Adobe Commerce (Magento) vs Shopify Plus: A Detailed 2026 Comparison

Most Adobe Commerce vs Shopify Plus comparisons are written by teams that sell one of the two. We work on both every day. We run multi-store Adobe Commerce Cloud stores, write patches for their modules, and we are moving a large Magento catalogue to Shopify. This comparison is what we tell merchants who ask us which platform to choose in 2026, including the parts that rarely make it into vendor material.

The Short Answer

Choose Shopify Plus if you sell mainly direct to consumers, your catalogue fits Shopify’s product model, and you would rather spend your budget on marketing and merchandising than on running a platform.
Choose Adobe Commerce if your business logic is the product: complex B2B, unusual pricing and promotion rules, deep ERP integration, or a multi-store setup that needs full control over every store, URL and checkout step.
Look again at Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service if you like Adobe’s commerce model but not the cost of upgrades. It is a different product from the Magento you may know.

The rest of this article explains how we get to those answers, area by area.

Four Products, Not Two

“Adobe Commerce vs Shopify” hides the fact that Adobe now sells three different things, and Magento Open Source is a fourth option.

Magento Open Source is the free, self-hosted core. You pay nothing for the licence and everything for hosting, development and security.
Adobe Commerce on Cloud Infrastructure is the classic platform-as-a-service: Magento code with Adobe’s commercial modules, deployed to Adobe-managed infrastructure through Git. You own the code, the upgrades and the extensions.
Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service is Adobe’s SaaS edition. It is versionless and updated automatically, with a 30-day evaluation window before updates reach production. Customisation moves out of the core: instead of in-process PHP modules, you extend it with APIs and App Builder applications, and the storefront runs on Edge Delivery Services.
Shopify Plus is Shopify’s enterprise plan: fully hosted SaaS, one shared codebase for every merchant, extended through themes, apps, Shopify Functions and checkout extensions.

When people say “Magento”, they usually mean the first two. Most of the trade-offs below are about those, with notes where the SaaS edition changes the picture.

Side by Side

	Adobe Commerce (Cloud Infrastructure)	Shopify Plus
Model	PaaS: your code on Adobe-managed infrastructure	SaaS: Shopify runs everything
Pricing	Licence quoted on gross merchandise value, not published	From €2,100–2,250 a month (about $2,300–2,500 in the US); variable fee for high volume
Upgrades	Yours: each 2.4.x release has three years of standard support	None: the platform updates itself
Security patches	Monthly bulletins, applied by your team	Handled by Shopify
Customisation	Any layer, including core behaviour, through modules and patches	Themes, apps, Functions and checkout extensions within Shopify’s limits
Checkout	Fully customisable, including the data model	Extensions and Functions on Shopify’s checkout
Catalogue	Attribute sets, configurable, bundle and grouped products, custom options	Up to 3 options and 2,048 variants per product; metafields for the rest
Multi-store	Websites, stores and store views in one installation	Markets in one store, plus 9 expansion stores included
B2B	Native B2B module: company accounts, shared catalogues, quotes, purchase orders	B2B on Plus: company profiles, catalogues, payment terms
Performance	Your responsibility: caching, database, extensions	Shopify’s responsibility; you control theme and app weight
URLs and SEO	Full control over URL structure	Fixed prefixes such as `/products/` and `/collections/`

What It Really Costs

Shopify Plus publishes a starting price: on Shopify’s own pricing page it is €2,250 a month on a one-year term and €2,100 on a three-year term in the EU, around $2,500 and $2,300 in the US. Larger merchants move to a variable platform fee based on revenue, which Shopify does not publish. The plan includes your main store and nine expansion stores. If you use a payment provider other than Shopify Payments, Shopify adds 0.20% per transaction.

The platform fee is rarely the only big number. Apps add up. Reviews, subscriptions, search, loyalty, translations and data imports are usually separate paid apps, and each one is a monthly bill and a dependency. Budget for them from the start.

Adobe Commerce does not publish prices. The licence is quoted mainly on your gross merchandise value, and the cloud editions include hosting. Magento Open Source has no licence fee at all, which makes it look cheap until you add hosting, a CDN, search and the people to run them.

For Adobe Commerce on Cloud Infrastructure, the licence is only the start. The recurring costs are work, not subscriptions:

Upgrades. Each 2.4.x release has three years of standard support from its release date. Version 2.4.8 is supported until 31 May 2028 and 2.4.9 until 31 May 2029. Every store needs a major upgrade every couple of years, plus PHP and database upgrades in between.
Security patches. Adobe releases security bulletins every month, and sometimes an emergency fix for a vulnerability that is already being exploited. Our guide to applying Magento security patches describes what that routine involves.
Extensions. Third-party modules need updates for every Magento and PHP release, and some need fixing. Our Magento performance patches collection shows what that looks like in practice.

In our experience, Shopify Plus usually costs less to run for a direct-to-consumer brand with a standard catalogue. Adobe Commerce becomes the cheaper option when the alternative is paying Shopify apps and middleware to imitate logic that Magento handles natively, or when your revenue depends on custom functionality Shopify cannot host.

Customisation: Where Each Platform Draws the Line

On Adobe Commerce, almost nothing is off limits. A module can change how prices are calculated, how the cart is validated, which shipping methods appear and what happens after an order is placed. When a third-party module misbehaves, you can patch it. That freedom is why complex merchants stay on Magento, and also why Magento stores accumulate technical debt.

Shopify works the other way round. The core is the same for every merchant and you cannot change it. You extend it through:

Themes in Liquid, or a headless storefront with Hydrogen.
Shopify Functions for discounts, delivery and payment customisation, and cart validation.
Checkout UI extensions for adding content and fields to checkout. The old checkout.liquid approach is gone, so checkout is customised only through extensions. We cover what still works in our post on Shopify Plus checkout customization.
Apps, public or custom, through the Admin API.

The practical test is simple. List the five things that make your store different from a competitor’s, and check whether each one fits into one of those extension points. If one of them needs to change how Shopify itself behaves, you will be building workarounds.

The SaaS edition of Adobe Commerce moves closer to Shopify here. Its extensions run out of process, through APIs and App Builder, which makes upgrades safe but rules out the deep in-process modules that classic Magento stores rely on.

Catalogue and Product Data

Magento’s catalogue model is richer. Attribute sets let each product type carry its own fields. Configurable, bundle and grouped products, and custom options, cover most catalogue shapes without extra tools. The price is complexity: large Magento catalogues are slow to index and easy to break with bulk imports.

Shopify’s model is simpler. A product has up to three options, such as size, colour and material, and since October 2025 up to 2,048 variants. Everything else lives in metafields and metaobjects. Most fashion, beauty and lifestyle catalogues fit comfortably. Catalogues that need a fourth option, configurable bundles or complex custom options need apps or a different structure.

Moving a large catalogue is mostly a data job. On our current Magento-to-Shopify migration, bulk work runs through Matrixify, the standard Shopify import and export app. It handles full loads and recurring delta updates as CSV files, which lets the old store stay the source of truth until cutover. If you already run a PIM, decide early which system will own product data after the move.

International: Store Views vs Markets

Magento was built for multi-store. One installation can run several websites, each with its own stores and store views, with different catalogues, prices, currencies, languages and domains. We run stores that serve seven countries from a single Adobe Commerce Cloud installation.

Shopify handles international selling with Markets inside one store: countries are grouped into markets, each with its own currency, prices, language and domain or subfolder. When markets are not enough, the nine included expansion stores give you separate stores, at the cost of separate admin and data.

One detail matters for SEO: how Shopify generates hreflang tags. We tested it on a development store rather than trusting the documentation, and the rules are not what the docs suggest:

A market covering several countries does not produce a language-only tag. It produces one tag for every combination of country and locale.
Each country takes its tags from exactly one market, the narrowest one it belongs to.
Only the primary market produces a language-only tag and x-default.
Countries do not get their own URL paths. Two countries on the same domain share the same URLs.
Automatic hreflang is one switch for the whole store. Adding your own tags on top creates duplicates.

None of this is a problem once you know it, but it means a market structure should be designed with SEO in mind, not just pricing.

B2B

Adobe Commerce has the deeper B2B toolkit: company accounts with roles, shared catalogues with negotiated prices, quotes, purchase orders, requisition lists and quick order. If your B2B buyers negotiate, approve and reorder inside the store, this is hard to match.

Shopify Plus includes B2B features in the plan: company profiles with locations, catalogues with specific prices, payment terms and quantity rules, on the same store as your consumer business. For a brand that sells wholesale to retailers alongside direct sales, it is often enough. For procurement-heavy B2B, it usually is not.

Many B2B processes do not belong in the store at all. Sales-agent commissions, for example, live better in the ERP. We build those in Odoo, connected to the store, rather than in the storefront itself.

Performance and Security

On Shopify, the platform’s performance is Shopify’s job. Infrastructure, scaling and the checkout are handled for you. What you control, and can still ruin, is theme code and app scripts: every app that injects JavaScript costs page speed.

On Adobe Commerce, performance is your job, and it goes beyond hosting. A single module can make every uncached request slower, as we found with a redirect module that loaded twelve thousand redirects on every uncached request, or make checkout fail, as a payment module update did. Full page caching, a CDN and constant attention to extensions are part of running Magento.

Security follows the same split. Shopify patches its platform for every merchant at once. On Adobe Commerce, your team applies Adobe’s patches, including emergency fixes for vulnerabilities that are already being exploited.

SEO

Both platforms rank well when set up properly. The differences are in control:

URLs. Magento lets you design any URL structure. Shopify fixes prefixes such as /products/, /collections/ and /pages/.
Technical files. Shopify lets you edit robots.txt through a theme template and generates sitemaps automatically. Magento gives you full control over both, and the responsibility for both.
Migrations. Moving between platforms means mapping every indexed URL to its new address with permanent redirects. On a large catalogue this is a project of its own.

Moving from Magento to Shopify: What We Have Learned

If you are on Magento and considering Shopify, the decision is not only about the destination. The move itself has costs that are easy to underestimate:

Customer passwords do not move. Shopify cannot import Magento password hashes, so customers need to activate their accounts again. Plan the communication.
Every extension needs a replacement decision. Some become apps, some become Shopify Functions, and some business rules simply have to change.
URLs change. Redirects for products, categories, CMS pages and old campaigns need to be generated, tested and loaded before launch.
Integrations are rebuilt. ERP, PIM, marketing and fulfilment connectors are platform-specific. Budget for each one.
International setup is redesigned. Store views do not map one-to-one to markets, and the hreflang behaviour above shapes the structure.
The old platform keeps running. Until cutover, Magento still needs patches and fixes. It is reasonable to limit deep investment in a platform you are leaving, but not its security.

Questions That Decide It

Before comparing feature lists, answer these:

Which three to five capabilities make your store different, and does each fit Shopify’s extension points?
Is B2B a side channel or the core of the business?
How many countries, languages and catalogues do you run, and how different are they?
Who will own the platform: an internal team, an agency, or nobody in particular?
What does your ERP expect from the store, and does a reliable connector exist for each option?
How much of next year’s budget should go into the platform itself rather than growth?

If the answers point to standard commerce done well, Shopify Plus is hard to beat. If they point to logic only you have, Adobe Commerce, or its SaaS edition if upgrades are your biggest pain, is still the stronger foundation.

We work with both, and we are happy to say when a merchant should stay where they are. If you are weighing a replatform, or need someone to keep your current Adobe Commerce store healthy while you decide, look at our services and Magento support, or tell us about your store.