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It doesn't matter if you are starting your ecommerce store for the first time or you've been in the game for over 20 years; few choices impact your success as much as the ecommerce platform you pick.
Different types of ecommerce businesses have different requirements from their ecommerce platform, and the business' size, revenue, and operations are going to naturally weed out some of your options. But for scaling ecommerce businesses in 2026, two of the most popular choices are Shopify and Magento. So let's compare the two platforms and help you decide which ecommerce solution is right for your online business.
Shopify Vs Magento: An Overview
Magento and Shopify - these are two of the most popular ecommerce platforms for ecommerce businesses around the world. In fact, for the top 1 million best-performing ecommerce sites worldwide (by site traffic), the two platforms account for a combined 31% of all ecommerce sites, according to builtwith.
Historically, people regarded Magento as the ecommerce king, and its open source nature gave both Magento developers and business owners more control. Ecommerce stores on Magento have more control over their domain, their hosting, and their payment processing. However, an open source operating system can mean more room for error and make rolling out updates slower.
The platform now regarded as the king of ecommerce, Shopify, is trusted by small businesses all the way to enterprise-level businesses like Gymshark and Rhode. Although it's not an open-source platform, Shopify gives merchants a ton of flexibility and - most importantly in the attention economy of today - allows them to roll out updates at speed.
For scaling ecommerce businesses, the decision largely comes down to "do you want the total flexibility of Magento, or the faster operation speed of Shopify?" But there's much more to consider too.
Before we dive deeper into the minor details, let's first take a closer look at each platform and what they can do for your business and your ecommerce website.
What is Shopify?
Shopify is a complete commerce platform - note commerce, not just ecommerce - that provides businesses with everything they need to sell both on and offline. Millions of ecommerce businesses rely on the platform, and Shopify, as a service provider, is constantly innovating and finding new ways to enable the merchants that trust them.
As an example, Shopify recognises that different merchants are at different levels of business growth, and therefore provides different plans tailored to them.
When deciding which ecommerce solution is best for your business? Potentially doing so alongside an ecommerce agency, Shopify certainly has a lot to offer. More than anything, Shopify has the best converting checkout of any ecommerce platform, significantly lower costs than comparable platforms, and a large library of integrations and Shopify themes to choose from.
Shopify's primary goal is to make managing a business online easy, so they provide all the hosting, servers, security, and architecture to store and run the business, taking away the brand's need to set this up.
But it does become an issue as your business grows and you want that added control - unfortunately, there's just no way to get it. For most businesses, however, this is never a concern, and Shopify has a 99.99% server uptime.
What is Magento?
Founded in 2008, Magento ecommerce is an open-source platform now owned by Adobe. And that's where the confusion around Magento can begin, as you actually can't build your ecommerce website with "Magento" in the same way you could in 2017. In fact, many of the sites still using Magento today are layovers from before the purchase by Adobe.
There is Magento Commerce Cloud, Magento On-Prem, and Magento Open-Source, with the first two being grouped under Adobe's "Magento Commerce" umbrella. The confusing aspect is that all three are technically open-source, despite it only being the namesake of one of them, with the main difference between the three instead being the pricing.
Magento Open Source is available to use for free, so long as you pay for hosting, whereas both versions of Magento Commerce come with a price tag. The distinction between the two "Magento Commerce" versions lies in the hosting. Commerce Cloud is self-hosted through a partnership with Adobe and is thus referred to as a "Platform as a Service," and Adobe makes it very clear that it would like you to choose this one.
Finally, Magento On Premises, shortened to 'On-Prem,' requires you to find and pay for your own hosting platform. However, neither "Magento Commerce" option has a fixed price.
All of that being said, Magento ecommerce is still frequently chosen by magento developers due to its open source nature. This means that they can build sites from scratch with whatever functionality is required.
As above, Magento lets ecommerce businesses build their ecommerce store precisely how they would like. However, whilst a team member with limited development experience could easily manage the back end of a Shopify site, the same cannot be said for Magento. Magento places a much larger strain on your development agency or in-house teams.
However there are some good things to be said about Magento in 2026. Highly focused on enterprise businesses, it provides them with a library of features to scale their business, including robust inventory management. And it's owned by Adobe, who are - at least publicly - committed to innovating and investing in the platform.
Shopify Vs Magento: What's the Difference?
Up until this point, you've likely discerned a lot about the differences between Shopify vs Magento for scaling businesses, but we're yet to directly compare the two platforms.
To use a sports analogy, we can think of Shopify as the young, technical wunderkind, whilst Magento is the past-its-prime veteran looking to prove itself once again (which is ironic since Magento is actually a newer platform than Shopify).
So let's explore everything from business support to features and more.
Shopify Vs Magento: Use Case
Magento vs Shopify: both are ecommerce platforms built to support businesses of different shapes and sizes. From business-to-business merchants to subscription-based services, both can support different business models. However, Magento makes an effort to market itself as the go-to platform for enterprise-level businesses, whereas Shopify has a much wider scope, serving everything from small businesses to global brands. As a result, some Shopify features may feel like they aren't relevant to your business.
For example, Shopify Sidekick - Shopify's AI-powered assistant to build your ecommerce store - may not be the most useful feature if your business is making £1million+ a year and looking to grow, but if you're just setting up an ecommerce website for the first time, then it can be a vital resource.
One of the pushbacks we hear about Shopify from ecommerce businesses is "Other ecommerce platforms better support our vertical," but that assumes your business is never going to change. Shopify, with its flexibility and speed to market, makes rolling out new features - from landing pages to full product catalogues - easy.
Additionally, Shopify specifically offers a solution to enterprise businesses called Shopify Commerce Components. It's a modular packaging of Shopify's infrastructure, APIs, services, and support designed specifically for enterprise brands - giving them the freedom to use Shopify's full platform, or choose only the components they need, connect with their existing systems, and build with the flexibility, scale, and speed that enterprise business requires.
So each platform is a great ecommerce solution for scaling businesses, with Shopify giving a slight edge due to its flexibility and capacity to adapt as your business evolves.
Shopify Vs Magento: Pricing
For scaling ecommerce businesses, the price of your ecommerce platform is going to be a major consideration.
We previously mentioned that Shopify offers several different plans depending on the size of your business. For growing businesses, though, the only one worth mentioning is Shopify Plus. Shopify Plus is Shopify's most-premium plan and comes in at £1,800 a month if on a three-year plan, with a 0.5% transaction fee.
As before, Magento's pricing can be a bit awkward, with Magento Open Source being free (minus hosting) and Adobe Commerce Cloud and Adobe On-Prem having a variable rate.
But businesses report that Magento can cost them between $122,000 to over $450,000 annually - a much higher investment, no doubt.
Shopify Vs Magento: Features
When it comes to running your business behind the scenes, Shopify and Shopify Plus and Magento offer a similar feature stack - after all, the requirements of running an ecommerce business tend to be quite similar, no matter what your business looks like.
Both platforms allow you to manage your product library, build collections, product pages, blogs, and more. Whilst the day-to-day management is slightly easier within Shopify, Magento offers a few more of these features out of the box - such as product bundling, parent and child product functionality, and more advanced inventory management capabilities.
For marketing your ecommerce store, Shopify takes the cake with its wide-reaching stack of marketing tools and integrations. From email content marketing with apps like Klaviyo to performance marketing with Meta, TikTok, Google, and more, Shopify allows you to get everything set up quickly. Shopify also integrates seamlessly with Google Analytics, giving you real-time insights into your store's performance and helping boost organic search visibility when paired with the right ecommerce digital marketing agency. However, Shopify's integrated content marketing tools are not as well-developed as other ecommerce platforms like WooCommerce or Magento.
On the other hand, Magento makes marketing your business quite difficult, with each integration requiring you to navigate a number of different hurdles. Magento SEO capabilities exist, but require significant technical expertise to unlock - particularly for ecommerce advertising agency integrations. Some advertising partners have built native integrations, but for a supposedly industry-leading ecommerce platform, you'd expect more.
Shopify Vs Magento: The Checkout and Payments
You cannot edit Shopify's Checkout unless you're on the Shopify Plus plan. In fact, it's one of the biggest complaints we hear about the platform. However, having worked with countless brands on Shopify Plus, you often won't want to edit the checkout anyway. After all, Shopify's Checkout converts up to 34% better than other ecommerce platforms, delivering exceptional customer experiences and a superior shopping experience out of the box. You can build some apps and integrations using Shopify's Checkout editor, but these are often very light touch - such as getting a signature at checkout or upsells.
As an open source platform, businesses can build Magento's checkout in whatever way, shape or form they wish: custom fields, bespoke logic, complex pricing rules, approval workflows for B2B, and multi-step flows tailored to specific verticals. But it performs infamously poorly on mobile devices.
When it comes to payments, Shopify natively integrates with over 100 different payment providers, including flexible payment options like Klarna, letting customers pay in whichever way they prefer. Similarly, Shopify has a payment gateway called Shopify Payments, which allows brands to offer all major debit and credit cards and accelerated payments, including Apple Pay and Google Pay, without the need for a third-party gateway.
There are some pitfalls to Shopify Payments. For example, forbidding the purchase of certain products such as CBD-based products, high chargeback fees, and the inability to add a payment method it doesn’t support; but it is otherwise a spotless ecommerce solution for businesses selling both domestically and internationally.
Magento natively integrates with PayPal, Braintree, and Authorize.Net payment service providers but does not natively offer its own payment gateway. This means any other payment gateway needs to be hard-coded into the ecommerce website in question. However, unlike Shopify, there are no restrictions on what payment gateways you can use.
So, whilst Shopify makes it easier out of the box, Magento does let you do more from a checkout and payment gateways perspective, even if the path to get there is a bit more complicated.
Shopify Vs Magento: Support
Shopify's support is second to none. If you're having an issue that your Shopify agency partner or ecommerce agency can't deal with immediately, either your team or theirs can easily contact Shopify either through email, phone, or live chat. Additionally, for store owners on Shopify Plus plans, you'll be assigned a dedicated merchant success manager to provide tailored and trusted support.
Magento offers a similar level of merchant support, however, not on a 24/7 basis. Plus, for enterprise-level plans, Magento does offer dedicated account managers at an added cost.
Another factor here is the platform's commitment to merchant success. Shopify as a platform is the primary offering of Shopify as a company, with POS terminals and other technology offered only as supporting resources. Therefore, Shopify is committed to innovating and improving the platform as best it can.
Whereas Magento - now Adobe Commerce - is one of over 50 products offered by Adobe. Put simply, Adobe Commerce does not get nearly the same amount of love as Shopify, and updates to the platform are slow to roll out.
Shopify Pros and Cons
Shopify is constantly growing and innovating, taking up more of the ecommerce market share worldwide with every passing quarter. Whilst they market themselves as the platform for entrepreneurs, they're equally focused on serving scaling businesses making multiple millions per year. For businesses at this level, the main benefits are:
- Running your B2B, B2C, and retail locations from one platform
- High flexibility, letting you make edits to your ecommerce website quickly
- High converting checkout, resulting in up to 34% more conversions than other platforms out of the box - a significant advantage for any ecommerce marketing agency or in-house teams managing performance
- Unparalleled support with hundreds of updates rolling out each year
All of these Shopify benefits sound great, but that's not to say the platform is without its drawbacks.
- Restrictive admin: Making fundamental changes to your Shopify site is difficult
- Poor content marketing functionalities: Shopify's blogging tools pale in comparison to other ecommerce platforms
- Shopify locks you into a rigid URL structure, which can hinder organic search performance and make migrating to the platform a challenge
- Your Shopify site relies on a third-party server: this is usually a non-issue; however, there have been some infamous occasions where all Shopify sites go down simultaneously
Magento Pros and Cons
Whilst its heyday is in the past, there are thousands of ecommerce stores built on Magento ecommerce, whose owners would never think about changing. There's a reason Magento became so popular in the first place after all. For scaling businesses - especially those who sell complex products and want custom interfaces - Magento has been and continues to be a reliable ecommerce platform.
For scaling businesses, the main benefits are:
- High levels of customisability
- Advanced inventory management capabilities
- An industry-leading content management system, international selling can be managed natively within the platform
- Strong Magento SEO tools for improving organic search rankings, when managed by experienced Magento developers
However, in 2026, the Magento ecommerce platform is rarely chosen by new ecommerce companies. In fact, Shopify made it part of its marketing as the ecommerce platform to migrate to from Magento. And once we look into the drawbacks, it's easy to see why.
- Magento stores require significant development experience, and many businesses will need an internal development agency or the support of a dedicated ecommerce services agency to manage their site
- Development and platform costs are significantly higher than other platforms
- Adobe's support for the platform is not to the level you'd hope for such a prestigious platform
- Adobe is not rolling out updates frequently enough to keep the platform competitive
Shopify vs Magento: Which is Best for you in 2026?
Shopify vs Magento - these two platforms make up a combined 31% of the top-performing ecommerce sites worldwide. Whilst they may do so for different reasons, it's easy to see why. Both platforms offer a flexible, scalable ecommerce solution to run an online business and allow you to market and drive traffic to your site.
The best decision for your business is always going to be based on your unique business model and needs.
However, even if we are a Shopify agency and have an experienced team of Shopify website builders, we believe that Shopify offers a much better business package for scaling ecommerce businesses in 2026.
Whilst some may view Shopify's lack of control over domains and hosting as a negative, it gives you one thing less to worry about. Whereas the dependency on your servers with Magento can be a challenge as your business grows or over big spikes in traffic.
Magento does offer you more customization options; however, very few ecommerce stores are ever going to need or benefit from this level of complexity.
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As a full-service ecommerce digital agency and ecommerce marketing agency, we offer everything from Shopify development agency services to ecommerce advertising agency support, content marketing, and Google Analytics setup - making us a go-to ecomm agency for ambitious brands.
Whether you're looking for a digital marketing agency ecommerce solution, an agency ecommerce partner, or a dedicated ecommerce digital marketing agency to handle your full strategy, We’re here to help. As one of the best ecommerce marketing agencies for scaling brands, we combine deep platform expertise with proven results.
If your online business is looking to scale, whether you want help migrating to Shopify, managing your current ecommerce store, or help building a new ecommerce website, contact us. We'd love to hear from you.
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