You've probably seen the numbers. Magento powers roughly 126,000 live stores, down about 11% year over year, while Shopify has grown past 2.6 million. In any 90-day window, hundreds of stores migrate from Magento to Shopify. Agencies that sell those migrations publish a steady stream of "time to leave" articles.
I make my living on Magento, so you'd expect me to tell you to stay. Instead, here's the honest framework I'd give a friend.
Why merchants actually leave
- Total cost of ownership. A mid-market Magento store commonly spends €50,000–200,000 a year on hosting and operations — often 2–4x a comparable Shopify Plus setup.
- Maintenance eats the budget. Many merchants spend 60–70% of their development budget just keeping the platform running: upgrades, patches, module conflicts.
- Security is your job. Patches are manual. Miss one and you're exposed — the SessionReaper wave (CVE-2025-54236) compromised hundreds of stores, most of which had simply patched late.
- The frontend decision. Luma is in long-term support and being sunset; every store must plan a move to Hyvä (or headless) anyway.
When leaving makes sense
Be honest with yourself. Shopify is probably the right call if all of these apply:
- Your catalog and checkout are standard — no complex pricing rules, no unusual product logic, no deep ERP coupling
- You're B2C with one storefront, one currency or simple multi-currency needs
- Your custom modules mostly replicate things Shopify now does natively
- Nobody on your team wants to own infrastructure, ever
In that situation, staying on Magento means paying enterprise-grade maintenance for capabilities you don't use. A migration typically runs 8–16 weeks, and migrated brands commonly report a checkout-conversion lift and a meaningful drop in total cost of ownership.
When staying is the better business decision
- B2B or complex commerce. Company accounts, negotiated price lists, quotes, requisition lists, multi-warehouse MSI — this is where Magento is still years ahead, and where Shopify's per-transaction economics get expensive.
- Multi-store, multi-country. One Magento instance can run many storefronts with shared catalog and separate pricing/tax/language. Replicating that on Shopify often means multiple stores and sync headaches.
- Deep customization is your moat. If your store's logic is your competitive advantage, you own it on Magento. On SaaS you rent what the platform permits, and platform-fee changes are out of your control.
- You've already invested. A stable, patched 2.4.x store with a Hyvä frontend has already paid the painful bills. Throwing that away to escape maintenance you can outsource for a fraction of migration cost rarely adds up.
The third option nobody sells you: make Magento cheap
Most "Magento is too expensive" stories I audit come down to three fixable causes:
- Oversized or mismanaged hosting. A tuned stack (Varnish, Redis, OpenSearch, PHP 8.x with OPcache) on right-sized infrastructure routinely cuts hosting bills in half while getting faster.
- Module bloat. Stores accumulate 40–80 third-party extensions; each upgrade multiplies the conflict surface. Auditing and removing half of them cuts every future upgrade quote.
- Reactive maintenance. Emergency fixes cost multiples of scheduled ones. A monthly maintenance routine — patches within days of each APSB bulletin, staged upgrades, monitoring — turns unpredictable spikes into a flat, small bill.
Do those three things and Magento's cost story changes completely — while you keep the flexibility that brought you to the platform in the first place.
The bottom line
If your needs are simple, leave — sooner is cheaper than later, and don't let anyone (including me) talk you out of it. If your needs are complex, stay — but stop running Magento reactively, because that's where all the pain comes from.
Not sure which side you're on? Send me your store URL. I'll give you an honest assessment — including "you should probably move to Shopify" if that's the truth — plus the three highest-impact cost cuts if you stay.