Two answers to "beyond Shopify"
When hosted platforms stop fitting, the self-hosted fork is WooCommerce vs Magento, and they are rarely compared honestly because they serve different operating models. WooCommerce extends WordPress: content-led businesses that sell. Magento (now Adobe Commerce / Magento Open Source) is commerce-first infrastructure: catalog-heavy operations that also tell stories.
WooCommerce wins when
Content and commerce are entangled (editorial plus shop, B2B catalog plus resources), the catalog is hundreds-to-tens-of-thousands of SKUs (not hundreds of thousands), the team already speaks WordPress, and budget discipline matters, WooCommerce work prices well below Magento equivalents because the surrounding CMS is free and familiar. Extensions are abundant and cheap. The ceiling: performance and complexity tuning gets real at scale, caching discipline, hosting quality, plugin hygiene (the optimization page covers the ops).
Magento wins when
Tens of thousands+ of SKUs, multi-store and multi-warehouse, complex B2B price architectures, native promotions engines, ERP-grade integration, and, critically, a budget with dedicated ongoing developer or agency support. Magento is an operations commitment: hosting is heavier, releases need staging discipline, and specialist rates run 1.5–3× WooCommerce rates. What you buy is native depth no plugin can fake.
The total-cost truth
WooCommerce: low entry, plugins-and-maintenance curve. Magento: high entry, high ongoing, native depth. The expensive mistake runs both directions, Magento money spent on a WooCommerce-scale problem, or WooCommerce stretched into a Magento problem until every workaround costs more than the platform would have. The Shopify-vs-WooCommerce guide covers the hosted middle ground.
The honest scoping question
SKU count, order volume, store count, ERP needs, team size. Five answers, one recommendation, send those five and the fork resolves quickly.