Best Shopify alternatives for a growing business
The best Shopify alternatives for a growing business depend on the limit you have hit. If third party payment fees hurt, compare BigCommerce or WooCommerce. If you need heavy catalog and multi-store operations, look at Adobe Commerce. If your rules cannot fit into apps, a developer-led platform like Sylius makes sense. If none of those describes your problem, staying on a higher Shopify plan is often the right answer.
A word on my interest: I am a freelance developer based in France, I build custom stores and work with Sylius, so I benefit when someone chooses that route. Prices below were read on official pages on 1 November 2026, and they can vary by country. For a French language overview of the wider market, see my comparison of Shopify alternatives.
First, measure what Shopify really costs you
On Shopify's French pricing page, plans cost 27, 79 and 289 euros a month on annual billing for Basic, Grow and Advanced, excluding tax, and Plus starts at 2,100 euros a month. The figure growing merchants tend to underestimate comes next: if you do not use Shopify Payments, the same page lists an extra fee of 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus.
Do the sum for your own store. With one million euros in annual online sales through a third party provider on Grow, that 1% comes to 10,000 euros a year, before the provider's own charges. That is my arithmetic, not a Shopify figure. Moving up a plan may solve this more cheaply than moving away, so work this out before you speak to anyone selling a migration, me included.
Best Shopify alternatives for growing business ecommerce platforms, by limit
| The limit you hit | Platform to look at | Published starting point | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fees on your preferred payment provider | BigCommerce | $29 a month billed annually, no fee on listed embedded providers | Sales caps trigger plan upgrades |
| Control over your site and content | WooCommerce | Free core, hosting about $25 to $350 a month | You own updates and security |
| Large catalogs, complex operations | Adobe Commerce or Magento Open Source | Open source edition has no licence fee | Heavy infrastructure, specialist team |
| Business rules apps cannot express | Sylius | Open source core, Sylius Plus from 800 euros a year | Needs a developer from day one |
BigCommerce: closest in spirit, with its own trap
BigCommerce is the most direct swap because it stays hosted. Its pricing page lists Core at $29 a month billed annually, Growth at $79 and Scale at $299, with no fee for embedded payment providers such as Stripe or Adyen, while open providers carry a 2%, 1% or 0.6% fee. Read the sales limits closely: Core runs up to $30,000 in trailing twelve month sales, Growth up to $100,000, and each moves up automatically beyond that. Scale adds a 0.9% rate on monthly volume above $33,333. A growing business can therefore reach a higher tier quickly, so model next year's sales rather than this year's. The figures are in dollars, so check local availability.
WooCommerce: more control, more responsibility
WooCommerce suits businesses for whom content drives sales. Its pricing page says the core is free, most stores spend about $25 to $350 a month on hosting, optional extensions run about $29 to $299 a year each, and WooCommerce adds no processing charge of its own. The trade is plain: server requirements such as PHP 8.3 and WordPress 6.9 become your concern, along with patching and backups. Without someone assigned to that work, you have swapped a fee for a risk.
Adobe Commerce and Magento: for genuinely complex operations
This is the heavyweight option. Adobe's system requirements for version 2.4.9 list PHP 8.5, MariaDB or MySQL, OpenSearch, Valkey, RabbitMQ and Varnish, so hosting and staffing become a project in their own right. Standard support for 2.4.9 runs to 31 May 2029 according to its lifecycle policy, which helps planning. Adobe's documents describe B2B as an extension to Adobe Commerce, so confirm what you would get on the open source edition before relying on it.
Sylius: when your rules are the product
Sylius is a framework for building a store, based on Symfony and PHP. It suits unusual pricing, subscriptions, configurable products or tight links with internal systems. Version 2.3 requires PHP 8.3, and Sylius Plus adds paid modules like B2B and marketplace, starting at 800 euros a year and priced by online sales and modules chosen. There is no app store comfort here: you pay for development and upkeep. In my own work, I took over the Belgian store Coucouroucoucou, about 15,000 orders carried over with customers and invoices, with no interruption in sales. Ask any provider, me included, for proof that matches your case.
When you should stay on Shopify
Stay if your pain is a missing feature that an app covers, if your team has no technical owner, or if you cannot fund upkeep. Check your assumptions too: Shopify says B2B is available on Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus, with features depending on the plan, so wholesale alone may not justify leaving. A move also has a real cost beyond the invoice: Google warns of temporary ranking changes during a site move and advises keeping redirects for at least a year.
The next step
Write down the one limit that costs you most, and put a yearly figure on it. Then compare that figure with a three year budget for each platform. If you want a second opinion, see my ecommerce page or my Sylius developer page. I reply within 24 business hours, and you speak directly to the person who writes the code. If staying on Shopify is the sensible call, I will tell you.