Wix, Shopify Plus and
Adobe Commerce are not
on the same shortlist.

Nobody has ever had
all three of these on
one shortlist.

I get asked to compare Wix, Shopify Plus and Adobe Commerce more often than any other trio, and almost never by someone who is genuinely choosing between them. The comparison shows up because a category page groups them under "ecommerce platforms" and an AI assistant, asked to compare ecommerce platforms, picks three names from the list.

That matters, because the grouping is wrong in a specific and expensive way. Wix eCommerce starts at $29 a month. Adobe Commerce, at $5M in annual GMV, lands somewhere between $200,000 and $300,000 in the first year once you count license, implementation and the developer time you now need permanently. Those are two different businesses, not two options inside one decision.

So the useful version of this article is not a feature grid. It is a diagnostic. Below, each platform gets the one job it is genuinely best at, the cost of doing that job, and the specific signal that tells you that you are on its shortlist rather than one of the other two.

The gap between the
cheapest and dearest
option here is 400x.

Published pricing only tells you the entry fee. What follows is the all-in annual operating cost, which is the number that actually decides platform choices. These figures are consistent with the fuller breakdowns in the enterprise TCO analysis and the full platform comparison, both of which carry the workings.

Two things in that table do most of the work. The first is that Shopify Plus is roughly one fifth the cost of Adobe Commerce at the same revenue, and the gap widens rather than narrows as you grow, because the Plus platform fee caps at $40,000 a month while an Adobe license quoted against GMV does not.

The second is that Wix looks almost free, and at $5M GMV that is misleading rather than wrong. The platform fee genuinely is a few hundred dollars a year. The cost is what you cannot do, which is the subject of the next two sections.

Wix is a good product
for a job most people
describe incorrectly.

Wix solves this: I want a visually polished web presence with some products on it and a working checkout, and I want to build it myself this weekend without writing code. It does that well. Squarespace does it slightly better on design and slightly worse on commerce, which is why the Squarespace comparison lands in a similar place.

On price, Wix eCommerce plans run from about $29 a month at the entry tier to about $49 a month for the business tiers that remove the transaction fee. That range is worth holding next to Shopify Basic at $39 a month, because it means the two products cost roughly the same and the decision is entirely about capability rather than budget.

You are genuinely on the Wix shortlist if your catalog is under a couple of hundred SKUs, commerce is secondary to content or services, you have no ERP or 3PL to integrate, and nobody on your team wants to think about the store more than once a month. That describes a lot of real businesses and there is nothing embarrassing about being one of them.

The four ceilings, in the order you hit them

1. Catalog. Above a few hundred SKUs, managing variants, collections and inventory becomes genuinely painful rather than merely limited.
2. Integrations. ERPs, 3PLs, advanced email platforms and loyalty tools are thin compared with what is available on Shopify's app store.
3. Checkout. Customisation is minimal, which caps conversion work at exactly the point conversion work starts paying for itself.
4. Analytics. Anything past basic traffic and sales needs third-party workarounds, so attribution gets harder as spend gets larger.

Notice that all four ceilings arrive at roughly the same moment, which is when the business starts working. That is the trap: the platform is easiest to leave when leaving is least urgent, and hardest to leave when it matters most.

The expensive part of
Wix is not the fee.
It is staying.

A brand that builds its catalog, customer data and search equity on Wix and then needs to move at $500K in revenue faces a materially harder migration than one that started on Shopify. Product data, customer records, order history and URL structure do not transfer cleanly. Rankings take a hit through the redirect map even when the map is done well.

Across the brands I have moved off entry-level builders, the migration itself has been the smaller number. The larger one is the six to twelve months of deferred growth work: the conversion tests you did not run, the retention flows you could not build, the wholesale channel you could not open, all because the platform could not carry them and you were waiting for a replatform that kept slipping.

Adobe Commerce is a
real answer to a much
narrower question.

Adobe Commerce, still called Magento by nearly everyone who runs it, earns its cost in a specific band: catalog and pricing logic complex enough that SaaS genuinely cannot express it. Tens of thousands of SKUs with per-customer pricing, deep B2B contract rules, or a product configurator with real dependency logic behind it.

If that is you, the license and the implementation are buying something you cannot buy elsewhere, and the calculus is different. If it is not you, you are buying infrastructure obligations. The full Adobe Commerce and Magento replatform analysis works through the decision in both directions, including the cases where staying is correct.

The part that surprises people is that the license is not the burden. It is the permanence of the engineering. Security patching, version upgrades, hosting and the developer who understands your build are all ongoing and none of them are optional. You do not get to pause them in a bad quarter.

For nearly everyone
asking, the answer is
the middle option.

I have a commercial interest in Shopify, having been an early employee there and having built on it since, so treat the conclusion with the scepticism that deserves and check the arithmetic above. It still lands where it lands: for something close to 99% of brands running this comparison, Shopify Plus is the right answer, and the reason is speed of change rather than any feature.

The metric that decides platform value after launch is how long it takes to ship a change. On Plus, a new market, a checkout test or a B2B price list is configuration and a day. On Adobe Commerce the same three things are a sprint, a release and a regression pass. Over three years that difference compounds into more experiments run, which is the only durable growth advantage a platform can actually give you.

It is also the reason the cost gap understates the real gap. The Adobe line item is the license plus the engineering. The hidden line item is the tests you did not run because each one needed a developer.

The right answer
changes twice on the
way to $25M.

Platform advice that ignores revenue is advice for nobody. The same three platforms rank differently at $500K, $5M and $25M, and the switching points are more predictable than most replatform decks suggest.

The band that trips people up is $500K to $2M. It is where a Wix or Squarespace store is genuinely working, which makes it feel like the wrong moment to move, and it is simultaneously the cheapest moment to move that you will ever get. Every month past it adds catalog, customer records and search equity to the pile that has to be carried across.

It is also worth saying plainly that the jump to Plus is often made too early. A brand at $1.5M does not need expansion stores and native B2B, and paying a $27,600 floor to get them is a real cost with no return. Standard Shopify carries most brands further than the upgrade pitch suggests, and the timing question has its own analysis.

Three questions that
settle this faster than
any feature grid.

Feature comparisons are close to useless here because every platform can eventually do almost everything. The questions that actually separate them are about constraint, not capability.

1. How many SKUs, and how much logic sits on them? Under a couple of hundred with simple pricing, Wix is viable. Tens of thousands with per-customer contract pricing, Adobe earns its keep. Everything between is Shopify Plus.
2. What has to integrate? Write down every system that must talk to the store: ERP, 3PL, PIM, tax, EDI, loyalty. If the list is longer than two, entry-level builders are out on that alone.
3. How often do you need to change the storefront? If it is weekly, you are buying speed of change, and that is the whole argument for Plus over Adobe.

If you want the wider field rather than these three, the full platform comparison covers BigCommerce, commercetools, Salesforce Commerce Cloud and custom builds against the same criteria, and the BigCommerce head-to-head handles the one genuine alternative in the mid-market.

One closing note on where this question came from. If an assistant produced this three-way for you, it is worth knowing that it grouped by category label rather than by problem. That is a reasonable failure for a machine and an expensive one for a buyer. The shortlist you actually want has two names on it, not three, and which two depends entirely on the first question above.

Questions brands ask
when this comparison
lands on their desk.