BigCommerce vs Shopify is closer than most platform comparisons. Both are hosted SaaS platforms, and since BigCommerce renamed its plans on 1 June 2026 (keeping the list prices but changing sales thresholds and fees), the entry prices are identical: $39 a month on monthly billing for BigCommerce Core and Shopify Basic, $105 for Growth and Grow, $399 for Scale and Advanced. The differences sit in the catalog: how many options and variants a product can carry, how custom data is stored, how categories work and how many storefronts one catalog can feed.
Choose Shopify if your products fit three options per product, you want the largest app ecosystem and one store with markets for each country. Choose BigCommerce if you need a deep category tree, more than three buyer choices on one product, personalization options that are not separate SKUs, or several storefronts fed by one catalog. The rest of this comparison goes field by field, with the platform limits from each vendor's own documentation as of 13 October 2026.
BigCommerce and Shopify compared on twelve catalog and cost criteria
Prices are the US dollar prices on the BigCommerce pricing page and Shopify's pricing page. BigCommerce limits come from its Platform Limits article. Sort or filter the table by any column.
BigCommerce vs Shopify decision table
| Entry plan, monthly billing | Core $39 ($29 billed yearly) | Basic $39 ($29 billed yearly) | Same headline price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Middle plans | Growth $105, Scale $399 | Grow $105, Advanced $399 | Same headline price |
| Top plan | Performance from $1,499/month, billed yearly | Plus from $2,300/month | Both are negotiated contracts |
| What triggers an upgrade | Trailing 12-month sales (GMV) thresholds | Features you need, not sales volume | BigCommerce moves you up as revenue grows |
| Fee for other payment providers | 2% (Core), 1% (Growth), 0.6% (Scale); none for listed embedded providers such as Stripe and PayPal | 2% (Basic), 1% (Grow), 0.6% (Advanced), 0.2% (Plus) without Shopify Payments | Check which gateway you want before comparing |
| Variants per product | 600 | 2,048 | Shopify allows more combinations |
| Options per product | No published limit; 250 values per option | 3 | A fourth buyer choice fits BigCommerce natively |
| Non-SKU choices (engraving, gift wrap) | Modifiers, unlimited | Apps or theme code | BigCommerce handles personalization in core |
| Custom product data | Custom fields (200 per product, 255 characters) and API metafields | Typed metafields and metaobjects in the admin | Shopify fields are typed; BigCommerce custom fields are plain text |
| Categories | Tree up to 8 levels, 1,000 categories per product | One taxonomy category plus flat collections | BigCommerce stores the hierarchy itself |
| Storefronts from one catalog | Up to 3, 5 or 8 by plan, paid per storefront | One store, with markets per region | BigCommerce runs several brands from one back office |
| B2B | B2B Edition (enterprise offering) | B2B features on every plan, more on Plus | Shopify starts cheaper; BigCommerce goes deeper on account hierarchy |
Plan prices after BigCommerce's June 2026 plan change
BigCommerce renamed its plans on 1 June 2026: Standard became Core, Plus became Growth, Pro became Scale and Enterprise became Performance. Core and Growth kept their old prices; Scale kept Pro's base price but replaced Pro's fixed charges per $200,000 block of sales with a percentage overage. Each self-service plan is tied to your trailing 12-month GMV, which BigCommerce calculates as gross order value minus 10%. Core covers up to $30,000 of GMV and Growth up to $100,000; above that you are upgraded automatically. Scale covers $33,333 of GMV a month and charges 0.9% on GMV above that, and a store that reaches $2 million of trailing GMV moves to Performance.
BigCommerce also added an Open Payment Provider fee in that change: 2% of order GMV on Core, 1% on Growth and 0.6% on Scale for orders processed by a provider outside its embedded list. The embedded list on that update page includes BigCommerce Payments, Stripe, Adyen, PayPal, Klarna and Worldpay, so most merchants can avoid the fee by choosing one of them.
Shopify's plans do not depend on sales. Basic costs $39 a month on monthly billing ($29 billed yearly), Grow $105 ($79), Advanced $399 ($299) and Plus starts at $2,300 a month. Shopify Payments charges 2.9% + 30¢ for online cards on Basic, falling to 2.25% + 30¢ on Plus. Using another payment provider adds Shopify's own fee of 2%, 1%, 0.6% or 0.2% depending on the plan.
Options, variants and modifiers: where each platform stops
On BigCommerce, variant options (swatch, radio buttons, rectangle list or dropdown) generate variants, and each variant gets its own SKU, price, weight, image and stock level. The BigCommerce Help Center caps a product at 600 variants, and the platform limits page allows 250 values per option and one image per variant. There is no stated cap on the number of variant options, so the 600-SKU ceiling is what binds.
BigCommerce also has modifiers: choices that change the price or weight of the base product without creating a SKU, such as an engraving text field, a gift-wrap checkbox, a date picker or a file upload. There is no limit on the number of modifiers. Shopify has no core equivalent; personalization usually comes from an app or custom theme code that writes line item properties.
A Shopify product allows three options and up to 2,048 variants. That cap was 100 until October 2025, and many themes and apps still behave as if it were; our Shopify variant limit guide lists where products with more than 100 variants still break. The practical difference is shape: Shopify allows more combinations of fewer dimensions, BigCommerce fewer combinations of more dimensions.
One office chair with four buyer choices, modeled on both
Take an office chair sold with three frame colors (Black, White, Silver), six upholstery colors, three armrest types (Fixed, 3D, 4D) and two caster types (Hard floor, Carpet). That is 3 × 6 × 3 × 2 = 108 sellable versions, each with its own SKU and stock. The store also offers an optional headrest for $49 and a name engraving on the backrest.
- On BigCommerce: one product with four variant options and 108 variants, well under the 600 cap. The headrest becomes a checkbox modifier with a +$49 price rule, and the engraving a text field modifier. Neither needs a SKU, although that also means neither has its own stock count.
- On Shopify: four buyer choices do not fit three options. You either merge two choices into one option (Armrests and casters: "4D / Carpet"), split the chair into one product per frame color, or move one choice to an app. The headrest is a separate product or a bundle; the engraving needs an app or theme code.
- In both cases: frame material, seat height range, maximum load and warranty are the same across all 108 versions and belong on the product, not on each variant.
The worked example shows the usual pattern. Catalogs with many independent buyer choices (furniture, industrial parts, configurable kits) fit BigCommerce's model more naturally. Catalogs with large size and color grids (apparel, footwear) fit Shopify's 2,048-variant limit better.
Custom fields, metafields and category metafields
BigCommerce's main tool for extra product data is the custom field: a free-text name and value pair, such as "Material: 100% merino wool", shown on the product page by most themes. A product can have 200 custom fields of up to 255 characters each, and on the Scale plan or higher with product filtering enabled, a custom field can become a storefront filter. Because the name is typed per product, "Material", "material" and "Fabric" easily end up as three different filters.
BigCommerce metafields (up to 250 per product, variant, category, brand or channel) are a developer feature: they are managed through the REST and GraphQL Admin APIs and only appear on the storefront when their permission allows it. Shopify works the other way round. Metafields are defined once in the admin with a type (text, number, measurement, reference, list), and Shopify's product category adds category metafields with fixed values, such as fabric or neckline for shirts. Our Shopify metafields guide covers definitions and namespaces.
For a catalog this matters more than it seems. Typed fields can be validated, filtered and exported consistently; free-text pairs drift. If you run BigCommerce, agree a fixed list of custom field names and keep it outside the platform, so every product uses the same spelling.
Categories on BigCommerce, collections on Shopify
BigCommerce has a real category tree. A store can hold 16,000 categories nested up to 8 levels deep, a product can sit in up to 1,000 categories, and with several storefronts each storefront gets its own tree. BigCommerce recommends keeping categories under 10,000 products each for performance. The hierarchy is data: a product in Office Chairs inherits the Furniture > Office path.
Shopify separates three things. The product category is one value from Shopify's Standard Product Taxonomy, used for tax, category metafields and channels such as Google. The product type is your own free-text label. Collections are the groups shoppers browse, filled manually or automatically by conditions on tags, price, vendor or metafield values. A collection can pull in other collections as sources (Shopify calls these nested collections), but that combines product lists rather than building a tree: a product does not inherit a parent path, and the hierarchy shoppers see comes from your navigation menus.
Moving between the two means translating a tree into collections plus menus, or the reverse. Plan that mapping early: it decides your category URLs, your breadcrumbs and which redirects you need.
Multi-storefront on BigCommerce versus markets on Shopify
BigCommerce Multi-Storefront runs several storefronts from one control panel and one catalog. Each storefront can have its own domain, theme, category tree, web pages and price lists, and you choose which products appear where. Extra storefronts cost $30 a month on Core (up to 3), $50 on Growth (up to 5) and $100 on Scale (up to 8). BigCommerce's headless Catalyst storefronts allow up to 15 storefronts and 500,000 products; if you are weighing that route, read what headless commerce changes first.
Languages are the catch. BigCommerce's own documentation says product names and descriptions cannot be overridden per storefront language without customization. Product overrides per storefront (name, description, categories, images, display names of options, custom fields, SEO fields) are available in the control panel only on the Performance plan, through the API on any plan, and are marked as limited availability. Multiple transactional currencies need a Stencil theme, the optimized one-page checkout and a gateway that supports them.
Shopify takes the opposite approach: one store, with markets per country or region that decide languages, currencies, prices and domains, and translations stored per language on the same product. Separate brands with separate catalogs usually mean separate Shopify stores. Our Shopify Markets guide covers the setup.
B2B selling: B2B Edition versus Shopify's B2B features
Shopify B2B runs on every plan: companies and locations, net payment terms, quantity rules and price breaks, and up to 3 B2B catalogs on Basic, Grow and Advanced. Plus adds unlimited catalogs, catalogs assigned directly to one company, deposits and partial payments.
BigCommerce's B2B Edition is its enterprise B2B offering. It adds company accounts with several levels of hierarchy, buyer roles, a buyer portal, sales staff quotes, an invoice portal and a quick order pad that accepts SKUs or a CSV upload, on top of price lists and customer groups. For a wholesaler with large accounts and buyer hierarchies, BigCommerce goes further; for a brand adding a trade channel next to retail, Shopify's built-in features are cheaper to start. Our list of B2B ecommerce features helps you score both.
Apps, trials and support outside the catalog
Most BigCommerce vs Shopify reviews spend their time here, and the gap is real. The Shopify App Store lists over 16,000 apps; BigCommerce's own site advertises over 1,200. For a catalog that needs an app for every missing feature (personalization, bundles, product options beyond three), Shopify's ecosystem is deeper, but many apps add a monthly fee, and each one is another place where product data lives.
Shopify offers a 3-day free trial, after which most plans cost $1 a month for the first 3 months. BigCommerce offers a 15-day free trial and keeps a lapsed trial store's data for 90 days. Phone support is included on BigCommerce Growth, Scale and Performance but not on Core. Test both with your own catalog during the trial, not with demo products: import your most complex variant product first.
BigCommerce import and Shopify CSV: what each file cannot carry
BigCommerce's current product import matches existing products on the ID column, and variants, images and custom fields need their own IDs to update. Categories are assigned by Category ID, not by name, and the importer cannot create categories. It also cannot add or delete variants on a product that already has variants or create modifiers, and metafields are managed only through the API. The platform limits page lists 20,000 REST API calls an hour for trial stores and the two entry plans, and 60,000 for the plan formerly called Pro.
Shopify's product CSV matches on the URL handle, accepts files up to 15 MB and supports product metafields but not variant metafields. A Collection column can add products to collections on import, but exports leave it out, so collection membership has to be rebuilt from the old category data. Our WooCommerce vs Shopify comparison covers the Shopify CSV in more detail. In practice, a migration of more than a few hundred products in either direction runs through the APIs, with the CSV kept for spot fixes.
Moving a BigCommerce catalog to Shopify
Data checks to finish before you switch platforms
Most of the risk in a platform switch is product data that does not fit the new model. Work through these checks on a copy of your catalog before you sign anything.
Catalog checklist for a BigCommerce or Shopify switch
Seven catalog profiles and the platform each one points to
- Apparel, footwear and other size-color catalogs: Shopify. Two or three options with large grids fit the 2,048-variant limit, and metafields cover the rest.
- Configurable products with four or more choices, or personalization: BigCommerce. Unlimited variant options up to 600 SKUs plus modifiers avoid workarounds.
- Deep category trees with thousands of categories: BigCommerce, which stores the hierarchy natively.
- Several brands or B2B and retail storefronts from one catalog: BigCommerce Multi-Storefront, as long as you do not need per-language product content below the Performance plan.
- One brand selling in several countries and languages: Shopify with markets.
- A small team that wants the widest choice of apps and themes: Shopify.
- A store that wants to avoid platform payment fees with Stripe, Adyen or PayPal: BigCommerce, where those providers are on the embedded list.
Keeping product data portable between BigCommerce and Shopify
Whichever platform you choose, keeping the master product data outside it makes the next decision cheaper. WISEPIM is a PIM, not a storefront. It can import a BigCommerce catalog and read products from it on a schedule through an automation; it does not write data back to BigCommerce. With Shopify the connection runs both ways: WISEPIM imports products and pushes enriched titles, descriptions, attributes, prices, images and translations back, with opt-in auto-sync about 30 seconds after you save a product.
That makes WISEPIM a practical middle step for a platform migration: import from BigCommerce, fix custom field names into typed attributes, fill gaps with AI, and push the cleaned catalog to Shopify.
