Magento vs Shopify: which one your shop should run
Choose Shopify unless your business matches one of four specific conditions, and budget step 04 for the build: EUR 3.500 to 7.500 over 6 to 12 weeks, because a checkout with payments in it is step 04 work on any platform. Magento, sold by Adobe as Adobe Commerce, starts at step 05, from EUR 7.500 after discovery, and the build is the part of Magento you eventually stop paying for.
The four conditions are set out below, and you would already recognise them in your own business. If none of them describe you, the decision is finished before the rest of this page.
The real difference is who owns the server
Shopify is rented software. Your shop runs on machines Shopify owns, patched by people Shopify employs, and when the checkout breaks at nine on a Saturday evening it is their phone that rings.
Magento Open Source is software you install. Somebody pays for servers sized to your peaks, applies security patches, keeps a staging copy so an upgrade can be rehearsed before it touches the shop that is taking orders, and answers on that Saturday evening. Adobe Commerce is the paid, licensed edition, sold self-hosted or as a cloud service Adobe runs. On Open Source and on self-hosted Adobe Commerce, keeping the server patched and fast becomes a standing job somebody is paid to do, every month, for as long as the shop exists.
That is not an argument against Magento. It is what you are buying, and it has to buy you something back.
What Magento asks for that Shopify does not
- Hosting sized for your busiest week, not your average day.
- Security patches applied promptly, because an unpatched shop taking card details is a liability, not a bug.
- Version upgrades, which are projects rather than button presses.
- A staging copy, because you cannot rehearse an upgrade on the live shop.
- Caching and performance work that Shopify does for you and never mentions.
- A developer who knows Magento and will still answer after launch.
- Extensions that have to agree with each other.
That is seven standing commitments and a customer can see none of them. A visitor cannot tell which platform served the page. They can tell whether it was fast and whether the checkout asked for something strange.
When Magento is the right answer
Four situations genuinely call for it.
- Rules that depend on who is logged in. Per-customer price lists, credit accounts, purchase orders, quote before order, tax handling per customer group. Magento was built for that shape and a hosted shop has to bend into it.
- Product data that refuses to be a simple catalogue. Deep attribute sets, dependent options, configurators where the price is calculated rather than looked up.
- Several storefronts from one catalogue and one admin, following genuinely different rules rather than different logos.
- An integration with the system that already runs your company, where the connector exists, works, and rebuilding it is not on the table.
Underneath all four sits a fifth condition: a person whose job includes this shop. Magento rewards a company that owns it and punishes one that bought it and walked away.
Side by side
| Question | Shopify | Magento or Adobe Commerce |
|---|---|---|
| Who runs the server | Shopify | Agreed per project, and we can host it |
| Security patches | Included and invisible | A standing job, for as long as the shop lives |
| Platform cost | A published subscription | Hosting and maintenance, plus a licence on Adobe Commerce |
| Checkout | Shopify's, and largely fixed | Yours, which means yours to test |
| Design freedom | Wide on the storefront, narrow in the checkout | Complete, checkout included |
| Where our build lands | Step 04, EUR 3.500 to 7.500 | Step 05, from EUR 7.500 |
| What breaks first | An app you installed and forgot | An upgrade nobody scheduled |
What stays yours
The theme code we write is yours, in your repository, and so is any app we build for you. The product, customer and order data is yours to export. The trade on Shopify is that the platform itself is rented. On Magento the code is yours in a fuller sense, and so is the question of where it runs. That is agreed per project: we can host it, and if we do, it is written into the quote rather than assumed.
If the storefront is the product and a theme is in the way, a custom front end in front of Shopify's catalogue and checkout is a real option. That is step 05, from EUR 7.500, with the quote following discovery, and how we build front ends covers it.
How the build runs
Scoping comes first and a fixed quote follows it. For a step 04 shop that means agreeing the catalogue shape, the payment and shipping rules, the tax handling and what happens after an order is placed, then building over 6 to 12 weeks. For step 05 the quote follows discovery, because quoting a platform that size from a conversation would be a guess.
One part of the timeline is not ours. Product data, photography, descriptions, tax categories and the approval of your payment account come from your side. This is the part that waits on you. The steps and what each one includes are on the packages page.
When to spend less
You have not sold anything online yet. Buy a Shopify subscription and a paid theme, load the products yourself and find out whether people buy. Nothing we build makes an untested product sell. Come back when the shop works and its limits are costing you orders.
You sell a handful of things, mostly in person. A site that says who you are, what you sell and where to find you is step 02 at EUR 900 to 1.500, or step 03 at EUR 1.500 to 3.500 once it grows to four to seven pages. A checkout you do not need is the most expensive thing on this page.
Nobody arrives. A platform migration does not create demand. SEO foundation is a one-off of EUR 450 to 750 covering Search Console, analytics, indexation, technical hygiene, titles, internal links and a plan for the next 3 to 6 months. If traffic is the problem, start there and leave the platform alone.
If one of those three is you, then do not hire us yet.
Questions buyers ask
Magento is free, so is it not cheaper?
The licence for Magento Open Source costs nothing, and the licence is the cheapest part of it. Hosting, patching, upgrades and a developer who knows the platform are the real cost, and they continue every month whether or not anything changed. Compare the running total across the life of the shop, not the download price.
We are on an old Magento version. Do we have to move?
You have to do something, because a shop taking card details on an unsupported version is a risk you are already carrying. Upgrading in place is a project and moving to a hosted platform is also a project. Which one costs less depends on how much of your setup is custom integration work that would have to be rebuilt, and that is what scoping establishes.
Can Shopify handle our business customers and their prices?
Depending on the plan, it handles a good deal of it through customer groups, price lists and a separate entrance for trade accounts. It gets strained when the rules multiply: purchase orders, credit limits, approval chains, a negotiated price per product per contract. Write down the rules your sales people keep in their heads, because that list is the specification and it answers the platform question.
Will we lose our search rankings in a migration?
Not if the addresses are handled. Every old product and category URL has to survive or redirect to its match on the new shop, and that mapping belongs in the build rather than in a panic afterwards. Rankings wobble after any migration while search engines recrawl, and the redirect map decides whether they settle back.
If you already know which of the two you need, we can price it. If you do not, that is what scoping is for. Tell us what you sell and we will tell you which step you are in.
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JP Studio designs and builds websites, storefronts and product interfaces.