Magento Open Source has no licence fee. It is the first thing mentioned in every comparison and it is close to irrelevant, because the licence was never the expensive part.
What Magento actually costs to run
Hosting. Magento is heavy. Running it well means real infrastructure — usually several hundred to a few thousand a month once you account for the application servers, the database, Elasticsearch, Redis and a CDN. Shopify hosting is included and you never think about it again.
Developers. Magento specialists cost more than Shopify developers and there are fewer of them. That gap has widened every year since Adobe acquired it. If your Magento developer leaves, replacing them is a genuine project.
Security and patching. Somebody has to apply patches, and it has to be somebody who understands what breaks when they do. On Shopify this is not your problem in any sense.
Upgrades. Major Magento version upgrades are projects with budgets and risk, not maintenance tasks. Brands routinely defer them, which is how stores end up years behind on a platform where being behind is a security exposure.
Where Magento is genuinely the right answer
It would be dishonest to say never, so here is when we would tell you to stay.
Genuinely unusual commerce logic. Configurable products with deep dependency rules, complex B2B pricing hierarchies, or a catalogue model that does not map onto products and variants. Magento is more flexible at the data-model level and that is a real advantage for a minority of businesses.
You already have a functioning team. If you employ Magento developers who know your codebase and the store works, the migration cost is real and the benefit may not clear it. "It runs and we understand it" is a legitimate position.
Regulatory or hosting constraints. Some industries need control over where data physically sits. Shopify is a hosted platform and you take its arrangements.
Everything else — theme flexibility, SEO control, integrations, performance — is no longer a Magento advantage. Several of these were true in 2018 and are quoted as though they still are.
The argument we hear most, and why it is usually wrong
"We need full control of the code."
Almost always this means one of three things: a custom checkout flow, a bespoke pricing rule, or an integration someone believes Shopify cannot do. The first two are Shopify Functions on Plus. The third is usually an app or a few hundred lines against the Admin API.
Control is worth paying for when you use it. Most stores that migrated to Magento for control ended up with a standard store, running slowly, on infrastructure they cannot afford to leave.
Talk it through
Send us the Magento requirement you think Shopify cannot meet.
We will tell you straight whether it can, roughly what it would take, and when the honest answer is that Magento is the right home for what you have built.
Put it to the testA real read within one business day — not a sales call.
If you are migrating off Magento
Two things decide whether it goes well.
The data model. Magento catalogues frequently use structures that have no direct Shopify equivalent — deep configurables, custom attribute sets, category logic doing work it should not. Mapping that properly is the bulk of the project and it happens before anything is built.
The URLs. Magento stores accumulate URL patterns over years, and a mature one will have thousands of indexed pages including layered navigation URLs you may not know exist. Every one that matters needs mapping before cutover.
Done properly, a Magento to Shopify migration should cost you no organic traffic. Done as a redesign with a data import bolted on, it will cost you a quarter of it and take a year to get back.
About the author
Manpreet Singh
Manpreet Singh is the founder of Proscube, an ecommerce growth studio. He leads the studio's Shopify and Shopify Plus engineering, headless builds, CRO, and its work on AI engine optimization, and writes its guidance on how to grow a DTC brand without wasting money. He works directly with founders — no account-manager layers between you and the people doing the work — and would rather tell a client not to build something than sell them work they don't need.
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