E-commerce Platforms Comparison

Scope. The four platforms are not the same kind of product. Shopify is a hosted software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform: Shopify runs the servers, the checkout and the upgrades, and the merchant configures a store and installs apps and themes. PrestaShop and Magento Open Source are free software that the merchant (or a host) installs and operates. Adobe Commerce is the licensed edition built from the Magento code base, offered on-premises, on Adobe’s cloud infrastructure and as a software-as-a-service edition. WooCommerce is a free plugin that turns a WordPress site into a store, so every WooCommerce figure also reflects WordPress, its themes, its plugins and the hosting it runs on. Mage-OS, a community distribution of the Magento Open Source code base, appears only as context.

Snapshot date. All values on this page were fetched on 2026-10-27 from the sources listed in References and in scripts/ecommerce-comparison-charts/data/sources.csv; every row of the CSV files carries its own fetch date. Time series end at the latest complete period at that date: 2026-09 for the HTTP Archive Tech Report (October is not published yet), 2026-Q4 to date for Store Leads, and 2026 to date for the yearly series. A value that could not be obtained is shown as n/a, never as zero, and a value that came from a secondary source or from a page that could not be opened from the authoring environment is marked unverified.

Where to check current values. Each table and figure names its source. The live pages are the W3Techs technology pages, the Store Leads reports, the HTTP Archive Tech Report, the Web Almanac e-commerce chapter, the GitHub, npm, WordPress.org and Stack Exchange APIs, the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) API, the official pricing pages and the official lifecycle policies listed in the References. The data and the scripts that draw the figures are in scripts/ecommerce-comparison-charts/, so the charts can be regenerated with npm run charts:ecommerce-comparison.

How the metrics are used. The sections after the feature matrix present metrics in six groups (popularity, performance, security, ease of use and maintenance, cost, and other characteristics), each with a statement of what it measures and what it does not. Three rules apply throughout:

Caveats that apply to the whole page.

Source: W3Techs, content management systems, HTTP Archive Tech Report and Store Leads reports

The matrix lists what each platform does by itself, without extra apps, modules or plugins unless the cell says so. n/a means that no reliable public figure exists. The platform pages hold the details and the examples.

Source: Shopify API versioning, Shopify pricing, PrestaShop system requirements, PrestaShop repository (licence statement), Magento 2 repository, Adobe Commerce lifecycle policy, WooCommerce on WordPress.org and WooCommerce Store API

The platform pages explain each row: Shopify plans and Plus, Shopify checkout extensibility, Shopify markets and internationalization, PrestaShop architecture, PrestaShop multistore and i18n, Magento editions and ecosystem, Magento catalog, multistore and B2B, WooCommerce architecture and WooCommerce taxes, currencies and i18n.

The table summarises the main strengths and weaknesses of each platform. Each cell is backed by the data later on this page or by the source named under the table.

Source: the figures are those of the tables below, with sources HTTP Archive Tech Report, Store Leads, Patchstack State of WordPress Security 2026, PrestaShop issue 42441 (no Content-Security-Policy in core) and CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog

Shopify. The advantage is that the operational work is someone else’s. Hosting, certificates, scaling for peak traffic and platform patches are part of the subscription, and the HTTP Archive field data shows that this translates into the highest share of origins passing Core Web Vitals (see Performance). The price of this is a constrained platform: server-side code runs only in apps and Functions, and the checkout steps beyond the basics are customisable only on Plus. See Shopify Functions and Checkout Extensibility for what can and cannot be changed.

PrestaShop. It is the open-source option with the smallest operational footprint of the PHP platforms and a code base that has been modernised with Symfony in the 9.x line. The weaknesses are scale of ecosystem and momentum: Store Leads detects 144,665 live stores in 2026-Q4 to date against a peak of 220,112 in 2022-Q3. See PrestaShop architecture and hooks.

Magento and Adobe Commerce. The most capable core and the most demanding to run. Choose the edition first: Open Source is free but lacks the B2B extension and the Adobe services, while Adobe Commerce adds them for a licence fee. See Magento editions and ecosystem and versions, lifecycle and requirements.

WooCommerce. The market leader by number of stores, with the lowest barrier to start and the broadest choice of themes and plugins. The same freedom is its main risk: quality and security depend on the plugins chosen and on the host. See WooCommerce architecture and performance and security.

Popularity metrics answer a narrow question: how widely is each platform used and how large is the community around it? They do not say how good a platform is. The sources count different things, so the table gives each source’s own unit and the figures never share an axis.

W3Techs labels Magento as Adobe Commerce, and counts WooCommerce inside WordPress (WordPress alone is on 39.6% of all websites), so the WooCommerce figure is the share of sites that use WooCommerce as detected by W3Techs. The Store Leads quarter 2026-Q4 is partial, because it covers the days of the quarter that have passed; Store Leads detects live stores and publishes no official count.

Performance here means field data: how real visitors experienced the origins (sites) that the HTTP Archive detected as running each platform, taken from the Chrome UX Report and from Lighthouse runs on the HTTP Archive crawl. It is not a controlled benchmark. An origin passes the Core Web Vitals when its 75th percentile values are good for Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). The numbers describe the whole population of stores built on a platform, including their themes, apps, plugins, hosting and content, so they say how stores on a platform tend to perform, not how fast the platform could be if tuned. The pass rate is the number of origins with good results divided by the number of origins with enough traffic data to be tested.

Source: HTTP Archive Tech Report, endpoints https://cdn.httparchive.org/v1/cwv, https://cdn.httparchive.org/v1/lighthouse and https://cdn.httparchive.org/v1/adoption, fetched on 2026-10-27

Security data is the hardest to compare, so this section reports what is counted, says what each count can and cannot show, and explains why the totals for the platforms are not comparable. Three kinds of evidence are used: CVE records in the National Vulnerability Database (NVD), security advisories published by the vendors and the community, and notable incidents with their CVSS v3.1 base score and their status in the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalogue.

Ease of use has no objective public metric. This page does not use user-review ratings: G2 and Capterra could not be opened from the authoring environment (HTTP 403), their ratings would be self-selected reviews, and they are recorded as n/a (unverified) for all four platforms. The ease-of-use scores in the radar charts are editorial and rest on what a new merchant or developer has to do before the first sale:

For developers the learning curve follows the extension model: Shopify asks you to learn Liquid, the GraphQL APIs and the app and Functions model, and gives no access to the server; PrestaShop and Magento ask for PHP and Symfony or the Magento object manager and configuration (the learning path is on the Magento overview); WooCommerce asks for WordPress hooks and PHP, with React for the block-based admin and checkout. The platform sections start at the Shopify, PrestaShop, Magento and WooCommerce overviews, each with a learning path.

Maintenance is the recurring work to keep a store running: applying releases and security patches, upgrading dependencies such as PHP, and migrating when a version leaves support. The release and support policies are official and dated, so this is the best documented of the human-effort metrics. The table summarises the policies and the Gantt chart that follows draws them.

Source: Shopify API versioning, PrestaShop minor release lifecycle, PrestaShop 8.2 extended support, Adobe Commerce lifecycle policy and WooCommerce security support policy

The WooCommerce repository’s own SECURITY.md says that only the latest version has continued support; the developer documentation page cited above gives the longer backport policy and is the one used here. The month-based names of the Adobe patch builds are described by bulletin APSB26-153 (2026-10-13), and the Experience League version table had not yet been updated for them on the fetch date (unverified).

Figure 22: release lines and support windows. PrestaShop minor releases 8.0 to 9.2, each maintained until the next minor shipped (inferred, no official dates), with 8.2 in extended support until 10.0.0 and no end date; Magento 2.4.5 to 2.4.9 with three years of standard support and then the extended and security-only phases; Shopify API versions 2025-01 to 2026-10, each supported for at least 12 months. Source: PrestaShop, Adobe and Shopify lifecycle policies.

Figure 23: every WooCommerce minor release line from 8.5 (2024-01-09) to 11.2 (2026-10-07), about one every five weeks; each line is current until the next one ships. Source: GitHub releases API of woocommerce/woocommerce, fetched on 2026-10-27.

Taken together, the policies show two very different maintenance loads. A Shopify merchant migrates API versions in the apps and custom code that use them, about once a year if the code is kept on the oldest supported version, and takes no action for the platform. A WooCommerce store sees a minor release every five weeks, and its plugins and WordPress add their own releases; the support policy backports only critical security fixes. A Magento store follows a three-year line with monthly bulletins, and moving between lines (2.4.7 to 2.4.9, for example) is a project. PrestaShop ships a new major or minor line about as often as Magento ships a 2.4.x line (six since 2022 against five), but its minor releases are short-lived, so a store is expected to move to the next minor (8.2 is the exception, with extended support until 10.0.0). See PrestaShop versions and support, Magento upgrades, WooCommerce versions, requirements and release cadence and Shopify what is new and deprecation timeline.

The price list is only part of the cost. The fees that can be compared are platform subscription or licence and payment fees. The costs that cannot be charted are the merchant’s own: hosting, themes, extensions or apps, development, maintenance and payment provider fees. For the open-source options these costs vary too much for a reliable figure, so they are n/a here and the charts show a zero licence price, not a zero total cost.

Source: Shopify pricing and Shopify Plus pricing, rendered in euro on 2026-10-27; the prices exclude taxes, apps, themes and the domain. The trial is three days free and then EUR 1 a month for three months (promotional).

The dollar prices are unverified: the US page could not be fetched, and values from third-party summaries (tech.co and ecommerce-platforms.com) are USD 39 (Basic), USD 105 (Grow), USD 399 (Advanced) and from USD 2,300 (Plus) a month billed monthly, and USD 29, USD 79 and USD 299 billed yearly for the first three. Re-check them on a US-locale browser before relying on them.

Source: PrestaShop project, Magento 2 repository, Adobe Commerce documentation and WooPayments fees, checked on 2026-10-27

Figure 24: platform subscription or licence price per month, billed monthly, in euro: Shopify Basic 32, Grow 92, Advanced 384 and Plus from 2,100; PrestaShop, Magento Open Source and WooCommerce are free software (0) but need hosting, extensions and development; Adobe Commerce is quote-based (n/a). Source: official pricing pages.

Figure 25: percentage part of the online card rate per transaction (a fixed fee of 0.30 is added): Shopify Payments 2.1% on Basic down to 1.3% on Plus; WooPayments 2.9% for US cards and 1.5% for European cards (with a fixed 0.25). Source: Shopify pricing and WooPayments fees. Rates are country specific, and other payment providers charge their own fees.

Reading the cost data. Shopify’s cost is visible and predictable: a store that sells EUR 20,000 a month with Shopify Payments on the Grow plan pays EUR 92 for the subscription plus the card rate, and nothing for hosting. For the open-source platforms the licence is free and the cost is distributed over hosting, developers and extensions, which is cheap for a small catalogue on shared hosting and expensive for a Magento store that needs a cluster and specialists. The page therefore scores Shopify 5 on low cost (a subscription plus fees, with hosting included), PrestaShop and WooCommerce 8 (no licence, moderate infrastructure), and Magento 3 (heavy infrastructure, quote-based licence on Adobe Commerce); the reasoning is in the rubric.

Tools and functionality. The scores are editorial and their basis is in data/radar-scores.csv: Magento 9 (the most complete core: multiple sources and stores, B2B on Adobe Commerce, GraphQL and REST), Shopify 8 (built-in checkout, point of sale, Markets, B2B, Flow automation, Functions and an app store with about 32,000 apps; advanced checkout control is Plus-only), WooCommerce 7 (the core covers catalog, orders and the blocks checkout, and most advanced features come from the 10,039 plugins tagged woocommerce and from WordPress itself) and PrestaShop 6 (catalog, multistore and, from 9.2, a one-page checkout and improved B2B behind flags, with breadth beyond the core from paid Addons modules).

Scalability. Shopify 9 (managed infrastructure that scales with traffic, with API rate limits and plan caps as the limits), Magento 8 (designed for large catalogs and traffic with indexers, message queues and cloud editions, at the cost of infrastructure and tuning), WooCommerce 6 (scales with WordPress hosting and caching; high order volumes need HPOS, the custom order tables, and careful plugin selection) and PrestaShop 5 (scales by sizing hosting and caching yourself; the platform targets small and mid-size catalogs and has the lowest median mobile Lighthouse score, 0.345).

Production deployment complexity. Shopify has none: the vendor runs the infrastructure. The three self-hosted platforms can all run as stateless containers on several Kubernetes nodes with a managed database, but the amount of state to move out of the server differs. WooCommerce inherits WordPress: uploads, the object cache, cron and the session table (WooCommerce: Cloud Deployment Overview). PrestaShop core has no S3 media option and no TLS setting for its database client, so images stay on shared storage and an encrypted database connection needs a workaround (PrestaShop: Cloud Reference Architecture). Magento needs the most: managed OpenSearch, Valkey and RabbitMQ in addition to the database, Varnish with purge fan-out, and separate consumers, cron and indexers (Magento: Cloud Reference Architecture). The WordPress-side design that the WooCommerce store builds on is in WordPress: Cloud Reference Architecture.

Customisation flexibility. WooCommerce and Magento 9 (open code with actions, filters and block extensibility, or with dependency injection, plugins, preferences, observers and layout XML), PrestaShop 8 (open PHP and Symfony code, hooks, overrides and services) and Shopify 6 (Liquid, theme blocks, apps and Functions allow wide changes, but server code, the checkout and the data model are constrained).

Vendor lock-in and data portability. Shopify is proprietary: the themes use Liquid, the apps use Shopify’s APIs and the data lives on Shopify’s servers, so leaving means exporting data and rebuilding the theme and the integrations. The open-source platforms keep the code and the database under the merchant’s control and can move between hosts, at the price of operating them. No numeric lock-in metric exists, so it does not appear in the radar charts.

Headless readiness. Shopify 9 (Storefront API, Customer Account API, Hydrogen and Oxygen: a documented first-class path), Magento 8 (GraphQL and REST APIs, PWA Studio and the headless Adobe Commerce storefront, with heavy integration work), WooCommerce 7 (REST API v3 and the Store API; GraphQL needs a community plugin) and PrestaShop 5 (data APIs only, with no official storefront framework or storefront API).

Internationalisation and B2B. Shopify Markets, the PrestaShop multistore with CLDR locales, Magento store views and WooCommerce through WordPress language packs and a multilingual plugin all support several languages and currencies, with different depth (see the feature matrix). B2B is built into Shopify on all plans with limits, into Adobe Commerce as an extension, behind a flag in PrestaShop 9.2, and only through plugins in WooCommerce.

Developer job demand. Not reported: no trusted public source with a comparable method was found.

The radar charts condense the comparison into ten axes scored from 0 to 10, higher being better. Two axes are computed from the data of this page and eight are editorial scores whose basis and source are recorded next to each value in data/radar-scores.csv. The scores summarise the evidence on the page; they are not a benchmark, they are not weighted or summed into a total, and moving a score by one point is within the uncertainty of the method.

The resulting scores, with the two computed axes rounded to one decimal:

Source: scripts/ecommerce-comparison-charts/data/radar-scores.csv and scores.mjs, computed from the metrics of this page on 2026-10-27; the basis of each editorial score is written beside it in the CSV file.

Figure 26: the four platforms on ten axes. The scores are editorial except Performance and Ecosystem, which were computed from the metrics of 2026-10-27 (sources as in the figures above, rubric in data/NOTES.md).

Figure 27: Shopify. Ease of use, maintenance, scalability and headless readiness are the strengths; cost and customisation flexibility are the lowest scores.

Figure 28: PrestaShop. Low cost and customisation flexibility lead; the ecosystem is the smallest of the four.

Figure 29: Magento and Adobe Commerce. The profile is the most lopsided: the top scores are tools and functionality and customisation flexibility; ease of use, maintenance and cost are the lowest.

Figure 30: WooCommerce. The largest ecosystem, low cost and deep customisation, against the weakest security posture and performance scores.

The flowchart follows the recommendations below. Start from who will operate the store.

Figure 31: decision flowchart for choosing a platform. It is a starting point; check the metrics and caveats above before deciding.

The data snapshot date for every figure below is 2026-10-27. The recommendations are justified only by the data on this page. They name the option the evidence favours first and what to check, and they are not rankings: a team with deep experience of one platform can reasonably choose it against the table.

Two points matter in every case. First, the cheapest choice on the price list is often not the cheapest in total, because hosting, development and maintenance fall on the merchant for self-hosted platforms, and fees and apps accumulate on Shopify. Second, the performance and security figures describe populations of stores. A well-run Magento, PrestaShop or WooCommerce store can match the Shopify numbers, and a poorly configured Shopify store with many apps can fall behind them, so these recommendations are starting points that a short proof of concept on the shortlisted platforms should confirm.

The comparison pages for other choices of this site use the same method: the Documentation Tools Comparison and the Cloud Providers Comparison. The section overview and its bibliography are at E-commerce.