Which ecommerce platform is right for your business growth – Magento or Shopify Plus?
When online shopping becomes the core of your business, platform selection is no longer just a technical issue. It directly impacts customer experience, sales, costs, marketing, and future opportunities.
In this comparison, we focus on what Magento (Adobe Commerce / Magento Open Source) and Shopify Plus actually offer – especially when the goal is to grow, differentiate, and integrate deeply with other systems.
This is not a traditional light comparison. It is a professional’s perspective on the needs of larger and developing online stores. It includes clear tables, practical examples and expert comments from Codaone – how we implement these things in practice for our customers.
Our goal is not to say that only one option is right. But if your online store requires flexibility, integrations and you want to build it on your own terms – Magento gives you more options . The Open Source version takes you really far, and Commerce brings additional features when there is a business need for them. When the platform is implemented by an experienced partner, the end result is truly in line with your business.
- Platform technical freedom and developer tools
- Information security, hosting and monitored environments
- Scalability, multi-commerce and internationalization
- Checkout management and conversion optimization
- B2B needs: customer-specific prices and ordering processes
- Integrations with business systems
- Content management, automation and multilingualism
- Search engine optimization and marketing technology
- Cost, ownership and long-term manageability
- Which platform should you choose?
The Magento platform is now known as Adobe Commerce. Adobe offers two versions of it:
- Magento Open Source – a license-free and flexible platform developed using an open source model. It offers full customizability and is especially suitable for companies that want to build their online store on their own terms. Hosting and maintenance are handled separately – Codaone has ready-made, monitored solutions for this.
- Adobe Commerce – A commercial version of Magento that brings additional features such as built-in B2B tools, campaign management, and cloud infrastructure. This option includes a separate licensing fee for Adobe and offers several options for hosting and environment management.
In this comparison, we will primarily focus on Magento Open Source, which we develop primarily for our customers. If any functionality requires additional Adobe Commerce features, it will be mentioned separately in the features section.
1. Platform technical freedom and developer tools
Magento offers full control over the platform’s structure, logic, and integrations. Shopify operates in a closed environment where customization is limited.
2. Information security, hosting and controlled environments
Magento can be hosted within the EU, self-managed, and configured with precision. Shopify offers convenience, but no control over the infrastructure or data location for the customer.
3. Scalability, multi-commerce and internationalization
Magento natively supports multilingual views, currencies, and separate market-specific entities. Shopify requires separate solutions or parallel Stores for this.
4. Checkout management and conversion optimization
Magento allows for complete customization of the checkout process. Shopify limits checkout customization – even in the Plus version.
5. B2B needs: customer-specific prices and ordering processes
Magento includes native B2B features like customer group pricing, business accounts, and bulk orders. Shopify requires separate apps and workarounds for this.
6. Integrations with business systems
Magento is built to work with ERP, PIM, WMS, and other systems with deep logic. Shopify mostly uses out-of-the-box app interfaces that are not as customizable.
7. Content management, automation and multilingualism
Magento allows for campaign content, menus, and language versions per view – also segmented. In Shopify, content management is more limited and often requires manual work.
8. Search engine optimization and marketing technology
Magento offers free URL management, schema support, and deep analytics integration. Shopify supports basic SEO, but doesn’t allow for in-depth optimization without limitations.
9. Costs and ownership management
Magento requires a higher initial investment but offers a lower total cost of ownership in the long run. Shopify brings predictability but less control and ownership.
The technical flexibility of an e-commerce platform determines how well it adapts to your business processes – now and in the future. Magento offers full control over code, functionality, and integrations. Shopify is a closed SaaS platform, where many solutions are pre-built for you – which makes it easier to get started, but limits long-term freedom and scalability.
Magento is often chosen by companies that want to manage their own technology and develop e-commerce as a strategic part of their business. Shopify is suitable for situations where you want to get to market quickly and operate according to a ready-made model.
Magento is a developer-centric platform. It gives you full control over every detail, making it an excellent choice when you want to build your own processes, create unique customer experiences, or integrate deeply with other systems for your online store. The downside of this technical freedom is that Magento requires a skilled development team or partner.
Shopify is a good choice when you want to get started quickly within predefined boundaries. It limits the developer’s possibilities, but on the other hand it offers a safe and ready-made environment where many technical choices are already made.
Magento gives us the opportunity to build online stores for our customers that are tailored to their needs – without compromise. We utilize modern development practices such as the Hyvä theme and Composer-based environment, and optimize stores for performance, usability, and scalability. For us, Magento is not a heavy-duty solution, but a managed, agile, and sustainable one.
Not all online stores are the same – and neither are their security requirements. When your business requires controlled hosting, transparent data management, and rigorous auditing, platform ease of use is not enough. The key issues are where the data is located, who controls it, and how the environment can be monitored.
Shopify Plus is a managed SaaS service where the merchant is not responsible for hosting, security, or backups – but cannot influence them either. Shopify does not offer a customer-specific option to lock data location to a specific country (for example, only within the EU), nor does it give the merchant team access to server logs, environment settings, or recovery processes.
This makes Shopify Plus a challenging option for things like:
- For public administration or state-owned company environments
- For the health, wellness or pharmacy industry
- For the financial sector and other regulated industries
- For companies that require ISO 27001-level environments or specific documentation for auditing
Magento is an open platform that can be fully hosted in environments defined by the customer or partner – for example, in EU internal cloud services (AWS, UpCloud, Hetzner). Data stays where you want it to be. All operations can be logged, backed up and audited. Firewalls, user roles, usage control and performance metrics are under the control of the customer or implementer.
A Magento environment can be built:
- In accordance with information security standards (e.g. ISO 27001)
- Monitored, documented and configured
- According to the customer’s internal or external security requirements
- To support multi-level user management, recovery plans and risk management
At Codaone, we have built Magento environments where hosting, security, and data management are a critical part of the whole – not an afterthought. We have implemented solutions where the environment:
- Only works within the EU
- Includes logging, monitoring, and recovery mechanism
- Designed to meet the requirements of regulated business
Magento makes this possible – and we make sure it’s done right. At Codaone, security is not an afterthought, but a proactive approach. A typical example of our proactive approach: we have detected and fixed critical vulnerabilities even before official information about them has been published. This is possible because we actively monitor Magento’s core code and its ecosystem – and react quickly to changes when they are critical to the business.
Codaone’s Magento maintenance includes:
- Production and test environments
- SSL certificates
- 24/7 production environment monitoring
- Automatic backups
- User support weekdays 8 am–4 pm (Slack or other agreed channel)
- Installing critical security updates as part of maintenance
The choice of e-commerce platform directly affects how well a company can grow – in terms of product catalog, market areas and business models. Magento is designed to scale: it supports multi-store structures (store views), very large product volumes, different languages, currencies and tax settings natively. Shopify is successful in scaling, but limits are often encountered earlier – especially in managing multilingualism and multi-store.
Magento is suitable for businesses with multiple brands, countries, or customer segments. Shopify is great for a single, mid-sized online store or a D2C brand that doesn’t yet operate in multiple markets.
Magento has also been designed from the ground up to meet the needs of multinational companies and growing online stores. It allows you to manage multiple language regions and businesses from a single dashboard – without compromise. This makes it an excellent platform for corporations, brand portfolios and stores operating in different market conditions.
Shopify works great for a single or dual-market business. But if your business expands to multiple languages, currencies, tax jurisdictions, or distribution channels, technical limitations start to show: each store is its own entity, which increases maintenance costs and complicates management.
Magento gives our customers complete control over their growth – whether it’s multiple language regions, brand differentiation or market-specific campaigns. We build multi-store solutions from the ground up to be scalable: one management, multiple views, maximum freedom. This allows our customers to grow without the system holding their business back.
The checkout process is one of the most important single components of an online store’s success. Its smoothness, customization, and technical structure directly impact conversion rates. Magento offers complete freedom to build the checkout according to customer needs and behavior. Shopify limits checkout customization – and some features are only available at the Shopify Plus level.
Magento allows for complete control over the checkout logic, visual structure, payment method prioritization, staging, and validations. Shopify is quick to deploy, but offers fewer opportunities to technically optimize conversion.
Online store conversion is often improved at the checkout stage – but that requires the ability to test, customize, and optimize. Magento gives you the full tools for this: you can build a completely new payment path, use checkout solutions that only require an email address and payment, hide delivery methods by customer group, or implement special B2B fields.
Shopify, on the other hand, offers a well-functioning but largely fixed checkout path, with limited customization and often tied to Shopify Payments. This works great for simple designs, but can slow down conversion optimization for a growing store.
Magento enables the optimization of the checkout process to be truly customer-specific. We build customized checkout solutions for our customers, taking into account the buyer’s segment, customer type (B2B/B2C), language and payment method needs. We have implemented integrations with Avarda, Klarna and Paytrail, among others – also in special situations, such as installment payments, corporate invoices or VAT 0% customers. The goal is always to remove friction and increase conversion – not only to look good, but to function better.
B2B e-commerce requires a platform that supports more complex pricing, customer-specific terms, order path customization, and often integrations with ERP systems. Magento is designed to support these out of the box – without additional applications. Shopify Plus offers some B2B features, but the overall package is more limited and dependent on separate app solutions.
Magento allows for example separate price lists for different customer groups, visibility rules, order lists, request for quotation functions and mass orders. With Shopify you can try to build these using applications, but structurally they are not part of the core functions.
Magento is one of the few commercial platforms where B2B is structurally considered: it is not a separate add-on but a built-in part of Adobe Commerce. This enables a truly customer-specific service – both technically and commercially.
Shopify is a good choice for straightforward D2C sales, but on the B2B side it requires a lot of application tuning, often manual solutions, and limited visibility logic. Sales process automation and customer-specific content are weaker than Magento.
We build customer-specific price lists, view filters and shopping logic for Magento online stores – even in complex B2B environments. We implement, among other things, product group-specific visibility rules, company accounts with multiple users and integrations with ERP systems that can control price and stock availability. For us, B2B is not an additional function – it is a built-in thinking model in the implementation.
An online store never stands alone. It operates as part of a larger system: ERP, PIM, WMS, CDP, CRM, marketing automation and analytics. The platform must support these integrations reliably, in a controlled manner and in a way that the online store works seamlessly with them – not as a separate piece.
Magento was originally designed as a modular platform that scales around complex integrations. Shopify Plus offers interfaces, but its architecture relies more on ready-made applications and automated integration services, where the logic is often hard-coded.
Magento acts as the core of an e-commerce store when it is part of a larger digital infrastructure. Its architecture is based on the idea that data is moved, processed, and enriched – not just transferred. Shopify offers a lightweight and fast solution for the most common integration needs, but falls behind in heavier, multi-step data flows.
Magento is particularly suitable for situations where the online store does not operate independently, but needs deep dialogue with ERP, WMS, and other business-critical systems.
Integrations are our core competence at Codaone. We have designed and implemented connections to, among others, Akeneo, Maxx, Custobar, Labellive, Klevu and several PIM, ERP, logistics and customer data solutions. We manage both real-time and scheduled data flows, and we build them in a way that supports the customer’s processes – not just transfers data.
Many large players have chosen us as their official integration implementer or recommend us to their partners because we combine technical understanding, architectural design, and implementation management into a single chain. For us, integration is not a single API call – but an intelligently built system interface that works stably and scales with the business.
Magento gives us the freedom and tools to implement these integrations correctly – and we turn it into a competitive advantage for the customer.
Ecommerce content management is much more than product descriptions and campaign banners. When a company has multiple language regions, customer groups, or differentiated campaign structures, you need a system that supports automation, targeting, and local management. Magento is designed for exactly that – structurally, logically, and technically.
Magento enables language-specific content versions, scheduled campaign content, customer group-specific visibility, dynamic categories, and a fully customizable page layout. Magento can also be integrated with a PIM system, such as Akeneo, to centrally manage language versions and attributes of product content.
Shopify Plus offers basic content management capabilities. It supports multiple languages and CMS pages, but content cannot be differentiated as finely. Targeting, scheduling, and customer group logic often require separate applications and manual work.
Magento gives online retailers the tools to build a content management system that scales both technically and commercially. This means that language versions are not just translations, but separate views where products, campaigns, visibility and customer experience can be managed precisely. Magento gives you the opportunity to combine marketing, product management and conversion management into one functional entity.
Shopify is great for a basic language store that doesn’t require localized content or campaign structures. But in more complex situations, content can easily become duplicated and management can become manual. This increases the risk of errors and takes time.
Magento provides us with an environment where we can build a managed and scalable content management system for our customers – from language versions to campaign blocks and customer group-specific visibility. We combine Magento’s CMS functions with the PIM system Akeneo, allowing product content and market-specific versions to be managed efficiently from one place. We implement scheduled campaign content, customer-specific visibility and market-specific messages for our customers – so that the right content is visible to the right user, at the right time.
A well-built online store isn’t just visually appealing – it also needs to be found. Search engine optimization (SEO) and integration with marketing tools are critical for growth and visibility. Magento offers full control over technical SEO: URL structure, metadata, sitemaps, schema.org tags, language versions, redirects, and canonical tags are all customizable. Shopify Plus offers many SEO features out of the box, but technical control is more limited.
Magento also gives you free rein when it comes to marketing technology: you can connect the platform directly to email marketing, CDP, customer journey tracking, and analytics – however you want. Shopify focuses on ready-made integrations, but their logic is not always customizable in depth.
Magento empowers technical and marketing teams to build a search engine friendly and marketing-ready online store – without compromise. The platform does not limit data collection, URL structures, or campaign structure analysis. This is crucial for long-term organic growth and scalability.
Shopify works well when you have the basics covered and the focus is on rapid deployment. But when you want to implement a marketing strategy based on omnichannel, language targeting, and deep customer data, Magento’s open architecture offers a significant advantage.
We build online stores where SEO and marketing data management are technically managed – not just additional features. We implement multilingual URL structures, hreflang tags, schema.org support and full measurement level integrated with Google Analytics, GTM and Looker Studio. When necessary, we also integrate email tools such as Custobar and Klavyio into the client’s data ecosystem. The result is a store that is not only found – but also works effectively from a business measurement and marketing perspective.
When choosing an e-commerce platform, the monthly price alone doesn’t tell the whole story. It’s more important to understand what the costs include, what you own, what you can control – and how well the platform will serve your business in the years to come. Magento offers full ownership of the infrastructure, code, and data. Shopify operates as a service (SaaS), where payments are based on usage and additional services, but control is partial.
Magento allows you to optimize costs according to your own priorities: you can scale hosting, choose partners freely, and build your own infrastructure. Shopify offers ease and predictability, but at the same time binds the platform to your own terms and limits customization options.
Magento offers the opportunity to build your own digital assets from an e-commerce platform – the system becomes a strategic part of the business, not a lease. Ownership means the opportunity to develop, optimize, compete and scale at your own pace. This brings more responsibility, but also full control.
Shopify works well when you want a fast, stable environment with fixed costs. But in the long term, as your business grows, the limitations become apparent, both technically and financially: every new feature, additional service, or integration brings with it new monthly fees or percentages.
Magento doesn’t require monthly fees just for the platform’s existence. Shopify, on the other hand, charges you for ongoing usage – even when no new development is being done. The more functionality you need, the more you pay for licenses, and eventually a significant portion of your budget can be spent on recurring payments alone.
Magento also allows you to use add-ons, but they are often purchased with a one-time license – and they are customizable, under your own control. You develop as needed, in stages. Every built functionality is yours – and it does not incur new license costs. This way you can allocate your budget to growth and new development, not to features that have already been paid for once. In the long run, this brings more freedom, predictability and often also a significant cost advantage.
Shopify Plus and Magento 2 (Adobe Commerce) are both top-tier platforms – but they serve different purposes. Shopify is a good choice if you want a fast-to-deploy, closed, and easy-to-use environment with ready-made tools to cover your basic e-commerce needs.
Magento, on the other hand, is the right choice when you want to build a core business system for your online store – a flexible, manageable and expandable entity that does not limit growth or development.
Choose Magento if…
• You want full control – from the user interface to the business logic
• You need multilingualism, multi-store, customer-specific prices or B2B functions
• Your store requires deep integrations with systems such as ERP, PIM, WMS or CDP
• You are looking for a platform that adapts to your strategy, not the other way around
• You want to own your own infrastructure, data and code
Magento is not a finished product – it is a foundation from which to build an online store that supports your business. Realizing this potential requires an experienced partner who understands both the technology and the commercial objective.
At Codaone, we specialize in Magento online stores and have developed them for dozens of companies that want more than a ready-made template. Our customers are not looking for just a supplier – they are looking for a partner who thinks like an architect, acts like a team, and builds like a business expert.
Whether it’s a fresh start, a platform change or an expansion into international markets, we provide:
• A technical environment that grows with you
• Content and logic that supports the customer experience
• System integrations that save time and reduce errors
• A development model that does not bind – but liberates
If you want your online store to be part of your competitive advantage – not just a user interface – get in touch. Let’s build it right from the ground up.
Magento offers exceptional flexibility, deep integrations, and robust B2B capabilities without out-of-the-box limitations. It adapts to your business processes and grows with you – especially if you’re targeting international markets.
Adobe is committed to developing and maintaining Magento until at least 2030. The platform is not disappearing – on the contrary, it is increasingly becoming a strategic cornerstone of Adobe Commerce.
Codaone specializes in Magento online stores and we have implemented dozens of large, sustainable and business-oriented solutions. For us, Magento is not just a technology – it is a platform on which to build a competitive advantage.
Our customers choose us when they need:
- Technical expertise that extends from architecture to usability
- A partner who manages integrations, maintenance and development
- Understanding that online shopping is not a project – but a continuous growth environment
If you want to build an online store platform that lasts beyond the campaign days – let’s discuss further.
