Craft Commerce: A Complete Guide for 2026
From the Journal – Posted 10.06.2026
Selecting and investing in the right ecommerce platform for your business is a pivotal decision. You don’t want to spend the next few years wrestling with a solution that’s far too big and heavy for your business. At the same time, you want something that will give you ample room to grow.
Craft Commerce has something different to offer. It isn’t a self-contained ecommerce platform like the ever-popular Shopify, or a complex enterprise-grade system like Magento (Adobe Commerce). Instead, it’s more of an ecommerce layer for Craft CMS, which means everything coexists in the same place, built to your own specs.
Is that right for you? Only you can answer that (though we’ll try and help). And if your website is already built using Craft CMS, then it could actually be an easy decision.
In any case, this guide covers what Craft Commerce is, how it functions, how it compares to Shopify and Magento, how licensing works (it’s not totally straightforward), and what’s new since Craft Commerce 5 launched. Hopefully, it makes choosing your ecommerce platform a little easier, or at least rules in or rules out Craft Commerce.
💡 Further reading: Migrating from WordPress to Craft CMS: A Complete Guide
What Is Craft Commerce?
Craft Commerce is an ecommerce platform built as a plugin by Pixel & Tonic, the same team that built Craft CMS itself.
Instead of being - like so many - a standalone platform, it adds functionality to your Craft site, giving you everything you need to get started: products and variants, carts and checkout, payments, tax and shipping rules, discounts, subscriptions, and order management.
The difference between Craft Commerce and other ecommerce platforms is one worth making. With most platforms, your shop is the central system, and your content gets added on around it. With Craft Commerce, everything works the other way around.
Your ecommerce store becomes part of your wider CMS. It’s robust and flexible. Your product pages, editorial content, and campaign landing pages all share the same fields, the same control panel, and the same front end.
As with Craft CMS, it’s a developer-first approach that typically appeals to brands and businesses that have outgrown templated stores, but aren’t quite ready for the scope, complexity and cost of something like Magento. That said, Craft Commerce is capable of supporting everything from single-product experiences to multi-brand, multi-currency operations.
And, to be honest, if you’re already familiar with Craft CMS, you’ll feel at home straight away. If you’re not, don’t worry; it’s intuitive and easy to pick up.
💡 Further reading: 5 Reasons to Choose Craft CMS for Your Website
How Craft Commerce Works
Craft Commerce is a plugin for Craft CMS. So, it pretty much functions in the way the rest of Craft functions. And we love Craft.
Products and variants
Products are managed much like any other content in Craft, with custom fields that you define. Variants (size, colour, material, etc…) aren't limited to a fixed set of options. You model them around your product set, and you can attach as much custom data to each one as you like. There's no cap on the number of products or variants you can create.
Template-free front-end
Like Craft, Craft Commerce doesn’t force templates on you. You can build a more traditional storefront using Twig, or run it headlessly should you wish. Either way, you control the design, and the customer journey is in your hands.
Payments
Craft Commerce supports multiple payment gateways. Typically, that would be Stripe, which supports cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Cash App, buy-now-pay-later options like Afterpay and Affirm, ACH transfers, and subscriptions. But you can use other gateways too, or integrate something more bespoke if you need to.
Tax, shipping, and discounts
Custom tax zones and categories, multiple shipping methods, coupon codes, group and per-customer pricing, sale pricing, and conditional dynamic pricing all come built in. Essentially, this covers everything you would expect from a modern ecommerce platform.
Craft Commerce vs Shopify
If you’re considering Craft Commerce, this is where you’ll likely start. Shopify is one of the best-known ecommerce platforms globally. But the question you need to ask yourself is: do I want something bespoke and owned, or something standardised?
Shopify is a fully hosted SaaS platform. You pay a monthly subscription, and Shopify handles the hosting, security, and PCI compliance. Your store can go live very quickly and relatively easily. We won’t lie, Sophify is a genuinely excellent product for getting selling fast, and for a lot of businesses it’s the right choice.
Where it might not be quite right is when you need something specific. Shopify gives you less freedom than building from scratch, and customisation often means bringing in apps (each with a monthly cost). If you don’t want to use Shopify Payments, that’s extra too.
In short, if you’re going to use Shopify, it’s best to play their game and conform to the limitations it imposes. If that doesn’t work for you out of the gate, then you may want to look elsewhere.
Craft Commerce is kind of the opposite. There are, of course, costs, but there’s no monthly platform subscription; the build is yours, the hosting is yours, the look and feel is yours. But you have to build it. The cost is, instead, in the upfront investment plus licensing.
| Area | Craft Commerce | Shopify |
|---|---|---|
| Model | Self-hosted & bespoke | Fully hosted SaaS |
| Complexity | Moderate, developer-first | Fast & simple |
| Design freedom | Complete control | Theme-based |
| Customisation | No limitations | Limited via third-party apps |
| Hosting & security | Self-managed | Included |
| Transaction fees | None | Yes, dependent on your setup. |
| Ongoing cost | Licence + hosting | Subscription (Starter £5 to Plus ~£1,800/mo) + apps |
| Best for | Brand-led, custom stores | Fast, standardised storefronts |
The Bottom Line
Choose Shopify if you want to launch quickly, you're happy within a more standardised framework, and you'd rather not think about hosting or maintenance.
Choose Craft Commerce if your store needs to be genuinely bespoke, you want full ownership of the build and the data, and content and commerce need to work as one.
Craft Commerce vs Magento (Adobe Commerce)
Firstly, some clarification. Magento is not one product. Adobe bought Magento back in 2018. So, instead, you have…
Magento Open Source
This is the free, self-hosted, community-maintained edition (formerly Community Edition). It's powerful and endlessly customisable, but it's cumbersome and needs developer and DevOps resource to work with.
Adobe Commerce
This is the paid, enterprise edition. Licensing is based on your gross merchandise value and typically starts around $22,000 per year. It adds B2B features, advanced reporting, AI-driven merchandising, and commercial support, and it's now also offered as a fully-managed cloud service.
In a sense, it doesn’t matter which we focus on; both are built for scale and complexity. And if your operation is high-volume and multi-region with complex requirements, something like Magento could well be the right decision.
For everyone else, it often becomes a maintenance burden and a cost centre. This is where Craft Commerce is strong: more flexible and design-led than Shopify, but considerably lighter to own and run than Magento.
| Area | Craft Commerce | Magento Open Source | Adobe Commerce |
|---|---|---|---|
| Licence cost | Commerce Pro from $1,199/project | Free | From ~$22,000/yr (GMV-based) |
| Hosting | Self-hosted | Self-hosted | Self-hosted or Adobe cloud |
| Complexity | Moderate, developer-first | High | High |
| Maintenance burden | Lower | Significant | Significant |
| Best for | Brand-led, custom stores | Large catalogues with strong dev teams | Enterprise & complex B2B |
| Total cost of ownership | Predictable | High (dev-led) | Very high |
The Bottom Line
There’s a good chance you’ll know if you need Adobe Commerce. You’ll already be operating at serious scale and complexity, perhaps globally. If you have a strong in-house team and a large, complex catalogue, Magento Open Source is worth considering.
For the space in between that and Shopify (which is a rather large one), Craft Commerce could be the ideal solution. It’s certainly the more sensible choice for mid-size, brand-led stores that want flexibility but not heft.
Craft Commerce Licensing and Editions: Pro vs Enterprise
The licensing model for Craft Commerce has changed in recent years, so it’s worth a recap of sorts. And the first thing to understand is that there are two licenses you’ll need to consider.
As already mentioned, Craft Commerce is a plugin. That plugin sits on top of a Craft CMS licence, and you pay for both. Of course, if your website is already built using Craft CMS, then you’re already paying for that portion.
Craft CMS License
Craft CMS comes in four editions (prices are per project, in USD, and include one year of updates; after that, updates are $99/year):
Solo - free, for personal or single-user projects.
Team - $279, for small teams (up to five users).
Pro - $399, the standard choice for most businesses (unlimited users, branded control panel).
Enterprise - custom pricing, adding SAML SSO, a custom licence agreement, procurement support, and dedicated premium support.
Craft Commerce License
Then, on top of your Craft CMS license sits your Craft Commerce license. And it comes in two flavours:
Commerce Pro - $1,199 per project, including one year of updates ($299/year after that). This is the full-featured edition: custom checkout, multi-currency, up to five stores, up to five inventory locations, and the full catalogue pricing and discount engine.
Commerce Enterprise - available by request, with custom pricing. It lifts the store and inventory-location limits beyond five to a custom number, and adds SAML SSO, a dedicated customer support manager, and invoicing with payment terms.
So, if you take a typical use case, your ecommerce solution would be licensed as Craft CMS Pro ($399) plus Craft Commerce Pro ($1,199). And, if you don’t want to commit right off the bat, you have the option to trial Craft Commerce for free in a local dev environment.
What's New in Craft Commerce 5
Craft Commerce 5, released in 2024, was a significant update that delivered two of the most requested features in the platform’s history, alongside an improved product management experience.
Multi-store. A single Craft Commerce installation can now run up to five separate stores, each connected to one or more sites. Each store can have its own base currency, and products can be enabled, priced, and discounted on a per-store basis.
Inventory locations. Stock can now be tracked and managed across up to five locations. Commerce handles inventory states per location and supports transfers between them. That makes Craft Commerce perfect for businesses with multiple fulfilment points.
Catalogue pricing. Pricing can now be pre-generated using custom pricing rules, improving scalability and performance for high-volume stores with complex pricing logic.
Product revisions. Products now behave like Craft entries, with drafts, autosaving, versioning, and live preview. That means you can prepare and preview product changes, and roll back if something isn't quite right.
Variant indexes and bulk editing. Variants are managed through an embedded element index and support Craft 5's bulk inline editing, which makes managing large, variant-heavy catalogues far easier.
A first-party Stripe gateway. Stripe is now a natively built, first-party gateway (rather than an Omnipay-based one), giving you modern payment methods, strong customer authentication, and subscriptions out of the box.
Is Craft Commerce Right for You?
You should have a fairly strong grasp of whether Craft Commerce is right for you by now. But, to summarise:
- Your website is already built using Craft CMS
- You need a custom store with flexibility, but don’t have enterprise complexity
- If you want your content and commerce in a single control panel
- You want to own your build, data, and hosting package
- You want a predictable, one-off licence cost rather than monthly fees
- You're selling across multiple stores, regions, or currencies, or managing stock across more than one location.
On the other hand, Craft Commerce probably isn’t quite the right fit if you need something simple and standardised. In that case, choose Shopify.
It’s also likely to hold you back - or be wholly unsuitable - if you’re a large enterprise with thousands upon thousands of SKUs. In that case, look at Magento/Adobe Commerce.
Building on Craft Commerce
In short, Craft Commerce is for businesses that want flexibility and control. Craft CMS is our platform of choice, and so is Craft Commerce. If you're weighing up a new store or thinking about replatforming, and you'd like to talk Craft CMs or Craft Commerce through, we're happy to chat.