Tl;dr - The Magento AI tooling that landed over the past year genuinely gutted the cost of building custom stuff, and the 2026 releases fixed a lot of what people used to complain about. But none of it touched the reason merchants walked away in the first place, which is the cost of keeping the thing patched and alive. So, is Magento easier now? Yes, mostly.
For most of the last decade, telling someone you ran your store on Magento (or Adobe Commerce) got you the same look as telling them you only listen to music on vinyl. Half respect, half pity, both followed by questions on why you chose a difficult life.
Then the mood in the community threads started to shift. A developer posted in r/magento2 under the flag "unpopular opinion" and said:
"I know the common wisdom is that Magento is "too much work," but I think that AI has flipped the script. Projects that used to take me two weeks are now getting finished the same day. Because Magento is so open, I can use AI to build and adapt modules instantly.
Lately, clients are asking for integrations they never could have afforded before. I just set up a system where Magento reads an email, pulls a bank XML, and reconciles transactions automatically. It took me maybe two hours. On Shopify, that would have been a massive technical headache involving endless workarounds."
Around the same time Brent W. Peterson, the formidable LinkedIn personality who has been kicking around this ecosystem longer than most agencies have been in business, published a piece with a title that reads like a dare: "Magento Is Now Easier Than Shopify". That is a bold title, especially considering that internet doesn’t usually spare such stark opinions.
So what's going on? Is the Magento vs Shopify argument, which everybody assumed got settled somewhere around 2019, is back out of the garage? Is Shopify nearing the end of its run as the Apple of ecommerce platforms? And more importantly, should you be considering a shift?
We're answering all these questions and more.
Let's start with the thing that made Magento miserable to work on in the first place. Did you know that the store you see in the files is not the store that actually runs?
Let me break this down: Magento assembles pages on the fly, pulling pieces from dozens of modules. So changing one button can mean first figuring out which of the 12 modules actually controls it.
That’s why early AI coding tools struggled. They could read the files, write beautiful code, and then promptly set your live store on fire.
That got fixed, and the fix is boring plumbing with a clunky name. It is called MCP, short for Model Context Protocol, and the easiest way to picture it is through a mechanic's diagnostic port. Instead of the AI popping the hood and guessing from the service manual, it plugs straight in and asks the running engine what it is actually doing. That means AI tools like Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and many more can become a part of your coding journey.
I'll take an example here. Instead of saying, “I think this button comes from this module,” the AI can trace the button to the module actually generating it and make the change there.
Neat, isn't it? But was that the only big change?
May 2026 was the busiest month the Adobe Commerce had in years.
Magento has clearly come a long way. But that raises a more interesting question:
All that said, the flexibility argument was never wrong. It just got cheaper. Here's a look into how:
Shopify’s Checkout Extensibility is a genuinely good toolkit. The only catch with it is that you’re still building inside Shopify’s house, so you have to play by Shopify’s rules. Customization is only allowed till a limit. Complex multi-step configurators and industry-specific checkout flows can hit their limits pretty quickly.
Magento doesn’t have that fence. If you want to customize your checkout however you like, you can customize your checkout however you like.
Remember the Reddit thread earlier? The poster was trying to build an automation for bank reconciliation job. For Shopify, there is no app for it.
That’s the problem with closed platforms: if nobody built the integration, you’re stuck waiting for someone to build it. Magento lets you build it yourself.
Some products refuse to fit neatly into a dropdown menu like made-to-measure furniture, build-to-order equipment, or products with enough configurations that make your head hurt.
If your catalogue doesn't behave like a normal catalogue, Magento gives you much more room to customize the platform behave like your business, rather than the other way around.
This one is new and underrated. Adobe's Commerce MCP server lets you build your own shopping assistants and upsell agents on your own terms. Shopify handles the agentic plumbing for you, which is lovely right up until the moment you want control over what an AI shopping agent is allowed to see and offer. With AI traffic to US retail sites up 269% year on year as of March 2026, that distinction is about to matter a lot more than it does today. But that promise comes with its own can of worms as agents can destroy your site in seconds or worse, can be hijacked by attackers.
"Made the jump from Magento to Shopify about 8 months ago and honestly wish I did it sooner... My conversion rate actually went up a bit too, probably because the checkout process is way smoother now"
Just like this random redditor, none of the above is the reason people left.
Last autumn a vulnerability called SessionReaper went public. It let attackers walk into a store without a password and, on the wrong server setup, run whatever code they liked. Adobe shipped an emergency patch immediately.
Six weeks later, a security firm checked how many stores had installed the patch. Hint: it was just 38%. The other 62% were still sitting there wide open, with working exploit code circulating publicly. Within ten days of the attacks going properly automated, 81% of every Magento store on earth had been probed, and somewhere between 16% to 18% are believed to have had a backdoor quietly installed before anyone these stores got around to patching.
But that's just the story from the security side. If we look at the data, we'll see a very similar narrative. Data still shows Shopify as the number one destination for stores leaving Magento, and they are paying between $50,000 and $250,000 for the privilege. People do not spend a quarter of a million dollars to escape a platform they merely find annoying.
To summarize, AI made the building faster. It did not shorten the gap between Adobe publishing a patch and your team deploying it. And it sure as hell did not rectify other technical issues Magento had.
Ask yourself these five questions and then score yourself honestly. Take one point for each.
Now judge your score-
Four or five: Magento’s AI development story is probably relevant to you. If your business keeps bumping into Shopify’s limits, it’s worth taking a serious look at what Magento can do now.
Two or three: Don’t blow up the whole store to fix one annoying problem. Solve the specific pain first. Replatforming for a single issue is a pretty expensive way to create a new set of problems.
Zero or one: AI probably doesn’t change your answer. Shopify’s $2,300-a-month price tag is still buying you something valuable, mainly, someone else worrying about what happens to your site at 2 a.m.
So, is Magento better than Shopify in 2026? For a merchant with engineering muscle and a serious patching habit, the gap narrowed more this year than in the previous five combined. But for everyone else, the same trade sits where it always did.
Whichever side you land on, there’s one thing your platform can’t natively solve for you: what happens when the products you sell eventually breaks. That’s where SureBright comes in for the rescue, giving merchants a simple way to offer extended warranties, accidental damage and shipping protection without adding another operational headache. And beyond simply protecting products, it can help drive incremental revenue, reduce returns and improve overall profitability. It’s one less thing to worry about.
Want to see how that looks on your site? Book your demo today.
.jpg)
M Khizar is a writer enjoys making complicated things feel simple. He writes about warranties, ecommerce, and the small details people usually overlook, until they matter. His work focuses on clarity and helping readers make smarter decisions without overthinking it. Outside of work, he enjoys reading, writing personal blogs, and binge eating with friends.
