We scanned 80,000 stores across Shopify, Shopware, Magento, and PrestaShop. The data does not name a best platform. It names a tradeoff, and which side of it suits you depends on resources you can be honest about. For merchants choosing a platform, or reconsidering the one they are on.
“Which platform is best” is the question everyone asks and the one the benchmark cannot answer, because the platforms did not sort into better and worse. They sorted into a tradeoff. Before any of the numbers are useful, it is worth being clear about what they are and what they are not.
What the benchmark measures, and what it does not
The benchmark scanned 20,000 live stores on each of the four platforms and checked the same set of signals: site speed, SEO hygiene, structured data, security exposure, and AI-readiness. So it measures the technical condition of real stores at one point in time, which is narrower than it sounds. It does not measure revenue, conversion, or whether a business is doing well: a platform that tends to produce tidy stores is not necessarily the one that makes a given merchant the most money, and we have data on the first question only.
A few other limits matter for a choice like this. The sample counts a one-person store and a large operation equally, so it describes the typical store, not where the sales concentrate. It covers English-language stores. It captures headless and decoupled builds poorly, so the most advanced Magento and Shopware setups are partly invisible to it. And the hosted platforms look clean on security partly because the server layer that gets breached is not yours to misconfigure or ours to scan, which is not the same as zero risk.
Read the scores, then, as what the average store on a platform looks like under the hood, not as a buying recommendation.
The choice is not which platform is best. It is how much you want to own.
Underneath every number is one question: how much of the work does the platform do for you, and how much does it leave to you.
Two of the platforms answer it by doing the work. Shopify and Shopware ship a high technical baseline and keep most stores near it, whether or not the merchant ever thinks about it. The other two answer it by handing you the controls. Magento and PrestaShop give you the depth to build almost anything and let the result depend entirely on who set the store up and whether they kept at it.
The data shows this as consistency, and it is the most decision-relevant thing in the whole study. Score the stores from worst to best on each platform and look at the range between the tenth percentile and the ninetieth:
| Platform | Floor (P10) | Ceiling (P90) | Range |
|---|---|---|---|
| Magento | 51.2 | 93.5 | 42.3 |
| PrestaShop | 58.4 | 82.1 | 23.7 |
| Shopware | 79.1 | 91.4 | 12.3 |
| Shopify | 81.3 | 89.2 | 7.9 |
On Shopify and Shopware, the platform largely determines the outcome, and it determines it high: almost every store lands in a narrow, healthy band. On Magento and PrestaShop, the team determines the outcome, and the distance between a store with a good team behind it and one without is enormous. The platform is not the variable that matters most on those two. You are.
The ceiling nobody puts on the brochure
Here is the part that complicates any simple ranking. Magento’s ninetieth percentile, 93.5, is the highest store-health ceiling in the entire study, above Shopware’s best and above Shopify’s. A well-run Magento store is healthier on these signals than almost any Shopify store can be. That ceiling is real, and it is exactly why large and complex merchants run Magento, often as Adobe Commerce, despite the work involved.
But the ceiling is available, not given. Most Magento stores sit well below it, its floor (51.2) is the lowest of the four, and 22% of Magento stores fall into the lowest maturity band, against a couple of percent on the hosted platforms. Magento is a bet on your own execution. Make the investment and the result clears anything the modern-defaults platforms allow; skip it and you land in the wide, low part of that range, where a lot of stores quietly sit.
PrestaShop is the case that keeps this honest. It is configurable in the same way, with the same exposure to a low floor, and 31% of its stores fall into the lowest maturity band, the most of any platform. But its ceiling, 82.1, is the lowest of the four, and only just clears the floor that Shopify and Shopware stores start from. PrestaShop asks you to own the work without offering Magento’s payoff at the top; it is the lighter, more independent, cheaper-to-run option.
That is the real tradeoff, stated plainly: a high floor you do not have to build, or a high ceiling you do. PrestaShop is the reminder that the second half of that sentence is not automatic, since only Magento’s ceiling actually clears the others.
Deciding by your situation, not by the scores
There is no winner here to copy. There is a fit, and it follows from things only you know.
If you do not have engineering resources, or you would rather not spend them on the plumbing, a modern-defaults platform fits. Shopify or Shopware will hold your store near a healthy baseline you mostly cannot fall below, and in exchange you give up some ceiling and some control. For a great many merchants that is the right trade, because the work they would have to do to beat that baseline is work they were never going to do.
If you have a team, or the budget to hire one, and you need real control, custom logic, complex catalogues, or serious B2B, a built-to-be-configured platform fits, though the two are not interchangeable. Magento, including Adobe Commerce at the larger end, gives you the most depth and the highest ceiling, on the condition that you do the work and keep doing it. PrestaShop offers a lighter, more independent path that is cheaper to run, with a lower observed ceiling and the variance any configurable platform carries. It suits stores that want self-hosted independence without Magento’s weight.
The questions that actually decide it are not about the platforms but about the total cost of owning one over time, which no licence price or monthly fee shows you. Do you have, or will you pay for, people to configure and maintain the store? How much custom behaviour do you genuinely need, versus want? How comfortable are you letting the platform make decisions for you? Will this store be maintained for years or set up once and left? Answer those honestly and the platform tends to choose itself.
The same tradeoff shows up in every pillar
Each area of the benchmark is the same consistency-versus-control choice in a different place, which is why the per-platform guides keep arriving at parallel conclusions.
On speed, the modern-defaults platforms give you good infrastructure for free and then let apps spend it, while the configurable ones have more headroom but ship with the performance levers off. The site speed guide and the platform speed pieces for Shopify, Magento, and PrestaShop walk through each. On SEO it is the same shape: a baseline handed to you, a set of controls shipped off, or a system assembled from parts, covered in the SEO guide and the platform SEO pieces. On security, the hosted platforms hand the server surface off, so you cannot misconfigure what you do not run but also cannot control it, while self-hosted means you own the surface and the exposure both, which the security guide covers. AI-readiness comes down to structured data the platform may or may not generate for you, in the AI search guide and the AI-readiness benchmark.
How to decide with your own data instead of the average
The benchmark is the average store on each platform, and your store, or a store you are evaluating, is not the average. That is the catch in choosing on these numbers: a platform’s mean tells you what tends to happen, not what is true of one specific store and one specific team.
The more useful move is to measure the actual store rather than the platform. Scan the store you run now, or one you are considering taking over, and see where it really sits in that range, which defaults are on and which were left off, and what the previous team did and did not do. That answers a real decision in a way no platform average can. The 2026 platform benchmark has the full picture across all four, and the most common problems piece shows what the scan tends to surface first.