BigCommerce vs Shopify Plus

Which should you choose?

Brands rarely leave BigCommerce because it’s broken. They leave when growth runs into the edges of its ecosystem. So weigh three things: what you pay per order, which features you’d otherwise buy as apps and how large an ecosystem your roadmap needs.

How do BigCommerce and Shopify Plus compare side by side?

Broad comparison; details vary by plan and contract. Platform facts and published prices as of October 2026. App counts are third-party estimates – neither platform publishes an official figure. Migration time and cost are OUXP’s typical ranges; the free assessment gives bands for your store.

What does each platform cost to run?

On platform fees alone, BigCommerce usually costs less. The gap comes from two lines: the subscription, and the fee for processing payments through a gateway other than the platform’s own.

Published prices checked on bigcommerce.com and shopify.com in October 2026. BigCommerce introduced new plan names and fees in 2026 – its Enterprise plan is now Performance. Contract prices on both platforms are negotiated, so treat these as starting points, not quotes.

A worked example: $5M a year through your own gateway

Take a store selling $5M a year – about $417,000 a month, below the level where Shopify’s variable fee is commonly reported to start – that wants to keep its existing payment processor rather than switch to Shopify Payments.

• BigCommerce Performance: from about $18,000 a year, with no gateway fee. That is the published $1,499/month floor; a quote at this volume may be higher.
• Shopify Plus: $37,600–$40,000 a year – a $27,600–⁠$30,000 subscription plus $10,000 (0.20% of $5M) for the third-party gateway.

At BigCommerce’s published floor, that’s a gap of about $20,000–$22,000 a year – roughly 0.4% of sales. That gap, plus the one-time cost of the move, is the bar Shopify Plus has to clear through conversion, apps you don’t have to build and engineering time saved. Switch to Shopify Payments and the $10,000 fee disappears, but you change processor and rates – a decision for your finance team, not a footnote.

Costs the table leaves out

• Payment processing. The largest cost line at scale on either platform. Card rates depend on your processor and volume, not on the platform.
• Apps. Features BigCommerce includes – reviews, product modifiers, customer-group pricing – often mean an app subscription on Shopify. Count those before you compare. The Shopify Plus pricing guide breaks down a typical app stack and the all-in annual cost by store size.
• The move itself. A BigCommerce migration typically costs $30,000–⁠$70,000, once. The migration cost guide shows what moves the number.

Want the numbers for your own store? Get a free migration assessment: within 2 business days an engineer sends a written cost band and timeline band for the move.

What’s the same on both platforms?

Many of the usual comparison points don’t separate these two. Both are fully hosted SaaS, so on either platform:

• Hosting, CDN, SSL and scaling for peak traffic are the platform’s job – nothing to provision before Black Friday
• The platform is a PCI DSS Level 1 service provider, so card security sits largely with it
• There are no version upgrades – both update continuously
• Modern APIs connect your ERP, CRM, PIM and 3PL, and power headless storefronts

So ongoing work on either platform means the theme, apps, integrations and custom features – not servers. Both also retire features on their own schedule, and on Shopify, custom apps need a yearly update because each quarterly API version is supported for at least 12 months.

If you’re also weighing a self-hosted platform, where the servers and security are yours, read WooCommerce vs Shopify Plus or Magento vs Shopify Plus.

Which features are built in on each platform?

BigCommerce’s pitch is that more comes in the box. That holds for a handful of features that matter to catalog-heavy and wholesale stores – and it’s the main reason some brands stay.

If your store leans on modifiers, group price lists or bulk pricing, a move to Shopify Plus means rebuilding them – as theme code, Shopify Functions or an app – so they belong in the migration scope, and any app fees belong in the cost comparison.

How much can you change – checkout, catalog and URLs?

Here the trade-off is control versus upkeep. BigCommerce hands developers more raw control; Shopify Plus offers fixed extension points that Shopify maintains for you.

Checkout

BigCommerce ships a one-page checkout and lets developers fork its open-source checkout, written in React, or build their own on its Checkout SDK. That is full code-level control. The price is upkeep: your fork has to keep pace with BigCommerce’s updates, and once a custom checkout changes how card payments flow, you can no longer rely on BigCommerce’s PCI attestation alone – that part of compliance becomes yours.

Shopify Plus gives no access to checkout code. You customize it through Checkout UI extensions, the branding API, web pixels and Shopify Functions for discount, shipping, payment and validation logic – and only Plus can extend the information, shipping and payment steps.

Shopify maintains and tests the checkout itself, and Shop Pay is built in. That covers most real requirements, but not a checkout whose steps you need to redesign from scratch.

Catalog

BigCommerce combines variant options with modifiers, allows up to 600 SKUs per product and up to 200 custom fields per product. Categories nest, and brand is a field of its own.

Shopify allows 3 options and up to 2,048 variants per product, with extra data in metafields and metaobjects. Collections – hand-picked or rule-based – replace categories, and hierarchy lives in navigation menus. Products with more than 3 variant options are the biggest scope driver when a BigCommerce store moves.

URLs

BigCommerce lets a product or category live at any URL – /blue-widget/ at the root, for example. Shopify fixes the paths: /products/, /collections/, /pages/ and /blogs/. Almost every product and category URL changes in a move, so the redirect map decides whether your rankings survive it.

Which is better for B2B – B2B Edition or Shopify B2B?

Both platforms handle serious B2B, packaged differently. BigCommerce sells B2B Edition, an add-on to its Performance plan with custom pricing. Shopify put its core B2B features on every paid plan on April 2, 2026, and keeps the scale features for Plus.

Feature names from BigCommerce’s B2B Edition pages and Shopify’s B2B features by plan, checked October 2026.

B2B Edition is the more complete buyer portal out of the box – quotes, invoices and shopping lists without extra apps. Shopify’s B2B costs nothing extra and covers most wholesale programs: company accounts, catalogs, net terms and volume pricing.

If your buyers depend on negotiated quotes, an invoice portal or multi-level approvals, map how each would work on Shopify before you decide – the free migration assessment flags the ones that would need an app or a custom build. ERP-driven pricing and credit limits usually run through an integration either way – see commerce integrations, and the CleanFlow case study for catalog and cross-border B2B on Shopify.

Apps, developers and AI – how big is the gap?

This is the strongest case for Shopify Plus, and the one BigCommerce can’t close by adding features.

• 18,000–25,000

  Shopify App Store apps (third‑party count)

• 1,000–1,300

  BigCommerce marketplace apps (usual estimate)

Apps and developers

Third-party trackers counted roughly 18,000 to 25,000 apps in the Shopify App Store in 2026; BigCommerce’s marketplace is usually put at 1,000 to 1,300. Most categories exist on both. Niche needs – a specific 3PL, loyalty model or marketplace connector – are far more likely to be covered on Shopify, often by several competing apps.

The same goes for people. Shopify has the larger pool of agencies, freelancers and in-house candidates, so specialists are easier to hire and to replace. BigCommerce specialists exist, but there are fewer of them.

AI and new features

Shopify builds AI into every admin: Sidekick, an assistant that analyzes the store and carries out tasks with your approval, and Shopify Magic for content. Agentic Storefronts, announced in December 2025 and rolling out through 2026, let merchants list and sell products in AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot. Shopify announces new features twice a year in its Editions releases.

BigCommerce announced its own assistant, BigCommerce Companion, in April 2026, alongside conversational search. To reach AI shopping channels such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity, it relies on Feedonomics, a feed-management business owned by its parent company, Commerce.com (formerly BigCommerce Holdings).

For most stores, AI is a tiebreaker rather than a reason to move: both can put your catalog in front of AI shopping assistants – Shopify from its own admin, BigCommerce through Feedonomics.

Headless

Both support headless builds. Shopify pairs Hydrogen, its React framework, with Oxygen hosting; BigCommerce offers Catalyst, a Next.js storefront, with Makeswift for visual editing. Headless is rarely what decides between the two – headless commerce covers when it is worth it at all.

Thinking of moving from BigCommerce?

Price the move against what you’d gain, not against BigCommerce’s subscription. OUXP, a Shopify Plus Partner since 2019 with 300+ projects delivered, moves BigCommerce stores to Shopify Plus, and our free assessment needs no access to your store. Within 2 business days an engineer sends a written platform verdict, timeline band, cost band and the 2–3 risks most likely to complicate your move – and says so if staying is the better call.

What a BigCommerce move involves

SaaS to SaaS means no servers to unpick. Products, customers, order history, reviews, blog posts and pages export cleanly through BigCommerce’s APIs. The work sits in six places:

1. Options and modifiers. Products with more than 3 variant options are split into linked products, or their non-stock choices move into metafields; modifiers become line item properties or app-driven options. You approve the mapping before any data moves.
2. Custom fields, brands and categories. Custom fields become metafields, brands become the vendor field or metaobjects, and nested categories become collections plus navigation menus.
3. URLs and SEO. Almost every URL changes, so a per-pattern 301 map, carried-over metadata and structured data, and ranking monitoring after launch are part of the job.
4. Pricing rules. Customer-group price lists, bulk pricing and B2B Edition workflows are rebuilt as B2B catalogs, discounts or Shopify Functions.
5. Theme. Stencil themes don’t transfer, so the storefront is rebuilt in Liquid – as a faithful copy of your design or as a redesign.
6. Apps and integrations. Every app is mapped to a Shopify app, a native feature or a custom build, and ERP, CRM and 3PL connections are reconnected and tested before cutover.

Customer passwords don’t move: BigCommerce doesn’t export them, and Shopify can’t import passwords from any platform. A new Shopify store uses Shopify’s customer accounts, so returning customers sign in with a one-time code sent by email – no password to reset and no activation invite to send. Gift certificate balances get their own migration step.

Typical range: $30,000–⁠$70,000 over 4–⁠12 weeks – along with WooCommerce, one of the two shortest paths to Shopify Plus we run. A single storefront with products that fit Shopify’s 3 options lands near 4 weeks; B2B Edition workflows, heavy modifiers, ERP integrations or several storefronts push it toward 12. The assessment gives you bands; after a deeper review with read-only access under NDA, the price and timeline are fixed in writing before work starts – and SEO preservation is always included.

On a BigCommerce contract, count back from the renewal date: discovery, 4–⁠12 weeks of delivery and a buffer, without launching in your peak season.