BigCommerce vs. Shopify: Which falls short for enterprises — and why commercetools wins

In the battle for eCommerce dominance, BigCommerce vs. Shopify is a classic debate. Both platforms offer solid solutions for businesses looking to sell online. But when it comes to enterprise-grade commerce, neither of them truly measures up.

At first glance, Shopify and BigCommerce appear to be excellent options. They promise ease of use, out-of-the-box functionality and scalability. But scratch beneath the surface and their limitations quickly become apparent, particularly for complex, high-growth enterprises — and even more so in the agentic era. 

Enter commercetools — a leading AI-first commerce platform built for enterprise-level flexibility, scalability and innovation. Before we explain why commercetools is the superior choice for global enterprises, let’s break down the BigCommerce vs. Shopify battle.

The ability to customize experiences beyond out-of-the-box features is crucial for enterprises seeking to deliver personalized customer experiences while ensuring their commerce platform evolves in tandem with business growth. Achieving this is possible through extensibility, which is the very opposite of a closed ecosystem approach provided by all-in-one solutions.  

• BigCommerce: More flexible than Shopify, thanks to its API-driven approach, but still tied to a monolithic structure. Customizations often require third-party plugins, which can increase complexity and cost. While offering robust extensibility, BigCommerce’s core still provides a more opinionated, pre-built set of functionalities and a native administration layer, leading to integration issues, hidden costs and vendor reliance.

• Shopify: Highly restrictive and over-dependent on apps. Many core features (advanced search, subscriptions, B2B tools) require additional paid plugins, making extensibility cumbersome and costly. Additionally, Shopify Scripts and Liquid restrict businesses to predefined workflows, which can hinder those with unique needs or complex processes, particularly beyond checkout and for advanced promotion management. Making deep customization is difficult, as most changes require additional apps or workarounds. Stemming from an SMB-focused offering, Shopify Plus still struggles to support complex enterprise requirements, particularly with multi-region and multi-channel commerce.

Enterprises need a platform that scales with them, handling high traffic volumes, global expansion and growing product catalogs.

• BigCommerce: No sales limits and better performance under heavy traffic than Shopify. BigCommerce is (increasingly) cloud-native. It is primarily hosted on Google Cloud Platform, with AWS-backed processing for redundancy.

• Shopify: Despite leveraging Google Cloud, Shopify’s infrastructure remains rooted in its original monolithic design, limiting its cloud-native capabilities. Versioned APIs also create technical debt and impact the vendor’s ability to handle growth. As a result, Shopify struggles with scalability for big sales events. Shopify Plus users often experience performance bottlenecks due to its reliance on multiple instances rather than a unified architecture. 

Large-scale businesses are inherently complex as they usually operate across multiple brands, channels (think digital and brick-and-mortar stores), regions and business models. Managing this “multi-everything” is only possible with a unified commerce platform that provides a foundation for all business endeavors while remaining 100% flexible. 

• BigCommerce: BigCommerce’s B2B focus and reliance on third-party POS integrations hinder true unified commerce by emphasizing the connection between channels rather than unification.

• Shopify: While Shopify supports both B2B and B2C operations, its limited B2B functionality often requires separate stores. Its POS system struggles with data synchronization between online and physical locations, hindering unified commerce.

As agentic shopping starts to take off, enterprises are increasingly eager to experiment with, roll out and adapt AI-driven experiences. BigCommerce and Shopify are certainly not standing still, as both vendors are making moves to position themselves for all things agentic. 

• BigCommerce: Although the vendor rebranded in 2025, signaling a broader shift and vision toward AI-driven and agent-driven commerce, its capabilities appear to be more theoretical at this stage. The main issue for the vendor is that, despite emphasizing open SaaS and modularity, the platform still includes legacy components and may have parts that are less flexible, which makes fine-grained, agentic control more challenging. Moreover, many of the agentic enhancements are built via partnerships, which, while common, reduce the enterprise’s ability to swap agents at will or integrate different AI stacks. 

• Shopify: Shopify has begun exploring agentic AI, with concrete progress, including the joint announcement with Stripe and OpenAI, which launched the ACP (agentic commerce protocol). However, its structural rigidity and lack of modularity may hinder its ambitions. Because its systems aren’t as interchangeable, pluggable modules, customizing, extending or replacing parts (e.g., recommendation engines, checkout logic, agent workflows, etc.) is difficult, especially for enterprises with specific requirements.

Ultimately, it all comes down to business value. How fast can enterprises implement new commerce capabilities? What’s the total costs of ownership (TCO) they can expect?  

• BigCommerce: Thanks to its out-of-the-box features, BigCommerce offers fast time-to-market and time-to-value — but only for more straightforward commerce implementations. For organizations with limited budgets or those seeking a turnkey solution, BigCommerce’s lower upfront costs and bundled services could be attractive from a TCO perspective.

• Shopify: Projects can be created within weeks due to limited customization options and a predefined, linear deployment path. This is a poor experience for enterprises that are complex and require true customizability. Moreover, Shopify’s enterprise pricing model, which includes a fixed subscription and revenue share, can lead to higher costs, especially for online orders. Complex customizations can further inflate your TCO.

While BigCommerce seems like a better fit than Shopify for enterprises, it still has major weaknesses:

• Limited flexibility: API-based but still has a one-size-fits-all approach, relying on a suite of built-in features with APIs layered on top. The older API structure can limit the customization of integrations.

• Lack of key enterprise features: No native support for subscription management, multi-tier marketplaces and other advanced functionalities needed for complex digital commerce.

• Limited scalability: Inventory challenges, monolithic architecture constraints and not fully cloud-agnostic, creating friction for global expansion.

Meanwhile, Shopify falls even shorter for enterprises:

• Not composable/modular: Shopify’s rigid architecture makes customization even more difficult than BigCommerce, limiting adaptability for large enterprises. Even their Commerce Components offering — intended for large businesses — lacks true microservices, reducing agility for complex integrations. Commerce Components also require significant in-house tech capabilities, further narrowing their appeal. 

• Higher TCO and pricing challenges: Shopify is even worse than BigCommerce in terms of total cost of ownership. Its reliance on third-party apps, revenue-based pricing model and restrictions, such as forced Shopify Payments, creates an expensive and inflexible ecosystem that becomes costlier as businesses scale.

For enterprises with complex needs, neither BigCommerce nor Shopify is the right choice.

commercetools isn’t just an alternative — it’s a fundamentally different approach to enterprise-grade commerce. Here’s what makes it superior:

• AI-first, modular architecture: Unlike BigCommerce and Shopify, commercetools delivers true modularity by allowing enterprises to build, customize and scale their commerce stack to drive revenue. This is a stark contrast to the limitations found in BigCommerce vs. Shopify Plus, where businesses often struggle with outdated structures and dependency on app marketplaces. With commercetools, it’s easier to integrate and scale emerging technologies, such as agentic AI. 

• Superior scalability and performance: commercetools operates on a multi-cloud infrastructure, ensuring reliability and disaster recovery through a no-point-of-failure architecture, elastic scalability that dynamically adapts to sudden spikes in demand, and unmatched uptime and performance.

• Unified commerce: Unlike Shopify and BigCommerce, commercetools offers a unified commerce platform that supports multiple brands, regions, business models and channels in one platform. 

• Lower TCO: commercetools is designed to deliver enterprise-grade capabilities while maintaining a lower total cost of ownership (TCO). 

• Unmatched recognized industry leadership: 

  • commercetools was named a Leader for the fifth consecutive year in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce. 

  • commercetools was also named as a Customers’ Choice in the 2025 Gartner® Voice of the Customer for Digital Commerce with an impressive 89% “willingness to recommend” score. 

  • commercetools was a top performer in the Paradigm B2B Combine 2025 (Enterprise Edition) with 12 medals across the evaluated 12 categories, including 8 gold, 3 silver and 1 bronze medals. 

Note: Neither BigCommerce nor Shopify has been able to match these accolades across all of these market analysts. 

For enterprises seeking a future-proof commerce solution, commercetools is the clear choice. 

To dive deeper into how commercetools stacks up against BigCommerce and Shopify, download our short enterprise decision guides for commercetools vs. BigCommerce and commercetools vs. Shopify.