MahoCommerce vs Magento 2 vs Shopify

Migration

Picking an ecommerce platform in 2026 is a tradeoff exercise.

There is no "best" ecommerce platform. There are platforms that fit particular combinations of budget, team size, customisation appetite, and growth horizon. This is an honest comparison of the three options that get considered most often in our conversations with prospective clients: Maho, Magento 2, and Shopify.

We build and sell Maho extensions — we're biased. We've written this as honestly as we can, flagging where each platform wins.

Thirty-second summary

  • Shopify is the right answer for most stores under $10M/year that don't need anything custom, don't mind paying for ease, and want to focus on the business not the platform.
  • Magento 2 (Adobe Commerce) is the right answer for enterprise stores with six- or seven-figure Adobe budgets, deep B2B requirements, and existing Adobe Experience Cloud investment.
  • Maho is the right answer for self-hosted stores that want to own their code, have or can get a PHP developer, and don't want to pay ongoing platform fees or fight Magento 2's complexity.

If you're confident which bucket you're in, stop reading and go build. If you're not sure, keep reading.

Developer experience

Maho: PHP 8.3+, Composer-first, Symfony components, plain Apache/nginx/Caddy + MySQL/SQLite/PostgreSQL. Local dev: composer install then serve. Deploy: push files, run migrations, done. Attributes instead of XML for most wiring. If you've written a Symfony or Laravel app in the last five years, Maho will feel familiar within a day.

Magento 2: PHP 8.x, Composer, Zend Framework legacy, a very large custom framework on top. Module system uses XML configuration, dependency injection XML files, and multi-step build/deploy commands (bin/magento setup:upgrade, bin/magento setup:di:compile, bin/magento setup:static-content:deploy). Deploys take minutes. Local dev requires Elasticsearch, Redis, and a capable machine. Frontend is PHTML templates or Hyvä + Tailwind. Steep learning curve — expect 6–12 weeks for a new developer to be productive.

Shopify: Liquid templates in their cloud admin, Shopify CLI for theme development, Shopify Apps for backend logic (in Node/Ruby/whatever). Easy to start, can be very complex once you outgrow the defaults. No access to the underlying database or server — everything is their API. Great developer ergonomics within Shopify's box; you stop enjoying it when you need to leave the box.

Winner depends: Shopify for "I need a store next week". Maho for "I have a PHP dev". Magento 2 for "I have an Adobe Commerce contract already".

Customisation ceiling

Maho: unlimited. Your PHP, your database, your observers, your layout XML. Fork the core if you need to. It's software you run.

Magento 2: unlimited but painful. Every customisation fights the framework's abstractions. Ten-minute work in Maho often becomes a half-day in M2 because of the DI layers, interceptor plugins, and preferences.xml config cascades. Talent pool is smaller than Shopify's, rates are higher.

Shopify: bounded. Inside the Shopify world (theme.liquid + App Bridge + Shopify Functions) you can do most things. Outside it — e.g. a complex B2B pricing workflow, unusual tax rules, custom checkout flows — you hit walls or pay Shopify Plus for more access. Shopify Plus checkout customisations via Checkout Extensibility help, but it's still not your code.

Winner: Maho for deep customisation; Shopify for "normal but polished"; Magento 2 for "complex but enterprise-standard".

Performance

Maho: small footprint, ships with FPC out of the box, can run on FrankenPHP/Caddy for modern HTTP/3 + Brotli. We run Maho behind Cloudflare Workers for sub-50ms pages globally (architecture post). SQLite + Litestream is viable for low-traffic stores. A tuned Maho instance outperforms a tuned Magento 2 instance by a wide margin.

Magento 2: big surface area, Varnish recommended, Elasticsearch required. Uncached page loads are slow. Cached pages fine. Requires continuous tuning as your catalog grows. Commerce tier bundles a CDN option.

Shopify: Shopify's global CDN handles this — not your problem. Their infra is very good. You pay for it in the monthly fees but you don't think about it. Fastest "out of the box" of the three.

Winner: Shopify for zero-effort performance; Maho when tuned properly; Magento 2 only when heavily resourced.

Cost

Maho: software is free (OSS). You pay for hosting (Fly.io / your VPS / Hetzner / wherever), your developer's time, and optional commercial modules (ours start around $79). No Adobe licence, no monthly platform fee, no transaction fees. For a medium-complexity store: ~$50–200/month hosting + developer retainer.

Magento 2: Open Source (Community) is free; Adobe Commerce starts ~$22,000/year and climbs sharply with GMV. Commerce Cloud adds infrastructure costs on top. Typical total cost of ownership for a Commerce merchant: six figures annually.

Shopify: Basic $29/month, Shopify $79, Advanced $299, Shopify Plus $2,300+. Plus transaction fees (0.5–2% unless using Shopify Payments). Plus App Store subscriptions that add up fast — $200–800/month is normal once you're running six or eight apps. Typical total: $100–3,000/month depending on tier + apps.

Winner: Maho for cost-per-feature, hands down. Shopify for predictable low floors. Magento 2 is expensive everywhere.

Data ownership

Maho / Magento 2: your database, your files, your server. You can dump and migrate anywhere. Export customer data with a SQL query. Nothing is held hostage.

Shopify: their database, their servers. You can export product and customer data via CSV or API, but you cannot take the platform-level configuration (theme hooks, app configurations, automation rules, Shopify Flow state) with you. Migrating away is a project.

Winner: Maho and Magento 2 (tie).

Ecosystem

Maho: early. The official Maho extension ecosystem is growing — Mageaustralia is one of the first commercial vendors, and a few others have started appearing. The Magento 1 commercial ecosystem (Amasty M1, Mirasvit M1, etc.) is largely frozen; Maho-native alternatives are being built. For most common functionality (preorders, SEO tooling, checkout, analytics) there's either a Maho module now or we'll ship one in the next six months.

Magento 2: still very large, but in slow decline. Amasty, Mirasvit, Mageplaza, Fooman, Magestore — all active. Quality varies. Prices trend high ($200–500 per commercial module is normal, $2000+ for enterprise-tier).

Shopify: enormous. Shopify App Store has tens of thousands of apps covering every niche. Quality varies wildly; pricing is mostly subscription-based. Because apps run in Shopify's sandbox, integration is smooth; because they run in Shopify's sandbox, apps are often limited compared to equivalent M2/Maho extensions.

Winner: Shopify (most options), Magento 2 (most mature), Maho (early but ours is growing fastest percentage-wise — small denominator).

When to pick which

Pick Shopify if:

  • Revenue under $5M/year, no unusual logic
  • You don't have and don't want a developer on retainer
  • You want a large catalogue of ready-made apps for every business function
  • You're happy to pay platform fees for zero infrastructure responsibility
  • You don't mind that migrating away later will be a project

Pick Magento 2 / Adobe Commerce if:

  • You're already in the Adobe ecosystem (Experience Manager, Target, Analytics)
  • You need Adobe Commerce-tier features (B2B accounts, content staging, advanced reporting)
  • You have enterprise budget for licences and an agency or in-house M2 team
  • You have strict requirements that only specific M2 commercial extensions solve

Pick Maho if:

  • You want to own your code and data
  • You have or can hire a PHP developer (Symfony/Laravel background transfers in weeks)
  • You want to run on a modern stack (PHP 8.3, Symfony, Composer) without Adobe's tax
  • Your needs are specific enough that off-the-shelf Shopify apps won't cover them, but you don't want Magento 2's complexity or cost
  • You're currently on OpenMage or Magento 1 and need a forward path (see our OpenMage migration guide)

What Mageaustralia is betting on

We think the Maho segment is structurally under-served — there's a large population of merchants who want self-hosted-but-modern, who don't fit Shopify's subscription model, who can't justify Magento 2's complexity. They need commercial extensions that are as polished as the M2 options they're used to, at prices that reflect 2026's dev economics (AI-assisted development has compressed build costs).

Our pricing floor is 50-65% of the M2 median for each category. Our modules are composer-installable with year-1 updates included and year-2+ maintenance at 30% of the license per year. Many ship a free OSS tier on GitHub alongside the commercial Pro tier.

Browse the Mageaustralia marketplace

Not sure which bucket you're in? Get in touch. We're honest when Shopify or Magento 2 is the right answer — it's just not our business.