Is Shopify better than Magento for a UK business?

For most Magento stores, yes — but for genuine enterprise, not always. Shopify Plus now matches Magento on most enterprise features (B2B catalogues, customer-specific pricing, automation, expansion stores) while costing less all-in, and the lower Shopify tiers serve the SMB cases Magento was always overkill for. Magento still wins where you need deeply bespoke catalogue logic, complex multi-brand multi-store, or custom modules that are a genuine competitive advantage. The real question isn't capability — it's whether you're still the business that needs all of Magento's depth.

Is Shopify cheaper than Magento?

Almost always, once you count the whole bill. A mid-market Adobe Commerce store often pays $22,000+/year in licence, £200–£500/month in hosting, and £500–£3,000/month in agency retainer just to run — frequently £30,000–£60,000 a year all in. Shopify Plus is £2,000/month (£24,000/year) with hosting included and far less developer time needed. Magento Open Source saves the licence but still carries hosting and developers; Shopify Basic at £25/month is dramatically cheaper for an SMB.

Why do people move from Magento to Shopify?

Usually the enterprise tax — paying enterprise prices and maintaining enterprise complexity for a store that has stopped growing into either. The common triggers are the Adobe Commerce licence climbing year over year, the agency retainer needed just to keep the lights on, page speed that won't improve without heavy optimisation, upgrade cycles that are projects rather than patches, and — for anyone still on Magento 1 — a platform that reached end of life in June 2020 and no longer gets security patches.

Will I lose my Magento SEO rankings migrating to Shopify?

Not if it's done properly. Magento URLs tend to be deeper than Shopify's, so the redirect map is the largest single piece of work — every URL gets a 301 to its Shopify equivalent and the existing Magento URL-rewrite table gets lifted wholesale. Done properly, rankings hold and often improve, because Shopify's page speed is meaningfully better than typical Magento performance. The detail is in my Magento to Shopify migration guide.

When is Magento the right choice over Shopify?

When you're genuine enterprise: very high-volume B2B with deeply custom catalogue logic, real multi-brand multi-store complexity, an in-house development team already fluent in Magento, custom modules that are a competitive advantage, or a tightly-coupled ERP/PIM/OMS footprint. If three or more of those apply, the migration needs more analysis than a guide can give, and staying may well be right. For a single-store SMB on Magento because it was recommended in 2018, it rarely is.

How much does a Magento to Shopify migration cost?

More than the other platforms, because the source data and feature set are richer. Standard migration is £3,495 — up to 2,000 products, complete data migration, theme setup, 301 redirects and training. Enterprise migration is £5,995 — unlimited products, custom integrations, multi-store migration, priority support. Both are fixed prices, covered in my Shopify migration cost guide.

Magento or Shopify: Which Is Right for Your UK Store?

Magento and Shopify aren’t really competing for the same store any more. Magento is an enterprise platform that demands an enterprise team; Shopify is a managed platform that runs itself — and Shopify Plus quietly closed most of the capability gap. The question isn’t which is more powerful. It’s whether you’re still the business that needs all that power.

I migrate stores onto Shopify for a living, and Magento is the one where I most often tell people to slow down before they move — because for genuine enterprise, Magento’s depth is real and worth keeping. So let me be fair to it first: there is almost nothing Magento can’t be made to do, given enough developer time. That flexibility is why most current Magento merchants chose it, and for some of them it’s still the right call.

This isn’t a feature comparison. Magento will win a feature checklist on raw capability — that was never the question. The question is what that capability costs to keep, and whether your business still uses enough of it to justify the bill.

What Magento actually is — and where the cost hides

Magento — now Adobe Commerce on the paid tier, Magento Open Source on the free one — was built for enterprise complexity. Configurable and bundle products, customer groups, tier pricing, B2B quote workflows, multi-store, deep ERP integration: it does all of it, given the team to run it. The depth is genuine.

The catch is that the depth doesn’t switch off when you stop using it. Most Magento stores use about a third of the platform and pay for the whole thing — the licence, the specialist hosting, the developer retainer, the upgrade projects. When the business stops growing into that capability, the spend stops being infrastructure and becomes a sunk cost wearing infrastructure’s clothes.

With Magento the question is never whether it can do something. It’s whether you’re still the business that needs it to.

Four structural reasons people move off Magento

These aren’t complaints about the platform. They’re the points where enterprise capability turns into enterprise overhead.

1. The enterprise tax

This is the big one. Proper Magento hosting starts around £200/month and climbs with traffic. The admin is dense enough that most merchants keep an agency on retainer — £500 to £3,000 a month — just to operate the store. And on Adobe Commerce, the licence starts around $22,000 a year and goes up. Add it up and a mid-market Magento store frequently runs £30,000–£60,000 a year before it has sold anything.

£24,000/yr

Shopify Plus, all-in with hosting — against a typical mid-market Magento store’s £30,000–£60,000 in licence, hosting and agency retainer

2. You can’t run it yourself

Magento’s admin was built for developers, not merchants. The practical effect is dependency: you don’t change a thing on the store without someone who knows Magento, which is why the retainer exists. Shopify’s admin is designed to be merchant-operated — you add a product, run a promotion, or edit a page from your phone, and the developer is for the things that genuinely need one.

3. Upgrades are projects, and speed is a fight

Major Magento upgrades aren’t patches, they’re projects — M1 to M2 was effectively a full migration. And typical Magento Lighthouse scores sit at 30–60 unless someone has spent real money optimising, where Shopify routinely lands at 80–95 with no special effort. Slow stores lose sales and rankings, and on Magento, speed is something you buy rather than something you get.

4. Magento 1 is the forced hand

If you’re still on Magento 1, the decision is already made for you. M1 reached end of life on 30 June 2020 — no security patches, no official support, every extension author long since moved on or gone quiet. Staying isn’t holding steady; it’s running a known-vulnerable platform a single exploit away from a breach you’d have to disclose. The only question on M1 is where you move, not whether.

What Magento does genuinely better than Shopify

Here’s the part a migration pitch skips, and with Magento it’s substantial, so I’ll be straight about it: for genuine enterprise, Magento still does things Shopify can’t match, and pretending otherwise would talk the wrong businesses into a move they’d regret.

Magento strength	What you’d be giving up moving to Shopify
Open-source control — you own the code and can build literally anything	Shopify is a managed platform; you work within its model, not under the bonnet
Deep multi-store / multi-brand on one install	Shopify handles this via Plus expansion stores and Markets — capable, but a different shape
Bespoke catalogue and pricing logic built over years	Rebuildable on Shopify Plus / Functions, but genuine custom logic is real work to move
A development team already fluent in it	Switching has a retraining cost you’d be choosing to pay
Custom modules as competitive advantage	A Shopify app rebuild can degrade something that was genuinely yours

The honest meta-point: Shopify Plus now matches most of Magento’s enterprise feature set — B2B catalogues, customer-specific pricing, automation flows, expansion stores — at £24,000 a year all-in, usually below the Magento total. And the lower Shopify tiers cover the SMB cases Magento was overkill for in the first place. “Most” is doing honest work in that sentence: at the genuine top end, Magento’s openness still wins. The question is whether you’re at that top end, or just paying as if you were.

When Magento is still the right answer

I would not migrate a store off Magento if three or more of these are true:

Very high-volume B2B with deeply custom catalogue logic and ERP integrations that took years to bed in.
Genuine multi-brand multi-store complexity that Shopify Plus expansion stores wouldn’t actually simplify.
An in-house development team already fluent in Magento, where the switching cost includes retraining.
Custom modules that are a real competitive advantage — something a Shopify app rebuild would water down.
A tightly-coupled enterprise integration footprint — PIM, OMS, ERP, custom WMS — wired to Magento-specific extensions.

If that’s you, the migration needs more analysis than any guide can give, and staying may well be right. Magento isn’t always the wrong answer — for the business it was actually built for, it’s still the best one.

When the move to Shopify is worth it

I would migrate a store if any of these are true:

You’re an SMB on an enterprise platform. You’re a single-store business on Magento because it was recommended in 2018, paying retainers to keep a platform running that you don’t fully use.
The licence keeps climbing. Adobe ramps the Commerce fee year over year, and you can’t point at the capability that justifies it.
You want out of the developer dependency. You’d rather run your own store than file a ticket to change a price.
Speed is costing you and you don’t want to keep buying optimisation to stand still.
You’re on Magento 1. The move isn’t optional — only the destination is, and Shopify is the one that maintains itself afterwards.

Most stores reading this are in this list rather than the one above — that’s usually what brings someone to the question. But the first list matters, because it’s what lets you trust the answer when it really is “migrate.”

What moving actually involves

Magento gives you the cleanest exports of any platform — CLI, API, admin — but more data than the others, because it was built to capture more: product types, attribute sets, customer groups, tier pricing, multi-store, a deep category tree, and a URL-rewrite table that’s the largest single piece of the redirect plan. The export is the easy part; the mapping is the work, and it’s why Magento migrations run four to eight weeks rather than two.

The full methodology, the product-type mapping, and the redirect detail are in the Magento to Shopify migration guide, and the complete scope is on the Magento to Shopify migration page. As with every migration I do, your Magento store stays live and trading throughout, the Shopify build runs alongside it, and nothing cuts over until it’s tested.

What it costs

Magento is the one platform where the migration isn’t the standard fixed price — the data and the redirect map are simply bigger. Standard migration is £3,495 (up to 2,000 products, full data migration, theme, redirects, training) and enterprise migration is £5,995 (unlimited products, custom integrations, multi-store, priority support). Both are fixed at their tier — published in the Shopify migration cost guide, not hidden behind a quote form.

Set against £30,000–£60,000 a year to keep a mid-market Magento store running, a one-off migration into a platform that costs a fraction to operate pays for itself fast. If your store doesn’t fit either tier cleanly, get in touch and I’ll scope it honestly first.

The bottom line

Magento isn’t the thing to escape from. For a genuine enterprise with the team and the complexity to use it, it’s a serious platform doing a serious job, and I’d tell you to keep it. The honest question isn’t “which platform is more powerful” — Magento is. It’s this: are you still the business Magento was built for, or are you paying the enterprise tax for capability you’ve outgrown?

If you’re genuine enterprise, stay — and use the depth. If you’re an SMB carrying enterprise cost and complexity for a store that no longer needs either, Shopify hands you the same shop for a fraction of the running cost, and Plus is there if you grow back into needing more. Done properly, the move brings every URL, every product type, and every ranking across with it.

If you’d like me to look at your specific case, get in touch. I’ll be honest about which Shopify tier fits and whether the move makes sense — including, sometimes, telling you to stay on Magento.

Related: the Magento to Shopify migration guide covers the execution, the Magento to Shopify migration page covers the full scope, the Shopify migration cost guide covers pricing across platforms, and WooCommerce or Shopify, Wix or Shopify and EKM or Shopify run the same honest comparison for those platforms.