Most comparisons of these two platforms are written by agencies that build on only one of them. We are a Shopify Plus development agency and a BigDev Certified BigCommerce partner, and our own client roster is split: brands like Chantecaille and QC Supply run on Shopify Plus, while PayJoy, KOL Foods, and Richloom run on BigCommerce Enterprise. Each of those businesses is on its platform for a specific, articulable reason, and those reasons are the useful content of this article.
TL;DR: The platforms overlap on 80% of what a mid-market or enterprise store needs. The decisions that should drive your choice live in the other 20%: how you process payments, how much of the checkout you need to own, how complex your B2B and catalog logic is, and how much you value Shopify’s ecosystem. Fees and features below are current as of September 2026; confirm them on the official pricing pages before signing anything.
First, a Naming Note: “Enterprise” Is Now “Performance”
In June 2026, BigCommerce renamed its plans: Standard, Plus, Pro, and Enterprise became Core, Growth, Scale, and Performance. The enterprise tier you are probably researching is now sold as BigCommerce Performance, with custom pricing that the BigCommerce pricing page lists as starting at $1,499 per month, billed annually.
Everyone still calls it Enterprise: buyers, agencies, and existing contracts. We use both names in this article, but if you request a quote today, the paper will say Performance.
Shopify Plus vs BigCommerce Enterprise at a Glance
| Factor | Shopify Plus | BigCommerce Enterprise (Performance) |
|---|---|---|
| List price | From $2,300/mo (3-year term) or $2,500/mo (1-year) | Custom quote, from ~$1,499/mo billed annually |
| Above-volume pricing | Variable fee (0.35%–0.40% of sales) above ~$800k/mo, capped at $40k/mo | Negotiated against your GMV at contract |
| Third-party payment gateways | Allowed, +0.2% platform fee per transaction | Allowed; 0% platform fee with contract |
| Checkout | Hosted by Shopify; customized via sandboxed extensions | Open Checkout: open source, fully replaceable |
| Native B2B | Company accounts, catalogs, terms; deepest on Plus | B2B Edition: buyer portal, quotes, shopping lists |
| Multi-store | Up to 9 expansion stores + Shopify Markets | Multi-Storefront on one backend; count per contract |
| Headless | Hydrogen + Oxygen, Storefront API | Catalyst (Next.js), GraphQL Storefront API |
| App ecosystem | Largest in commerce | Smaller, enterprise-focused |
| Best fit | DTC-led growth, launch velocity, ecosystem depth | Payment flexibility, checkout ownership, complex catalogs |
Pricing: Comparable Licenses, Different Shapes
According to Shopify’s pricing page, Shopify Plus starts at $2,300 per month on a three-year term, or $2,500 per month on a one-year term. Above roughly $800,000 in monthly sales, the license converts to a variable fee (0.35% of sales on three-year terms, 0.40% on one-year), currently capped at $40,000 per month.
BigCommerce Performance is quote-based. Public reporting and our own client experience put mid-market contracts in a range that overlaps heavily with Plus. The important structural difference: your BigCommerce contract price is negotiated against your GMV up front, while Shopify’s variable fee is a formula that scales automatically as you grow.
Neither list price is your real cost. Apps, development, integrations, and payments will each move the total more than the license delta. We walk through the same discipline in our Magento vs Shopify Plus TCO analysis: model three years of total cost, not one year of subscription.
The Payments Question: Who Takes a Percentage of Every Sale?
This is the single most common reason our clients end up on BigCommerce Enterprise, so it deserves precision.
On Shopify Plus, using Shopify Payments waives third-party transaction fees, and Plus gets Shopify’s lowest card rates. But if your business needs a different primary processor, an FX or high-risk specialist, a regional acquirer, or your own negotiated rates, Shopify adds a 0.2% platform fee on those transactions.
On BigCommerce, the calculus changed in June 2026. The lower self-serve plans now charge a monthly fee on GMV processed through non-approved (“open”) payment providers: 2% on Core, 1% on Growth, 0.6% on Scale. Roughly twenty embedded providers, including Stripe, PayPal Braintree, and Adyen, remain fee-free on every plan. On Performance, the open-provider rate is 0.0% with contract, which preserves the historical BigCommerce position at the enterprise tier: bring any payment stack you want, and the platform takes nothing.
At $30 million in annual GMV on a third-party gateway, Shopify’s 0.2% is $60,000 per year, on top of the variable platform fee at that volume. That is the kind of number that decides platforms.
Our client PayJoy is the concrete example: a fintech whose entire model is its own financing flow at checkout. They replatformed to BigCommerce Enterprise specifically so their payment architecture could be theirs, with no platform percentage and no forced gateway.
Checkout: Extensible vs Ownable
Both platforms let you go far beyond a stock checkout. The difference is where the ceiling is.
Shopify’s checkout is Shopify’s. You customize it through checkout UI extensions, the branding API, and Shopify Functions for discount, payment, and delivery logic. It is fast, PCI-scoped for you, and battle-tested at flash-sale scale. But extensions run in a sandbox: no arbitrary JavaScript in the checkout DOM, no third-party scripts, no replacing the flow. Full checkout customization, including UI extensions on the information, shipping, and payment steps, is a Plus capability. We cover the practical surface area in our checkout customization guide.
BigCommerce’s Open Checkout is yours. It is an open-source checkout you can modify or replace entirely: custom payment instruments, financing flows, multi-step B2B logic, whatever your business requires, with the corresponding responsibility for what you build. PayJoy’s checkout, with its own financing API in the payment step, is not something we could have built inside a hosted, sandboxed checkout. After the rebuild it also ran 40% faster than the implementation it replaced.
The honest framing: if your checkout requirements fit inside Shopify’s extension model, Shopify’s checkout is the better-maintained asset and you should not take on checkout ownership you do not need. If they do not fit, no amount of Shopify customization will change the ceiling.
B2B: Native Depth vs Ecosystem Breadth
Both platforms treat B2B as core, not an add-on, and both took big steps in the last two years.
Shopify B2B now ships on every plan: company accounts, B2B catalogs with customer-specific pricing, net payment terms, PO numbers, and quick-order lists. Plus adds unlimited catalogs, direct catalog assignment to companies and locations, deposits and partial payments, vaulted payment methods, and the option of a dedicated wholesale store. Where native features stop, the ecosystem continues; our own B2B Buyer Portal app exists because native Shopify B2B does not yet let buyers manage their own users and locations.
BigCommerce B2B Edition ships more workflow out of the box: a buyer portal, quote management, shared shopping lists, sales-rep masquerade, invoice payments, and purchase orders as a payment method. For distributors and manufacturers whose buying process is quote-driven and rep-assisted, that native depth means less custom development on day one.
We compared the two stacks feature by feature in Shopify B2B vs BigCommerce B2B, and the practical conclusion has held: list your five most important buyer workflows and test them against each platform’s native model before assuming either direction. Our Shopify B2B implementation guide shows what that requirements work looks like.
Multi-Store, International, and Catalog Architecture
Shopify Plus includes up to nine expansion stores alongside your main store, and Shopify Markets handles multi-currency, localized pricing, and regional storefront behavior. The model is multiple stores when you need genuinely different experiences, Markets when you need one store localized. Chantecaille runs five regional Plus stores under this architecture.
BigCommerce Multi-Storefront takes the opposite approach: multiple storefronts, potentially different brands, on one backend with one catalog, one admin, and shared customer data. Storefront count on Performance is contractual. For multi-brand businesses that want centralized operations, one backend is a real operational advantage; for businesses that want independent regional teams and release schedules, separate stores can be the safer model.
Developer Platform: Ecosystem vs Openness
Shopify’s developer platform is the deepest in commerce: the largest app store, Hydrogen and Oxygen for headless builds, Functions for server-side logic, and the biggest hiring pool of experienced developers and agencies. Its APIs are metered by query cost, which well-built integrations handle without drama, but high-frequency ERP synchronization needs to be engineered around the limits.
BigCommerce positions itself as the open platform: REST and GraphQL APIs with famously generous limits (unlimited calls has long been the top-tier pitch, with practical concurrency limits), webhooks, and Catalyst, its Next.js storefront framework, for composable builds. There are fewer apps, so you should assume more integration work is custom, and plan for the fact that the specialist talent pool is smaller.
For integration-heavy businesses, this trade is real in both directions: we have built custom middleware for Shopify ERP integrations that a BigCommerce build might have handled with raw API volume, and BigCommerce builds where a Shopify app would have saved four weeks of custom work.
What Our Own Client Base Says
Patterns from running both platforms in production:
- Chantecaille (Shopify Plus): luxury DTC, five regional stores, deep app and marketing-stack integration. Plus’s ecosystem and Markets architecture fit exactly.
- QC Supply (Shopify Plus): 50,000+ SKU wholesale catalog with ERP and PIM integration and a custom B2B portal. Shopify’s B2B model plus custom development carried the complexity.
- PayJoy (BigCommerce Enterprise): custom financing checkout and full payment-stack ownership. Open Checkout was the requirement, not a preference.
- KOL Foods and Richloom (BigCommerce Enterprise): businesses whose payment economics and catalog models priced out better on a zero-transaction-fee contract with checkout and API flexibility.
Most of our work is Shopify Plus, and when a business’s requirements fit both platforms, we usually say so and let economics decide. That is also why we maintain migration services in both directions: the right platform is a per-business answer, not an agency allegiance.
How to Decide
| If this describes you… | Lean toward |
|---|---|
| Your negotiated payment rates or custom payment flow are central to your margins | BigCommerce Enterprise |
| Your checkout must do something a hosted checkout will not allow | BigCommerce Enterprise |
| Quote-driven, rep-assisted B2B is your primary motion | BigCommerce Enterprise, or Shopify Plus with custom B2B work |
| You want the largest app ecosystem and fastest launch velocity | Shopify Plus |
| DTC growth leads, with B2B as a channel | Shopify Plus |
| You run multiple brands on one operational backbone | BigCommerce Multi-Storefront, or Plus expansion stores |
| You are international-first with one brand | Shopify Plus with Markets |
| Shopify Payments works for you at Plus rates | Shopify Plus; the fee argument mostly disappears |
Then pressure-test the choice the same way we advise for the standard tiers: take your three hardest requirements, not your average ones, and walk them through each platform with someone who has built both.
Get a Platform Recommendation With the Math Attached
If you are weighing Shopify Plus against BigCommerce Enterprise, bring us your GMV, payment mix, checkout requirements, and integration list. We will model the three-year economics on both platforms and tell you which one we would build on, including when the answer is the platform we do less business on. Start with our Shopify Plus development services or BigCommerce development services, or talk to us directly.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is BigCommerce Enterprise still called Enterprise?
BigCommerce renamed its plans in June 2026. The enterprise tier is now sold as Performance, with custom pricing starting around $1,499 per month billed annually. Most buyers, agencies, and even BigCommerce sales conversations still use the name Enterprise, and contracts negotiated under the old name continue to run.
Which is cheaper: Shopify Plus or BigCommerce Enterprise?
At typical mid-market volumes the license costs are comparable, and total cost depends more on payments. Shopify Plus adds a 0.2% fee when you use a third-party gateway and a variable platform fee above roughly $800,000 in monthly sales. BigCommerce Performance contracts typically include zero platform transaction fees for any gateway. Model your own volume and payment mix rather than comparing sticker prices.
Can you fully customize checkout on Shopify Plus?
You can customize Shopify checkout extensively through checkout UI extensions, the branding API, and Shopify Functions, but always inside Shopify’s hosted checkout and its sandbox rules. You cannot replace the checkout or run arbitrary code in it. BigCommerce’s Open Checkout is open source and can be replaced entirely, including custom payment flows.
Which platform is better for B2B?
BigCommerce B2B Edition ships more B2B workflow out of the box, including quoting, shared shopping lists, and a buyer portal. Shopify’s native B2B now covers company accounts, catalogs, and payment terms on all plans, with the deepest capabilities on Plus, and its app ecosystem can close most gaps. The right answer depends on which specific workflows your buyers need.
Can I migrate from Shopify Plus to BigCommerce Enterprise, or the other way?
Yes, both directions are well-trodden migrations. The work is in data mapping, SEO preservation, checkout and integration rebuilding, and testing. We maintain dedicated migration services for each direction and will recommend against migrating when the business case is not there.
Who should choose BigCommerce Enterprise over Shopify Plus?
Businesses whose economics depend on payment flexibility, whose checkout must do something Shopify’s hosted checkout does not allow, or whose catalog and B2B complexity map better to BigCommerce’s native model. Businesses that want the largest app ecosystem, the fastest launch velocity, and the deepest talent pool usually land on Shopify Plus.