Shopify vs BigCommerce: Which is the Best eCommerce Platform?

BigCommerce and Shopify take different approaches to eCommerce. Shopify combines a streamlined store-building experience with a large app ecosystem, while BigCommerce includes more eCommerce and B2B functionality directly in the platform.

Both platforms offer plans starting at $29/month on annual billing, but the total cost can change based on payment processing, apps, sales volume, storefront requirements, and international selling. This BigCommerce vs Shopify comparison examines pricing, features, B2B capabilities, apps, SEO, integrations, scalability, and other factors to help you determine which platform fits your business requirements.

Shopify vs BigCommerce: Comparison Table

Factor	Shopify	BigCommerce
Pricing	Starts from $29 per month. Additional transaction fees.	Starts from $29 per month. No additional transaction fees.
Ease of Use	Relatively easy, but some technical knowledge is required	User-friendly interface, good for beginners
Customization	Less customizable, but easier-to-use themes	Highly customizable, offers more flexibility
SEO	Good SEO tools, but less flexible	Strong SEO tools and features
Marketing Features	Basic marketing tools, but integrates well with third-party apps	Robust marketing tools, including email marketing and promotions
Customer Support	Good customer support, but less comprehensive than BigCommerce	Good customer support, including 24/7 live chat
Target Audience	Small to medium-sized businesses	Larger businesses and enterprises

Both platforms offer a suite of features to help you build and manage your online store. But which one is the right fit for you? Well, before we dive deep into the comparison, let’s look at an overview of the two platforms.

Overview of Shopify

Shopify is a hosted eCommerce platform founded in 2006 and now runs over 2.9 million active stores worldwide, making it the larger platform by user base in the Shopify vs BigCommerce comparison. Its model favors a lean core plus an extensive app marketplace: merchants launch fast with a visual, no-code editor, then layer in Shopify development as their store’s needs get more custom.

Pros & Cons of Shopify

Pros

+ Fastest setup for non-technical users: Drag-and-drop theme editor, no coding needed to launch or restyle a store.

+ Higher variant ceiling: Raised from 100 to 2,048 variants per product in October 2025, now ahead of BigCommerce’s 600-SKU cap.

+ Largest app ecosystem in eCommerce: Estimates range from roughly 12,000 to 17,000+ active apps depending on how “active” is counted, still many times BigCommerce’s marketplace.

+ Built-in AI tools: Shopify Magic (product descriptions, image editing) and the Sidekick assistant ship on the platform itself. BigCommerce’s equivalent, BigAI, is still mostly enterprise-only.

+ No forced revenue-based upgrades: Unlike BigCommerce, Shopify doesn’t cap sales volume per plan.

Cons

– Transaction fees apply outside Shopify Payments: 0.5% to 2% on top of your payment processor’s rate if you don’t use Shopify Payments.

– 3-option cap remains: Even with 2,048 variants allowed, you’re still limited to 3 option types (e.g., Size, Color, Material) per product.

– Multi-storefront requires Shopify Plus: Not available on Basic, Grow, or Advanced. You’re paying enterprise pricing just for this one feature.

– More reliance on paid apps: Several BigCommerce-native features (advanced filtering, customer groups) need a paid app on Shopify, adding to total monthly cost.

Overview of BigCommerce

BigCommerce is a hosted, open SaaS ecommerce platform founded in 2009. Its approach focuses on providing more eCommerce functionality within the core platform, including B2B capabilities, multi-storefront management, product catalogs, and flexible integrations.

This makes BigCommerce particularly relevant for businesses with complex catalogs, B2B requirements, multiple storefronts, or workflows that would otherwise require several third-party apps.

Pros & Cons of BigCommerce

Pros

+ Multi-storefront from the entry plan: Add extra storefronts on the Core plan for $30/month each (up to 3). Shopify only allows this on Shopify Plus ($2,300+/month).

+ Deeper built-in B2B tools: Customer groups, tiered pricing, and bulk discount rules are native, no app required.

+ Conditional zero platform fee: No fee if you route payments through one of BigCommerce’s 20 approved Embedded Payment Providers, including Stripe, PayPal, and Adyen.

+ 24/7 support via Phone, email, and live chat is available across BigCommerce plans.

Cons

– Payment fee applies outside approved gateways: BigCommerce’s Open Payment Provider Fee (2% on Core, 1% on Growth, 0.6% on Scale) applies to any order processed outside its approved list.

– Revenue caps force upgrades: Core is capped at $30K trailing 12-month sales and Growth at $100K. Crossing either triggers a mandatory plan bump.

– Lower variant ceiling: Caps at 600 SKUs per product, below Shopify’s current 2,048.

– Smaller app marketplace: Roughly 1,000 to 1,300 apps, a fraction of Shopify’s store.

– Steeper theme customization: Advanced layout changes often need help from BigCommerce development experts, since direct theme file edits aren’t beginner-friendly.

Difference Between Shopify and BigCommerce

Both platforms cover the basics. Where they actually diverge is in the specifics below: pricing structure, API openness, AI tooling, and international selling, each of which can change which platform fits your business.

Ease of Use

Shopify: A drag-and-drop editor handles most storefront changes without touching code, and the setup flow is built for non-technical founders from day one.

BigCommerce: The V3 admin panel is clean, but advanced theme edits (like changing a product page layout) often require editing theme files directly rather than using the visual editor.

Verdict: Shopify has the shorter learning curve for a first-time store owner. BigCommerce’s admin is capable but assumes more technical comfort once you go past basic setup.

Design & Customization

Shopify: Around 180+ themes (10 to 14 free depending on the count method), with the OS 2.0 theme architecture making section-based customization possible without code.

BigCommerce: Around 200 to 250 themes (roughly 12 free), built on the Stencil framework. Deep layout changes need developer-level theme file access.

Verdict: Shopify’s newer theme architecture makes non-developer customization more practical. BigCommerce offers comparable depth but leans on developers for anything beyond template settings.

Shopify’s newer theme architecture makes non-developer customization more practical. BigCommerce offers comparable depth but leans on developers for anything beyond template settings, so dedicated eCommerce website design services might be needed.

Scalability

Shopify: No revenue-based plan caps at all. You scale by adding staff seats and unlocking lower processing rates on higher tiers, not by outgrowing a sales ceiling.

BigCommerce: No revenue ceiling on features, but each plan has a trailing-12-month GMV cap (Core: $30K, Growth: $100K, Scale: $33,333/month with 0.9% overage above), and exceeding it triggers an automatic upgrade.

Verdict: For predictable cost scaling, Shopify avoids forced upgrades tied to revenue. BigCommerce’s caps mean fast-growing stores need to budget for tier jumps in advance.

Payment Gateways

Shopify: Shopify Payments carries no extra Shopify fee beyond standard card processing. Using any other gateway adds a 0.5% to 2% fee on top of that gateway’s own rate.

BigCommerce: No BigCommerce platform fee on orders through its ~20 approved Embedded Payment Providers (Stripe, PayPal, Adyen, Klarna, and others). Orders through any other gateway now carry an Open Payment Provider Fee: 2% on Core, 1% on Growth, and 0.6% on Scale.

Verdict: Functionally similar in 2026: both platforms now charge a fee for stepping outside their preferred payment provider. Neither is unconditionally “fee-free” anymore.

Sales & Marketing

Shopify: Core discounting and gift cards are native too, but advanced marketing (loyalty, SMS, upsells) typically routes through the app store, where Shopify’s much larger selection offers more choice.

BigCommerce: Built-in customer groups, tiered/bulk pricing, coupon and gift card tools, and native abandoned cart recovery ship on all plans without an app.

Verdict: BigCommerce packs more marketing capability into the base platform; Shopify offsets a leaner core with a far bigger app catalog to build from.

Apps

BigCommerce: Roughly 1,000 to 1,300 apps in its marketplace, covering the essentials but with fewer options in any single category.

Shopify: Estimates for active, publicly listed apps range from roughly 12,000 to over 17,000 depending on the count method, spanning nearly every niche use case.

Verdict: Shopify wins decisively on raw selection. BigCommerce compensates by needing fewer apps in the first place, since more is built in natively.

Integrations

Shopify: Broader third-party integration coverage overall (CRM, helpdesk, accounting, POS) simply due to app volume, though channel selling depends more on individual app quality than a unified native manager.

BigCommerce: Deep native Channel Manager for Amazon, eBay, Facebook, and Google Shopping (via its Feedonomics acquisition), plus strong ERP/PIM integration support through its open API.

Verdict: BigCommerce’s integrations feel more “managed” out of the box; Shopify’s are more numerous but more fragmented across separate app installs, often needing dedicated Shopify integration services to tie them together cleanly.

AI & Agentic Commerce

Shopify: Shopify Magic (product descriptions, image background removal, email generation) and the Sidekick admin assistant are live and broadly available. On the agentic side, Shopify has pushed further with Storefront API support for AI shopping agents and features like independent product-variant publishing built for machine-readable catalogs.

BigCommerce: BigAI is live for all plans in a limited form (a copywriting assistant), while predictive analytics, AI product recommendations, and a B2B quote assistant remain enterprise-focused and, as of this writing, still rolling out.

Verdict: Shopify is meaningfully ahead on both consumer-facing AI tooling and agentic-commerce infrastructure. BigCommerce’s equivalent is still maturing and mostly gated to higher tiers.

Headless Commerce & API Flexibility

Shopify: Hydrogen, its React/Remix framework, runs on Shopify’s own Oxygen edge hosting. It’s tightly integrated with Shopify’s commerce graph but keeps checkout and hosting coupled to Shopify, which some developers argue makes it “headless” in name more than in architecture.

BigCommerce: Catalyst, its open-source Next.js storefront framework used in headless commerce development builds (launched in 2024), deploys to any host (Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare, or your own infrastructure) with no vendor lock-in on hosting.

Verdict: For teams that want zero platform lock-in on hosting, Catalyst is the more open choice. For teams that want the deepest first-party integration with Shopify’s ecosystem and don’t mind the coupling, Hydrogen wins. For best execution, hire Shopify developers who know the framework.

Global Ecommerce

Shopify: Shopify Markets keeps one storefront with regional “Market” views layered on top (shared catalog, currency conversion, localization, duties). Markets Pro adds automated tax/duty remittance across 150+ countries. Full separate-storefront control still requires Shopify Plus.

BigCommerce: Multi-Storefront lets you run genuinely separate storefronts, each with its own catalog, theme, currency, and checkout, from one shared account, available starting on the Core plan for an added per-storefront fee.

Verdict: Shopify Markets is faster to launch for straightforward international expansion. BigCommerce Multi-Storefront gives more architectural control when regions need genuinely different catalogs or pricing structures, without requiring an enterprise-tier plan.

Security

Shopify: Also PCI DSS Level 1 certified, with a bug bounty program and fraud-detection tooling built in. Some updates depend on manual merchant or developer action rather than rolling out automatically.

BigCommerce: PCI DSS Level 1 certified, plus ISO/IEC 27001, SOC 1 & 2, and GDPR/CCPA compliance, with automatic platform-wide security updates.

Verdict: Both meet the same top-tier compliance bar. BigCommerce’s broader compliance certification list and automatic patching give it a slight edge for regulated or enterprise buyers.

Website Speed & Performance

Shopify: Also runs on a global CDN with strong baseline performance; Hydrogen storefronts add edge-rendering via Oxygen for further speed gains on headless builds.

BigCommerce: Ships a global CDN out of the box, with an average server connection time cited under 10ms and 99.98% average uptime by the platform’s own figures.

Verdict: Both platforms perform well by default. Neither has a decisive, independently verified speed edge over the other for a standard themed store; the bigger performance lever is theme/app bloat, not the platform itself.

SEO

Shopify: Covers SEO fundamentals (auto-generated sitemaps, editable meta tags, canonical tags) but lacks native robots.txt editing and has historically been more restrictive on URL structure, leaning on apps to close the gap.

BigCommerce: More SEO control out of the box: editable robots.txt, fully customizable URL structures, and native hreflang/localized URL support for international SEO.

Verdict: BigCommerce gives more native SEO control without add-ons, a genuine advantage for content- and SEO-driven brands, and one that’s directly relevant to why this comparison matters for your business.

Customer Support

Shopify: 24/7 support via live chat and email on all plans; phone support is more limited outside higher tiers.

BigCommerce: 24/7 support via phone, email, and live chat on all plans, plus a dedicated support team structure for higher tiers.

Verdict: Comparable on paper. BigCommerce’s inclusion of phone support across all tiers gives it a slight edge for merchants who want a human on the phone regardless of plan.

Shopify vs BigCommerce Pricing: What Will You Actually Pay?

List prices look nearly identical at every tier. The real cost gap shows up in fees, thresholds, and the extras neither platform puts on its pricing page headline.

Shopify Pricing Breakdown

• Plan cost: Starter $5/month, Basic $29/month annual ($39 monthly), Grow $79/month annual ($105 monthly), Advanced $299/month annual ($399 monthly), Plus from $2,300/month on a negotiated annual contract.
• Shopify Payments: No added Shopify fee. Card rates scale down by plan: 2.9% + 30¢ on Basic, 2.7% + 30¢ on Grow, 2.5% + 30¢ on Advanced.
• Third-party payment fees: Using any gateway other than Shopify Payments adds a platform fee on top of that gateway’s own rate: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced, 0.2% on Plus.
• App costs: The average paid Shopify app runs roughly $58 to $66/month, and most stores run several apps to match features that come built in on BigCommerce, so total app spend adds up faster.
• Shopify Plus: Starts at $2,300/month on a 3-year contract (reported to run $2,300 to $2,500/month depending on term), with unlimited staff accounts, the lowest third-party fee tier (0.2%), and access to multi-storefront-equivalent functionality that isn’t available on Basic, Grow, or Advanced.
• Markets/international costs: Markets itself is free on every plan. Selling in local currency adds a conversion fee of 1.5% (US) or 2% (most other regions) on top of normal Shopify Payments processing. Managed Markets (formerly Markets Pro), which shifts tax and customs liability to Shopify’s partner, costs roughly 3.5% plus the FX fee (3.25% on Plus) as of its October 2025 repricing.

BigCommerce Pricing Breakdown

• Plan cost: Core $29/month annual ($39 monthly), Growth $79/month annual ($105 monthly), Scale $299/month annual ($399 monthly), Performance custom from $1,499/month on an annual contract.
• Payment processing: $0 platform fee on orders through an approved Embedded Payment Provider, regardless of plan.
• Payment provider options: Around 20 approved providers, including BigCommerce Payments, Stripe, PayPal (Braintree, Complete Payments, Wallet), Adyen, Klarna, Afterpay, Affirm, and Worldpay. Any gateway outside this list is classified as an “Open Payment Provider” and triggers the fee below.
• Sales thresholds: Core caps at $30,000 trailing-12-month GMV, Growth at $100,000, Scale at $33,333/month (0.9% overage above that). Crossing a cap triggers an automatic plan upgrade, and GMV here is gross order value minus 10%, so freight and tax count toward it. Performance has no published cap.
• App costs: Typical paid apps run $30 to $200/month each, though BigCommerce’s larger built-in feature set means fewer apps are needed to reach full functionality compared to Shopify.
• Enterprise pricing: Performance starts at $1,499/month on an annual, negotiated contract, with GMV caps, feature limits, and discount levels set case by case through sales.
• Multi-storefront costs: $30/month per additional storefront on Core (up to 3 total), $50/month on Growth (up to 5), $100/month on Scale (up to 8). Performance terms are custom.

Total cost difference comes from the threshold and fee structure. BigCommerce forces upgrades based on revenue but keeps fees to a flat, predictable percentage; Shopify has no revenue ceiling but layers in staff-based upgrade pressure and a steeper Managed Markets cost for merchants selling internationally.

Shopify vs BigCommerce for B2B eCommerce

Shopify for B2B

Shopify B2B is built around company profiles, each with configurable payment terms, quantity rules, and access to specific product catalogs. Core B2B functionality (company accounts, custom pricing, quantity breaks) is available progressively across Basic through Advanced, but the deepest B2B workflows, including complex approval chains and advanced quoting, are concentrated in Shopify Plus.

Choose BigCommerce if B2B is core to the business. Its B2B Edition, quotes, POs, and wholesale catalogs are built in from the entry plan. Choose Shopify if you’re already on the platform and B2B is one part of a broader store, but budget for Shopify Plus once you need advanced approval workflows or quoting.

BigCommerce for B2B

BigCommerce’s B2B Edition is free on all self-serve plans. It includes customer groups with tiered pricing, company accounts, custom price lists, wholesale catalogs, quote requests, purchase order handling, and configurable approval workflows for multi-buyer accounts.

Multiple storefronts let you run separate B2B and B2C experiences (or separate wholesale catalogs per region) from one account.

Shopify vs BigCommerce: Which Platform Is Right for Your Business?

Match your situation to the list below, most decisions come down to one or two of these.

Choose Shopify if:

• You’re launching a new DTC brand
• Ease of use is a priority
• You want a large app and integration ecosystem
• You sell across multiple channels
• You want native Shopify POS for in-person sales
• You want the fastest path to launch

Choose BigCommerce if:

• You have a complex, high-SKU catalog
• You’re B2B or wholesale-focused
• You need advanced features built in, not added via apps
• You need multiple storefronts from one account
• You want more native URL and SEO control
• You want to minimize ongoing app dependency
• Your operations involve multi-brand or multi-region complexity

If your checklist splits across both columns, the deciding factor is usually catalog complexity: simple catalogs lean Shopify, and complex or B2B catalogs lean BigCommerce.

Conclusion

The pattern behind every comparison above comes down to one architectural choice: BigCommerce builds more eCommerce functionality into its core platform, while Shopify extends through a much larger app ecosystem. Neither approach is better in the abstract; it depends on whether you’d rather pay for depth upfront or add capability as you need it.

If you’re ready to move, our eCommerce migration services handle the switch between BigCommerce and Shopify with your products, customers, and rankings intact.

FAQs on BigCommerce vs Shopify