Centra vs Shopify Plus vs Magento: A side‑by‑side comparison
Ecommerce has evolved. Gone are the days when a single platform could be good for everything. Modern original brands need agility, design freedom, and scale to grow and reach their customers internationally.

How do brands score Centra on G2?
See how Centra compares to Shopify Plus and Magento 2, below.
Shopify Plus | Magento 2 | Centra | |
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Meets Requirements | 8.6 | 8.4 | 9.1 |
Ease of Use | 9.0 | 7.1 | 9.0 |
Ease of Setup | 8.6 | 6.2 | 8.3 |
Ease of Admin | 8.7 | 7.3 | 9.1 |
Quality of Support | 8.5 | 7.0 | 9.1 |
Ease of Doing Business With | 8.6 | 7.5 | 9.7 |
Product Direction | 8.8 | 6.9 | 9.5 |
The evolution of commerce platforms
Running a fashion brand? Pick the right tool for the trade!
If you’re doing fashion and lifestyle on a monolithic ecommerce platform, you’re very likely limiting the growth potential of your brand. Today’s leading monolithic SaaS platforms don’t support the business logic and complexity of modern lifestyle commerce. They may be good for everything, but they fail to meet the needs of modern, dynamic fashion brands.

At a glance
While there are many ecommerce platforms on the market, Shopify Plus and Magento are often mentioned as the top ones. However, when you look at how both platforms were built, which industries they serve best, and how they support growth, their shortcomings start to emerge – especially in how they solve the challenges of modern, global fashion ecommerce.
To scale fast, brands that grow the fastest right now are the ones that are adapting to new conditions very quickly. The high pace of business development is key for growth. Dynamic fashion brands need a solution that enables such growth without imposing limitations in terms of design and development.
Shopify Plus | Magento | Centra | |
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Powerful vs. ease of use |
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Wholesale vs. direct-to- consumer |
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Single vs. multi-market |
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Custom design/dev vs. closed templates |
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Payment options |
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Hosting |
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Automatic updates vs versions |
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Licensing fees |
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The 11 challenges of fashion commerce
To scale fast and grow internationally, dynamic fashion brands need a solution that enables it without imposing limitations in terms of design and development. These challenges include scalability, complexity, design freedom, internationalization and suitability for selling fashion and lifestyle products.
Let’s have a closer look at how popular platforms solve these challenges, and how they stack up against Centra’s headless, fashion-centric approach to fashion ecommerce.

Challenge #1
Lack of design freedom and flexibility
In terms of website design, the fashion industry has very unique needs. Ambitious brands need the agility and design freedom to build brand-authentic, pixel perfect sites – without compromises or design limitations.
Design freedom means empowering editors with a full-scale modular CMS mixing content marketing and shop capabilities. Most popular ecommerce platforms don’t enable full freedom, limiting brands’ growth and flexibility.
Why brands migrate to Centra
You can build a headless store on top of a monolithic commerce platform but you’ll miss out on the tooling that made you choose the platform in the first place. At the same time, you will also lose most of the benefits generally associated with headless like low price and minimal developer support. You will basically end up paying as much or more than a true headless ecommerce setup – while not getting all the benefits.
Fully headless, composable and API-first architecture offers some performance and growth benefits that are impossible to achieve with a monolithic platform like Shopify Plus or Magento.
Centra’s API-first approach caters to the needs of ambitious fashion brands. Many of Centra’s clients choose to work with a headless CMS as part of their front-end stack for a perfect mix of content marketing and advanced shop functionalities. The platform’s API coverage allows brands to elevate their front-end experiences without having to worry about the restrictions commonly associated with popular monolithic ecommerce platforms.
Challenge #2
Multi‑store and internationalization
Localization is key to driving sales internationally. Different markets accept different price points, and prefer different languages and payment methods. They follow different influencers, and their different climate zones impact seasonal sales. They want different payment options and localized checkout. However, traditional monolithic commerce platforms complicate localization, badly impacting SEO (especially for fashion ecommerce). They require one storefront per each localized market.
Offering a localized website and local payment methods can increase conversion rates by over 10%, and local shipping options can add another 10% to that figure.
Why brands migrate to Centra
Centra’s native multi-store architecture allows for full management of core data locally and globally across different stores, supporting brands with global reach or aspirations to enter new markets.
Centra allows admin users to manage product management at a store level, a language level, or globally. Descriptions can be different for stores based on languages, while the same images can be used globally. The same principle applies across things like category management, promotions, customer management, etc.
Challenge #3
Wholesale & B2B capabilities
Wholesale experience is a new competitive frontier for fashion brands. Shopify offers a product called wholesale, but it comes with fewer features than the B2B ordering apps that have been around for the past 10 years. If you want to move ahead with a wholesale strategy, it is a clear tell that you’ve outgrown your monolithic ecommerce platform.
Why brands migrate to Centra
With Centra, you also gain a fully digital wholesale platform out of the box to help your brand stand out from the competition. The built-in B2B portal for buyers, sales reps and agents, supports the full wholesale business logic for preorders and at-once orders.
Challenge #4
Native features vs plugins
Plugins and extensions offer a convenient way of expanding the functionality of your ecommerce platform, but native integrations are cheaper in the long run.
If you do not have a dedicated developer, be prepared to pay extra to hire developers working on your site 24/7. If you only need a simple site, this won't apply to you, but then you also have no reason to use Magento when simpler, more stable products are available.
Shopify Plus | Magento | Centra | |
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Features for fashion | Through apps/extensions | Through apps/extensions and native integrations (limited) | Native |
There are four big problems with the app-based approach to achieving the basic functionality that all fashion brands need:
Apps or plugins are not equal to native functionality
There are things that simply can’t be achieved by Shopify’s apps – they can’t access specific data. Business logic that needs to be interconnected is turned into silos – the app needed for managing the product catalog doesn’t speak to the app used to manage inventory.
With Centra, fashion brands get a highly integrated feature set that covers all core needs, out of the box.
Apps raise security and stability concerns
Each app is basically another website inside the Shopify admin, which means you depend on many third-party developers to keep their sites up and running well, and keep the data secure.
Apps cost extra
Monolithic platforms might look cheap to start with, but with all the apps, payment transaction fees, FX markups, and costs per storefront, the cost can go very high.
Apps lead to a cumbersome user interface
Because the apps are siloed, non-native extensions, they are managed from different parts of the user interface. Simple processes that are achieved with a few simple clicks in Centra need multiple steps in multiple apps with Shopify.
Monolithic platforms like Shopify Plus or Magento direct you to apps in their marketplace even when it should be something natively offered by the platform.
Why brands migrate to Centra
Launching on Centra, original fashion brands get all the features they need, integrated in a tight package.
Challenge #5
Performance, scalability and stability impact on SEO and conversion
In terms of website design, the fashion industry has very unique needs. Ambitious brands need design freedom to build brand-authentic, pixel-perfect sites – without compromises or design limitations.
Design freedom means empowering editors with a full-scale modular CMS mixing content marketing and shop capabilities. Most popular ecommerce platforms don’t enable full freedom, limiting brands’ growth and flexibility.
It is worth noting that you do have full control over the URLs If you use Shopify in a headless manner, as the platform isn’t powering the front end. It also gives you access to the server so you can implement things like visual merchandising solutions without just relying on JavaScript for the product grid.
Why brands migrate to Centra
If your store runs slow, it is a telling sign to upgrade your setup to Centra – a future-proof headless platform built for speed and growth.
Challenge #6
Support
Fast and responsive support is, apart from the features and capabilities, an important factor impacting how fast brands can get their stores up and running.
Challenge #7
Cost of ownership
The combined cost of frontend and backend development and maintenance, as well as hosting and other fees (like payment processing) may exceed the initially projected cost of launching on a legacy monolithic or generic headless platform.
Why brands migrate to Centra
With many features offered out of the box, Centra significantly reduces the long-term cost of maintaining the platform and ensuring its good performance in peak sale periods. Since there are no hidden costs and no third-party integrations needed, Centra is the most affordable ecommerce platform of the three.
Challenge #8
Analytics and reporting
Commerce needs reports to give you the means to review your store's recent activity, get insight into your visitors, analyze your online store speed, and analyze your store's transactions.
Magento has historically been bad at reporting, even with third-party modules.
A few years ago, Magento acquired RJMetrics (now Magento BI), which is a fairly strong solution that adds a lot of value to merchants. Magento BI is essentially a data warehouse and you can also pull in data from other systems and sources, which is really powerful.
The out-of-the-box Shopify reporting is much better. Although it doesn’t cover everything, Shopify has a much nicer and cleaner reporting interface and covers all of the core metrics, as well as having a really good API to support this. You can then use third party solutions like Glew or Daasity or build out your own data warehouse / bespoke reporting for broader business reporting.
Why brands migrate to Centra
Centra has an intuitive dashboard, giving an instant overview of sales. It is possible to analyze data through numerous different dimensions and time periods. The dashboard is powered by a high-speed database, making working in it fast and intuitive.
Centra has extensive report generation capabilities. Report generation methods exist to analyze virtually any part of the business data stored in Centra. Reports can be exported as csv or xlsx files and can be set to be automatically generated at set times or intervals and emails can be automatically sent once a report is generated.
Centra is your complete digital control room, giving you analytics and reporting modules for a detailed overview of your business performance.
Challenge #9
Bundling, promotions and upselling features
Centra has a really impressive set of features for trading and also supporting marketing activity.
Challenge #10
Suitability for fashion and lifestyle products
Most popular monolithic platforms don’t support the business logic and complexity of fashion lifestyle commerce. They are good if you want to launch fast without paying much, but then hold back your growth by not offering core, fashion-specific functionalities.
Shopify Plus | Magento | Centra | |
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Features for fashion | Through apps/extensions | Through apps/extensions and native integrations (limited) | Native |
Why brands migrate to Centra
Centra is built for original fashion and lifestyle brands, and supports complex lifestyle products. Centra makes handling styles, colors and sizes, different product displays, collections and drops easy.
Supported by Centra, fashion brands can focus on growing their fan base and global expansion rather than on maintaining complex technology. The features and roadmap are 100% designed for the needs of brands with global ambitions and no retailers influence the prioritization of features.
Challenge #11
Omnichannel capabilities
Brands want to sell to consumers and retailers across channels, countries and marketplaces to scale globally.
Why brands migrate to Centra
With Centra, you can sell through distributors, agents, resellers, marketplaces, and their direct-to-consumer websites – all from a single platform.
You’re in good company
International fashion brands choose Centra as the only platform that fully understands the needs and complex business logic of fashion commerce.
Join the vanguard of original brands that scale fast and expand on new markets without the limitations imposed by their legacy ecommerce platforms. Centra have a very impressive portfolio of brands using their platform, including Nudie Jeans, Sandqvist, ETON, iDeal of Sweden and Norse Projects – with some of these being on the platform right from the start.
