

In today's fast-moving market, speed equals competitive currency. On Magento, launching new features, custom landing pages, or simple promotional campaigns often requires formal development cycles. This process—involving briefs, quotes, development, testing, and deployment—can consume weeks or months, causing enterprises to miss critical market opportunities and lose competitive advantage.

Crippling Developer Dependency:

Scaling and innovating on Magento depends on a small, expensive pool of specialized developers. This often creates bottlenecks and limits the ability of marketing and merchandising teams to move quickly. While Magento offers deep customisation, it comes with significant operational complexity. Without dedicated technical resources, this can lead to hidden costs, delays, and reduced agility. In contrast, Shopify Plus manages all backend infrastructure—hosting, security, uptime, and patches—so teams can focus on growth-driving areas like marketing, product development, and customer experience.

Magento vs Shopify: Comprehensive Platform Analysis

1. Pricing & Value – Predictability vs. Volatility

Budget considerations are crucial when selecting an ecommerce platform for enterprise retail or B2B operations.

Magento:

Magento Commerce offers deep customisation and control, but that flexibility comes with unpredictable costs driven by infrastructure, development, and maintenance needs—making budgeting and scaling more complex. Magento offers two paths: Magento Open Source, a free option for small businesses, and Magento, the premium version for enterprises needing advanced features and support. To ensure sustainable growth, evaluating the platform’s total long-term cost is crucial.

• Pros: It offers complete control over infrastructure and customisation, with the freedom to choose hosting and service providers—ideal for brands with dedicated in-house development teams and substantial technical budgets.
• Cons: Magento is characterised by volatile costs across licensing, hosting, CDN, extensions, and security. Due to formal development cycles, It requires ongoing developer support that slows time-to-market, incurs hidden emergency costs for critical fixes, and demands continuous maintenance and monitoring that drains operational resources.

Shopify:

Shopify Plus offers a predictable and simplified cost structure ideal for brands that want to scale without the distractions of infrastructure management. With hosting, security, and updates all included, businesses benefit from operational clarity, enhanced efficiency, and significantly reduced internal overhead.

• Pros: Shopify Plus offers transparent, predictable pricing with a flat platform fee, includes enterprise-grade web hosting and global CDN infrastructure, supports unlimited bandwidth and transactions without additional costs, handles all security and PCI compliance automatically, requires no manual updates or patches, and provides dedicated strategic support through Launch Engineers and Merchant Success Managers.
• Cons: Shopify offers less flexibility in selecting infrastructure providers or hosting arrangements, and some advanced features may require third-party extensions and apps with additional subscription costs.

Verdict: Shopify Plus and Magento offer vastly different experiences when it comes to store management and day-to-day operations. Shopify Plus is built for operational ease, allowing companies users to manage content, products, and campaigns with minimal technical expertise. While undeniably powerful, Magento requires significantly more technical involvement,.relying on developer resources for even routine operational updates.

2. Ease of Use – Simplicity vs. Technical Complexity

User experience and operational efficiency are critical factors when choosing an ecommerce platform for enterprise business operations.

Magento:

Adobe Commerce provides comprehensive control and flexibility for brands with unique operational requirements. It is ideal for technical teams that must customise every aspect of their store experience and have the resources to manage that complexity. By consolidating content, product, and campaign management into a single platform, Adobe Commerce streamlines operations for enterprise businesses, making it easier to oversee multiple brands or business units from one unified system.

Magento Open Source offers a free version for new or growing brands that allows smaller companies or those new to ecommerce to start developing their online stores with minimal upfront costs, making it accessible for businesses just beginning their ecommerce journey.

• Pros: Provides complete control and flexibility for businesses with unique operational needs, making it ideal for technical teams seeking to customise every aspect of the store experience and tailor the admin interface with custom modules and dashboards that match specific business processes.
• Cons: There is a steep learning curve for non-technical users, and routine tasks often require developer assistance, significantly slowing time to market. Setup, configuration, and ongoing maintenance are complex and resource-demanding, posing substantial challenges for organisations without dedicated technical resources and specialised expertise.

Shopify:

Shopify Plus prioritises user-friendly design with intuitive tools that enable non-technical teams to manage their stores effectively and independently. This significantly reduces reliance on developers and accelerates retail and online business operations across all departments.

• Pros: It features an intuitive admin dashboard, drag-and-drop editor, and mobile-responsive themes that enable fast setup and iteration. This allows merchants to manage stores independently while reducing developer reliance and accelerating team onboarding across marketing, merchandising, and operations teams.
• Cons: It may be limited to highly complex workflows unless supported by third-party apps, and some advanced customisations may require developer involvement or implementation of a headless architecture for maximum flexibility.

Verdict: Shopify Plus stands out for its operational efficiency and ease of use. While Adobe Commerce offers greater control, it also significantly increases complexity and resource demands. For most enterprise businesses, Shopify Plus’s intuitive interface and reduced reliance on technical teams lead to faster time-to-market, lower operational costs, and greater agility. Its user-friendly design empowers marketing and merchandising teams to act independently, driving a more efficient and responsive organization.

3. Customisation & Flexibility – Strategic Control vs. Absolute Complexity

One of the biggest considerations for enterprise brands when evaluating platforms is finding a SaaS solution that balances control and customisation to maximize long-term growth.

Magento:

Adobe Commerce provides full, root-level access to its codebase, offering powerful flexibility for custom development and unique business logic. Magento Open Source, its free counterpart, gives smaller or newer businesses a flexible and cost-effective entry point to build online stores and scale over time. However, this freedom comes with trade-offs: each customisation adds complexity, leading to fragile upgrades, higher maintenance costs, and longer development cycles that can ultimately slow down innovation.

• Pros: It enables unlimited customisation through full code-level access, making it ideal for complex B2B logic or particular workflows. It best suits businesses with skilled in-house development teams or established long-term agency partnerships with deep Magento expertise.
• Cons: Customisations often lead to significant technical debt, making future upgrades slow and risky. Even simple changes can cause unintended issues requiring extensive QA processes. At the same time, ongoing reliance on specialised developers drives operational costs and hampers rapid innovation cycles.

Shopify:

Shopify Plus delivers enterprise-level customisation without the burden of maintaining a custom codebase. Its API-first architecture, Shopify Functions, and checkout extensibility provide the flexibility large businesses need—while ensuring the platform remains stable, scalable, and ready for future technologies.

• Pros: It uses an API-first architecture that supports deep backend integrations and headless builds, offers Shopify Functions for custom backend logic implementation, enables secure customisation of its industry-leading checkout through Checkout Extensibility, provides access to over 8,000 plug-and-play enterprise-grade apps in the Shopify App Store, and fosters rapid innovation without introducing technical risk or platform fragility.
• Cons: Developers don’t have root code access, which may limit specific edge-case customisations. Businesses accustomed to open-source flexibility may face a learning curve adapting to Shopify’s structured framework. However, this often results in more stable, maintainable solutions.

Verdict: This category represents one of the closest comparisons between the platforms. Adobe Commerce offers deep customisation through root-level code access, ideal for businesses with complex requirements and dedicated technical teams. However, Shopify Plus provides the flexibility most enterprises need—without the burden of technical debt. The extensive Shopify App Store further enhances functionality, making Shopify Plus the more sustainable long-term option.

4. Ecommerce Features & Functionality – Comprehensive Control vs. Streamlined Power

When considering ecommerce platforms, the available features and flexibility will determine your store's operational capabilities and expansion opportunities.

Magento:

Adobe Commerce offers robust ecommerce business functionality with deep customisation, making it ideal for businesses with complex product catalogues and unique operational needs. The Magento platform provides advanced store inventory management tools, including real-time stock updates, automated alerts, and support for multi-warehouse, multi-site operations, enabling seamless global commerce and managing multiple locations for international selling.

Integration with Adobe Experience Cloud further enhances capabilities with advanced analytics, marketing automation, and customer insights to support data-driven growth. These analytics and reporting features help merchants understand customer behaviour and improve their ecommerce site performance.

• Pros: Magento supports complex product types—including bundled, configurable, and downloadable products—along with multi-store setups and built-in B2B features like custom pricing, quote management, and account hierarchies. It enables custom workflows and business rules tailored to specific operational needs. It also integrates with third-party tools for automated store management and advanced analytics. The active Magento developer community provides a wide range of Magento extensions, which are essential for expanding store functionality and customising the ecommerce experience.
• Cons: It requires technical implementation to unlock or modify advanced features; many essential functions, like subscriptions and loyalty programs, require third-party modules and custom setup; ongoing testing and QA are needed to ensure stability after each feature addition or extension integration; and the feature-rich environment often proves overly complex for businesses without dedicated development teams and specialised expertise.

Shopify:

Shopify Plus provides powerful native ecommerce tools designed for rapid deployment and seamless operation,allowing teams to focus on digital growth strategies rather than infrastructure management and technical maintenance overhead.

• Pros: Comes with powerful native ecommerce tools, including advanced discounting engine, flexible checkout customisation, gift cards, subscriptions, and loyalty features, and comprehensive multi-channel selling capabilities across web, mobile, social media, marketplaces, and POS systems, all managed from one unified admin interface, complete B2B suite supporting wholesale catalogues, customer-specific pricing, net payment terms, and streamlined B2B workflows, easy integration with ERP, WMS, CRM, and PIM systems via APIs or certified apps, and rapid feature adoption through regular Shopify Editions updates and a thriving app ecosystem.
• Cons: Highly specific or niche features may require third-party apps or custom development, and custom B2B logic beyond the standard Shopify B2B suite may need workarounds or API-based solutions, though these are typically faster to implement than Magento customisations.

Verdict: Both platforms offer robust ecommerce capabilities, but Shopify Plus delivers features in a more accessible and immediately deployable format. While Magento provides deeper customisation of individual features, Shopify Plus’s native tools and seamless integrations enable faster implementation and more reliable performance. The platform’s regular feature updates through Shopify Editions and comprehensive B2B suite make it particularly attractive for retail and online businesses seeking rapid deployment and consistent innovation without the overhead of custom development and maintenance.

5. Design Templates & Customisation – Unlimited Freedom vs. Guided Excellence

Design flexibility and customisation capabilities vary significantly between platforms, affecting both creative possibilities and the resources required to achieve your desired storefront appearance and user experience.

Magento:

Magento offers complete design freedom with full access to the codebase, allowing businesses to build fully custom storefronts without creative limitations. Its flexible templating system supports extensive customisation of layouts, colors, and functionality, while a wide range of themes and templates helps brands create unique digital experiences that reflect their identity and engage target audiences.

The regularly updated Luma theme for Magento 2 offers a modern, reliable foundation for storefront design. It remains fully compatible with the latest Magento releases. Combined with Adobe Commerce’s vast ecosystem of third-party extensions and templates, it allows businesses to enhance the look and functionality of their stores easily. This flexibility helps brands quickly adapt to changing market trends, whether optimising checkout or creating visually engaging category pages.

• Pros: Magento offers unlimited design flexibility and fully bespoke storefronts with complete control over layout and interactivity. It includes a customisable theme library for businesses of all sizes, supports dynamic category pages and rich snippets for SEO, and features intuitive drag-and-drop tools for easy content management. With a vast ecosystem of extensions and advanced theming capabilities, it empowers brands to create immersive shopping experiences.
• Cons: This flexibility brings operational overhead, as even small visual changes often require front-end development, increasing time and costs. The slower design iterations make the platform more demanding for those without dedicated technical resources. Custom themes can cause performance issues and break during upgrades.

Shopify:

Shopify Plus balances professional design options with user-friendly customisation tools, enabling non-technical users and developers to create compelling storefronts efficiently without sacrificing quality or performance.

• Pros: Shopify offers a curated library of professional, mobile-responsive themes for fast deployment and reliable performance. Its drag-and-drop editor allows non-technical users to update layouts and manage content, enabling marketing teams to move quickly. Developers can use Shopify’s Liquid templating language to customise designs while maintaining stability. For full front-end control, brands can implement a headless setup via the Storefront API. With over 10,000 apps in the Shopify App Store, expanding site functionality is simple and scalable.
• Cons: Shopify’s structured theming system means creative freedom is more guided and unconventional layouts may require innovative solutions.

Verdict: While Magento Commerce offers unlimited design freedom, Shopify Plus balances creative flexibility and operational efficiency. The platform’s curated theme library, intuitive editing tools, and headless architecture options provide sufficient design capability for most enterprise needs while maintaining performance and stability. For businesses prioritising speed-to-market and design consistency, Shopify Plus’s guided approach proves more valuable than Adobe Commerce’s unlimited but resource-intensive customisation options.

6. Speed, Performance & Security – Guaranteed Excellence vs. Constant Vigilance

Platform performance and security capabilities directly impact customer experience, conversion rates, and business risk management across all operational aspects of your enterprise ecommerce operation.

Magento:

Magento offers robust security tools and performance capabilities, but managing these critical functions falls on your organization. While the platform includes advanced features to protect online stores and customer data, maintaining PCI compliance and ensuring data security is your responsibility—adding to the overall operational burden.

• Pros: The platform offers complete control over hosting infrastructure and performance optimisation, supports flexible web hosting with specialised providers, and provides a comprehensive security framework—including granular access controls and custom encryption—while its Open Software License (OSL) 3.0 ensures it remains open-source, legally compliant, and highly customisable to meet specific business, performance, and compliance requirements.
• Cons: Maintaining fast load times and strong security on a self-managed platform like Magento Commerce requires costly, finely tuned hosting, ongoing optimization, continuous monitoring, vulnerability testing, and manual patching. Your team bears full responsibility for PCI compliance, performance, and security, where even a single breach can cause lasting damage to brand trust.

Shopify:

Shopify Plus delivers performance and security as core components of the platform infrastructure, removing the operational burden from your internal team while ensuring enterprise-grade standards across all critical functions.

• Pros: Shopify is hosted on a globally distributed, lightning-fast CDN to ensure optimal experiences worldwide. A 24/7 security team of hundreds supports it and offers automatic Level 1 PCI DSS compliance across all stores without configuration. It manages all security updates, SSL certificates, and compliance tasks behind the scenes. Shopify Plus ensures no sensitive data is stored on the server, protecting customer information and maintaining security standards. It includes transparent uptime guarantees and performance monitoring, maintains enterprise-grade security standards, and frees your team to focus on customer experience and growth instead of infrastructure.
• Cons: Shopify’s managed infrastructure offers simplicity but also means reduced control over hosting choices, limited flexibility for advanced performance tuning or specialised security configurations, and reliance on platform-approved tools and providers.

Verdict: Shopify Plus offers a clear advantage in performance and security. While Magento can deliver strong results in these areas, it demands ongoing investment in infrastructure, monitoring, and maintenance. In contrast, Shopify Plus provides enterprise-grade performance and security out of the box, eliminating operational overhead and allowing businesses to focus on growth instead of infrastructure—delivering significant value for enterprise operations.

7. Customer Support & Resources – Dedicated Partnership vs. Community Reliance

The level and quality of support available can significantly impact your platform’s success, especially during critical business moments or when facing complex technical challenges that threaten operations.

Magento:

Much of the ongoing support is heavily dependent on your development agency. From day-to-day operations to complex customisations, businesses typically rely on their agency partners for timely fixes, feature development, and upgrade management.

• Pros: Magento offers comprehensive documentation, tutorials, and resources for developers and merchants, supported by a global network of contributors and partners. Its active community forums enable knowledge sharing and troubleshooting, while Adobe provides technical support, consulting, and training. Businesses can work with certified developers for custom integrations and ongoing support, accelerating ecommerce development. Enterprise users also receive dedicated account management and priority support for critical issues.
• Cons: Support quality and response times can vary significantly depending on the hosting provider and support tier, often requires coordination between multiple vendors (hosting, extensions, development) to resolve complex issues, and the vast community and numerous support options can be overwhelming for businesses without clear guidance on which resources to leverage, community-driven support may lack consistent quality control and official oversight, and emergency support can be expensive and may not be immediately available outside standard business hours.

Shopify:

Shopify Plus provides comprehensive, dedicated support designed specifically for enterprise merchants. It ensures consistent service quality and rapid resolution when issues that could impact business operations arise.

• Pros: Shopify Plus includes a dedicated Launch Engineer for onboarding and platform optimisation, and an ongoing Merchant Success Manager to support strategic growth. Merchants benefit from priority live chat support, access to the Shopify Academy with courses and certifications, and exclusive Plus community forums and events for networking and best practice sharing. Comprehensive API documentation, developer tools, and sandbox environments enable seamless integrations, while certified Shopify Plus agencies for expert implementation and ongoing support.
• Cons: Some highly technical or custom development questions may require escalation to specialised teams, though response times remain consistently fast.

Verdict: Shopify Plus provides a more structured and reliable live chat support experience, ensuring consistent service quality and faster resolution times. While Magento benefits from a vast community and flexible support options, this approach often requires coordination between multiple vendors and can result in inconsistent support quality. For enterprise businesses where downtime translates directly to revenue loss, Shopify Plus’s dedicated support model offers greater peace of mind and operational reliability. For a comprehensive guide on accessing expert support and troubleshooting, see Get Shopify Help: A Step-by-Step Guide.

Migration Readiness Checklist: Is It Time to Migrate Your Brand to Shopify Plus?

If you agree with several of these indicators, it's a strong signal that your business is ready for Shopify Plus's strategic advantages.

Your Total Cost of Ownership has become unpredictable, with constant surprises from unforeseen development, hosting, or maintenance costs appearing on quarterly reports. Your marketing and merchandising teams express frustration at being unable to launch campaigns, update content, or create landing pages swiftly without filing tickets with a development team. You worry about your site's ability to handle massive traffic spikes during major sales events like Black Friday without performance degradation or complete system crashes.

Your organization spends more time and resources discussing security patches and platform maintenance than discussing customer experience optimization and conversion rate improvement. Your development roadmap has become clogged with "keeping the lights on" tasks instead of innovative projects that drive measurable business growth and competitive advantage. You observe competitors on more agile platforms launching features and integrations in a fraction of the time it takes your team to implement similar functionality.

Deciding Which Platform Is Right for You

The enterprise ecommerce landscape has reached a turning point. While Adobe Commerce delivers powerful customisation capabilities for businesses with extensive technical resources, the question isn't whether you can build a complex solution—it's whether you should in today's fast-moving market. Adobe Commerce requires significant ongoing investment in specialised developers, infrastructure management, security monitoring, and platform maintenance. These operational burdens often consume resources that could drive growth, innovation, and customer experience improvements. Shopify Plus offers a fundamentally different approach: enterprise-grade power without the operational complexity. With predictable pricing, automatic security updates, guaranteed performance, and dedicated support, Shopify Plus enables teams to focus on what matters most—growing the business rather than maintaining the platform.

Choose Shopify and Shopify Plus if you want rapid scalability, predictable costs, minimal technical overhead, and the ability to launch features quickly without developer dependencies. It's ideal for growth-focused organisations that value operational efficiency and strategic partnership support.

Choose Magento if you have substantial technical resources, extensive customisation control, and unique operational requirements that demand custom development that justifies the complexity and ongoing investment.

For most enterprise brands, Shopify Plus represents a strategic advantage: faster time to market, lower total cost of ownership, higher conversion rates, and the ability to redirect resources from platform maintenance to revenue-driving activities. Shopify Plus delivers enterprise capabilities without enterprise complexity in a competitive landscape where agility determines success.

Your Partner for Seamless Migration & Future Growth

A successful migration is not just about moving products and customers. It's about re-platforming your business for its next chapter of accelerated growth. Ready to see what your brand's future on Shopify Plus looks like? Our team of certified Shopify Plus experts specializes in executing seamless, zero-downtime migrations for enterprise brands moving from Adobe Commerce (Magento). We understand the complexities and are here to guide you through every step of the transformation process.