Articles · Platform comparison
Shopify vs Magento
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Most Shopify versus Magento comparisons are written by someone who sells one of them. So is this one, and we have said where our bias sits at the bottom. What follows is the comparison we actually give brands who ask, including the cases where we tell them to stay where they are.
People arrive at this from both sides, searching shopify vs magento if they are deciding where to build and magento vs shopify if they are already on Magento and wondering what leaving costs. The order of the words is a decent guide to which half of this page matters to you.
The short answer
Magento gives you ownership and near-total control, and charges you for it in hosting, security patching and specialist developer time. Shopify takes the infrastructure problem away and charges a platform fee and a cut of revenue. If you employ engineers who know Magento, that trade can be worth making. If you do not, you are paying agency rates to maintain something a hosted platform would run for you.
Total cost of ownership
Magento Open Source is free to download, which is where most cost comparisons go wrong. The licence is the smallest line in the budget. The real figure includes hosting that can take the load, a developer or agency on standing arrangement, security patches applied promptly, extension licences, and the upgrade projects that arrive whether or not you planned for them.
Shopify inverts that. You pay a monthly platform fee plus payment processing, and hosting, PCI compliance, uptime and platform upgrades stop being your problem. The cost is more predictable and harder to defer, which some finance teams prefer and others resent.
The honest comparison is not licence against licence. It is your total annual spend on the store, including the people who keep it running. We have seen brands cut that materially by moving, and we have seen brands with a capable in-house team find the difference small enough that moving was not worth the disruption.
Where Magento genuinely wins
Magento still wins on deep customisation, complex catalogue logic and anything where you need to own the code outright. Very large catalogues with unusual attribute structures, pricing rules that no platform models natively, and tight integration into systems you also control are all cases where Magento earns its keep.
It also wins where the migration cost simply cannot be justified. A stable, converting Magento store with an engineering team who know it is not an obvious candidate for replatforming, whatever an agency tells you.
Where Shopify wins
Shopify wins on time. Time to launch, time to ship a change, and time your team spends on the store rather than on the infrastructure under it. It wins on reliability during peaks you did not forecast, and it wins on the size of the app and partner ecosystem when you need something solved rather than built.
The customisation gap that made this an easy argument for Magento has narrowed. Shopify Functions handle discount, shipping and cart logic on Shopify's own infrastructure. Checkout extensions cover the page that used to be locked. Markets handles multi-region trading, and native B2B covers wholesale that once required a separate build.
Shopify Plus vs Magento for larger brands
For brands comparing Magento against the enterprise tier rather than standard Shopify, the decision narrows to a few specifics: whether you need B2B alongside DTC, how many markets you sell into, how much of the checkout you need to change, and what your API limits look like at peak.
Worth saying plainly: being on Magento today does not mean you need Plus tomorrow. Some of the migrations we run land on standard Shopify because nothing in the requirement justified the enterprise tier, and we would rather say that than sell the bigger plan. If it does apply, our Shopify Plus development service covers what that build involves.
If you do decide to move
The risk in a Magento migration is not the data. Products, customers and orders move reliably with a decent process. The risk is search traffic. Magento URL structures rarely map onto Shopify's automatically, so every indexed URL needs finding, mapping and redirecting before launch rather than after it.
That is the part that decides whether a replatform is a step forward or an expensive year of recovering rankings you already had. We cover how we handle it on our Magento migration service.
Our bias, declared
We are a Shopify agency. We do not build on Magento, and we make money when a brand moves to Shopify, so read the above with that in mind.
What we will say is that we tell brands not to move when moving does not pay back, because a migration sold to a store that did not need one goes badly for everybody and we would rather keep the relationship. If you want that assessment on its own, our audit and strategy service gives you the findings whether or not we do the work.
Common questions
- Is Shopify cheaper than Magento?
- Usually, once you count everything. Magento itself is open source, but you pay for hosting, security patching, a developer who knows it, and extensions. Shopify charges a platform fee and a transaction rate, and absorbs hosting, PCI compliance and platform upgrades. A brand with no in-house developer almost always spends less on Shopify. A brand with a standing engineering team may find the maths closer than it looks.
- Is Magento more customisable than Shopify?
- At the deepest level, yes. You own the codebase and can change anything. That gap has narrowed considerably: Shopify Functions, checkout extensions and the Storefront API now cover most of what brands actually asked custom Magento builds for. The question is not whether you can customise, it is whether the customisation you need justifies owning a codebase.
- Will I lose SEO moving from Magento to Shopify?
- Only if the migration is done badly. Magento URL structures rarely map to Shopify automatically, so every indexed URL needs mapping and redirecting before launch. Rankings survive when that work is done properly and suffer when it is skipped. It is the single most common way a replatform loses money.
- Should I move to Shopify Plus or standard Shopify?
- Plus is worth it when you need B2B, several international markets, checkout customisation, or higher API limits. If none of those apply, standard Shopify runs the same storefront for considerably less. Being on Magento does not automatically mean you need Plus.
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