Shopify Plus alternatives: what to buy when you've decided against the upgrade Shopify Plus alternatives: what to buy when you've decided against the upgrade

The verdict

At a glance

Where a vendor publishes no price — Adobe, commercetools, Mtrix — the cell says so rather than inventing a band.

Start here: the Plus ceilings, and which one binds on you

Before you evaluate a replacement, be precise about what you're replacing. Here is everything Plus adds over Advanced, from Shopify's own plan-comparison table, read 26 July 2026:

• Checkout customization Full, against Limited on Basic, Grow and Advanced
• API rate limits up to 10×, against up to 2× on Advanced
• Unlimited staff accounts, against 15
• 200 inventory locations, against 10
• 25 headless storefronts, against 1
• Unlimited B2B catalogs, against up to 3
• POS Pro across 20 locations included, against $89/mo per location
• Priority support, against "enhanced live chat"
• Nine free expansion stores, then $300/mo each

Mark the rows that bind on you this quarter. Most brands pricing Plus mark none — they're pricing it because the checkout won't change, because the optimisation programme has stalled, or because someone said Plus is what you do at $10M. Only the first is on that list, and a replatform is the most expensive way to buy the other two.

The options below are ordered by how many DTC brands at $1M–$50M actually end up on them, not by preference. If you're on Basic or Grow rather than pricing Plus, the evaluation is a different one — see Shopify alternatives.

1. Shopify Plus — the option you already priced

If your only problem is Shopify's API limits, Plus is the simplest answer. Same platform, same apps, same checkout, one line item, done this week. The same is true if you run twelve retail locations, six B2B catalogs or nine expansion stores. Migrating to any other platform on this page to solve a rate limit is an expensive way to get a rate limit raised.

Two things to know before you sign. The advertised $2,300 is a 36-month commitment — the one-year rate is $2,500, and Shopify's FAQ is direct about the exit: "you can cancel when your term commitment expires." And Plus is not the top of Shopify's stack: their own published API rate-limit table lists an Enterprise tier above Plus at 2,000 points per second, with Commerce Components priced "get in touch" (shopify.com/plus/pricing, shopify.dev and help.shopify.com, 26 July 2026). The full upgrade arithmetic, including the 0.20% third-party processor fee, is on Mtrix vs Shopify Plus.

2. BigCommerce Performance — the only full-platform alternative with a published price

BigCommerce's enterprise tier, renamed Performance on 1 June 2026, is "custom pricing starting at $1,499 per month, billed annually" (bigcommerce.com/pricing, read live 26 July 2026). Read all three parts. It's a floor, it's annual, and the Performance row lists its GMV cap as "Custom" rather than a number — so what you actually pay still comes out of a sales call. The one hard figure Performance does publish is its Open Payment Provider Fee: 0.0% with contract, against 2.0% / 1.0% / 0.6% on the self-serve plans.

Two things changed on 1 June 2026 that most pages on this keyword haven't absorbed. The self-serve plans were renamed — Standard, Plus, Pro and Enterprise became Core, Growth, Scale and Performance — and that Open Payment Provider Fee is new (bigcommerce.com/dm/plan-pricing-updates-2026/, 26 July 2026).

Be fair about that fee. It applies only to GMV from providers outside BigCommerce's list of 20+ embedded providers, which includes Stripe, PayPal, Adyen, Klarna, Checkout.com and Worldpay — most DTC brands will never pay it. But "BigCommerce has no transaction fees," which every older comparison still says, stopped being true eight weeks ago.

Where BigCommerce genuinely beats Plus: a published enterprise starting price, no contract on the self-serve plans ("Core and Growth plans don't require a contract, and you can cancel at any time"), payment-processor freedom, native B2B and multi-storefront in a mid-market SaaS, and Feedonomics for channel feeds. Where Plus beats it: Shopify's marketplace dwarfs BigCommerce's "over 1,200 apps", and Plus includes nine expansion stores where Performance's multi-storefront is "Contact Sales."

The measurement gap is the same one you're leaving Plus over. BigCommerce's plan-comparison table stops at "professional reporting tools" — no row for A/B testing, session recording or heatmaps — and its 21-category app marketplace has no experimentation or conversion-optimization category at all (bigcommerce.com/apps/categories/, 26 July 2026). You would be buying the same gap you're leaving, at a lower price.

3. Adobe Commerce — the ceiling, and what it costs to stand under it

Adobe publishes no price for Adobe Commerce. No figure appears on any Adobe surface we could reach on 26 July 2026 — their commercial pages timed out on every attempt — and every number in circulation traces to agency blogs and migration vendors, so there isn't one here. Adobe's commercial terms tie the licence to sales volume rather than to seats.

Magento Open Source is free — OSL-3.0, per github.com/magento/magento2, read 26 July 2026 — and that sentence is useless without the next one. Adobe's own installation guide for 2.4.9 requires PHP 8.5, MariaDB 12.3 or MySQL 8.4, OpenSearch 3, nginx 1.30, RabbitMQ 4.3, Valkey 9, Varnish 8 and ActiveMQ Artemis 2, plus Composer 2.10 and 28 PHP extensions. Eight server-side services before you have sold anything. Even Adobe-operated Cloud Pro is four environments and a three-node production cluster you deploy across.

⏰ If you're already on Magento: Adobe's version table shows 2.4.5 extended support and 2.4.6 regular support both ending 11 August 2026, sixteen days from this review date. That's support lines expiring, not the end of the platform — 2.4.9 shipped 12 May 2026 with support to May 2029 — but on those two versions your choice is a funded upgrade or a replatform.

Where Adobe is genuinely the right answer: the customisation ceiling is higher than any SaaS platform here, Mtrix included. Native B2B is deep — company accounts with buyer tiers, purchase approval rules, negotiable quotes, shared catalogs with per-company pricing. Catalogs of hundreds of thousands of SKUs have few homes and this is one. And if the organisation already runs Adobe Experience Cloud, Commerce shares identity and audience data with it, which usually settles the argument before tooling gets a vote.

Where it doesn't fit this page's reader. An Adobe buyer almost always has an implementation partner attached — on a team of one to twenty, that's the wrong shape of purchase whatever the licence costs. Experimentation isn't included either: Adobe Target is a separate purchase.

4. Headless — Medusa, Saleor, commercetools, Hydrogen

Headless decouples the storefront from the commerce engine: complete front-end freedom, and a front end that does not exist until an engineer builds it.

What it costs, from the vendors' own pages, 26 July 2026:

• Medusa — MIT licensed. Medusa Cloud from $29/mo on Develop, $99 on Launch and $299 on Scale, plus metered compute at $0.16/hr past the allowance and $0.30 per million edge requests. Self-hosting means Postgres, Redis, a server instance and a worker instance.
• Saleor — BSD-3-Clause. Cloud Select $1,599/mo up to $200K monthly GMV with 0.8% overage; Volume $3,999/mo up to $1M GMV with 0.4%. The free "Sandboxes" tier sits under "Non-Commercial Use Only", so it isn't a free plan. They also list an Accelerator Plan at $6,000 one-time and Forward Deployed Engineering at $12,000 one-time — a platform that sells forward-deployed engineering as a line item is telling you what implementation looks like.
• commercetools — publishes no price. The model is order-based rather than GMV-based: "Unlike GMV-based models, our order-based approach ensures no hidden fees or penalties for scaling." Checkout is sold as an add-on and the storefront is a separate product.
• Shopify Hydrogen + Oxygen — the cheapest way to try headless. Hydrogen is MIT licensed (a React Router app, not Remix), and "Oxygen is available at no extra charge on paid Shopify plans." The catch is on the plan table: one headless storefront on Basic, Grow and Advanced; 25 on Plus.

What headless genuinely buys you: no theme system, so the front end is whatever the design team specifies. Performance headroom from edge rendering. One API serving many surfaces. And with Medusa and Saleor, a codebase you can fork and run forever — Medusa states outright that you can export your data any time and self-host.

The two costs nobody prices. The first is the build. Shopify's own enterprise blog, selling headless, says: "The pricing for an enterprise headless project could cost anywhere from hundreds of thousands to millions upfront, plus annual maintenance costs" — and adds "if your business is prospering with a traditional architecture, it may not be worth the financial and time resources to invest in headless." When the vendor selling it says that, believe it.

The second cost is the one that lands on the people who didn't choose headless. Whoever currently changes a page stops being able to. There is no theme customiser on the other side of this, so a seasonal banner, a landing page and a price callout all become tickets in the same queue as the architecture. The apps go with it — anything that injected into a theme has no theme to inject into. So does measurement: none of Medusa, Saleor or commercetools ships analytics, session replay, heatmaps, experimentation or error tracking. Every one of those gets rebuilt or re-bought afterwards, by the same engineers, out of the same budget, in the quarter after the storefront was supposed to be finished.

If you're already committed to headless, the honest Mtrix pitch is not "come back." Mtrix runs on the stack you have, via npm or a CDN script, and adds measurement and experimentation on top. Its server-side rendering path is documented for Hydrogen, Next.js and SvelteKit — exactly this reader's stack.

5. Stay on Shopify Advanced and buy the gaps

The cheapest option, and for a lot of brands the correct one. Advanced is $399/mo month-to-month or $299/mo billed yearly (shopify.com/pricing, 26 July 2026) — roughly $2,100/mo less than Plus.

Update most comparison pages haven't caught. Since 5 June 2026, Shopify Rollouts can "schedule, publish, and A/B test new themes and checkout and customer account configurations" (changelog.shopify.com). Experiments require the Grow plan or higher, so Advanced qualifies, and it costs nothing extra. Anyone still telling you that you can't A/B test the Shopify checkout is working from an old page.

Where it stops, from Shopify's own Help Center, read 26 July 2026:

• It swaps one whole configuration for another — three change types: edit your main theme, replace your main theme, replace your checkout and accounts pages. No element-level variation.
• Online-store checkouts only. "Headless and custom storefront checkouts aren't supported and can't be tested with rollouts."
• A checkout experiment reports exactly one metric: checkout conversion rate. Not revenue, not AOV, not orders. And "you can't customize the available metrics for your rollout."
• No statistical significance. The words significance, confidence, probability and sample size appear on none of the four Rollouts help pages. You look at the number and decide.

Concede the good part: by default a rollout reverts — "No changes are applied permanently to the affected resource." That's a safer default than most testing tools ship with.

Two more constraints on staying put. Below Plus, no app can touch the information, shipping or payment steps of checkout — Shopify's own app-availability table marks that row ✘ for every plan except Plus. And every store that isn't on Plus has until 26 August 2026 to upgrade its Thank you and Order status pages, with Additional Scripts already view-only since 28 August 2025. If any of your tracking lives there, it's on a clock: the checkout extensibility deadline.

The catch to staying is the invoice count — testing app, replay tool, analytics tool, page builder: four more subscriptions and four more definitions of a conversion. What a Shopify CRO stack actually costs does that arithmetic.

6. Mtrix — the option that isn't a bigger platform

Mtrix is the answer for the reader who priced Plus because the optimisation programme stalled, not because a rate limit bit.

Two ways to run it, and the difference matters. Build and host the store on Mtrix and you get the whole platform. Or run Mtrix as an npm package or CDN script on the Shopify store you already have, in which case you get experiments, session replay, analytics, error tracking and real-user performance monitoring — not the builder, not price testing, not the checkout. No replatform for the second path, and no three-year term for either.

On lock-in first, because it's the objection this keyword earns: Mtrix supports code export. You can leave with your site. That's the first question a merchant who has just declined a 36-month commitment should be asking.

The commercial shape. Monthly or annual. Pricing is flat across three tiers with no metered lines — not billed on sessions, orders or profiles — and there is no Mtrix transaction fee at all. One month free, no credit card, full platform access, then paid. There is no free-forever tier; if free is the requirement, Microsoft Clarity is genuinely free and unlimited and you should go there instead.

The platform. A drag-and-drop builder with live editing and one-click undo, published to the edge. Products, variants and inventory modelled natively. Multi-currency, multi-language, tax, custom domain, SSL, staging. SEO controls you edit yourself — meta, canonical, redirects, structured data, sitemap. SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certified, with GDPR, CCPA/CPRA and HIPAA/HITECH compliance programmes.

Testing and measurement, in the same product. Four test types — A/B, multivariate, split URL, mask URL — with variant assignment made in Mtrix's backend against your visitor ID rather than in a browser cookie. Bandit allocation, mutually exclusive overlapping tests, no cap on experiments on any plan, about five minutes to take one live. 100% of sessions captured, sampling opt-in, with replay filtered by experiment and variant arm — "open the sessions from the losing variant" is something you do rather than approximate. Rage clicks, dead clicks and form abandonment detected. Heatmaps by device. Errors grouped so four thousand occurrences read as one issue with a count. Real-user Core Web Vitals. Retention: one month for replay and errors, three years for events and purchases.

That combination — the experiment, the sessions it produced and the orders it moved, against one definition of revenue — is what every option above assembles from outside.

Checkout. On a store built on Mtrix: a native Mtrix checkout or the one you already have, and you can A/B test one against the other, across Stripe, Braintree/PayPal, Shopify Payments, iyzico, Mollie and Klarna. In Mtrix's own clients' checkout tests, the Mtrix checkout converted 14% better than Shopify's.*

Moving. Mtrix imports your store automatically — from your GitHub repo if you can give access, your live site URL if you can't, or Figma if you're starting fresh — then helps finish the setup. The most complex stores are fully live within one week. Order and customer history both transfer, and third-party app functionality, subscription logic and custom checkout code are supported natively — the jobs they do, not app-for-app — with each store's stack mapped on the migration call. Support is onboarding, then email, a shared Slack channel and a named contact; Mtrix does not run your experimentation programme for you.

Who should not replatform at all

• You hit a real ceiling. API limits, more than three B2B catalogs, more than ten locations, multiple storefronts. Buy Plus and stop reading.
• Five niche apps carry your revenue. Subscriptions, loyalty, your 3PL integration. Shopify's marketplace is its deepest moat and nothing here replaces it.
• You sell in person. Retail is the one column where Plus is quietly cheap — POS Pro across twenty locations, bundled, against $89/mo each anywhere below it. Mtrix has no POS at all, and neither does headless without building one.
• You're already inside a Plus term. Cancellation happens at term expiry — run the alternative in parallel and switch at renewal rather than paying for both.
• You're eight weeks from peak season. No replatform in this set is a Q4 project.

What these pages leave out

Every list on this keyword, including this one, is written by someone selling something. The part we can fix is sourcing: every figure above carries the page it came from and the date. Check three. If they hold, trust the rest.

Any page quoting you a confident dollar figure for Adobe Commerce or commercetools is quoting an agency blog. Neither publishes one. Nor does Mtrix.

Declining Plus does not make consolidation free. The reason you're on this page is that a line item looked too big. Every option above answers that by moving where the cost sits, not by deleting it: BigCommerce trades marketplace depth for a published price, headless trades the edit button for a ceiling, Advanced trades capability for four extra subscriptions, and Mtrix trades an app marketplace and a POS for one data model. There is no row on this page where you pay less and give up nothing. Pick the trade you can live with for three years, since that's the horizon the term you just refused was asking for.

Mtrix is web only. No native iOS or Android SDK — it records mobile web traffic. If you need in-app analytics, FullStory, Contentsquare and LogRocket all ship mobile SDKs and Mtrix doesn't.

Mtrix doesn't do B2B. No B2B catalogs, no company accounts, no wholesale price lists. Plus, BigCommerce Performance and Adobe Commerce all have them — if wholesale is part of your revenue, that gap decides it and Mtrix isn't in the running.

You will not find a customer of ours quoted on this page. Mtrix has published no case studies yet, so there are no logos and no lift numbers here — and a page arguing for sourcing every figure would be a poor place to invent the first one. If you want evidence at that level, ask for a reference call and talk to someone who runs it.

FAQ

The upgrade you were pricing was never about the platform

* Measured across 350,000+ sessions, tested side by side against Shopify's checkout in the same period, over two years of tests. Mtrix's own client results, not a guarantee of what a new store will see.