Published: Nov 2021

Type: eCommerce

Category: Shopify Plus, Magento

Written by:
Paul Rogers min
Paul Rogers
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Shopify Plus vs Magento Commerce / Adobe Commerce

Magento Commerce (now Adobe Commerce) and Shopify Plus are almost unquestionably the two most mainstream mid-market eCommerce platforms in the world – with both offering very different feature-sets and propositions to brands and retailers. This guide provides a detailed comparison across all aspects of the two platforms, including native feature-sets, true cost of ownership, extensibility, infrastructure, SEO, agency & technology eco-system, international, B2B and lots of other areas. This piece was last updated in January 2024 (having been originally published in ~2016).

My experience with Shopify Plus and Magento Commerce

Over the last ~14 years, I’ve worked on over 50 Magento replatforming projects in various capacities, ranging from advising on smaller consumer brand projects to acting as a solutions consultant on hugely complex builds for household names. In addition to this, I have both of the Magento solutions certifications. Examples of Magento brands I’ve worked with include The Conran Shop, Heal’s, PMT, Sunspel, Agent Provocateur, Waterford, The V&A, Dr Martens, and lots of others.

Over the last ~6 years, I’ve also been very hands-on with Shopify Plus, working in a solutions role on lots of replatforming projects and supporting requirements gathering, validation exercises and general consultancy on lots more. Examples of Shopify Plus projects I’ve worked on include Bulletproof, Pangaia, The Science Museum, David Austin Roses, Toteme, Lights4Fun, Mattel, Represent, Self-Portrait, This Works and various others. Vervaunt are also one of the world’s only Shopify Plus consulting partners.

This experience with both platforms has consisted of me scoping out requirements, architecting catalog setup, generally creating solutions, managing data migrations, handling platform setup, using Shopify Flow, working with Shopify scripts, testing and configuring various modules, managing integrations, setting up product catalogs, creating new channels (e.g. wholesale store), managing customisations, managing things like shipping and tax, creating business logic for merchandising purposes, managing UAT etc.

There are loads of these comparisons published online now, but this is intended to be more practical and based on hands-on elements.

TL;DR Summary

In summary of this very long article – Shopify Plus has improved drastically over the last few years and is dominating the SMB and mid-market B2C market, a position once held by Magento / Adobe. Adobe however has almost undoubtably gone the other way, seeing a large number of bigger brands migrating away to other platforms, often Shopify Plus. Although Magento / Adobe remains more flexible than Shopify, due to the open source nature of the platform, many are willing to compromise to achieve the benefits that Shopify gives you around TCO and agility.

Although they still have lots of large brands, Magento / Adobe haven't invested enough in their platform, eco-system and general go-to-market strategy, leaving them in flux and making them a target for other growing platforms, such as Shopfiy Plus, BigCommerce, CommerceTools, Centra and various others. As someone that has worked with Magento for a long time, it's a shame that the platform has ended up here (strategy changed when they started gearing up for the exit when under PE ownership). This said, if you're on. Magento / Adobe and have a strong team working on it, it's not a bad place to be overall, it's more the long-term future that's in question.

Introduction

In this article, I’ll be focusing on Adobe Commerce on-premise and cloud editions – when I first wrote this post around 8 years ago I talked a bit about Magento 1.x and also the Open Source version, but these aren’t as relevant today. The Open Source edition is still a very powerful platform, but I worry about it’s future and all (I think) of the brands we work with that have moved to Magento / Adobe Commerce are on the commerce version.

Magento 2.x had a very tough start to life, but stabilised after Magento ~2.2. Currently, Adobe Commerce 2.4.x is in a really good place from a stability perspective and there are far less core bugs than in the past. Some of the more recent changes to the Magento product (although I’ll talk about the issues with the platform not improving fast enough later on) include native integration with Adobe Sensei for product recommendations, various integrations with other Adobe products, MSI (multi-source inventory) and improvements to existing modules, such as Page Builder.

Magento Cloud has previously been questioned a lot, following it’s release in 2016. Early retailers faced a huge amount of pain with deployments, stability of non-production environments, core development principles and support – however, again, this is in a much better place now. We’ve got a number of clients using the Cloud Edition that are happy with the product and support and we’re not actively recommending against Cloud as we have done up until now.

Shopify Plus has grown at in insane rate over the last few years and, to be honest, I find it very hard to argue against it now when talking to brands in particular – although there are still limitations that prevent it being relevant to some retailers (but these are disappearing very quickly - largely around omni-channel and complex international). The eco-system is incredible and new partners are being introduced every day – this is one of the biggest pros for Shopify and I’ll do into a lot more detail on this later on.

Despite still being quite new to the enterprise end of the market, Shopify Plus’s market share is growing really quickly and their proposition is improving all the time – with large stores including JB Hifi, Fashion Nova, Gymshark, SKIMS and hundreds more. There are also more and more complex implementations launching, with examples we're aware of including Mattel, David Austin Roses, Boden (in build), Glossier, Staples and lots of others.

In recent times, the headless Shopify trend has really pushed Shopify Plus forward with more complex projects – with many of the larger brands on Shopify going down this route (including JB Hifi, Gymshark, AllBirds and SKIMS). They also introduced their Hydrogen and Oxygen solutions over the last couple of years, which have given them a really mature and established solution here. Going down the headless route with Shopify has pros and cons (more cons for the wrong type of brand), but it does give you more control around front-end development, freedom around URL structure, better page load speeds and also allows for integrating complex third parties (e.g. Fredhopper or Bloomreach) and introducing additional channels. I’ll talk more about this later on. Various changes over the last ~12 months and the new releases around hydrogen are also making this more interesting.


On the face of it, the TCO between these two platforms may not seem hugely different. However, Shopify Plus is a SaaS platform, whereas Magento commerce is primarily offered as a PaaS platform (cloud) that still requires a lot of technical resource, upgrades, security patches etc – Magento’s operating costs for support can also add up very quickly. Generally, I’d say that a mid-market merchant will pay hosting fees of anywhere from $30,000 per year to $100,000 per year, however, Magento Commerce Cloud will work out lower overall. In addition to this, you also have maintenance costs associated with Magento (no matter which version you’re using).

A normal Magento Commerce client is responsible for all server security, as well as the application of patches to the Magento core codebase, whilst this is all taken care of for Shopify Plus clients. Whilst Magento Commerce Cloud offers a lot of the benefits that Shopify Plus has on this side, I’d say (in my experience of dealing with clients who use it) it’s nowhere near as polished and finished as Shopify Plus. There are also very commonly contentious issues with agency vs Magento – which can be very frustrating for the merchant.

The TCO and agility of SaaS platforms is really driving people towards Shopify Plus (and BigCommerce) at the moment – Magento / Adobe can’t really compete here in my opinion, this isn’t where the benefit would come in for sure. Magento can argue this when competing against certain other enterprise platforms, but certainly not the likes of Shopify Plus.

Total cost of ownership / Pricing in more detail

As already mentioned, the costs associated with Magento / Adobe Commerce have increased a lot and will be higher than Shopify Plus – the license fee starts from ~$30k per year, but there are a number of large B2C stores and B2B businesses who go well into the millions of dollars for licensing, which is based on a number of factors, but primarily GMV brackets. Magento use brackets but they tend to adapt licensing costs on a case by case basis and this differs for Cloud Edition also.

There are standard tiers for Magento licensing costs, but these are constantly changing and moved towards a GMV-based model, in a similar way to Salesforce Commerce Cloud. The tiers themselves are based on GMV, but examples of other things that are factored into consideration across the different versions include number of employees, size of company, number of stores and even traffic with Cloud.

The pricing tends to vary a lot – if you have any questions on this, feel free to email me and I can talk you through what some of my previous clients have paid (as they’re generally pretty flexible / negotiable on costs).

In addition to these costs, you also have the integration partner costs, which is where the high CAPEX costs tend to come in. An Adobe Commerce build is likely to start at $150k and the highest cost build I’ve heard of was supposedly around $10m, which was for a large multi-brand, high volume retail group. Build costs vary massively depending on the agencies / partners you look at and the level of complexity around features, integrations etc.

You then have the costs of the maintaining a Magento Commerce store beyond this, which can be very high – this would generally be split into:

  • Support / maintenance retainer – depending on the Magento partner, this would include things like applying patches, version upgrades, maintaining environments, installing and maintaining modules etc. A support retainer, in my experience, averages at around $5k – $25k, but I’ve also seen this go up to $50k for very large and complex Magento stores.
  • BAU development and material projects – in my experience, a BAU development retainer for a standard Magento Commerce store could be anywhere from $5k per month to $50k per month, depending on your backlog, the costings of the agency partner and the work you want to do.

In addition to these costs, you also have hosting fees (non-Cloud), consultancy / BA fees (depending on how you work with your agency partner) and various other additional fees. It’s worth noting that this isn’t the only way to work as lots of Magento integration partners offer things like blocks of time paid upfront or even dedicated developers / development teams, where the economies of scale would generally change a lot.

Shopify Plus starts from a flat $2k per month license fee (for retailers not exceeding $800k in a single calendar month), which covers all licensing and application maintenance costs. This is a real benefit of Shopify Plus as it’s both affordable and covers a lot of the core areas where additional costs would come in (such as hosting, managing scale, support, upgrades etc). The costs around developing the store itself are also likely to be lower, although the industry is getting more mature and the costs are going up. I’ve generally found the hourly rates to be lower than the top tier of Magento agencies, more in-line with $100 an hour, although this would vary and the top agencies are more like $200 per hour (which is still lower than a lot of Magento agencies, particularly in the US market). A good Shopify Plus development partner is likely to start at around $100k for a theme build project and go up from there. Smaller brands can also use smaller agencies, which can be more in-line with $40k.

One big thing that sets these two platforms apart is the pricing – both in terms of licensing costs and operational costs. Shopify’s flat fee (until you hit the $800k in a month, where it’s still really cost effective at 0.25% of revenue in comparison to most other platforms at that level) is really appealing as you get a level of support included within this – this covers very minor development tasks, using the platform and things like conversion marketing / growing the store etc, which can be beneficial. I recently did a total cost of ownership analysis piece for a small, high-end fashion brand for Magento Open Source, Commerce and Shopify Plus and Shopify Plus came out as the lowest cost option over a three-year period by quite a way. This was largely due to no hosting fees, lower maintenance costs, no version upgrades, costs associated with integrations / modules and the agency rates. The fact that Shopify Plus Account Managers and Launch Managers offer support is also a minor differentiator for smaller retailers. I’ve worked on these projects for larger retailers too and Plus still generally comes out a lot lower than open source, but at that level it’s often about more than cost of ownership with the platform and there’s lots of cost considerations around aspects you’re taking out of the main platform (such as personalisation, loyalty, search, merchandising, PIM etc).

The additional costs with Shopify Plus generally come from the following:

  • Apps / third parties – there are monthly costs associated with these areas, which isn’t always the case with Magento Commerce. These costs aren’t generally too high – but they can add up. Our average cost would spend maybe $1k per month on apps and $3-20k on third parties (e.g. Klevu or Algolia for search, Dynamic Yield or NOSTO for personalisation, Yotpo for UGC etc).
  • Apps for international stores – Shopify charge for apps on a per-store basis, which can increase these costs a lot. Most of the app companies do negotiate though, which people often don’t realise. As markets has improved, there's less need for expansion stores, which helps here.
  • Transaction fees – if you’re not using Shopify Payments (through choice or eligibility), you’re going to need to pay an additional 0.15% per transaction.

You may also find yourself paying for things like custom apps, which may sit outside of build costs and standard operational costs.

In our average project, a merchant would use apps for at least the following:

  • Excelify / Matrixify to support data migration
  • Elevar or LittleData app to support GA / GTM setup
  • DataFeedWatch for data feeds
  • Loyalty Lion, Smile or Yotpo for loyalty
  • A third party search solution (e.g. Klevu)
  • Product recommendations / personalisation (NOSTO, Rebuy, Dynamic Yield etc)
  • Wishlist (e.g. iWishlist or Wishlist+)
  • Gorgias for CS / live chat
  • Automatic account invites and bulk account inviter for account activation
  • Avalara for tax
  • Yotpo or other for reviews / UGC
  • Census (our post-purchase app) for surveys

This is just on average – there are lots more that could be needed for specific areas and also most of our clients use an integration platform like HighCohesion, Integrator.io / Celigo or Patchworks. You may also find yourself developing custom apps to fill gaps or meet very specific requirements. The bigger third parties would also generally be factored into our Magento projects – e.g. Klevu, Nosto, ShipperHQ etc.

Paying Magento’s license cost is the only time you’ll deal directly with them, unless you want to use the their Enterprise Consulting Group, which is very expensive. Obviously, you’ll deal with the Platform.sh / support teams if you use Cloud edition, but that’s more of a support relationship. The real cost of using Magento 2 Commerce for the average project lies with the systems integrator, who generally charge higher fees, compared to Shopify Plus. The average rate for a Magento agency for merchants can expect to pay the top tier of agencies is anywhere from $100 – $250 per hour.

Based on my last few mid-level projects (relatively simple catalog, small scale international, £10m – £50m online turnover etc), this is what I would suggest that the total cost of ownership looks like for Magento Commerce vs Shopify Plus.

Shopify Plus Pricing Overview

  • Average website build cost for Shopify Plus (in my experience) – $100,000 – $500,000
  • Annual licensing cost – $24,000 (until you get to the $800k per month cut off, where you pay an additional 0.25% of overage revenue)
  • BAU development costs (in my experience) – $36,000 – $120,000
  • App costs (average) – $12,000
  • Key third parties - $60,000

Magento Commerce Pricing Overview

  • Average Magento Commerce build cost (in my experience) – $200,000 – $750,000 (can also be a lot higher)
  • Average annual Magento maintenance retainer (in my experience) – $60,000
  • Average annual licensing cost (Cloud Edition) – $80,000
  • BAU development costs – $36,000 – $120,000
  • Key third parties - $60,000

These are very much finger in the air estimates – but overall I’d say that Shopify Plus is a considerably lower cost option than Magento / Adobe. I previously wrote here that there’s an argument that Magento is more scalable for larger stores, but this is increasingly not the case with Shopify and I find that Shopify Plus is far more of a catalyst for growth than Magento / Adobe.

It’s also worth noting that merchants can build and maintain both Shopify Plus and Magento Commerce stores for less than these numbers, but this is based on the retailers I’ve dealt with recently and averages.

Shopify Plus vs Magento – Native & Core Functionality

Anyone logging into the admin / back end of Adobe and Shopify Plus will instantly see that Adobe has richer native functionality than Shopify Plus. Whilst Shopify Plus still has a relatively comprehensive feature-list that represents a good starting point for mid-market retailers, Adobe Commerce Edition excels in areas such as:

Promotions / discounts

Magento has a built-in promotions engine, which is often extended or via a module / extension (such as this Amasty module). The promotions engine is still fairly comprehensive (in comparison to most platforms) and supports a lot of base discounts / promotions. You can also use promotions / discounts as part of other core Magento features, such as customer groups, content scheduling and customer segmentation. Magento allows for two types of promotions in this area, which are catalog price rules (broader rule applied based on a criteria across the catalog) and cart price rules (condition-based, action applied in the checkout). This can also be extended – which a number of our clients have been done.

Shopify Plus does support promotions natively, but it’s not as advanced. A lot of merchants rely on scripts to achieve anything non-standard (which will change with the new checkout upgrade most will be doing next year), which is generally fine. I’ve worked on two projects where we used scripts extensively and we were able to achieve some really advanced requirements around tiered pricing, advanced GWP promotions, customer-specific promotions and advanced shipping fee logic. The only issues will come with scale for bigger retailers as the promotions don’t stack and there’s a good chance you’ll need to customise / add to the scripts in the future, which can get messy for really complex retailers or retailers with lots of requirements in this area. Shopify are releasing improvements next year here and they'll also be introducing native price lists in B2C, which will help many handle things like VIP sale preview etc.

This is an area where Adobe is stronger and more extensible, but Shopify Plus is better than a lot of people that don’t use the platform regularly assume.

Merchandising and production

Larger and more complex retailers with bigger catalogs and more complicated catalog setups will likely have more positive initial views on Adobe, as things like bundled products, grouped products and certain use cases for product attributes require customisation or re-thinking completely to replicate in Shopify, depending on how you want to use them. This is a mindset thing though – Shopify is far more scalable in this area than people think and metafields are now a much bigger part of the platform and are getting better all the time. I don't think there are any issues here with Shopify personally, it's more how metafields are presented in the admin and some smaller areas where tags are still needed.

Metafields are very similar to product attributes in Magento / Adobe, but they're not as flexible yet. This is improving all the time though.

Adobe Commerce has 7 native, standard product types, which are:

  • Simple products
  • Configurable products
  • Bundled products
  • Downloadable products
  • Virtual products
  • Grouped products
  • Gift cards

Shopify only has one type of product, which which can then used with variants to replicate how configurable products work. Variants are widely supported throughout Shopify and via apps and they natively allow for different SKUs and various other options.

Shopify also supports gift cards natively and they have an API available to allow for broad usage (although quite basic natively, there are apps that can really push this – such as Govalo or Rise.ai). Magento also allows for gift cards to be extended and if you have really complex requirements around gift cards (e.g. custom redemption needs, multi-channel gift cards etc), Magento may well be better. I have seen people extend Shopify quite nicely in this area though. Your approach on both platforms will differ depending on how you want these gift cards to work and whether you want physical gift cards or gift certificates.

Shopify, however, is easier to use when it comes to managing a product catalog and it’s often cited as being perfect for simple product catalogs selling simple products, like fashion retailers for example.

That said, there are various routes for extending product functionality for Shopify, such as:

  • Using separate products to avoid variant limits
  • Using a PIM to manage product complexity outside of Shopify (we have a number of clients that successfully do this by using Akeneo)
  • Using products in place of variants to allow for more custom data points
  • Using tags to trigger custom logic from outside the platform or from custom apps
  • Metafields are also useful for storing different types of data

It’s worth noting that are quite a lot of Shopify Plus stores that have over 1 million products and also achieve things like mixed baskets, live availability lookups, product customisation, highly configurable products etc on the platform.

I would say there is a theme when comparing the two platforms – Magento / Adobe generally has a stronger native offering and is also designed for customisation and generally very extensible, but that is also where issues do come from.

One aspect of product management that Shopify is stronger with is CSV import / export, which is native within the platform. I’ve used this function a lot with Shopify and I’ve not had any issues, whereas with Magento it’s always been a headache and I’ve only really seen it work well when using a third party like Magmi or URapidFlow. Most Magento merchants either steer clear or import / export or use a third party solution (or a PIM). The vast majority of our clients use an app called Matrixify – this is a really valuable app that makes importing and exporting a lot quicker and cleaner, allows for broader data to be used (e.g. metafields or images) and also allows for scheduling.

Things like order management and inventory management are comparable, but again Magento / Adobe has more of a robust, customisable solution. Most of our clients would use an OMS or an ERP here anyway, rather than using the standard feature-set. If you did want to use the platform more in this area, Magento is likely to be a lot stronger. I’ve worked with a couple of very complex retailers who have kept things like inventory management and order management within Magento, but this isn’t the best route. Shopify is investing a lot more in order management next year and they're going to start addressing things like pre-ordering and broader order routing, which will be a big improvement. 

Multi-store management

Multi-store is one of Magento’s key selling points, allowing merchants to manage multiple brands, regional stores and B2B / B2C stores from one Magento instance. The main benefit here is that the product catalog can be shared across different websites, you can achieve a single customer view, there's less operational overhead, stores and store views with the freedom to make changes at different levels etc. The scope of attributes can be set to be managed at a global or local level, allowing merchants to assign attributes like ‘product name’ at a global level, but define the price or long description attribute at a local level. This is applied at all levels and is a big pro for Magento for international, multi-brand and B2B2C retailers.

This feature is one of Adobe's biggest selling points and there are plenty of merchants that I’ve come across who are managing large product catalogs across over 100 websites (be it international stores or different brands etc). A few examples of stores doing this include Warner Music (multi-brand), Nestle (multi-brand), Helly Hansen (international) and lots of others. This is really flexible and there are some really impressive implementations.

Shopify Plus historically required expansion stores whenever you wanted to localise a specific market, however now markets is getting FAR better. You are also give the option to use up to 10 clone stores with the Plus license, which is sometimes still necessary. This has been by far the biggest reason I’ve seen retailers opt against Shopify Plus, but now it's really manageable I would say for most.

With markets, you're able to assign price lists, localise content, offer different payment methods etc, the main things that remain not possible with markets (that are often key include):

  • Ability to use multiple business entities
  • Assigning a specific inventory location to specific markets (should be fixed very soon)
  • Ability to pay out into multiple bank accounts
  • Pay in multiple currencies for some payment methods (e.g. Klarna)

If you manage it well, sometimes expansion stores can be very effective. We often use third parties to allow for global VMing, management of the catalog, management of search, reporting etc and the overheads are nowhere near as bad.

Shopify also recently introduced Markets Pro, which is a premium offering that allows them to operate as the merchant of record, support with fulfilment, better localise payment methods etc. It's essentially a modified version of Global-e (which they use for this service) along with a few additional features. 

I’ll talk more about this in the context of international in the next section.

Dependent on requirements, this is an area where Magento can win RfPs and offer a lot more – but it depends on setup and what a retailer prioritises.

Internationalisation (multi-currency, multi-language multi-warehouse etc)

Adobe / Magento has a lot of great features around internationalisation, as detailed above, and their global multi-store architecture is a huge reason why lots of merchants tend to use the platform. Shopify Plus can achieve a good solution, however, there will still be a more manual work and I’d personally say this is going to be one of the bigger compromise areas that still remain with Shopify Plus. This being said, Shopify have improved things considerably with markets, as above.

Because markets has improved so much, our average client will mostly now only use expansion stores when they need to pay-out into local bank accounts and when they have multiple inventory sources. Our global clients will usually have maybe three stores and use markets as well. These stores will usually be UK, EU and US, based on the inventory sources and bank accounts. 

Magento’s ability to allow the user to manage all components of individual stores (such as specific attributes, stock, the catalog etc) at a global level is an advantage, but I personally wouldn't select it over Shopify because of that, as you'll be compromising in many other areas.

Managing multiple languages and content generally is quite straight forward – if you’re managing stock across multiple stores you’ll probably want to look at using either a custom solution or an iPaaS to handle this.

Headless and composable

Magento / Adobe was earlier to the headless shift, introducing PWAStudio 5-6 years ago. Unfortunately it’s not really progressed since and there are very few people using it and developing on it. There are a lot of headless implementations of Magento, but they still have the same issues with the maintenance side. Although not strictly headless, Hyva is probably the most popular route for brands using Magento without the native front-end framework. This is really impressive and helps to make front-end development easier and remove a lot of the issues with performance that Magento / Adobe users typically face.

Magento / Adobe is fairly similar to many other platforms from an API perspective - there aren't too many issues on this side. Some examples of headless Magento builds include:

  • Oliver Bonas
  • Topps Tiles
  • Selco
  • Zadig & Voltaire
  • Me+Em
  • Fortnum & Mason

Shopify have released introduced Hydrogen, which is their own framework for building out headless sites / custom storefronts. There’s been a huge shift in headless Shopify sites over the last two years and some massive brands / stores have gone down this route, including:

  • Skims
  • Staples Canada
  • JB Hifi
  • Gymshark
  • AllBirds
  • Lick Paint

There are hundreds more examples and I’d say, despite not being as open, Shopify has more established brand headless stores than Magento. There are quite a few headless third parties that also exist in the Shopify eco-system, with Nacelle and Pack being the two biggest examples. Overall I am an advocate of headless as an approach for relevant businesses and teams (often as part of a broader push to invest in best-in-class technology etc) – however headless can be bad for businesses / teams. There’s a huge amount of hype around headless and the number of headless implementations increases every day, across the majority of mainstream eCommerce platforms, bespoke platforms and the various API-first, headless-only platforms. In addition to this, lots of the world’s biggest brands are going down the headless route and have really impressive brand experiences and use a very modern set of front-end tools. However, whilst there are some huge pros for headless for these businesses, smaller businesses and businesses with less technical teams should be really careful when adopting this approach.

I’ve spoken to a lot of brands who have gone down this route and regretted it – as most changes will cost more and take longer. Again, this is more applicable to smaller brands / businesses where their team isn’t as suited and where small changes are more important.

One thing I would add is that going headless with Magento doesn’t fix all the issues with the platform and the same frustrations around maintenance and technical issues that need to be solved still exist.

Eco-system – Apps, integrations, partners etc

Historically, Magento / Adobe had a very strong eco-system of technology partners and systems integrators, however this has shrunk a lot over the last few years, with many struggling with the support overheads that come from the implementations being so different. From an agency standpoint, there's also just not the same level of net new demand that other competitors have, particularly Shopify - so many have moved away entirely or offer multiple platforms.

This said, there are still some strong Adobe only partners, such as Gene, The Pixel and Pinpoint.

Shopify have an unrivalled eco-system, which is the biggest appeal. They have thousands of well-built, progressive apps that can play a big part in a brand's tech stack. Things like wishlist, loyalty, tracking, personalisation etc - there are many vendors available that would be far more likely to be best-in-class and the implementation time is far lower than with Magento / Adobe.

Shopify's implementation partner eco-system is also large and very strong, with many moving over following their significant growth and strong reputation at different levels. Some of the stronger SIs that we have worked with include: By Association Only, WeMakeWebsites, Half Helix, Blubolt, AskPhil, Code, Fostr and lots of others.

B2B / Wholesale Capabilities

One massive selling point for Magento / Adobe commerce is that it provides fairly advanced native support for B2B merchants, via their B2B suite (Magento 2). Even without the B2B suite, things like customer groups, tiered pricing, customer-based pricing and product availability, customer-specific promotions etc are all supported via standard features of the platform (both Open Source and Commerce), but the new B2B suite offers more.

B2B has been a big focus for Magento over the last few years and their B2B suite comes with a lot of features, such as the ability to manage quotes, create customer-specific catalogs, manage various settings against customers, assign roles to users, assign budgets to users and companies, setup credit limits, various approval workflows etc. This is a big strength of Magento over Shopify Plus.

Shopify Plus completed the acquisition of Handshake a few years ago, a highly regarded B2B eCommerce platform. This is likely to push them forward with B2B and expectations are high when they finally start to release a solution. There’s also lots of rumours about how Shopify are building out this side via their internal teams. Currently with Shopify Plus, options are nowhere near as comprehensive as Magento. The different options are:

  • Shopify Plus Wholesale Channel – a dedicated wholesale channel based on the main store’s catalog. Products are pulled through based on price lists, which use the main price and the wholesale price assigned to a tagged group of customers to calculate the discount, which is displayed on the front-end. This means that the sale is essentially going through as a normal order with a discount applied (which needs to be considered for things like reporting etc). There are various limitations here such as not being able to edit the theme, not being able to set different shipping rules (although this can be achieved via heavy usage of scripts, tags and a complex third party). The store is super easy to setup and manage though and features like customer-specific pricing and product visibility, tiered pricing and draft orders are very useful. This is a very basic solution but it can be good for proof of concepts and very basic wholesale needs.
  • Separate store – as you’d imagine, a separate clone store for wholesale, which allows for lots of freedom with setup and management. Shopify Plus still doesn’t natively support a lot of the requirements you’d need though, so this would need to be scoped out properly.
  • Using the main store with customer tagging, template variables and scripts – this can be effective for simple wholesale programs.

You can read more about the different options and how Shopify retailers use these options here.

Platform Support

Both Shopify Plus and Magento Commerce offer application-level support, however at different levels. For Shopify Plus clients, this is via phone, email or live chat, whereas for Magento Commerce clients, it is purely developer support and it doesn’t have the best reputation. You could also choose to work with the Magento Enterprise Consulting Group (ECG), however, this comes with a big price tag.

One of the key selling points for Shopify Plus is the support they provide, which also reduces on-going support costs with your agency. As per of the $2k per month license fee, merchants get access to a dedicated 24/7 account management function, who are able to help handle technical issues, general platform-related questions, fix bugs, provide guidance around marketing and conversion rate optimisation and pretty much anything else. These CSMs are generally super technical, but they can add value.

Although you’ll still need developers to implement changes and for front-end work, the support would cover what a merchant would usually pay for from a development support / SLA perspective. Although it’s advised that you still have a development retainer, you wouldn’t have the overhead around a support retainer that you would with Magento.

Control, extensibility & flexibility

Magento is commonly deployed as an on-premise eCommerce platform (although the cloud version is now in a good place) with a wide range of broad APIs across both the front-end and back-end of the platform, as well as the ability to customise most of the platform. The general extensibility of a platform like Magento is unquestionable, but this can be as much of an issue as a positive, as it can impact maintainability, upgradability and the costs of maintaining the platform. There has been a huge shift away from open platforms to SaaS, with businesses then extending via apps or micro-services.

We’ve already mentioned the fact that Shopify Plus users do not have access to the core codebase or the database behind their store. Whilst this means they do not have to worry about security patches etc, and they can rely on Shopify to keep the code up to date, it does mean that they have less control over the platform, although the pros often outweigh the cons on this front (for a lot of retailers).

In terms of systems integrators, I would say that Shopify Plus users would be far less reliant on developers, making it much easier to switch providers and also build an in-house development team. If a Magento merchant had a store built by an integrator, there would be an overhead around getting the code checked, understanding any custom extensions / integrations and ultimately handing everything over. You’d also then have more issues around agencies not really wanting to take full ownership of code. This wouldn’t be the same for Shopify Plus where agencies are only really (mostly) developing themes and some surrounding apps or scripts.

I personally don’t like the fact that with Magento every store is significantly different – this makes upgrades, the installation of modules and development changes generally take longer and more risky.

Shopify Plus also have some excellent partners and this list of Plus partners is growing all the time – examples of really good Shopify Plus partners that I’ve worked with include:

These are just a few examples – there are lots of others too, such as Eastside Co, Sweden Unlimited, Verbal & Visual, Diff, BV Accel, Zehner and there are also a lot of high profile Magento partners that have really grown in the Shopify Plus space – such as Corra, Bounteous, Something Digital and One Rockwell. There are also some of the bigger, platform-agnostic integration partners that have started working on Shopify Plus builds, which represents progress in an area where Magento was definitely stronger historically. Magento partners we work with commonly include:

Magento is better suited to more complex sites and is regularly chosen as a solution against SaaS platforms in general, not just Shopify Plus. I’ve been involved in a host of very complex Magento sites, ranging from headless implementations to mixed basket sites (requiring complex integration with booking engines etc) – there are also lots of other examples of where Magento has been used to provide solutions for highly complex B2B sites and high volume sites. These stores wouldn’t be suited to the Shopify Plus platform.

Overall, Magento is more extensible than Shopify Plus and the broad range of APIs and ability to do more with the software does make it a better option for complex stores. I’d say that the key here is to assess your requirements (both long-term and short-term) and see if Shopify Plus is able to provide a solid (without too many workarounds) solution to achieve these. If not, Magento is likely a better option.

My only big question marks around Magento here are where the platform is headed and for how much longer the platform remains relevant for SMB / mid-market businesses. In addition, how the overall architecture will change over time.

Payments

Magento Commerce had a host of options when it comes to accepting payment options, including existing integrations with Braintree, Adyen, Stripe and most of the mainstream payment gateways. In addition to this, there are a wide range of pre-integrated payment options within the core, reducing the overhead with the integration.

One pro and con of Shopify Plus (if you choose to use it) is that Shopify also offer Shopify Payments (which is basically white-labelled Stripe) as an option, which is owned and managed by Shopify and it’s very competitive in terms of fees (starting at 1.6% but coming down if you can prove a loss based on an existing provider). Shopify Payments has a number of benefits to the merchant, but it can be very frustrating too, with merchants needing to have a registered business and local bank account for any country they want to use it with. You also can’t use Shopify Payments in regions (e.g. European store or ROW store) and they’re very strict with eligibility. They also don’t support a number of countries currently, such as France. But, if you can work with it – it’s very simple and easy to work with.

Shopify do also work with most third-party payment gateways too, but they charge an additional processing fee if the retailer is using a third party gateway. Other examples of retailers with a Shopify integration include Stripe (clean integration within the Shopify checkout), Braintree, Adyen, PayPal, Sagepay (clean integration within the Shopify checkout), Klarna and Worldpay (clean integration within the Shopify checkout) – these are just a few examples.

SEO

Although there’s a lot of work that needs to be done from the out-of-the-box setup, Magento provides a lot more flexibility from an SEO perspective because the system is more open. Due to the locked down nature of Shopify, it’s not possible to make changes to things like the URL structure and hierarchy or implement certain technical SEO components easily. The lack of multi-store can also make things like hreflang logic harder to create, but it can certainly be done (and has been by lots of merchants). The other major frustration for lots of people is that stores need to be on a local CCtld (e.g. store.fr) or a subdomain (fr.store.com).

I’d say that Shopify Plus is probably stronger out-of-the-box from a technical SEO perspective than Magento, which requires work to prevent some issues (e.g. indexation of dynamic pages etc), but it’s very fixed (e.g. the URL structure).

If you use Shopify in a headless manner, you do have full control over the URLs, as Shopify isn’t powering the front-end. Lots of retailers do go down this route and it also gives you access to the server so you can implement things like visual merchandising solutions without just relying on JavaScript for the product grid.

Magento is actually very strong for SEO and you won’t ‘need’ to make big changes as part of the replatforming project – this is seen as a big plus for Magento over Shopify Plus.

Reporting

One of the biggest weaknesses of Magento has historically been the native reporting, including when using third-party modules (as there’s not really a good one in existence). The out of the box Shopify reporting is much better! Although it doesn’t cover everything, Shopify has a much nicer and cleaner reporting interface and covers all of the core metrics, as well as having a really good API to support this. You can then use third party solutions like Glew or Daasity or build out your own data warehouse / bespoke reporting for broader business reporting.

A few years ago, Magento acquired RJMetrics (now Magento BI), which is a fairly strong solution that adds a lot of value to merchants. Magento BI is essentially a data warehouse and you can also pull in data from other systems and sources, which is really powerful.

Examples of reports available from Magento BI include:

  • Time between orders
  • First time vs repeat orders
  • Customer lifetime value reports
  • Repeat order probability
  • Various reports around account creation etc
  • Various complex product sales reports focused on understanding product performance
  • Various top customer reports for identifying top spenders and aligning this with initial purchases

These are just a few quick examples of reports which can also include additional filters and variables. Magento BI is a really strong addition to Magento’s stack – you can read more about it here on Pinpoint’s article.

Community

The almost undoubtedly biggest selling point of Magento historically has been its community, as mentioned above and there are still thousands of skilled, experienced Magento developers out there capable of helping you build and maintain Magento stores at all levels (as well as work with other Magento products, such as Order Management and BI). This is declining though – with lots of these developers moving partly or entirely to new technologies or platforms – such as Shopify, Shopware, CommerceTools or just different technical approaches.

Magento has actually been pushed forward by this community – with lots of the core parts of the platform coming from community initiatives. Other platforms just don’t have this. The Magento certifications and partner program also help to give merchants guidance in selecting the right service providers. This being said, lots of the big Magento agencies now work with Shopify Plus, including Blue Acorn, Something Digital, Guidance, Inviqa etc.

Shopify’s partner network is getting really strong too now – with the platform growing at a crazy rate! In the UK, there are lots of strong partners that have built several Plus stores and several long-term Magento agencies have started offering Shopify Plus build services, such as Space48, Inviqa, GPMD and lots of others.

Shopify’s developer following and community is growing super quickly and things like Hydrogen will massively improve this – with that being an open source initiative. Shopify is opening up their platform and new APIs constantly, so this will also help them push this further.

Shopify Flow

One feature that can be hugely beneficial to Shopify Plus merchants is Flow, which is essentially an automation platform that can be really powerful and reduce the need for developers considerably. Flow has been improving quite a bit recently and there are some big updates coming.

Flow allows Shopify Plus merchants to create workflows to automate specific tasks, with the scope ranging from custom order notifications or order management logic to personalising the experience for specific groups of customers and creating customer-specific promotions.

Some examples of how I’ve used Shopify Flow with customers include:

  • Replace the add to cart function on specific SKUs based on inventory thresholds – on a project I worked on recently, we replaced the add to cart button with a pre-order button if the stock for a specific set of SKUs went below a certain number. The add to cart button would then be restored when the inventory increased above the threshold again. We had three levels of stock that we applied across different groups of products.
  • Order tagging – I’ve used Flow for tagging various types of orders, which can then dictate how orders are handled or the information that is passed into third party order management or ERP systems, for example. An example of this could be a wholesale order being tagged as “wholesale”, which would result in different order attributes being passed into the ERP.
  • Provide custom content in account section – Another workflow we created on a recent project was focused on providing access to specific downloadable items to specific customers based on them being assigned a tag. This tag was assigned based on them purchasing a specific item. This was super easy to setup and there was literally no management overhead.
  • Customer tagging – Again, I’ve used Flow to add various tags to customers, which can then be used for personalisation, order restrictions, promotions etc. Most of my use cases have been related to wholesale and assigning customers to specific price lists. I also used this with one retailer based on lifetime spend / loyalty to allow for specific promotions etc.
  • Custom order notifications – I’ve also used Shopify Flow to alert CS teams of large orders and draft orders, both of which would require checks and a different workflow.
  • Fraud checking – In one case, when a retailer I was working with moved to Shopify Payments (which doesn’t support 3d secure), we used Flow to create logic for fraud checks in the interim until we introduced a fraud checking tool.

These are just a few quick examples of how Shopify Flow can be used – these are also all very quick and easy-to-manage workflows that would likely require custom development with other platforms.

One other big new development with Shopify Flow is the introduction of third-party integrations, which opens up a whole new level of opportunity with the automation. A number of Shopify Plus technology partners have already integrated with Flow (such as Loyalty Lion) to allow support for native triggers. An example shown at Shopify Unite was pulling in customer groupings from Loyalty Lion and customising the on-site experience to encourage repeat purchase, for example.

Shopify recently introduced native ERP connectors – this will likely be built into Flow over time and will help strengthen the proposition.

Conclusion

As can be seen by this brief assessment, there are advantages and disadvantages on both sides – but I must be honest that I’m far more positive about the future and offering of Shopify Plus for brands and B2C retailers. The trajectory of the platform and recent developments are so positive for Shopify and the eco-system is just not comparable to any other platform. I’ve become a real advocate of Shopify Plus and struggle to recommend Magento more and more.

For merchants who have more complex requirements (particularly in terms of large, complex catalogs and complex multi-store) the native flexibility and scalability of Magento may mean that Magento Commerce Edition is the safer choice, but I think that’ll change over time.

The decision on which platform is the best choice should ultimately be a highly individual one, based on a clear and detailed assessment of the client’s specific functional requirements and in-house resources. It will undoubtedly be interesting to observe how, over the coming months or years, these two eCommerce giants fare against one another.

Magento Commerce is almost definitely going to cost you more than Shopify Plus, purely because you need to pay integrators more money (both in terms of higher rates and more hours required) and all fees around the platform are likely to be higher (particularly if you’re a high turnover merchant).

If I was running a relatively straightforward store and I didn’t have complex requirements, I’d personally be seriously looking at Shopify Plus – to be honest, this is becoming a bit of a no-brainer. If I was a store with some complex requirements, B2B requirements or if I wanted to go with a on-premise platform, I would look at Magento Commerce.

The below table shows a top-level feature comparison, providing guidance around native capabilities and where customisations are required in key areas.

Native product types

Shopify Plus 

Shopify natively supports the equivalent of simple and configurable products, but can achieve the other forms of products that Magento offers via customisations or the use of third parties. You would need to consider how you want the product setup to work from a discounting and catalog management perspective (particularly with bundles).

Magento Commerce

Simple products, configurable products, bundled products, virtual products, downloadable products, grouped products, gift cards

Multi-store support

Shopify Plus

Shopify doesn’t currently provide native support for multi-store, however this is gradually being rolled out now and features are coming quickly.

Magento Commerce

Native support for managing multiple storefronts – this is a real strength of Magento and the platform is built around managing data at different levels that allows for efficient management of multiple stores.

Product attribute management

Shopify Plus

Shopify uses tags and metafields instead of product attributes and this represents a bit of a different way of working. Shopify isn’t as advanced as Magento on product management in general, but there are usually workarounds to achieve core requirements. Shopify now allows for metafields to be managed directly in the interface.

Magento Commerce

Advanced product attribute management that allows for different types of data out of the box and allows for management of these attributes at different levels.

Customer management

Shopify Plus

Shopify use customer tagging, which can replicate most of the functionality provided via Magento. Once customers are tagged you can use this to apply different pricing, product availability, front-end nuances, promotions etc.

Magento Commerce

Magento’s customer groups is a very strong native capability that is built into the core of the platform – meaning you can use it alongside other areas of the platform, such as customer segmentation, pricing, promotions etc.

Visual merchandising

Shopify Plus

Shopify Plus don’t have a visual merchandising interface, however, the platform has the same basic capabilities really, with the drag and drop approach.

Magento Commerce

Magento has a basic visual merchandising interface within categories, but don’t apply for complex sorting or global weightings etc.

SEO

Shopify Plus

Shopify is very locked down around SEO, although it is relatively strong in places. Shopify doesn’t allow for editing of URL structures etc. Users are able to amend logic around things like canonical URLs, hreflang references, noindex tags etc. This will get better as over time.

Magento Commerce

Magento is far more flexible around SEO and allows for heavy customisation – I’ve seen retailers do pretty much everything with the platform and there are no real restrictions here.

International

Shopify Plus

Shopify Plus’s international offering has been the most widely talked about limitations of the platform, however this is getting better again – price books, duties calculations and various other features are helping to make this better. Improvements to markets over the next few months should help to reduce the gap here.

Magento Commerce

Magento has a very strong multi-store infrastructure, which allows for complex international requirements, such as local product management, local catalog visibility and selling restrictions, local payment methods, complex localised pricing, local shipping options and logic, sharing of global data at an attribute-level basis etc. Magento is a proven solution with international stores, which is one area where it really stands out, however, Shopify Plus are making big moves to change this.

Content management

Shopify Plus

Shopify Plus’s Online Store 2.0 has helped to massively improve native content management – with the introduction of Sections Everywhere. This allows users to use sections across different page templates and also makes the general management of content more comfortable.

Magento Commerce

Since acquiring the Bluefoot module from Gene a couple of years ago, Magento has been working on introducing a far more advanced and integrated CMS solution, but this still isn’t available presently. Rumours suggest that the new page builder module will be made available late this year as part of the 2.3 release. I’ve played around with page builder and it is very strong and allows for very clean management of content across the platform, not just on CMS pages and within static blocks. The ability to use things like static blocks in Magento is also a strength here.


If you have any questions about anything in this post, please feel free to email [email protected].

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