Shopify Plus Vs Magento 2: What to Choose in 2025

Shopify Plus ??? 

Or Magento 2 ???

It is hard to argue or choose between these platforms, as they come with a variety of benefits, features, and target audiences.

Shopify Plus has an easy-to-use interface, while Magento 2 is highly scalable for enterprise businesses.

Shopify Plus brings a range of apps and extensions, whereas Magento 2 offers multi-shop and multi-source inventory features.

The list goes on, and this makes it hard for you to decide between these platforms.

That’s why, in this blog post, we put Shopify Plus Vs Magento 2 to determine where these platforms perform and where they don’t. You will also learn how to pick one of them based on what your business needs.

Let’s get started.

Shopify Plus vs. Magento 2: Quick Comparison Table

Shopify Plus and Magento 2 are two of the best eCommerce platforms in the market.

They share a lot of similarities and have a lot of differences at the same time. Understanding their benefits and limitations helps you make data-backed and confident decisions that you will not regret later.

In this section, let’s explore the key differences between these platforms by looking at their advantages and disadvantages to help you understand which one suits your business better.

Before we get to the meat of the discussion, here is an overview of the comparison in a table.

Factors	Shopify Plus	Magento 2
Ease of Use	— Highly user-friendly. — No coding is required .— Drag-and-drop editor for easy customization.	—Requires technical expertise. —Steeper learning curve .—Full control over design and functionality.
Pricing	— Starts at $2,000/month (can vary based on revenue). — Predictable pricing.	—The open-source version is free. —Flexible hosting and maintenance costs. —Magento Commerce pricing varies.
Customization	— Limited by Shopify’s ecosystem. — Customizations need Shopify-approved apps.	—Fully customizable, its OpenSource nature brings in flexibility. —Ideal for businesses needing complex functionalities.
Scalability & Flexibility	— Scales well for large businesses but there’s always a dependency on Shopify’s infrastructure.	—Is highly scalable. —Can modify code and optimize performance. —Can add any Magento extensions.
Performance & Speed	Hosting is managed by Shopify for better speed and uptime.	—Depends on hosting, server setup, and optimizations. —Proper configurations are needed.
SEO	— Strong built-in SEO features.— Limited control over URL customizations.	—Advanced SEO capabilities. —Full control over URLs, metadata, and site structure.
Community & Support	— 24/7 support via chat, email, and phone. — Smaller community compared to Magento.	—Large open-source community. —Extensive developer forums. —Paid support is available for Magento Commerce (Adobe Commerce) users.

We hope you got a good idea of how these platforms are different from one another. However, that’s not enough to make a decision.

In the next section, let’s explore these points in depth.

1. Shopify Plus vs Magento 2: Ease of Use

The ease of use is a vital element that influences the choice of eCommerce platform for businesses. You need a platform that’s easy to use and take advantage of to meet your business goals.

Shopify Plus is popular among entrepreneurs and businesses for its user-friendly interface.

Credit: Shopify

From the first instance of use, we can say that Shopify Plus is designed with simplicity in mind.

Shopify Plus has plenty of elements working in its favor, including its:

1. User-friendly interface and navigation.
2. Built-in generative AI capabilities.
3. Drag-and-drop builder for easy customization.

These features make it easy for entrepreneurs and small businesses to create stores and web pages from the ground up faster. You can also add products or customize product details without help.

Even if you are a non-technical person, Shopify Plus allows you to use the platform by offering:

     —Plenty of inventory management tools

     —Shopify analytics and reporting tools

     —Omni-channel selling capabilities

All these unique capabilities make Shopify Plus one of the easiest eCommerce platforms in the market in terms of user experience.

On the other hand, Magento 2, by default, is set up for large enterprises and businesses. Hence, it comes with a certain degree of complexity.

Setting up a Magento 2 store requires technical knowledge or the support of Magento developers. This might discourage businesses from using Magento to build their store. Although the platform offers plenty of customization, it is hard to use it without coding knowledge. Or you need to hire a Magento developer.

This constraint may not be ideal for businesses that don’t have the resources to hire a technical team. The platform also has a steep learning curve and you will take a lot of time to figure it out.

Verdict: Choose Shopify Plus if you prefer to have an easy-to-use platform. However, if you want a platform that offers you a lot of eCommerce functionalities and don’t mind a bit of complexity, Magento 2 is your fit.

2. Shopify Plus vs Magento 2: Pricing

For most businesses, pricing is a huge factor when picking Shopify Plus vs Magento 2.

While it may not be a deal-breaker, it is important to consider.

As you are thinking of choosing between Magento 2 and Shopify Plus, you may have a lot of questions about the pricing of these platforms.

Here are a few questions that our clients ask us often:

    —What is more budget-friendly—Shopify Plus or Magento 2?

    —What plan offers the features and support I need?

    —Can I upgrade or downgrade the plan if needed?

    —Are there any hidden costs you must know?

Let’s first look at the pricing of Shopify Plus here.

Credit – Shopify

Shopify Plus is available on a 1-or 3-year term. You can pick a Shopify Plus plan you think is suitable for your business.

Here are a few key features of the Shopify Plus plan:

1. The plan offers support in 200 inventory locations.
2. It offers localized global selling in 50 markets.
3. Create as many staff accounts as you need.
4. Sell whole or business to business (B2B).
5. Checkout customization with 40X capacity.
6. You can get 24×7 priority support for your store.
7. Use Shopify Payments in 200 POS Pro locations.

Shopify Plus also gives you access to bot protection during flash sales and Shopify Functions for building personalizations and unique commerce experiences.

When it comes to Magento 2, let’s start by saying that Magento 2 is free, thanks to it being an open-source platform. Anyone can download and use it without paying any license fee.

However, it gets tricky when you consider other elements that can cost you. After getting the Magento 2 platform, here are the expenses you need to manage:

     — Creating or customizing themes in Magento

     — Cost of integrating a payment gateway

     — Magento server maintenance fees

     — Cost of buying SSL certificates

     — Cost of buying Magento extensions

     — Expenses for Magento hosting plans

     — Cost of hiring a Magento developer team

When you build a Magento 2 store all these expenses must be taken care of. And the overall cost of development depends on the amount you want to spend on these elements.

Verdict: If you want a platform where you want more control over your cost, Shopify Plus is the best option. However, if you already have resources like hosting and an in-house team, Magento 2 would prove more value-adding.

3. Shopify Plus vs Magento 2: Customization

Shopify Plus offers deep customization options for businesses and brands. You can build your online store exactly as you need with Shopify.

Credit – Shopify Dev

Here are a few vital customization options Shopify Plus offers:

• Make advanced checkout changes without coding.
• Conditional rules to control what content visitors see.
• Edit code directly (HTML/CSS) to customize site design.
• Adjust colors, fonts, and button styles as per your branding style.
• Drag-and-drop tools to add banners, upsell products, modify layouts, etc.

In addition to all these, Shopify Plus also offers mobile-first layouts that you can customize to create unique mobile experiences for your audiences. You can also edit codes and use APIs with Shopify Plus to get the exact results you want. However, you will need the support of a developer for complex customizations.

Since Magento 2 is an open-source eCommerce platform, it offers plenty of customization options. In fact, the appeal of Magento 2 lies in the suite of customization features it offers.

Credit – MGT Commerce

Magento 2 allows you to customize the checkout experiences of your users on your store, which can help you improve your sales and conversion rate.

You can also reduce the cart abandonment rate by using checkout customization options in Magento 2.

The cart abandonment rate in the eCommerce industry is 70.19%, and checkout customization allows you to get ahead of most of your competitors.

The default review form template is not very intuitive or inviting to the customers. In Magento 2, you can also customize review form templates to capture reviews from your customers more easily.

As Magento 2 allows you to edit CSS, you can make it more enticing and easier for users to leave reviews and feedback. As 98% of customers read online reviews before making a purchase, having genuine reviews will help sell more.

Apart from this, Magento 2 also offers plenty of customization options, such as:

1. Optimization options for mobile devices.
2. Personalize order options for each customer.
3. Use custom Magento 2 themes, like Hyva Themes.
4. Install Magento extensions from the Magento store.
5. Adjust site layout for better user experience and navigation.

Verdict: Shopify Plus is the best option if you want to add minimal customization. On the other hand, if you want to customize the platform extensively, Magento 2, being opensource, is the best choice.

4. Shopify Plus vs Magento 2: Scalability and Flexibility

Shopify Plus and Magento 2 are both suitable for enterprise-level and large businesses. However, both platforms have numerous notable differences.

Let’s check them out here.

Every business wants to scale their business over the years. And when they start their business, they need a flexible platform. However, Shopify Plus was not historically very flexible and scalable.

However, Shopify Plus now offers a range of scalable and flexible options:

1. Single dashboard to manage business accounts and staff access.
2. Sell in 100+ social media platforms and 80+ online marketplaces.
3. Shopify Flow to automate merchandising, prevent fraud, etc.
4. Accept payments in multiple currencies in a single store.
5. LaunchPad to manage large flash sales and fight bots.

Apart from this, Shopify Plus also offers Shopify POS that integrates the online and offline shopping experiences of your customers. With the enterprise-level Shopify POS, you can:

     —Streamline reporting across online and offline stores.

     —Enjoy omnichannel selling with built-in features.

     —Ensure local pickup and delivery of products.

     —Sync online and offline customer profiles.

As a result, Shopify Plus can help you scale your business without complex changes to your store while being flexible.

Magento 2, on the other hand, offers unmatched customization and flexibility through its open-source framework. However, a chief issue that might hinder its open-source capabilities is the dependency on the quality of the services and its timely maintenance.

You can also modify every aspect of the Magento store by working with a Magento development agency. This option lets you scale the platform as much as you want.

Another scalability feature that Magento 2 offers is that you can add an unlimited variation of products to your store. Here are a few more elements that make Magento 2 highly flexible and scale for businesses of any size:

• Integration with third-party data analysis tools like Google Analytics, DataDog, MixPanel, etc.
• Tools to efficiently handle product catalogs and manage different product types, inventory, attributes, and more.
• An extensive extension marketplace for adding functionalities without custom development.
• Use a variety of payment options, as needed by different users, including checks and money orders.
• Localization features to sell in multiple countries with support for different currencies and languages.
• All these scalability features make Magento 2 an excellent choice for businesses looking to scale their business hassle-free.

Verdict: Shopify Plus offers a range of platform-centric scalability features and flexibility features that you can use right away without making many changes. If you prefer that, Shopify Plus is the best option. But if you have a Magento team in-house who can work on the platform for any of your scalable needs, Magento 2 is a more suitable option.

5. Shopify Plus vs Magento 2: Performance and Speed

Your website’s performance has a huge role in determining the success of an eCommerce store. If a website takes more than 3 seconds, 53% of visitors are likely to abandon the store, says Google.

In fact a survey by Statista shows that with every second a store takes to load, the chances of the visitor leaving increase.

In the performance category, Shopify Plus always offers better and more reliable performance as it is a hosted solution. We can confidently say that Shopify Plus has been engineered for speed and performance.

Several factors contribute to the platform’s performance. 

Here are a few vital reasons:

1. Uses a CDN to deliver content quickly and for better performance.
2. Offers unlimited bandwidth and web hosting to support high site traffic without compromising speed.
3. Shop Pay to speed up the checkout process by 60% and boost sales.
4. Launchpad to set up app processes to run a flash sale anytime you want during seasons like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, etc.
5. Scalability functions to handle high volumes of traffic and large orders even during peak hours.
6. Automatic updates to ensure the site has the latest features, security patches, and performance upgrades.

Check Shopify’s Web Performance Dashboard here:

Credit – Shopify

All these features, supported by the closed infrastructure of the platform, make Shopify Plus perform exceptionally well.

Magento 2 also has been developed to deliver the best performance on mobile devices, desktops, and laptops.

Credit – Servebolt

However, the extensive customization options can compromise the performance of Magento 2 stores. Newly added features and capabilities to the platform can increase the number of database queries, leading to slower responses. Another area where Magento 2 lacks in terms of performance is its dependency on the hosting provider.

A reliable, optimized hosting provider is the backbone of the performance of Magento 2. And it can bring the best out of Magento 2.

Although unreliable hosting can impact Magento 2’s performance, with the right optimization and performance strategies, you can overcome this challenge.

Here are a few strategies you can try:

1. Regularly update your Magento 2 version for new features, bug fixes, and speed improvements.
2. Choose a hosting provider that offers enough server resources and options for scaling.
3. Use lightweight themes with fewer widgets, sliders, custom blocks, and other elements that might slow down the store.
4. Audit and review the third-party extensions to avoid any performance issues they may cause.
5. Optimize images and other multimedia content on your store for faster loading speed and performance.
6. Combine this with other custom practices suitable for your eCommerce store to make your Magento 2 store perform well.

Verdict: If you want performance and speed without having to rely on third-party apps and extensions, Shopify Plus is the right choice. But it limits customization. On the other hand, Magento 2 is the right choice if you don’t mind a little snag in performance and speed for the sake of eCommerce capabilities and features.

6. Shopify Plus vs Magento 2: SEO

Search Engine Optimization is vital for an eCommerce store. By optimizing the store, its products and category pages, and other on-page SEO elements, you can improve the speed and search performance of the store.

How To Get Your Shopify Store to RANK HIGH IN SEARCH ENGINES (SEO Checklist)

Credit – Shopify

Shopify Plus offers robust SEO functionalities to its users. These features allow the store owners to customize the store and make it faster and more user-friendly.

Here are the SEO features that Shopify Plus offers:

1. Customizable meta titles and descriptions to optimize them with keywords for a higher click-through rate.
2. SEO-friendly URLs that can be optimized with target keywords to improve search ranking.
3. Mobile-friendly themes and layouts to increase speed and user experience on diverse devices.
4. Content delivery networks and image optimization to ensure fast loading times and improved search engine rankings.
5. In-built blogging functionality to create content and build authority in the niche to meet Google’s EEAT criteria for search rankings.
6. Structured data to enrich search results with product details, such as reviews, pricing, availability, etc., for higher CTR.
7. All these elements in Shopify Plus allow merchants to optimize their stores for better search engine rankings and traffic.

Like Shopify Plus, Magento 2 also offers a range of SEO capabilities to improve your store’s search performance and traffic.

One of the best parts of Magento 2’s SEO capabilities is its focus on technical SEO. Magento 2 allows you to improve your store’s on-page SEO with:

1. SEO-Friendly URLs that you can edit and add keywords relevant to product and category pages.
2. Customizable meta tags to customize meta details with keywords and provide search engines and users with more content details.
3. XML Sitemap to list all relevant pages of your site and help search engines locate and index these pages.
4. Robots.txt to control which pages search bots can crawl and index for better visibility of relevant pages.
5. Canonical Tags to handle duplicate content issues by specifying the preferred version of a page.

Along with these in-built SEO features, Magento 2 also allows you to use a range of extensions to improve your store’s SEO performance.

These extensions can help you:

     —Preview and adjust how meta details appear in search results

     —Customize the store’s XML sitemap to improve navigation.

     —Manage your site’s URLs and add attribute aliases.

     —Use the hreflang attributes for international SEO.

     —Control how Google indexes pages with filters.

Verdict: Shopify Plus offers a hands-off approach to SEO. You can easily customize your Shopify store for SEO. On the other hand, Magento 2 offers extensive SEO customization options across your eCommerce store but it comes with a certain degree of complexity.

7. Shopify Plus vs Magento 2: Community and Support

Shopify Plus has a strong and active development community offering support and assistance to merchants.

It allows both merchants and other Shopify development agencies to come together and share ideas. They can also find solutions for common issues and stay up-to-date about various developments happening on the platform.

There are several options for businesses to be a part of this:

1. Shopify Plus forums and discussion threads.
2. GitHub handles to share ideas, insights, and solutions.
3. Tutorials on the Shopify website for everyone using Shopify.

Apart from this, Shopify Plus also offers priority support to those who are looking for quick and immediate help.

All these make Shopify Plus a reliable platform that can serve its users well.

One of the major differences between Magento 2 and Shopify Plus is the lack of a proper channel to support merchants who use Magento 2 as it is an open-source platform. While there are forums and other community means to help, there is no official support line. 

This means that you need to hire Magento development agencies, like Aureate Labs, to help you out.

At the same time, Magento 2 also has one of the most active communities for support and assistance. It consists of developers and merchants constantly sharing knowledge and insights to make the platform better.

With forums, social media handles, self-help guides, and more, the Magento community can help you address any of your issues, no matter what they are.

Verdict: Both Shopify Plus and Magento 2 have a strong community behind them to support users and businesses. However, Magento 2 has a more active community thanks to it primarily being an open-source platform.

Shopify Plus vs Magento 2: What Should You Choose?

From the comparative review we have done above, we can understand that Shopify Plus and Magento 2 have as many similarities as there are differences.

And it paints a clear picture of what suits your eCommerce business better.

Choose Shopify Plus if you:

• Are a small or medium business or a startup.
• Need a less complex platform that’s easy to use.
• Want an eCommerce platform with a merchant-first approach.
• Wish to reduce your upfront investments in an eCommerce platform.

Choose Magento 2 if you:

• Are a large business or enterprise looking to expand.
• Need high customization features and don’t mind complexity.
• Want extensive scalability and flexibility features for your store.
• Have the resources and technical expertise to leverage the platform.

As you can see above, the choice of the platform between Magento 2 and Shopify Plus largely depends on your business goals.

Hence, list down your business goals and requirements first before you start looking for an eCommerce platform.

Once you have established the business goals and where you want to see your business in the next few years, it will be easier to find the most suitable platform for your business.

Conclusion

The eCommerce industry is expected to be worth US $8.034 trillion by 2027, according to Statista. And It is a huge opportunity for your business. However, your success depends if you can deliver reliable and customized services to your customers. And the platform you use has a huge role to play in it—whether it is Magento 2 or Shopify Plus.

The decision to choose an eCommerce platform is vital for your business success and growth and it must come after a lot of research, reviews, and considerations. If you need help with the same and want to work on your dream eCommerce store after making the choice, Aureate Labs can help you in every way you want.

Having already worked with leading eCommerce brands across the world, we are equipped with the right talent, expertise, platform insights, and industry knowledge to help you build your dream eCommerce store.

If you wish to speak to our eCommerce experts, contact us and schedule a free consultation.