Magento still wins a few categories. Shopify Plus has caught up on most of the rest. Before we touch your replatform, we walk you through the risk register below. Every Magento client sees it first.
Most Magento to Shopify replatforms fail at the categories below, not at the data export. So we open every audit with this register. Naming the risks up front is the cheapest place to catch them.
Read it like this. Likelihood is the chance an issue surfaces if you do not plan against it. Impact is what it costs you in revenue or rankings when it does. Mitigation is what your engineering team builds into the cutover sprint.
| Risk | Likelihood | Impact | Mitigation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Data integrity loss | M | H | Three-pass field-by-field map; row-count parity check pre and post import; 1% sample manual audit. |
| SEO ranking regression | H | H | Full indexed-URL inventory; 301 map covering products, categories, CMS, blog; schema port; Search Console daily watch for 60 days. |
| Third-party module loss | H | M | Pre-audit Magento extension list; map each to Shopify app, custom build, or accept gap; budget custom dev for anything without an app equivalent. |
| B2B feature mapping gap | M | H | B2B parity audit before kickoff; Plus B2B company accounts versus Adobe Commerce native customer groups; flag bespoke rules for Functions or accept downgrade. |
| Custom dev port | H | M | Inventory all custom Magento PHP extensions; rebuild as Liquid sections, theme app extensions, Shopify Functions, or admin apps; budget 4 to 8 weeks per significant module. |
| Search relevance regression | M | M | Magento's Elasticsearch tunings (synonyms, boosts, attribute weights) port to Shopify Search and Discovery API; budget 2 weeks for relevance tuning post-launch. |
| Performance regression | L | H | Lighthouse audit pre and post; image format conversion to WebP; theme-section budget caps; deferred app loading; expect Shopify to beat tuned Magento on mobile p75 LCP. |
| Checkout downtime | L | H | Staged DNS flip with sub-1-minute TTL; rehearsal cutover on staging the day before; rollback plan with 10-minute decision tree. |
| Payment-rail re-vetting | H | M | Confirm gateway compatibility; reauthorize stored cards (PCI-bound, gateway-dependent); test recurring tokens for subscriptions before cutover. |
| Tax regime port | M | M | Magento tax rules export; map to Shopify Tax or Avalara/Vertex integration; verify VAT, GST, and US sales-tax nexus rules per country and state. |
H = high, M = medium, L = low. Likelihood assumes no active mitigation in the cutover sprint.
Magento Open Source is in slow contraction. Adobe Commerce is healthy, but it is expensive. Smaller merchants feel this most. They pay enterprise prices, keep pace with a 90-day patch rhythm and the PHP 8.4 cadence, then watch community velocity thin out year over year. The five signals below are what we check on every Magento audit.
Adobe's GMV-tiered licensing scales steeply past $5M annual GMV. Merchants between $10M and $25M frequently report annual license costs of $60K to $190K before hosting. Plus subscription pricing scales linearly to a flat ceiling, so that math gets harder every year.
A production Magento store needs PHP-FPM, Varnish, Redis, Elasticsearch (or OpenSearch), MySQL or MariaDB, and a CDN. Each is a moving part. Adobe's DevDocs and Adobe Experience League documentation covers the recipe, but operating it falls on your team or your host.
Magento 2.4.x ships security patches every 90 days. Skipping two cycles puts you outside the supported window. Skipping four is a known compromise vector. Stores that lapse here account for the bulk of Magento incident reports we see.
The Magento certified developer count peaked around 2019. New backend developers entering ecommerce now overwhelmingly choose Shopify, headless React stacks, or Laravel commerce. Hiring a senior Magento developer in 2026 costs 30 to 60 percent more than a senior Shopify developer with comparable years.
A poorly-tuned Magento install routinely shows p75 LCP above 3.5 seconds. Google now treats that as a soft demotion signal, per web.dev's Core Web Vitals reference. Tuning gets you to the 2.5-second threshold, but the engineering hours add up.
Adobe Commerce installs at enterprise scale with deep B2B requirements remain healthy. The contraction is at the small and mid-market tier where the cost-to-feature math has tilted toward Shopify Plus. The wider history is covered in the Magento Wikipedia entry.
Five capabilities still belong to Magento by default. We name them up front for a reason: half the merchants who book a migration audit walk away with our advice to stay on Adobe Commerce. Without these five lines, this comparison page would not be honest.
Magento's Multi-Source Inventory module routes each order to the optimal warehouse based on stock, distance, and priority rules. Shopify's equivalent (Shopify Fulfillment Network plus location-based inventory) handles the basics but does not rival Magento's rule depth for distributors with 8+ warehouses.
Adobe Commerce treats customer groups as core data with cascading pricing rules, gated catalogs, and tier-pricing matrices. Plus B2B handles 80 percent of these patterns through company accounts and catalog assignment. Stores with bespoke logic (industry-specific NDA-gated SKUs, multi-axis tier pricing) still implement faster on Magento.
A single Magento install can run multiple websites with shared customer data, separate catalogs, and separate domains. Shopify Markets handles multi-region; for genuinely separate brand storefronts under one operations team, Magento's hierarchy is cleaner.
Magento exposes its database. An experienced operator can write a SQL view, build a custom admin grid, or run a one-off rule update without waiting on a developer. Shopify's API surface is excellent but does not match the urgency of "log into the database and fix it."
If your team has the engineering depth, Magento Open Source carries no per-store fees and no GMV ceiling. Hosting, security, and maintenance are your problem, but the platform itself is yours to keep. Shopify is a subscription that ends if you stop paying.
The 2023-2025 Plus releases reshaped this comparison. Functions, Markets, B2B company accounts, Hydrogen, and a deeper apps ecosystem each closed a category Magento once owned outright. The five capabilities below explain why mid-market replatforms now tilt toward Plus.
Custom discounts, payment-method gating, delivery-rule logic, and cart-mutation hooks run as serverless functions per the Shopify Functions API. This replaced the historical "Plus is closed at checkout" objection that Magento merchants used to cite.
Multi-currency, multi-language, geolocation, hreflang, and per-region tax handling all work through one storefront. A merchant selling US, UK, and EU from one Plus store gets what previously required Magento store-views.
NET-30 terms, company-level role permissions, catalog pricing per company, and quote workflows shipped natively in 2023. Distributors with standard tier pricing and customer-group catalogs find this covers the majority of Magento's B2B surface.
Brands needing pixel control and CMS-led content alongside Plus checkout can split the storefront from the commerce layer using Hydrogen, Oxygen hosting, and the Storefront API. This used to be a Magento-only pattern.
8,000+ apps in the Shopify App Store cover Klaviyo email, Postscript SMS, Recharge subscriptions, Gorgias support, Yotpo reviews, Searchanise relevance, and so on. Magento has roughly 4,000 extensions, with quality variance much higher and update cadence often slower.
Multi-warehouse rule depth and SQL-direct admin overrides. For most merchants these are not blockers; for industrial B2B distributors they sometimes are.
Field data at the 75th percentile is what Google ranks against. The benchmarks below come from CrUX field data and Lighthouse audits across mid-market merchants we have audited in 2025 and early 2026. Shopify's hosted edge wins out of the box. Tuned Magento can match it, but rarely beats it on mobile.
| Configuration | LCP (p75) | INP (p75) | CLS (p75) | Page weight |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shopify Dawn (clean) | 2.0s | 110ms | 0.04 | 1.2 MB |
| Shopify Plus (10 apps) | 2.4s | 160ms | 0.07 | 2.1 MB |
| Shopify Hydrogen (headless) | 1.8s | 130ms | 0.03 | 1.5 MB |
| Magento 2 (tuned, Adobe Cloud) | 2.5s | 180ms | 0.08 | 2.4 MB |
| Magento 2 (typical, untuned) | 3.6s | 260ms | 0.14 | 3.1 MB |
| Magento 1 (legacy) | 4.4s | 340ms | 0.21 | 3.8 MB |
| Google "good" threshold | ≤ 2.5s | ≤ 200ms | ≤ 0.10 | target < 2 MB |
Numbers indicative; per-store results vary with theme, app footprint, image weight, and host. Source: magento.com platform documentation for Magento configurations; field observations from our merchant audits 2025-2026.
Subscription is the smallest line on the bill. Hosting, agency retainer, extension or app spend, and security port matter more. The all-in numbers below are typical mid-market estimates we have validated against client invoices. Your mileage varies with team size, app footprint, and integration depth.
| Line item | Plus @ $5M GMV | Adobe Commerce @ $5M | Plus @ $25M GMV | Adobe Commerce @ $25M |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Platform license / subscription | $83K | $75K | $108K | $420K |
| Hosting + infrastructure | included | $54K | included | $120K |
| Agency retainer (3-yr) | $108K | $216K | $216K | $360K |
| Apps / extensions | $36K | $72K | $54K | $108K |
| Security + PCI port | included | $45K | included | $90K |
| 36-month total | ~$227K | ~$462K | ~$378K | ~$1.10M |
Excludes one-time replatform cost. Excludes payment processing fees (consistent across platforms). Adobe Commerce Cloud licensing per Adobe's Adobe Commerce product page; Shopify Plus per Shopify Plus pricing.
Our Magento to Shopify methodology compresses the cutover into a 90-day calendar. It includes a rehearsed DNS flip, a 60-day post-launch parity window, and an SEO safety net that runs for the first 60 days after go-live. The full method ships as part of our Magento to Shopify migration service. The four-phase summary follows.
Schema audit of Magento, extension dependency map, indexed-URL inventory, B2B feature parity check, integration landscape. Output is the risk register from §01 with your specific store's numbers.
Theme build (Liquid or Hydrogen), data migration scripts, custom apps and Functions, integrations rebuild, B2B configuration. Staging on a private Shopify dev store; weekly reviews with your team.
Two rehearsal cutovers on staging, freeze of the Magento store for the 24-hour go-live window, sub-1-minute DNS TTL, 301 redirects deployed. Rollback plan with 10-minute decision tree if any metric goes red.
60-day daily crawl monitoring, rank tracking against pre-cutover baseline, Search Console error response, 404 and redirect validation, content parity verification. We measure recovery weekly and report to you.
SEO preservation is six steps, in order, every time. Skip any one and you risk an 8 to 14 week ranking dip. The discipline below applies to any platform-to-platform replatform. We have run it on 40+ Magento to Shopify migrations, and the recovery curve is consistent when the steps are followed.
Crawl the live Magento store with Screaming Frog or Sitebulb, then export every indexed URL. Cross-reference with Search Console's coverage report and your Google Analytics top-100 organic landing pages. That catches ranking pages the crawl missed.
Every old URL maps to a new URL or to the canonical replacement. Products, categories, CMS pages, blog posts, and any campaign URLs still earning organic traffic. Bulk import via Shopify's URL redirect CSV.
Product, Organization, BreadcrumbList, and any review or article schema rebuilt cleanly per schema.org's Product reference. Validate every page with Google's Rich Results Test before launch.
Daily Search Console monitoring for the first 60 days post-cutover. 404 spikes and "Discovered, not indexed" anomalies get same-day investigation. Submit the new sitemap on day one and resubmit weekly.
Server logs (or Cloudflare logs if proxied) reviewed weekly for 60 days. Confirm Googlebot is hitting redirected URLs and following them through. Confirm crawl frequency does not drop sharply, which would signal an indexation problem.
Weekly comparison of ranking positions for the top 200 commercial keywords against the pre-cutover baseline. Recovery curves should reach baseline by week 8 to 12. Expect faster on tuned cutovers, slower if any of steps 01-05 were skipped.
The decision is rarely platform-versus-platform in the abstract. It is your store, your team, your B2B depth, and your engineering capacity. The three profiles below cover roughly 90 percent of the merchants who book audits with us. Match yours to the closest profile, then book the call.
Catalog 200 to 5,000 SKUs, simple B2C, small team, no in-house Magento engineer.
Shopify Plus, no question.
Multi-axis tier pricing, NDA-gated catalogs, deep ERP integration, 25,000+ SKUs.
Adobe Commerce, usually.
8+ warehouses, complex inventory routing, mid-volume B2B with standard tier pricing.
Both viable; depends on rule depth.
It depends on your engineering capacity and B2B depth. Run a DTC brand under $25M GMV with a normal catalog? Shopify Plus wins on operating cost, feature velocity, and team time. Run an industrial B2B distributor with 10,000+ SKUs, multi-warehouse inventory, and a deep custom rule engine? Magento (Adobe Commerce) is still the more honest fit.
The 2024-2025 Plus releases (Functions, Markets, B2B company accounts) closed most of the historical gap. A few enterprise B2B patterns stay Magento-native.
Plan a 12 to 18 week replatform. Your budget tracks three things: data volume, integration count, and B2B feature depth. A $5M GMV DTC brand typically lands in the $40K to $90K range for a clean Plus migration. A B2B distributor with NetSuite or SAP integration, 25,000 SKUs, and customer-group pricing typically lands $120K to $280K.
Most of that spend is integration work and SEO preservation, not the data export itself. See our Magento to Shopify migration cost breakdown for the line items.
Shopify, out of the box. Its hosted edge network handles caching, CDN, and image optimization with no configuration. A clean Dawn-based Plus theme typically shows p75 LCP of 2.0 to 2.4 seconds.
Magento can match or beat that with proper hosting: Adobe Commerce Cloud, or Cloudways with Varnish, Redis, and a tuned PHP-FPM stack. The engineering overhead is substantial. A poorly-tuned Magento store frequently shows p75 LCP above 3.5 seconds, and Google now treats that as a soft ranking demotion.
For most B2B patterns, yes, since 2023. Shopify Plus B2B introduced company accounts with NET-30 terms, catalog pricing per company, role-based location access, and quote workflows.
Adobe Commerce still wins on native multi-warehouse inventory allocation, deep customer-group rule engines, and complex tier-pricing matrices. Shopify handles those through Functions and metafields, not as first-class objects. Most mid-market distributors land cleanly on Plus B2B. The top 10 percent with bespoke pricing logic stay on Adobe Commerce.
Yes, by a wide margin, on every dimension except the customization ceiling. Magento needs a server admin or a managed-host partner. It also needs security patches every 90 days, PHP compatibility checks, extension conflict resolution, regular database optimization, and a dedicated developer for any non-trivial change. Shopify hands all of that to its hosted infrastructure.
The trade-off is real. Magento gives you raw SQL, full template control, and unlimited custom logic. Shopify constrains you to its app ecosystem, Liquid, Functions, and Hydrogen.
Not if the cutover treats SEO preservation as a first-class deliverable. The mandatory steps: a full URL inventory of every indexed page, a 301 redirect map covering products, categories, CMS pages, and ranking blog posts, a schema port (Product, Organization, Breadcrumb), title and meta-description preservation across all ranking URLs, and a 60-day Search Console error response window after cutover.
Skip the URL inventory step and you typically lose 20 to 40 percent of organic traffic for 8 to 14 weeks. Follow the discipline and traffic is often flat or up by week 12, because Shopify's faster Core Web Vitals lift mobile rankings.
Shopify Plus is a hosted SaaS subscription starting around $2,300 per month, with usage-based scaling, automatic upgrades, and zero infrastructure burden. Adobe Commerce is a licensed product, cloud or self-hosted. Its annual GMV-based licensing typically runs $25,000 to $190,000 per year before hosting, plus the engineering team to operate it.
Plus optimizes for operational simplicity and feature velocity. Adobe Commerce optimizes for customization depth and native enterprise B2B. Plus reaches feature parity for roughly 80 percent of mid-market merchants. The other 20 percent are usually B2B distributors with bespoke logic.
Strongly consider it if any two of these are true: your annual hosting and patching cost exceeds $30K, your team spends 12+ hours a month on Magento maintenance, your last security patch is more than 90 days behind, your developer pool is shrinking, your Core Web Vitals are flagged in Search Console, or you pay for Adobe Commerce licensing without using its B2B-native features.
The Magento Open Source ecosystem is contracting as Adobe deprioritizes it, so staying becomes a long-tail risk. Migrate when you have 14 to 18 weeks of bandwidth and a clear SEO preservation plan.
30-minute audit call. Written recommendation within 48 hours. Most calls conclude either "stay on Adobe Commerce" or "migrate, but plan for these four risks first." We get paid the same either way.
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