Adobe Commerce vs Shopify Plus for Australian Retailers
Shakewell ·
We build on both, which is the only reason this comparison is worth reading. Almost every published version of it is written by an agency that holds a partnership with one of the two, and it shows: the platform they sell wins on criteria chosen after the conclusion.
Here is the honest version. The two platforms fail in different places, and which failure you can tolerate is the actual decision.
The question that decides it
Not catalogue size. Not revenue. Not “enterprise”.
How much of your commerce logic is unusual enough that a SaaS platform will not let you express it?
Adobe Commerce is code you control. If your pricing depends on something strange — customer group, contract, volume break, a rule inherited from a wholesale business your company bought in 2014 — you can write it. Shopify Plus is a product. It has become dramatically more flexible, particularly at the checkout, but there remains a boundary, and on the far side of that boundary you are building workarounds.
If nothing in your business is on the far side of that boundary, Adobe Commerce is charging you for a freedom you will not use.
Where Adobe Commerce genuinely wins
Large, structurally complex catalogues. Tens of thousands of SKUs with deep attribute sets, configurable products with many variations, and category logic that is more than a tree. Adobe Commerce was built for this and handles it without strain.
Pricing that is genuinely non-standard. Customer-group pricing, tiered and contract pricing, and rules that need to reference something outside the order. This is the strongest single argument for the platform.
B2B with deep hierarchy. Where a customer is not one account but a parent with subsidiaries, each with buyers, approval limits and negotiated catalogues. Adobe Commerce’s B2B module models this properly.
You need to own the checkout completely. Not customise it — own it. Rare, and worth being honest with yourself about whether you are in this category or just dislike a default.
Where Shopify Plus genuinely wins
Operational cost, decisively. No hosting to run, no patching cadence, no upgrade projects. For most retailers this is the entire argument and it is a strong one. The Adobe Commerce upgrade cycle is real work that produces no new customer value — we have written separately about what those upgrades cost and when you must move.
Speed of merchandising change. A marketing team can do more without a developer. Over three years that compounds into a meaningful difference in how often the store actually changes.
Reliability during peaks. Plus absorbs traffic spikes as someone else’s problem. Under Adobe Commerce, a Black Friday capacity plan is your problem, and it is a real line item.
Checkout extensibility has closed much of the gap. The historical objection — “you cannot touch the Shopify checkout” — is substantially out of date. Discount logic, shipping presentation and payment rules can now follow your business rules to a degree that surprises people who last evaluated Plus some years ago.
What does not decide it, despite being cited constantly
Revenue. Plenty of very large stores run comfortably on Shopify. Revenue alone has never been a good reason to pay for platform freedom.
“We need enterprise.” This is a procurement word, not a technical requirement. Ask what specifically the business needs to do that the cheaper option cannot, and the conversation becomes useful immediately.
Headless. Both support decoupled front ends. This is a separate decision about your front end, not a tiebreaker between platforms — and on a single storefront, a themed build is usually the better engineering call regardless of platform. We build headless commerce where it earns its cost, which is less often than the discourse suggests.
Feature-matrix comparisons. By the time a feature reaches a comparison table, both platforms usually have some version of it. The differences that matter are in how much it costs to change things two years in.
The Australian specifics
A few things that shift the calculation locally:
- Payment gateways and BNPL. Both handle the Australian set well. Shopify’s native handling of Shop Pay and the major BNPL providers is smoother; Adobe Commerce needs extensions, which need maintaining.
- Freight. Australian shipping logic — remote-area surcharges, multi-carrier splits — is expressible on both, but it is configuration on Plus and often custom work on Adobe Commerce.
- GST. Straightforward on both. The carve-outs for food and health products need catalogue-level tax classes either way.
- Talent. There are more Shopify developers in Australia than Adobe Commerce developers, and the gap is widening. If you build on Adobe Commerce, the team that maintains it is a smaller market — which is a genuine risk to weigh, and part of why we say so plainly.
How we would run the decision
- Write down your five most unusual business rules. Not features — rules. The things that make your commerce different from a generic store.
- Test them against Shopify Plus specifically. Not against your memory of Shopify from a few years ago. If all five are expressible, the operational argument for Plus is very strong.
- Cost it over three years, not one. Include hosting, patching, upgrades and the developer time each platform actually consumes.
- Then decide — and if you are moving off Adobe Commerce, the route itself is well-trodden. We have written about what a Magento to Shopify migration costs in Australia and what makes it more expensive than quoted.
We work on Adobe Commerce and Shopify Plus both, and we have no partner badge on either side pushing the answer. If you want a second opinion on a decision already in progress, that is a conversation we are happy to have.
Common questions
Is Adobe Commerce better than Shopify Plus?
Neither is better in general — they fail in different places. Adobe Commerce wins where the catalogue is large and the commerce logic is genuinely non-standard, because you can change anything, including the checkout. Shopify Plus wins where you want to stop staffing infrastructure and move faster on merchandising. The question that actually decides it is how much of your business logic is unusual enough that a SaaS platform will not let you express it.
Which is cheaper, Adobe Commerce or Shopify Plus?
Shopify Plus is almost always cheaper to run, and the gap is wider than the licence comparison suggests because Adobe Commerce carries hosting, patching and periodic upgrade projects that Plus does not. Adobe Commerce can still be the cheaper total if it removes work elsewhere — for example where complex B2B pricing would otherwise need custom apps and manual processes on Plus. Compare total cost over three years, not licence against licence.
Can Shopify Plus handle B2B and wholesale?
Increasingly well. Company accounts, customer-specific catalogues, price lists and payment terms are native rather than app-bolted. Where it still strains is deep account hierarchies and pricing that lives in an ERP and must be honoured in real time. Test your actual pricing rules against it before committing — that single exercise resolves most Adobe Commerce versus Plus debates faster than any feature comparison.
Should we move from Adobe Commerce to Shopify Plus?
Often yes, when the reason is operational — a platform team you no longer want to staff, or infrastructure work that earns nothing. Rarely, when the reason is that Magento feels dated. That is the most expensive reason to replatform there is, and it tends to surface halfway through the project as a list of business rules the new platform cannot express.