Shopify vs Magento Cost: The Real Numbers in 2026

“How much does Shopify cost” and “is Magento expensive” sound like simple questions. They’re not, and the way they get answered usually reveals what the person asking is actually trying to figure out. Most of the time, it’s not curiosity. It’s one of two things: a business trying to budget accurately before committing, or a team trying to build a case for a migration decision it’s already leaning toward.

We’ll give you the real numbers here, without the marketing spin either platform’s sales materials tend to apply. This is the financial side of that migration conversation; for the strategic side, see our Shopify vs Magento decision guide.

Shopify’s Actual Pricing Tiers in 2026

Shopify’s current plan structure runs Basic at $39/month, Grow at $105/month (this was renamed from the old “Shopify” plan), and Advanced at $399/month, all billed monthly, with roughly a 25% discount for annual billing. There’s also a free Agentic plan aimed at brands that want to plug into Shopify’s AI shopping and Catalog infrastructure without running their full storefront on Shopify, and a $5/month Starter plan for link-in-bio-style selling.

None of those numbers are what a real store actually spends. Apps typically add $100-$500/month depending on how many tools you’re running, payment processing takes its cut regardless of plan, and most stores beyond a hobby project are paying for at least some theme customization or ongoing developer support.

Realistically, a small-to-midsize brand running a properly built Shopify store lands somewhere between $300 and $1,500 per month all-in, apps and light support included. That’s still meaningfully cheaper than the alternative, but it’s not the $39 the plan page advertises.

Shopify Plus: The Enterprise Tier

Shopify Plus starts at $2,300/month and scales from there based on revenue. That headline number is closer to reality than the Basic plan’s is, but it still tends to understate what serious brands actually spend once you add app subscriptions at enterprise scale, custom checkout extension development, and ongoing agency or in-house development support. A realistic monthly operating cost for a brand running meaningful volume on Shopify Plus is usually in the $6,000-$20,000 range, not the base subscription fee alone.

What Magento Actually Costs

Magento isn’t SaaS, and that changes the entire cost conversation. There’s no monthly subscription that bundles hosting, security, and infrastructure the way Shopify’s does. You’re paying for those separately, which is exactly why Magento costs get underestimated so often: people compare Shopify’s monthly fee against Magento’s software license and miss everything else.

Magento comes in two forms. Magento Open Source is free to license, but “free” only describes the software, not the store. Once you add hosting, development, security hardening, and ongoing maintenance, a realistic annual cost for a US-based Magento Open Source store lands somewhere between $40,000 and $200,000+, depending heavily on catalog complexity and how much custom functionality you need.

Adobe Commerce, the paid enterprise tier, adds a license fee on top of all of that: starting around $22,000/year and climbing past $100,000/year for large-scale operations. Combined with development and infrastructure, a serious Adobe Commerce implementation is commonly in the $100,000-$500,000+ annual range.

Is Magento Actually Expensive, Then?

It depends entirely on whether you need what it’s built for. Magento is expensive relative to Shopify if you don’t need deep customization, don’t have technical leadership in-house or on retainer, or tend to over-build features you don’t actually use. In those situations, you’re paying enterprise-architecture costs for a mid-market problem.

It’s a genuinely good value if you require complex B2B logic, deep ERP or PIM integration, multi-store or multi-region architecture, or catalog complexity that Shopify’s app-stack model starts to strain under. In those cases, the equivalent Shopify build, once you’ve paid for enough apps to replicate Magento’s native capability, often isn’t actually cheaper, it’s just cheaper to start.

Development Costs, Side by Side

US Magento development rates typically run $120-$200/hour. A small Magento store build lands in the $30,000-$60,000 range, mid-market builds run $75,000-$150,000, and enterprise implementations regularly exceed $200,000. Magento is rarely, in practice, a starter platform.

Shopify project-based builds are considerably more predictable: a basic store runs $5,000-$15,000, a custom mid-market build lands around $20,000-$50,000, and enterprise Shopify Plus builds run $50,000-$150,000+. Ongoing retainers, for either platform, typically run $2,000-$10,000/month depending on scope. Shopify’s cost structure is simply more predictable across the board; Magento’s flexibility is exactly what makes its cost more variable.

Why Businesses Consistently Underestimate the Real Number

Three patterns show up repeatedly in cost conversations we’re part of.

The first is comparing license fees only. Magento Open Source being free to license says nothing about what it costs to run. The second is underestimating ongoing maintenance: security patches, version upgrades, and performance work are not optional line items on Magento, they’re the cost of keeping the platform safe and fast, and they recur indefinitely. The third is ignoring opportunity cost entirely. A slow build, a performance bottleneck that takes months to resolve, or a poorly planned migration has a real cost even when it never shows up as a line item on an invoice.

When Cost Comparisons Are Really About Something Else

A lot of cost comparisons happen in the middle of a migration conversation that’s already emotionally decided. Magento sometimes gets chosen because it feels more powerful and future-proof. Shopify sometimes gets chosen because it feels simpler and lower-risk. Both instincts are understandable, and both can lead to the wrong decision if cost is being used to rationalize a choice that was really made on a different basis.

The more useful question isn’t “which platform is cheaper.” It’s “which platform matches our actual operational complexity, today and over the next three to five years.” We walk through that decision in more depth, cost aside, in our Shopify vs Magento strategic guide.

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