Picking a commerce platform is one of the few decisions that is genuinely expensive to reverse. The licence fee is the part everyone compares. It is also, almost always, the smallest number in the eventual total.
Below are the current prices, checked against the vendors' own pages in August 2026, and then the costs nobody puts on a pricing page.
First, the names changed
Two of these three renamed things recently, and most comparison articles have not caught up.
Magento is Adobe Commerce. Adobe bought Magento in 2018 and retired the Magento name for the paid product in 2021. The free edition kept it and is still called Magento Open Source. "Magento Enterprise Edition" and "Magento Cloud Edition" have not existed for years, which does not stop them appearing in articles published last week.
BigCommerce renamed every plan on 1 June 2026. Standard became Core, Plus became Growth, Pro became Scale, Enterprise became Performance. So if you are reading a page about "BigCommerce Pro pricing", you are reading something stale.
The sticker prices
Adobe Commerce
Magento Open Source costs nothing to download. That covers the software and stops there: hosting, security patching, development and design are yours, and no support contract sits behind any of it.
Adobe Commerce is licensed against your gross merchandise value rather than a flat rate, so what you get is a quote, not a price. The band people report is roughly $22,000 to $125,000 a year for the on-premise licence, and roughly $40,000 to $190,000 for Adobe Commerce on Cloud, which bundles managed infrastructure.
One thing worth carrying into the budget conversation: across the partner ecosystem the licence usually works out to somewhere between a fifth and two fifths of annual platform spend. Hosting, development and extensions eat the rest.
Shopify
| Plan | Monthly |
|---|---|
| Starter | $5 |
| Basic | $39 |
| Grow | $105 |
| Advanced | $399 |
| Plus | $2,300 |
Hosting, security and PCI compliance come with every tier. The app store is where it gets interesting. Features other platforms ship natively are a monthly subscription here, and a stack of six or seven apps quietly rebuilds the gap between Shopify and something self-hosted.
Transaction fees matter too. Use Shopify Payments and you pay card rates. Use an external gateway and Shopify takes a cut on top, which at volume is a bigger line than the plan.
BigCommerce
| Plan (from 1 June 2026) | Was | Monthly |
|---|---|---|
| Core | Standard | $39 |
| Growth | Plus | $105 |
| Scale | Pro | $399 |
| Performance | Enterprise | Custom, from $1,499 |
Core and Growth carried their prices through the rename untouched. Scale did not simply inherit Pro's terms: overage is now a continuous 0.9% on GMV above $33,333 a month, replacing Pro's fixed per-block charges. Budgeting on the old model will give you the wrong answer.
No platform transaction fee sits on top of your gateway here. That is the cleanest structural difference between BigCommerce and Shopify.
Where the money actually goes
Everything above is what a vendor is happy to publish. Four other things move the total more, and none of them are on a pricing page.
Getting on the platform in the first place. A theme plus a catalogue import is not a launch. Product data has to be mapped, tax and shipping rules rebuilt from scratch, redirects written for every old URL, and somebody has to decide what happens to years of order history. On a replatform this is routinely the biggest single line in year one. It is also more or less the same work whichever platform you land on, which is why it rarely helps you choose.
Integrations. ERP, PIM, WMS, accounting, whatever CRM the sales team refuses to give up. Self-hosted and SaaS genuinely diverge here. On Adobe Commerce you can write against the database and the module system directly. On Shopify and BigCommerce you work through APIs and rate limits, and some integrations cannot be built the way you would like at all. Neither is worse. They are different constraints, and the useful thing is to find out which one your stack argues with before you sign anything.
Staying current. Adobe Commerce needs somebody applying security patches and running version upgrades. That is a recurring engineering cost, it never appears in a comparison table, and it does not go away. Shopify and BigCommerce absorb it for you, and in exchange they decide when things change underneath you.
Leaving. Nobody prices this at the start. Products and customers travel fine. Theme work, app configuration and custom checkout logic do not travel at all. The more of your business rules live in platform-specific code, the more the next migration costs, and there is always a next migration.
So which one
No answer holds for every business, but the shape of the decision is fairly stable.
If your catalogue, pricing rules or B2B workflows are odd enough that you keep hitting the edges of a SaaS platform, Adobe Commerce buys you the freedom to build precisely what you need. It also hands you a permanent engineering bill for that freedom.
If your requirements are ordinary and your volume is not, Shopify or BigCommerce will get you live faster and cost less to run. Between the two: Shopify has the larger app ecosystem and the transaction fee, BigCommerce has fewer apps and no platform cut on top of your gateway.
The mistake worth avoiding is choosing on the monthly figure. The platform that looks cheapest in year one is often not the cheapest by year three, and by then changing your mind has got expensive.
If you would rather work this through against your actual catalogue, order volume and integration list than against a table, talk to us.
Prices verified against Shopify, Shopify Plus and BigCommerce in August 2026. Adobe Commerce is quoted per customer, so the figures above are the ranges commonly reported across the partner ecosystem rather than a published rate card.
