For years, Magento—now rebranded as Adobe Commerce—has held a dominant position as the “Goliath” of eCommerce platforms.
Even though things started going downhill for Magento following the Adobe acquisition, businesses still chose the platform for its robust feature offering.
However, in recent years, Shopify has aggressively closed the gap, enhancing its Shopify Plus offering to cater to mid-market and enterprise-level businesses, making it a serious contender for brands that once would have looked exclusively to Adobe Commerce.
In this post, we’ll compare the key features of Adobe Commerce and Shopify Plus, with a focus on how they serve mid-market brands.
Let’s dive in.
Adobe Commerce comes in three versions: Magento Open Source, Adobe Commerce On-Premise, and Adobe Commerce Cloud.
Here’s a brief description of the three Adobe Commerce versions:
- Magento Open Source: This is the free, self-hosted, community-driven version of Adobe Commerce, offering basic eCommerce functionality. It provides flexibility and customization but requires significant technical expertise to handle hosting, maintenance, and development. It’s ideal for smaller businesses or developers who want full control over their platform without paying for enterprise-level features.
- Adobe Commerce On-Premise: This version is the self-hosted enterprise solution, offering advanced eCommerce capabilities for larger businesses. It includes additional features such as advanced B2B tools, customer segmentation, and powerful business intelligence tools. Merchants have complete control over their hosting and infrastructure, but it comes with higher costs and complexity due to the need for in-house management.
- Adobe Commerce Cloud: This version is the fully hosted, cloud-based option. It includes all the features of Adobe Commerce On-Premise but is managed through Adobe’s cloud infrastructure. This provides the flexibility and control of the on-premise version but with reduced complexity in managing the hosting environment. It integrates seamlessly with other Adobe Experience Cloud products, making it ideal for larger businesses looking for a robust, scalable solution with less operational overhead.
Shopify Plus, meanwhile, is the advanced version of Shopify’s standard offering, designed to handle more complex needs.
Implementation
Implementing Shopify Plus is incredibly straightforward. It’s a SaaS (Software as a Service) platform, meaning all you need to do is sign up with your credit card, and you’re good to go. Shopify manages the entire infrastructure, so there’s no need to worry about server management, hosting, or updates. This hands-off approach allows businesses to focus on what matters—running their store—without getting bogged down in technical complexities.
In contrast, implementing Adobe Commerce On-Premise or Magento Open Source is much more involved. These platforms offer unparalleled control and flexibility over your infrastructure, but that power comes with a price: increased complexity and risk. Setting up and managing Adobe Commerce requires extensive planning and technical expertise, as businesses are responsible for configuring their own hosting, servers, security, and updates.
For example, here’s a reference architecture for hosting Adobe Commerce on AWS:
As you can see, setting up Adobe Commerce On-Prem is no small feat and certainly not for non-techies. It’s precisely this complexity that has led to the growth of a vast ecosystem of Adobe Commerce implementation partners, who help businesses navigate these challenges and ensure successful deployment.
For the rest of the comparison, we’ll focus on Shopify Plus and Adobe Commerce Cloud version.
Total Cost of Ownership
The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) between Adobe Commerce and Shopify Plus differs significantly, both in upfront and ongoing costs.
Adobe Commerce:
- License Costs: Starts around $30,000 annually but can reach millions depending on factors like Gross Merchandise Value (GMV), company size, and number of stores. Costs vary between on-premise and cloud editions.
- Build Costs: An Adobe Commerce build starts around $150,000, with some larger projects costing up to $10 million.
- Ongoing Costs:
- Support and maintenance retainers range from $5,000 to $50,000 per month.
- Business-as-usual (BAU) development can cost $5,000 to $50,000 per month.
- Additional fees for hosting (if not using Cloud), third-party tools, and integration partners can add significant costs.
Shopify Plus:
- License Costs: Shopify Plus has a flat fee starting at $2,600 per month, which increases by 0.25% of revenue for stores exceeding $800,000 in sales per month.
- Build Costs: Shopify Plus builds typically range from $100,000 to $500,000.
- Ongoing Costs:
- BAU development costs around $36,000 to $120,000 annually.
- App costs average $12,000 annually, with key third-party integrations averaging $60,000.
- Hosting, maintenance, and upgrades are covered in the licensing fee, reducing overall operational complexity.
Shopify Plus generally offers a lower TCO than Adobe Commerce, especially for small to mid-sized businesses. Adobe Commerce’s flexibility and control come at the cost of higher implementation, maintenance, and operational expenses, while Shopify Plus provides an easier, more cost-effective solution with built-in infrastructure and support.
With that said, let’s look at the major differences in the core features of Adobe Commerce vs Shopify Plus to see if the higher cost of Adobe Commerce is worth it.
Major Differences in Core Features
For the purpose of this comparison, we’ll focus only on the native features of Shopify Plus and Adobe Commerce, excluding capabilities achieved through extensions.
Category Management
Both Shopify Plus and Adobe Commerce handle large product catalogs effectively and allow merchants to organize products into collections or categories.
Shopify Plus offers Automated Collections, allowing merchants to define rules that dynamically populate collections based on product attributes. This feature helps streamline product organization without manual effort.
Similarly, Adobe Commerce provides Dynamic Categories, allowing merchants to use category rules to automatically group products.
Multi-Store Catalog Management
Adobe Commerce historically had an edge with its multi-store management, allowing merchants to share inventory and catalogs across multiple stores or channels with ease. This feature simplifies managing multiple storefronts or international businesses.
However, Shopify’s Markets feature, introduced in recent updates, brings Shopify closer to Adobe’s level. Although Adobe Commerce still offers more control with the ability to create a global catalog across multiple domains, Shopify Markets addresses the same use case with greater simplicity, allowing merchants to sell globally from one platform.
Product Types and Variations
Adobe Commerce offers more native product types and greater flexibility in managing product variations.
In Shopify Plus, products are limited to 3 options and 100 variations per product. To extend this limit, third-party apps are required.
Adobe Commerce allows merchants to add as many options as necessary using configurable products, providing greater flexibility for businesses with complex product catalogs.
Storing Custom Product Data
Both platforms enable adding custom data to products, but their approaches differ.
Shopify Plus uses Metafields, which are highly flexible and can store a wide range of data types (text, numbers, dates, images, files). Shopify’s Meta Objects further enhance the ability to manage and display custom data, improving the customer experience by offering tailored product details.
Adobe Commerce Attributes are structured and used for product characteristics like size or color. While they are powerful for filtering and organizing products, they are less flexible than Shopify’s metafields for handling diverse content types.
Multi-Source Inventory
Adobe Commerce’s Multi-Source Inventory (MSI) was a standout feature, giving businesses the ability to manage inventory across multiple locations, warehouses, or stores, allow businesses to assign products to different sources and track stock in real-time.
Key to MSI’s power is its shipping algorithms. These algorithms automatically assign orders to the best inventory source based on factors like stock levels, the customer’s location, and the desired delivery speed.
This ensures that orders are fulfilled efficiently, with minimal shipping costs and faster delivery times.
This was a major gap between Shopify Plus and Adobe Commerce until Winter 2023, when Shopify introduced Smart Order Routing, which brought similar capabilities to Shopify Plus.
Shopify’s Inventory Locations feature lets merchants manage inventory across multiple warehouses, stores, and third-party fulfillment centers.
With Smart Order Routing, Shopify can automatically route orders to the best location for fulfillment, based on predefined rules such as proximity to the customer or inventory availability. This simplifies the order fulfillment process and reduces shipping costs.
B2B Features
Adobe Commerce has long differentiated itself with a robust set of B2B features, which can be enabled by installing the Adobe Commerce B2B extension, making it a strong choice for B2B eCommerce.
Shopify Plus, though previously lacking, introduced significant B2B updates in Summer 2024, bringing its B2B module closer to Adobe Commerce.
Both platforms now offer robust B2B features, all built-in natively like company management, custom pricing, custom catalogs, purchase orders, B2B payment methods and more that streamline the B2B buying process.
However, Shopify Plus still lacks certain features natively, such as Request for Quote, Company Credit, Quick Order, and Requisition Lists.
Conversely, Adobe Commerce has limitations, such as not allowing minimum order quantities to be set on a per-product basis, which may affect some B2B use cases.
Discounts, Promotions & Gift Cards
Adobe Commerce (Magento) has a robust, built-in promotions engine that supports a wide range of discount types and promotional rules. It allows for catalog price rules (applied broadly across product categories) and cart price rules (applied during checkout based on conditions).
These rules can be tailored based on customer groups, segmentation, or scheduling, making Adobe’s promotion capabilities highly flexible and scalable.
On the other hand, Shopify Plus does support native promotions, but it is less advanced compared to Adobe Commerce.
For more complex promotions like tiered pricing, gifts-with-purchase (GWP), or advanced shipping fee logic, Shopify merchants often rely on Shopify Scripts, which enable custom promotions at checkout.
Both Adobe Commerce and Shopify Plus offer gift card support by default. Merchants can issue and manage gift cards natively on both platforms, adding another layer of promotional flexibility for both B2B and B2C operations.
Overall, Adobe Commerce offers more comprehensive promotion capabilities, while Shopify Plus offers solid features that can be enhanced with scripts.
Wishlists and Product Comparisons
Adobe Commerce offers native support for wishlists and product comparison, providing advanced features like multiple wishlists per customer and integrated product comparison tools.
Customers can organize and share wishlists, add personalized notes, and easily transfer items to their cart. This functionality is built into the platform, offering a seamless experience.
Additionally, Adobe Commerce’s product comparison tool allows users to evaluate products side by side, enhancing the shopping experience for more complex product offerings.
In contrast, Shopify does not offer native wishlist or product comparison features. Merchants must rely on third-party apps to implement these functions.
Personalization Tools
Adobe Commerce provides a robust personalization toolkit deeply integrated with Adobe Experience Cloud, allowing businesses to deliver personalized experiences at scale. Merchants can leverage data from multiple sources, including customer behavior and profiles, to personalize product recommendations, content, and promotions.
The integration with tools like Adobe Real-Time CDP and Adobe Journey Optimizer enables advanced audience segmentation and omnichannel campaign management, while Adobe Target allows A/B testing and dynamic content personalization.
In contrast, Shopify Plus relies on third-party apps to achieve similar personalization. While apps like Klaviyo and Nosto offer solutions for personalized emails and product recommendations, Shopify’s native personalization features are less extensive compared to Adobe Commerce’s built-in capabilities and enterprise-level tools.
Shopify Flow Automation Tool
Shopify Flow is a no-code automation tool designed to streamline repetitive tasks and workflows for merchants using Shopify Plus.
With Flow, businesses can easily automate processes across their store, saving time and reducing manual work. Shopify Flow allows merchants to set up workflows using a simple trigger-action framework in a drag-and-drop interface.
Triggers such as new orders, customer actions, or changes in inventory can automatically activate actions like sending notifications, tagging customers, applying discounts, or managing inventory.
Some common use cases for Shopify Flow include:
- Customer Segmentation: Automatically tagging customers based on behavior or order history for personalized marketing campaigns.
- Inventory Management: Notifying store managers when stock levels are low or automatically reordering products.
- Order Management: Triggering order notifications for high-value customers or automating follow-up messages for abandoned carts.
- Fraud Prevention: Flagging orders that meet certain criteria for further review.
Adobe Commerce does not have a direct equivalent to Shopify Flow.
Adobe Commerce relies on its event-driven architecture for automation, but setting up workflows requires more technical expertise and often involves custom development.
Tasks such as customer segmentation, inventory management, or order automation typically need to be built through custom logic, using Magento’s events and observer system or by leveraging third-party extensions.
Conclusion
While Adobe Commerce offers extensive control and customization, these benefits often come at a significantly higher cost—both in terms of implementation and ongoing maintenance. Adobe Commerce’s robust infrastructure requires technical expertise and long-term development resources, which can be daunting for businesses that want a simpler, more scalable solution.
On the other hand, Shopify Plus delivers nearly all the essential features—multi-store management, B2B functionality, automation tools like Shopify Flow, and personalization capabilities—at a fraction of the cost.
Shopify’s SaaS model eliminates the need for businesses to manage hosting, updates, and security, allowing brands to focus on growth rather than technical complexities.
Additionally, with continuous updates like Smart Order Routing and an expanding B2B module, Shopify is closing the gap in areas where Adobe Commerce traditionally held an advantage.
Migrate to Shopify Plus if you want to bring simplicity back to commerce.
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