Saleor vs Shopify Plus: when owning your stack starts paying off

Let’s start where an honest comparison has to: most stores should be on Shopify. If you’re finding product-market fit, Shopify’s speed, ecosystem and operational polish are worth every fee. We build headless commerce on Saleor, and we’d still tell a young brand to stay on Shopify. The comparison gets interesting at scale, because the two platforms charge you for growth in fundamentally different ways.

How each platform taxes growth

Shopify Plus is a subscription that starts in the low thousands per month, plus payment processing, plus — and this is the structural piece — either Shopify Payments or additional per-transaction fees for using your own provider. Add the app subscriptions that accumulate around every real store (search, reviews, subscriptions, ERP connectors), each billing monthly and several taking their own percentage. Individually reasonable; together, a permanent percentage-of-revenue drag that grows exactly as fast as you do.

Saleor is open-source: no license, no per-transaction platform fee. Your costs are hosting and engineering — building the store, then owning it. That’s not “free”; it’s a different shape. You’re trading a revenue-linked tax for a fixed engineering investment.

That’s the whole comparison in one sentence: Shopify costs scale with revenue, Saleor costs scale with ambition.

Where the ceiling actually hits

Brands rarely leave Shopify over fees alone. They leave when they hit walls:

• Checkout customization. Shopify’s checkout is deliberately constrained — it’s their revenue perimeter. B2B pricing logic, multi-step configurators, regional payment flows: at some point you’re fighting the platform’s business model, not its API.
• Complex catalogs and B2B. Contract pricing, approval workflows, multi-warehouse logic — the app ecosystem stretches only so far before you’re maintaining a Rube Goldberg machine of subscriptions.
• Data and ownership. Your commerce data lives in someone else’s system, accessible through their APIs, at their rate limits, under their terms. For brands investing in their own data platform, that dependency starts to chafe.

Saleor, being a GraphQL-first Django application you run yourself, has none of these walls — every workflow, checkout step and integration is code you control. The storefront is whatever you build it with (we use Next.js or Astro). The flip side, stated plainly: every one of those capabilities is also your responsibility now.

The prerequisite nobody should skip

Owning your commerce stack requires engineering ownership — in-house or through a partner you’d trust with production. If your organization can’t or doesn’t want to own software, no fee schedule justifies Saleor, and the “savings” will be consumed by an under-maintained platform. This is the main thing we screen for before taking a Saleor project, because a migration that shouldn’t happen helps nobody.

A realistic decision rule

Stay on Shopify while: fees are an annoyance rather than a board-slide line item, your checkout needs fit the platform, and engineering isn’t a muscle you want to build. Consider Saleor when at least two of these are true: platform-linked costs have become a material percentage of margin, you’re blocked on customization that matters commercially, B2B workflows are core to the business, or you already have engineering ownership. Migrations from Shopify, Magento and WooCommerce — catalog, customers, order history — are well-trodden; we’ve outlined how we run them.

Bring us your fee breakdown and your blocked-features list, and we’ll tell you honestly which side of the line you’re on — that conversation is free.