Magento vs Shopify Cost: What You Really Pay

Ask what Shopify costs and you get a number. Ask what Magento costs and the honest answer is: it depends on how much of the platform you are prepared to own. That is the whole Magento vs Shopify cost story in one line. Shopify’s cost is mostly the subscription on the pricing page. Magento’s cost is mostly everything the pricing page does not show — hosting, extensions, developer time, security patches and upgrades. Compare only the sticker prices and you will reach the wrong conclusion.

We migrate stores off Magento onto Shopify often enough to know where the money actually hides. This is the breakdown we walk merchants through before anyone signs anything — no scare tactics, no invented figures, just where each pound tends to go.

There are two Magentos, and “free” is misleading

Before comparing anything, you have to know which Magento you mean, because the pricing could not be more different:

• Magento Open Source — free to download and licence, but self-hosted. You (or an agency) provide the server, the security, the updates and the development. The licence is £0; the platform is not.
• Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento Commerce / Enterprise) — a paid, quote-based licence tiered on your gross merchandise value. Adobe does not publish the number; it is negotiated, and it climbs as you grow.

Shopify sits in a different model entirely: a flat monthly subscription plus payment processing fees, with hosting, security, PCI compliance and platform updates bundled in. Shopify plans are public — from the standard tier up to Shopify Plus for higher-volume merchants. The point is not that one number is bigger. It is that Shopify’s number is nearly the whole cost, while Magento’s licence is the smallest line in a much longer bill.

Magento vs Shopify cost: where the money actually goes

Total cost of ownership is the honest way to compare two platforms that price themselves so differently. Here is the same store, viewed as line items rather than a single subscription.

Hosting and infrastructure

Magento is self-hosted, so performance is something you buy and tune. A busy catalogue needs a properly specced server, a CDN, caching layers and someone who understands how to keep them fast. On Shopify, infrastructure is not a line item at all — it scales behind the subscription, including through traffic spikes you did not plan for.

Extensions and apps

Both platforms lean on add-ons, but the cost shape differs. Magento extensions are frequently paid one-off, then need a developer to install and reconcile with everything else you have running. Shopify apps are typically monthly subscriptions that install themselves. Neither is free; the difference is whether “install” is a purchase or a project.

Development and maintenance

This is the line most cost comparisons miss. Magento realistically needs ongoing developer access — a retainer, an in-house engineer, or an agency. That is not a criticism of the platform; it is what full backend control costs. Shopify moves a large share of routine changes (theme edits, product logic, basic automations) within reach of a non-developer, so the retainer becomes optional rather than assumed. If you want to see how build-and-maintain effort maps to budget, our project cost estimator is a quick way to sanity-check a scope.

Security, patches and upgrades

On Magento you own the security posture: applying patches promptly, staying PCI compliant, and treating a major-version upgrade as a real migration in its own right. Merchants who lived through Magento 1’s end of life know a “version upgrade” can mean rebuilding the store. Shopify absorbs all of that into the subscription — updates ship without you scheduling a project around them.

The costs nobody puts in the spreadsheet

Even a careful line-item comparison leaves things out, and they are usually the expensive ones:

• Developer availability. Experienced Magento developers are a smaller, pricier pool than Shopify developers. Scarcity is a cost, in both rate and how long you wait for changes.
• Downtime and self-managed risk. When you own the stack, an outage is your problem to fix at your expense. Managed platforms price that risk in for you.
• Speed and conversion. A slow store is a revenue cost, not just a technical one. On self-hosted Magento, staying fast is ongoing work; if speed is your worry, that is exactly what a free Shopify audit is meant to surface.
• Time to launch. Longer builds mean later revenue. That gap rarely appears on a cost sheet, yet it is real money.

When Magento is worth the cost

None of this makes Magento the wrong choice. It makes it a deliberate one. The spend is justified when the requirements genuinely need it:

• Complex B2B logic — customer-specific catalogues, pricing tiers, quotes and approval flows — that you want to own end to end.
• Deep ERP, PIM or bespoke back-office integration where total control of the backend is the point.
• Very large or unusually structured catalogues that push past what an off-the-shelf platform is tuned for.
• An internal engineering team already fluent in Magento, so the maintenance cost is absorbed rather than outsourced.

If that is you, Magento’s total cost buys real capability. If it is not — and for most merchants it is not — you are paying for control you will never use. That realisation is what usually starts an ecommerce replatforming conversation.

How to compare honestly for your own store

Do not compare a Magento licence to a Shopify plan. Compare three years of everything. Add up hosting, extensions, the developer retainer, security work and one likely upgrade on the Magento side, then set that against Shopify’s subscription, apps and payment fees. The gap between month one and year three is where the real decision lives.

Two things make that exercise concrete. First, model your actual margins — our free Shopify profit calculator shows what platform and payment costs do to the bottom line on real numbers. Second, if you want the broader context on where ecommerce budgets go, what ecommerce software really costs covers it platform by platform. And when you are ready to see the two side by side on features rather than price, our full Shopify vs Magento comparison is the companion to this piece.

Frequently asked questions

Is Magento really free?

Magento Open Source is free to licence, not free to run. You still pay for hosting, extensions, development, security and upgrades. Adobe Commerce, the paid edition, adds a quote-based licence on top. “Free” describes the download, not the total cost of ownership.

Is Shopify cheaper than Magento?

For most small and mid-sized merchants, Shopify’s total cost of ownership is lower and — just as important — more predictable, because hosting, security and updates are bundled. Magento can be competitive at large scale with an in-house team, but its costs are spread across many line items rather than one bill.

How much does it cost to migrate from Magento to Shopify?

It depends on catalogue size, custom functionality and how much needs rebuilding rather than moving. The controllable part is scope. Our Magento to Shopify migration service exists precisely to keep that cost predictable instead of open-ended.

Is Adobe Commerce the same as Magento?

Adobe Commerce is the paid, cloud-hosted edition of Magento; Magento Open Source is the free, self-hosted one. Same lineage, very different price and support model — which is exactly why “the cost of Magento” is never a single figure.

The takeaway

The Magento vs Shopify cost question is not really about which pricing page shows the bigger number. It is about how many of the costs you want to carry yourself. Magento hands you control and the bill that comes with it. Shopify trades some of that control for a predictable, bundled cost and far less to maintain. Price the next three years, not the next month — then the right answer for your store is usually obvious.