Magento vs Shopify Plus for B2B: An Honest Split

Magento vs Shopify Plus for B2B is usually argued by people who sell one of the two. The honest version is narrower and more useful: both platforms now ship real B2B features, both can carry a wholesale business, and the choice turns on a handful of specific questions about how your buyers order, how your catalog is shaped and who is going to run the platform for the next five years. This article goes through those questions one at a time and says plainly where each platform wins.

What each platform ships for B2B

Adobe Commerce B2B

Adobe Commerce has carried a dedicated B2B module for years, and its feature list reads like a distributor's order desk: company accounts that group many buyers under one customer, company hierarchies that let a parent manage its subsidiaries, shared catalogs with custom prices per company, quick order by SKU, negotiable quotes, requisition lists for the things a buyer reorders every month, purchase orders with approval rules, and payment on account against a company credit limit.

Two licensing facts decide who can use it. On Adobe Commerce on cloud infrastructure or on-premises, B2B is an extension that needs its own licence and installation, while Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service includes core B2B features such as company management and quoting by default, as Adobe's platform and services overview sets out. Magento Open Source, the free edition, does not include the B2B module at all; an Open Source store that needs B2B builds it or buys extensions for it.

Shopify B2B

Shopify's B2B features arrived later and have grown quickly. B2B customers are set up as companies, each company has one or more locations, and each location carries its own catalogs, pricing, payment terms, tax exemptions and contacts. Payment terms can require a deposit on orders placed at checkout, and catalogs can carry quantity rules (a minimum, a maximum and an increment per variant) and up to ten volume price breaks per product.

The plan question is often answered wrongly. Shopify B2B is not a Shopify Plus feature any more: Shopify's B2B documentation lists it on the Basic, Grow, Advanced and Shopify Plus plans, and not on Starter or Retail. Plus still matters for B2B, for the reasons in the sections below, but it is no longer the entry ticket.

Magento vs Shopify Plus for B2B, category by category

Company structure and buyer roles

Adobe Commerce models the customer as a company with a hierarchy of teams and users, each user holding a role that decides what they can see and do: who may place orders, who may only build a requisition list, who approves above a limit. Hierarchies of related companies let a parent administrator manage subsidiaries from one account.

Shopify models the customer as a company with locations, and puts the commercial terms on the location: its catalogs, its prices, its payment terms, its tax status. That fits a business whose customers are branches, stores or sites very well. It fits less well when the buyer organisation itself is deep, with departments, cost centres and layered permissions inside one customer.

Winner. Adobe Commerce for deep buyer organisations; a draw for customers whose structure is simply a list of locations.

Pricing and catalogs

Both platforms give each customer its own prices. Adobe Commerce does it with shared catalogs assigned to companies, which can also hide products a company is not allowed to buy. Shopify does it with catalogs assigned to company locations, up to 25 per location, with quantity rules and volume breaks layered on top.

The difference shows at the extremes. Contract pricing that comes from an ERP and changes per customer, per SKU and per date usually needs an integration on either platform, because neither admin is meant to be the place a pricing team maintains ten thousand customer-specific prices by hand. Where the rules are tiers, breaks and a few price lists, Shopify's catalogs are quick to run.

Winner. Adobe Commerce at the complex end, Shopify for straightforward tiered pricing.

Quotes, requisition lists and approvals

Negotiable quotes, requisition lists and purchase orders with approval rules are native in Adobe Commerce B2B, with the rules written on order total, shipping cost or the number of distinct SKUs. A buyer can ask for a quote on a cart, the sales team can counter, and the agreed quote turns into an order.

Shopify covers part of this natively, through draft orders reviewed by the merchant and payment terms on the location, and the rest through apps or custom development. Stores that live on negotiated quotes and multi-step internal approvals feel that gap every day; stores that sell at list price to known accounts never notice it.

Winner. Adobe Commerce, clearly, if quoting and approvals are how your customers buy.

Catalog size and the product model

Shopify's product model now allows up to 2,048 variants per product, with up to three options per product, a large step from the old limit and enough for most apparel and many parts catalogs. A catalog that needs more than three options per product, or products that are really configurations of many independent attributes, still has to be modelled around that limit, usually by splitting products or by using an app.

Adobe Commerce has no comparable ceiling on attributes, and its configurable, bundle and grouped product types were designed for catalogs where one item is assembled from many choices. The cost is complexity: a large Adobe Commerce catalog needs indexing, search and caching tuned by someone who knows the platform.

Winner. Adobe Commerce for configurable and attribute-heavy catalogs; Shopify for catalogs that fit three options.

Custom logic and checkout

On Shopify, custom backend logic runs as Functions: custom discounts, payment and delivery options shown or hidden by rule, and cart validation such as stopping an order over a limit. Public apps that contain Functions work on any plan, but only Shopify Plus stores can run custom apps that contain Function APIs, which is where Plus earns its place in a B2B store with rules of its own. The checkout itself is extended with checkout UI extensions, and checkout.liquid is no longer supported for the information, shipping and payment steps.

On Adobe Commerce, custom logic is PHP in modules, plugins and observers, with almost no limit on what can change. That freedom is the reason heavily customised B2B stores live on Magento, and it is also the reason their upgrades are expensive.

Winner. Adobe Commerce for unlimited customisation; Shopify Plus for custom rules inside a platform that stays upgradeable.

ERP integration

Both platforms integrate with the ERPs B2B merchants run, and on both the integration is the real project: orders out, stock, prices, customers and credit back in, reconciled every day. Adobe Commerce exposes its B2B entities, companies, credit, quotes and purchase orders, through its APIs. Shopify exposes companies, locations and catalogs through its Admin API.

Winner. A draw. Pick the platform on the other questions and budget the integration either way.

Hosting, upgrades and who runs it

This is the question merchants most often answer last and should answer first. Shopify is hosted and upgraded by Shopify; nobody on your side patches it. Adobe Commerce on cloud infrastructure is hosted by Adobe, but the merchant stays responsible for application-level maintenance, custom code and every version upgrade, and Adobe's lifecycle calendar is strict: 2.4.6 left standard support on 11 August 2026, 2.4.7 follows on 31 May 2027, and from 1 June 2027 Adobe stops maintaining Cloud environments that run unsupported versions. Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service changes that, because Adobe manages the core application, the infrastructure and the updates, at the price of moving customisation out of the core.

Winner. Shopify, unless you have, or hire, a team that will keep an Adobe Commerce store current.

The comparison at a glance

Which one to choose

Choose Adobe Commerce if

• Your customers negotiate quotes, order through layered approvals and buy on account against a credit limit.
• Your catalog is configurable, attribute-heavy or modelled on more than three options per product.
• Your business logic is genuinely unusual, and you have, or will pay for, a team that keeps the platform current.

The build itself, from company accounts to ERP sync, is what our Adobe Commerce B2B development service covers.

Choose Shopify, with Plus where the rules demand it, if

• Your customers are locations buying from catalogs at agreed prices and terms, without negotiation on every order.
• Your catalog fits Shopify's product model, and a few rules can live in Functions rather than in a custom codebase.
• You would rather nobody on your side ever schedules a platform upgrade again.

The cost of choosing wrong

Getting this wrong costs a migration, and the two directions fail differently. A B2B merchant who chose Shopify and outgrew it usually hits the wall on quotes, approvals or catalog shape, and the move back to Adobe Commerce is described on our Shopify to Magento migration page: company accounts, shared catalogs and ERP sync built natively, with the catalog, customers and order history moved and the rankings kept.

A merchant who chose Adobe Commerce for B2B depth it never used usually feels it in the upgrade bill and the hosting invoice. The way out runs through our Magento to Shopify migration, which starts with the honest fit check, because some stores should stay where they are.

In both directions the expensive parts are the same: customer passwords cannot be carried across, so every buyer is invited to set a new one; order history goes in through the API rather than the customer import; and every old URL needs a redirect before cutover. A careful first choice avoids all of it.

Key takeaways

• Shopify B2B runs on Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus; Plus matters for custom-app Functions, not for B2B itself.
• Adobe Commerce B2B needs its own licence on Cloud and on-premises, is included in Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service, and is absent from Open Source.
• Quotes, approvals, deep buyer hierarchies and configurable catalogs point to Adobe Commerce; locations, price lists and reorders point to Shopify.
• Decide who will keep the platform current before you decide the platform.

Conclusion

Magento vs Shopify Plus for B2B has stopped being a contest between a B2B platform and a consumer one. Both carry wholesale businesses today. Adobe Commerce still wins where buying is negotiated, approved and configured, and it asks for a team in return. Shopify wins where buying is a login, a catalog and a reorder, and it asks for nothing on upgrade day. Answer how your customers order and who will run the platform, and the choice usually makes itself.