Shopify Plus vs BigCommerce Enterprise: Full Comparison [2025]

The main difference between Shopify Plus and BigCommerce Enterprise is that Shopify Plus supports multi-stores, but only one brand per contract, while BigCommerce supports multi-store and multi-brand businesses from a single platform.

Choosing a content management system (CMS) is a critical step in supporting your business goals and your ability to keep pace with evolving consumer expectations and technology opportunities and to support your growth, however you choose to grow.

In this guide, you will find a full comparison between these two enterprise platforms across the critical factors that matter to large organizations, including:

• Performance and scalability considerations
• Developer criteria
• Built-in features to support marketing and sales
• Customization and extensibility
• B2B capabilities
• Support and service
• Security

Disclaimer: The information below is accurate as of November 20, 2024.

What is Shopify Plus?

Shopify Plus is the enterprise platform for high-growth businesses that sell between $1 million and $500 million annually. Shopify Plus is backed by a large development team and a strong history of updates and innovations in digital commerce, trusted by brands including Shiseido, SONY, and Converse. Shopify Plus can be deployed on Shopify’s own headless stack or can be deployed and hosted anywhere of your choosing.

What is BigCommerce Enterprise?

BigCommerce Enterprise is a headless and composable platform designed to support high-growth enterprise businesses with both vertical and horizontal scaling, with no limits on the number of brands you can support. BigCommerce Enterprise now features some of the latest innovations in commerce, including BigAI developer tools and integrated AI toolsets to support personalization, analytics, B2B processes and more. BigCommerce supports brands including YETI, Badgley Mischka, and Saddleback Leather.

Shopify Plus vs BigCommerce Enterprise: Quick Comparison

Here are some of the elements that come up often when comparing enterprise CMS platforms and how Shopify Plus and BigCommerce Enterprise stack up.

If you are looking for a more in-depth comparison of all BigCommerce and Shopify plans, read our BigCommerce vs Shopify guide.

Let’s break down some of these comparisons into more detail.

BigCommerce Enterprise vs Shopify Plus: Pros and Cons

Before we do a head-to-head comparison of some of the critical factors that may influence your purchasing decision, here are some of the top pros and cons for each CMS.

BigCommerce Enterprise pros and cons

BigCommerce supports nearly 43K stores, with a growing percentage of users taking advantage of omnichannel capabilities across B2C and B2B segments. Some of the top pros and cons of BigCommerce include:

If you want other insights, we also offer a BigCommerce vs Adobe Commerce (Magento) comparison.

Shopify Plus pros and cons

Shopify is a platform trusted by 644M customers around the world, many of whom leverage Shopify Plus to manage and grow at scale. Here are some of the pros and cons of Shopify Plus, at a high level:

Detailed Comparison: Shopify Plus vs BigCommerce Enterprise

In the following section, we’ve pulled out additional details to help you compare Shopify Plus enterprise features to BigCommerce enterprise.

Costs and pricing

Comparing pricing plans, the winner is BigCommerce, which offers a pricing plan that is more comprehensive (no brand limits) and no transaction fees. Since license cost is only one factor in your overall eCommerce budget, we also encourage you to read our guide to estimating eCommerce website cost.

BigCommerce Enterprise pricing and costs

Although BigCommerce has three lower priced packages, its enterprise package pricing is completely custom, but estimates suggest it starts at $1000 per month. Some things to note about the BigCommerce Enterprise pricing plan:

• For enterprises making over $1M in revenue
• 0% added transaction fees
• Personalized payment rates
• Unlimited bandwidth, file storage, SKUs, and staff accounts
• Custom number of inventory locations

Offers more flexibility through unlimited API calls, unrestricted GMV limits, priority routing and support, and more customizations.

Shopify Plus pricing and costs

Although Shopify also offers four lower-priced tiers, its enterprise plan starts at $2300 per month, for a 3-year term, or $2500 per month for a 1-year term. For more complex businesses, Shopify Plus is also available at a variable platform fee. Shopify Plus pricing includes or is limited by:

• Designed for enterprise users making over $1M across online, retail and B2B
• Limit of one brand per contract
• Support for up to 20 locations and 9 more storefronts across locations (+ fees or revenue share for more stores)
• Transaction fees, which vary by region
• Unlimited bandwidth, transactions, SKUs, and staff accounts
• 200 inventory locations, 50 markets

User-friendliness

User-friendly is a tie between BigCommerce Enterprise and Shopify Plus. Although headless commerce is not known to be user-friendly by default, these two market leaders have invested heavily in supporting content development with visual editing capabilities and AI assists.

Ease of use for BigCommerce Enterprise

One of the top reviews for BigCommerce from review sites and analyst reports is the ease of use of BigCommerce, for both technical and non-technical users. BigCommerce offers visual editing tools for pages and themes, removing the need for developers, and has enhanced developer tools to create frontends, manage staging environments, and create AI apps.

Ease of use for Shopify Plus

Shopify is known for being a user-friendly tool for organizations of any size. Recently, Shopify has been investing in its Plus platform with more advanced capabilities for editors and developers. For example, the new Sidekick AI assistant is making strides in simplifying the administrative experience for editors, offering step-by-step instructions or creating reports and content using a chat-based experience.

Design and themes

While many enterprise clients will choose to create custom themes, both enterprise plans offer ready-to-use storefront themes. Based on its new low code tools, BigCommerce is the winner.

BigCommerce Enterprise themes and design

BigCommerce offers the chance to use low/no code tools using a Stencil framework (Page Builder Visual Editor and Style Editor), as well as the option to create your own headless storefronts. BigCommerce has 256 themes available in its theme store, with the option to toggle by catalog size, a requirement for large images, or B2B.

Shopify Plus Themes and Design

Shopify has 219 themes available in its theme store. Enterprise customers can tailor themes by region easily using the Theme Editor. Shopify Pro also recently released a B2B-optimized theme to embrace its B2B features.

Scalability and extensibility

Scalability can be considered across three areas: horizontal scaling (business expansion), vertical scaling (dealing with traffic) and system scaling (extensibility). In this way, we are naming BigCommerce the winner, for the greatest horizontal scaling capabilities.

BigCommerce Enterprise scalability and extensibility

BigCommerce allows for unlimited horizontal scaling across brands, locations, and segments. BigCommerce has APIs, developer tools, and a robust app & integration marketplace to support extensibility.

Shopify Plus scalability and extensibility

A Shopify Plus contract limits horizontal scaling across brands, requiring one contract per brand, but allows for multi-store scaling and coordination. Shopify offers back-end extensibility with its Shopify Functions capabilities and APIs. Shopify Plus offers exclusive integrations to enterprise customers, has flexible APIs, and has a very robust marketplace. The marketplace for Shopify has more apps than BigCommerce, with more ratings to help guide decision making.

Payment gateway options

Both Shopify and BigCommerce have invested in simplifying checkout and offering a breadth of choice. While Shopify has its own payment gateway, for companies looking to avoid lock-in and have zero transaction fees across a wider variety of payment gateways, BigCommerce is the winner.

Shopify Plus payments

You have the choice to use Shopify Payments as your payment gateway, with online and in-person card fees going to Shopify. This is the lowest rate option with no third-party transaction fees, but card rates vary per country. Shopify Payments supports local payment methods.

Alternatively, you can use a third-party processor as a primary payment gateway, with fees paid to the processor plus 0.20% per transaction to Shopify.

BigCommerce Enterprise payments

BigCommerce supports a variety of PSPs, gateways, and digital wallets, as well as the option to support buy-now-pay-later (BBPL). BigCommerce does not charge transaction fees, though some of its card processors have their own fees. With BigCommerce’s native one-page checkout, customers see an average of 61.9% checkout conversion.

Sales features

BigCommerce Enterprise and Shopify Plus were both designed with large enterprises in mind, and that comes with the need to manage large catalogs and omnichannel selling. However, the inventory analytics and proprietary POS of Shopify Plus make them the winner in this category.

Inventory management

While both platforms offer plug-and-play integrations with ERP systems, each also offers built-in capabilities.

• BigCommerce Enterprise: centralized inventory management across channels (including in-store), support for digital products, product and variant tracking, support for a custom number of inventory locations
• Shopify Plus: diverse options for inventory management, insights from inventory analytics, product and variant tracking, support for management with fulfillment apps, support for up to 200 inventory locations

Sales channels

Both BigCommerce and Shopify Plus are designed with omnichannel tools that enable real-time synchronization across channels:

• BigCommerce Enterprise: Website, in-store, social, 150+ marketplaces, buy online pick up in store (BOPIS)
• Shopify Plus: Website, in-store, social, 150+ marketplaces, buy online pick up in store (BOPIS)

Point-of-sale (POS)

Omnichannel selling for enterprise platforms also includes in-store retailing. Where you want choice in POS to support your specific vertical and needs, choose BigCommerce.

• BigCommerce Enterprise: Integrate with a variety of POS systems, managed within BigCommerce. Support for BOPIS and store-level access control.
• Shopify Plus: Shopify POS can manage payments and inventory, all from within Shopify. There are an additional 14 integrations available to other POS systems.

Marketing functionality

Both Shopify Plus and BigCommerce are releasing innovative AI-supported marketing features that span from AI-assisted copy generation and workflow automation to smart analytics. For this reason, we mark this category as a tie. As CMS platforms continue to invest in customer experience, this category will see a lot of innovation.

Marketing tools in BigCommerce Enterprise

BigCommerce recently released a number of new features for marketing, boosting its existing capabilities in segmentation, advanced filtering, reviews, coupons, discounts and more.

• BigAI product recommendations: real-time personalization of product recommendations. Supported on the back-end by AI that helps more accurately categorize products.
• BigAI predictive analytics: predict the future lifetime value of new shoppers to help direct marketing efforts.
• Promotion targeting: recently released granular promotion targeting, coupon stacking, and more

Marketing tools in Shopify Plus

Shopify Plus offers powerful tools to help convert across platforms, including exclusive capabilities in increasing ad performance, but oddly a lack of AI support for personalization.

• Shopify Campaigns: automates tactics, creative, placements and targeting
• Shopify Audiences: Maximize ad performance based on buyer behavior, supported by a new retargeting boost list.
• Shopify Flow: Automate marketing efforts

B2B features

In this category, we mark BigCommerce in the lead due to the flexibility of the open-source buyer portal. Analyst ratings demonstrate these two are constantly innovating their B2B capabilities. Learn more about how to evaluate B2B eCommerce platforms.

B2B capabilities in BigCommerce Enterprise

BigCommerce offers robust B2B capabilities, including a new round of innovations to tackle complex B2B.

• Open source B2B Buyer Portal with a simple buyer experience that priorities quick re-orders, shared lists and more
• Multi-storefront localized experiences using segments, locations, verticals, languages, currencies
• Recent innovations: coming soon, you’ll also have advanced business account hierarchy, automated workflows powered by AI, and expanded quote capabilities

B2B capabilities in Shopify Plus

Shopify’s recently introduced capabilities in workflow automation and personalization and the ability to make headless storefronts with Hydrogen and Utopia.

• Buyer portal with standard features and focus on quick reorders and bulk ordering
• Workflow automations using Shopify Flow to assign terms, send invoices and more
• Robust integrations across ERP, CRM, ESP, OMS and more

Security features

The winner in this category is Shopify Plus, supporting a greater range of internal security controls, including the latest in passkey authentication.

Security protocols in BigCommerce Enterprise

BigCommerce has robust internal practices that are PCI DSS and ISO certified.

• PCI DSS compliance supported by Reflectiz
• Security and privacy settings across user roles and permissions, MFA, SSL, basic capabilities such as control password timeout
• Consent tracking banner can be displayed in four languages to comply with laws such as GDPR and CCPA

Security measures in Shopify Plus

Shopify Plus supports PCI DSS and provides various SOC reports on its security. Features for security include:

• MFA and passkey support for store admins
• Fraud prevention tools including fraud analysis and card testing protection
• Localized privacy settings in order to comply with laws such as GDPR, CCPA

Customer support

Both BigCommerce and Shopify offer advanced customer support for their enterprise users, so this category is a tie.

Customer support in BigCommerce Enterprise

BigCommerce offers priority support and professional services for its Enterprise customers, but also guarantees express routing and API support.

Customer support in Shopify Plus

Shopify offers priority support and professional services to its Plus customers. Shopify Plus also recently added an AI assistant to its help center, greatly supporting the navigation of documentation.

Deciding Between BigCommerce Enterprise and Shopify Plus

We have attempted to provide unbiased content about the very latest capabilities of BigCommerce Enterprise and Shopify Plus, to help you evaluate your options for an enterprise headless eCommerce platform.

When to opt for BigCommerce Enterprise

BigCommerce enterprise is ideally suited for mid-to-very large enterprises who want a hosted composable and headless SaaS solution that includes more user-friendly tools and the capacity to support multiple brands, due to:

• Its proliferation of low code no code tools for editors
• The high level of developer support, including frontend UI kids and BigAI tools
• The multi-segment, multi-brand, multi-location, multi-storefront capabilities
• The greater granular control of a composable headless platform

When to opt for Shopify Plus

Shopify is ideally suited for the largest of enterprises who only manage a single brand, but want multi-storefront capabilities and advanced marketing tools and potentially the option to self-host their headless stack.

• Flexibility to self-host or use Shopify’s headless stack
• Advanced AI capabilities to assist in workflows for marketing teams with a heavy focus on advertisement
• The ability to customize back-end logic with Shopify Functions, exclusive to Plus plans

Also check out our list of essential factors to choosing the best eCommerce platform.

Take your enterprise commerce to the next level

Both BigCommerce Enterprise and Shopify Plus are designed to help simplify your enterprise commerce management, with the scalability and performance you require to take your business to the next level. Both platforms are highly reviewed by analysts and large enterprise users, showcasing unique features and a continued path of innovation.

While you can rely on either trusted commerce solution, leveraging an agency partner can help take your enterprise commerce results to the next level. Net Solutions is a leading eCommerce development agency and certified BigCommerce partner, offering comprehensive commerce consulting, design, development and optimization services. We have experience working with large commerce solutions, including a leading airline, American Golf, and Euro Car Parts.