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E-Commerce · head to head

BigCommerce vs Magento

BigCommerce logo

BigCommerce

E-Commerce

Hosted e-commerce platform that charges no transaction fee and no surcharge for third party gateways

From
$29.95/month
Rated
-
Full reviewWebsite
Magento logo

Magento

E-Commerce

Open core commerce platform, free as Magento Open Source and licensed by revenue as Adobe Commerce

From
Free
Rated
-
Full reviewWebsite

The short version

  • Only Magento has a free tier, so it costs nothing to try first.
  • Each has a real cost: BigCommerce plans are gated on annual online sales, so a strong year pushes you into a higher tier and a higher subscription even though your traffic, catalogue and resource usage are unchanged.; Magento it is open core rather than open source, so B2B, customer segmentation, content staging and the Adobe analytics and recommendation services sit behind the Adobe Commerce licence, and discovering that mid-project converts a free platform into a revenue-banded contract.
  • They diverge on capability: BigCommerce covers No platform transaction fee, Magento covers Two editions.
  • Prices and features above were last checked on 30 August 2026.

Where they differ

Only the attributes on which BigCommerce and Magento actually diverge.

Attributes where BigCommerce and Magento differ
AttributeBigCommerceMagento
Starting price$29.95/monthFree
Pricing modelsubscriptionopen-source
Free tierNoYes
Founded20092008

Identical on both: platforms (Web), user rating (Not yet rated), category (E-Commerce).

What each one covers

Drawn from each product's published feature list. An absence here means we hold no record of it - not that the product lacks it.

Only in BigCommerce

  • No platform transaction fee
  • Stencil theme framework
  • Multi-storefront
  • Faceted search
  • B2B capabilities
  • Headless support
  • Built-in tax integrations
  • Multi-currency

Only in Magento

  • Two editions
  • Complex catalogue handling
  • Multi-store and multi-website
  • Native B2B in the paid edition
  • Multi-currency and multi-region
  • Composer module system
  • GraphQL and REST APIs
  • Hyva and Mage-OS ecosystem

What people use each for

The jobs each tool is most often brought in to do.

BigCommerce

  • A merchant whose volume makes a percentage transaction fee the largest line in the platform decisionnot Magento
  • A retailer needing several branded storefronts sharing one catalogue and one back officenot Magento
  • A B2B seller who needs company accounts and customer-specific price lists without custom developmentnot Magento
  • A team going headless who wants a managed commerce back end rather than a self-hosted onenot Magento

Magento

  • A retailer with tens of thousands of SKUs and attribute-heavy catalogue logic that SaaS platforms restrictnot BigCommerce
  • A multi-brand or multi-region group needing separate websites, currencies and tax treatment from one back officenot BigCommerce
  • A B2B seller needing company accounts, negotiated pricing and quoting inside the storefrontnot BigCommerce
  • An enterprise with an in-house or retained development team that treats commerce as owned softwarenot BigCommerce

Where each one falls short

Documented limitations, not opinions. Every one is a constraint you would hit in normal use.

BigCommerce

  • Plans are gated on annual online sales, so a strong year pushes you into a higher tier and a higher subscription even though your traffic, catalogue and resource usage are unchanged.
  • There is a documented ceiling on the number of variants a single product can have, which breaks configurable, made-to-measure and heavily optioned catalogues and forces awkward workarounds such as splitting one product into several listings.
  • The application marketplace is much smaller than the largest competitor's, so a specific integration or niche feature is more often a custom build, and custom builds are the line item that quietly exceeds the platform cost.
  • Theme customisation past the visual settings means Stencil, Handlebars templates and a local command line workflow, so changes that look small to a marketing team still require a developer and a deployment.
  • Migrating out moves products and inventory reasonably well and moves the things that matter badly, since customer passwords cannot be exported in usable form, order history rarely transfers intact, and reviews and URL structure have to be rebuilt with a redirect map you must produce yourself or lose the search traffic.

Magento

  • It is open core rather than open source, so B2B, customer segmentation, content staging and the Adobe analytics and recommendation services sit behind the Adobe Commerce licence, and discovering that mid-project converts a free platform into a revenue-banded contract.
  • The Adobe Commerce licence is priced on bands of gross merchandise value, so the platform bill increases as the store succeeds and is largely unrelated to the infrastructure or support you consume.
  • A production installation needs a search engine, a cache, a reverse proxy, a message queue and a database tuned together, so hosting is a DevOps engagement rather than a plan, and the first serious traffic event is where under-sizing becomes visible.
  • Minor version upgrades regularly break third party modules, so staying current means a regression testing and remediation project several times a year, and merchants who skip upgrades to avoid that end up running software with unpatched vulnerabilities.
  • The specialist developer market is small and expensive relative to other platforms, so an agency retainer becomes a permanent operating cost and losing that agency is a genuine business continuity problem rather than a procurement inconvenience.

Pricing, plan by plan

BigCommerce

$29.95/month
  • Standard$29.95/month
    • Unlimited products
    • 2 staff accounts
    • Basic reports
  • Plus$79.95/month
    • All Standard features
    • Up to 5 staff accounts
    • Advanced reports

Magento

Free
  • Magento Open SourceFree
    • Unlimited products
    • Multiple storefronts
    • Advanced marketing
  • Adobe Commerce$20000/year
    • All Open Source features
    • 24/7 enterprise support
    • Managed cloud hosting

Which should you pick?

Choose BigCommerce if

  • You need no platform transaction fee.
  • You also want stencil theme framework.
BigCommerce review

Choose Magento if

  • You need two editions.
  • You want to start without paying.
  • You also want complex catalogue handling.
Magento review

Questions people ask

Is BigCommerce or Magento better?
Neither clearly leads. BigCommerce starts at $29.95/month and Magento at Free, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.
Which is cheaper, BigCommerce or Magento?
Magento has a free tier; the other does not. Paid plans start at $29.95/month for BigCommerce and Free for Magento.
Does BigCommerce or Magento run on more platforms?
Both run on Web, so platform support will not decide this one for you.
Can I use Magento for free?
Yes. Magento has a free tier, so you can try it without paying. BigCommerce starts at $29.95/month.
What is BigCommerce best used for?
BigCommerce is most often used for a merchant whose volume makes a percentage transaction fee the largest line in the platform decision, a retailer needing several branded storefronts sharing one catalogue and one back office, a b2b seller who needs company accounts and customer-specific price lists without custom development, a team going headless who wants a managed commerce back end rather than a self-hosted one. Of those, a merchant whose volume makes a percentage transaction fee the largest line in the platform decision and a retailer needing several branded storefronts sharing one catalogue and one back office are not what Magento is typically brought in for.
What can BigCommerce do that Magento cannot?
BigCommerce covers No platform transaction fee, Stencil theme framework, Multi-storefront, Faceted search. Magento covers Two editions, Complex catalogue handling, Multi-store and multi-website, Native B2B in the paid edition.

Answered from the vendors’ own pages

BigCommerce: Does BigCommerce charge transaction fees?

No, and it does not surcharge third party payment gateways either. Revenue affects the price through plan sales thresholds instead.

Magento: Is Magento free?

Magento Open Source is. Adobe Commerce is not, and it holds back B2B, segmentation, content staging and the Adobe analytics and recommendation layer. Establish which edition a requirement needs before you commit.

BigCommerce: What happens when I exceed my plan's sales threshold?

You move to the next plan tier. Model this at your projected growth rate, because the increase is driven by revenue rather than by usage.

Magento: How is Adobe Commerce priced?

On bands of gross merchandise value, so the licence grows with revenue rather than with usage. Model it against your three year forecast, not this year's turnover.

BigCommerce: Is the app ecosystem large enough?

It covers the common integrations. For anything niche, assume a development project rather than an install, and price that in before comparing subscriptions.

Magento: What does it really cost to run?

Licence if applicable, plus tuned infrastructure, plus a specialist agency or in-house team. For most deployments the people and hosting exceed the licence.

BigCommerce: How hard is it to leave?

Products export cleanly. Customer passwords, order history, reviews and SEO URLs do not. Build the redirect map before you cut over, not after traffic drops.

Magento: Why do agencies keep mentioning Hyva?

The stock front end stack is slow to develop against, so Hyva, a commercially licensed replacement front end, has become a common default. It is another licence to budget for.

Magento: What happened with Magento 1?

It reached end of life and left merchants on unsupported, unpatched software facing a full replatform. It is the reference point for how long to assume support for any edition you adopt.

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