Platform choice is usually decided by organisational capacity rather than feature lists. Any of the three can run a large store; not all of them fit every team.

Rough fit

• Shopify Plus — fastest to market, lowest operational burden, strong ecosystem. Constraints appear at complex B2B pricing and deeply custom checkout.
• Adobe Commerce — strong native B2B, multi-store and complex catalog handling. Requires real engineering capacity and a genuine upgrade discipline.
• commercetools — maximum flexibility through composable services. Requires an in-house team; without one, the flexibility becomes a liability.

The question people skip

Who maintains this in year three? A platform that fits your requirements but not your team will be re-platformed again within four years, which is the most expensive possible outcome.

Build a scorecard

Weight your genuine requirements, score each platform against them, and include total cost of ownership and hiring difficulty as scored lines. A scorecard makes the trade-off visible and makes the decision defensible internally.