Magento2 vs Shopify
Magento2 and Shopify are both e-commerce software. Magento2 is open source under OSL-3.0, with 12k GitHub stars. Shopify is a commercial product from Shopify Inc.
Which to pick
- Pick Magento2 when
- A mid-size or large merchant needs deep customisation and has access to experienced Magento developers and hosting.
- Pick Shopify when
- A merchant wants to sell online quickly without managing hosting, and can work within Shopify's data model.
Side by side
Magento Open Source, Adobe's PHP ecommerce platform for large catalogues, multi-store and extensive customisation through modules.
Hosted e-commerce platform for building online stores with themes, checkout, payments, point-of-sale and a large app store.
Heavy to host and expensive to develop and upgrade; Adobe steers advanced features to paid Adobe Commerce.
Monthly app costs add up, and checkout and URL structure are only partly customisable.
Production-ready (both)
Self-hosted server
Cloud service and mobile app
PHP, MySQL, Elasticsearch and Redis
Ruby on Rails and Liquid
Open source, OSL-3.0 (strong copyleft)
Closed source, sold by Shopify Inc.
Use inside your business is unrestricted, but anything you distribute that includes it must be released under the same license.
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
12k GitHub stars
11k Wikipedia readers a month on phones
Established: started 15 years ago, latest release 2.4.10-alpha1.
Not known
Other comparisons
More e-commerce platforms
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.