The Short Answer
Shopify Plus is cheaper to run, faster to launch, and easier to operate. Magento 2 is more flexible, more powerful on B2B, and lets you own your stack. For most UK DTC merchants under £10M revenue with a relatively standard catalogue, Shopify Plus wins on TCO. For mid-market B2B, multi-store, unusual catalogue requirements, or merchants who genuinely benefit from owning the platform, Magento 2 with Hyva is still the right call. The decision is rarely close once you write down what you actually need.
This guide is for UK merchants currently on Magento 2 (or thinking about going there) who are weighing up Shopify Plus as the alternative. We're not going to tell you one platform is always better. The honest answer is that they suit genuinely different businesses, and most replatform regret comes from picking the wrong one for your specific shape.
Total cost of ownership over three years
Indicative ranges for a UK mid-market store doing £2M to £10M annual revenue:
| Cost line | Magento 2 + Hyva | Shopify Plus |
|---|---|---|
| Platform licence / fees | £0 (Open Source Hyva) or revenue-banded Adobe Commerce | £1,800-£1,950/mo on UK pricing; revenue-share kicks in above $800k GMV/month |
| Hosting | £600 to £3,000+/mo depending on traffic | Included |
| Initial build | £40,000 to £150,000 | £25,000 to £80,000 |
| Annual support / development | £25,000 to £100,000+ | £15,000 to £60,000 |
| Apps / extensions | £0 to £5,000/yr (mostly one-off) | £3,000 to £20,000+/yr (recurring subscriptions) |
| Payment fees | Variable, your choice of PSP | Shopify Payments waives third-party fees; 0.20% surcharge if you use another PSP |
Three-year totals for a typical UK mid-market store land in the £180,000 to £400,000 range for Magento 2 + Hyva (Open Source variant), versus £130,000 to £280,000 for Shopify Plus. Shopify Plus typically comes out 25 to 40% cheaper, with the gap widest at the lower end of the revenue range.
Adobe Commerce (the licensed version of Magento) flips this. Once the GMV-banded Adobe licence pushes you north of about £30,000 per year on top of build and hosting, the TCO crosses over and Shopify Plus is cheaper at almost any revenue level.
Where Magento 2 genuinely wins
Don't pick Magento for tradition. Pick it when you need one of these:
Complex B2B. Per-customer pricing, quote-to-cart workflows, multi-tier approval, sales-rep account access, payment-on-account, complex requisition lists. Magento (especially Adobe Commerce B2B) has been built for this since launch. Shopify Plus has caught up significantly with Shopify B2B, but Magento still has the deeper feature set and the more flexible data model.
Multi-store, multi-brand, multi-locale at scale. Running 5+ stores on one backend with shared catalogue and per-store pricing, taxes, content, payment methods, and shipping. Magento does this natively. Shopify Plus does it with Shopify Markets and expansion stores, which work, but are less elegant and more expensive once you're in 10+ market configurations.
Genuinely unusual catalogue requirements. Configurable products with 6+ axis variations, bundled products with dynamic pricing, custom attribute sets per category, advanced search facets, granular pricing rules. Magento's EAV catalogue is a pain to work with, but it's flexible in ways Shopify isn't.
Heavy ERP and PIM integration. Magento's API and event system make it easier to integrate deeply with NetSuite, SAP, Akeneo, or a homegrown PIM. Shopify can do these, but the data model and webhooks are stricter, and you'll work around the platform more.
You want to own your stack. Open Source Magento on your own hosting means no platform vendor can change your pricing, deprecate features, or change terms. For some merchants that's existential. For most, it's not worth the cost.
Where Shopify Plus wins, often by a lot
Pick Shopify Plus when:
You're DTC and your catalogue is standard. Shopify is built around the DTC use case. Product, variant, cart, checkout, marketing. If that's your shape, Shopify Plus is faster to launch, cheaper to run, easier to hire for, and ships features you'd build from scratch in Magento.
You want speed to ship marketing campaigns. Shopify's content tooling, app marketplace, and theme ecosystem are all faster to operate in than Magento. A marketer can spin up a campaign landing page with a Shopify theme in an afternoon. The Magento equivalent involves PageBuilder, a developer, and a deploy.
You don't want to think about hosting, security patches, or platform upgrades. Shopify Plus is fully managed. Magento isn't. You'll pay an agency or hire in-house ops to keep Magento patched, upgraded, and secure. That's a recurring cost and a recurring risk.
Your team is small. Shopify Plus needs less in-house technical capacity than Magento. For a 5-to-15-person ecommerce team, the operational simplicity is worth real money.
You sell through multiple channels. Shopify's POS, social channels, and marketplace integrations are first-class in a way Magento has never matched.
The hidden costs nobody quotes
On Shopify Plus:
- App subscriptions add up. A mature Shopify Plus store easily runs £500 to £2,000+ per month in apps for things Magento either does natively or via one-off paid modules.
- The 0.15% transaction surcharge if you don't use Shopify Payments. If you're committed to a UK PSP like Stripe or Worldpay, factor this in.
- Theme customisation has a ceiling. Liquid is constrained, Shopify Functions help on checkout but you'll hit limits eventually.
- Checkout customisation is now done via Shopify Functions and Checkout Extensibility. It works, but if you've come from Magento, you'll find it constrained.
On Magento 2:
- Hosting capacity costs. A Black Friday spike on Magento needs real infrastructure capacity, which means paying for headroom you don't use 364 days a year.
- Security patches and upgrades are non-negotiable and non-optional. Budget for them.
- Adobe Commerce licence renewals can shift unexpectedly at contract renewal.
- Talent is harder and more expensive to find than Shopify, especially Magento backend developers in the UK.
Migration cost and timeline
Magento 2 to Shopify Plus is a meaningful project. Realistic UK 2026 numbers:
- Timeline: 4 to 9 months for a typical mid-market migration
- Cost: £40,000 to £150,000+ for the build, plus data migration, app procurement, and team retraining
- Data migration: typically the biggest hidden cost line. Customer accounts, order history, product attributes, content, URLs and 301s — all need careful handling
If your real complaint with Magento is just frontend performance, the cheaper path is almost always re-theming to Hyva, not replatforming. We've covered that in detail in Hyva vs Luma.
The decision in one paragraph
If you're a UK merchant under £10M revenue, predominantly DTC, with a relatively standard catalogue and no critical B2B complexity, Shopify Plus will save you money and operational stress. If you're B2B-heavy, multi-store, or you've invested heavily in a Magento backend that actually does what you need, fix the frontend with Hyva and stay put. The expensive mistake is replatforming because Magento feels old, when what you actually needed was a frontend refresh.