Magento 2 & Hyvä, done right by one developer.

For a self-assessment first pass, yes. For a final sign-off audit, no — that’s a 1–3 day paid engagement.

Here’s the honest breakdown of what these 50 questions can and cannot do:

• What 5 minutes covers: the questions a senior Magento operator can answer from memory + a quick admin-panel glance — patch level, 2FA on/off, FPC enabled, indexers in schedule mode, cron running, composer audit last result, sessions on Redis. About 35–45 of the 50 questions fall here.
• What 5 minutes can’t cover: things requiring code-reading or query-running — how many custom modules use deprecated APIs, whether a quote workflow still validates after the last patch, whether canonical tags are correct on every layered-nav permutation. Skip those, then ask your dev team. About 5–10 of the 50.
• What this checklist deliberately doesn’t do: custom-module security review, slow-query log analysis, dependency vulnerability deep-scan, ERP integration data-integrity check. Those are the deep-audit territory.

So: 5 minutes for the self-assessment, then a paid 1–3 day deep audit ($1.5k–$3k) if your overall grade is C or below, or any single category is at D.

Honest answer: directionally accurate within ~15–25% for the median case in each GMV bracket, less accurate at the extremes. It’s a first-pass screening tool, not a procurement-grade quote.

What it gets right:

• License tier ordering. Magento Open Source $0 vs Adobe Commerce $30k–$150k+ vs SFCC $200k+ — the ranking won’t change.
• Per-tx fee impact at scale. Shopify Plus 0.15% adds up identically every time; the math is exact.
• Dev cost order of magnitude. A $5M GMV store on Magento needs ~$40k upfront + $30k/yr ongoing — the bracket holds across most engagements I’ve seen.

Where it’s less accurate:

• SFCC and Adobe Commerce license — both are negotiated. Tier-1 SI partners often hold ±30% pricing power. The calculator uses public list-equivalent ranges; your actual quote may be lower (negotiated) or higher (uplift for Adobe Commerce Cloud Pro vs Starter).
• Custom dev edge cases — if your scope includes headless commerce, ERP integration, or multi-region inventory orchestration, dev cost can be 2–3x the calculator’s number.
• Region-specific pricing — the model assumes US dev rates. EU SI partners run 0.7–0.9x; India / Eastern Europe freelancers run 0.3–0.5x; Tier-1 US/UK SIs can run 1.2–1.5x.

Use it to rule out platforms and frame the conversation, not to write a budget line.

Every entry in the database is something I’ve installed, configured, and shipped on a real client store between 2019 and 2026 — no “found-it-on-the-marketplace” entries, no AI-generated brochure summaries.

The shortlist for each of the 12 categories is filtered through five gates:

1. Live install — ran on a paying-client production store for at least 90 days. If I’ve only POC’d it on staging, it doesn’t make the list.
2. Active maintenance — vendor shipped a release in the past 12 months. Silent vendors get cut even if the module is technically excellent.
3. Pricing transparency — vendor publishes a public price (not “contact us for a quote”). Enterprise-only modules get tagged but de-prioritized.
4. Hyvä compatibility known — I’ve either tested it on a Hyvä storefront or read the vendor’s explicit compat statement.
5. No undisclosed conflicts — doesn’t silently break checkout, search, or admin when stacked with the other 3-4 modules in its category.

That filters ~150 candidates I’ve touched down to the 60 entries you see. Re-curated quarterly — if a vendor goes silent, they’re marked deprecated and rotated out at the next refresh.

The calculator output is a budgeting range, not a quote. The low–high spread (-20% / +50%) intentionally absorbs the things you can’t see from outside your codebase: undocumented customisations, vendor extensions that have gone silent, hidden cron-orchestrated integrations, and the dependency-resolution chaos that only surfaces when you actually run composer update.

From my own data on 200+ shipped upgrades:

• ~78% of projects landed inside the calculator’s low–high range without a change order.
• ~17% needed a small change order (median +12%) usually for an extension swap-out the audit caught.
• ~5% needed a substantial replan — almost always when the client had hidden a major customisation from the audit step (rare, but it happens).

To turn the calculator output into a hard number, run a paid 1–3 day audit ($1.5k–$3k). Post-audit my fixed quote falls within ±5% of the audit estimate.

Yes, and it’s where Magento beats Shopify cleanly for sporting goods.

Sporting goods sizing has three different shapes per category:

• Apparel: size (XS–5XL) + fit (regular / slim / athletic) + length (short / regular / tall) + sometimes by-sport cut. 4 axes, 60–120 SKUs per product family.
• Footwear: size (US 5–15, EU 35–50, half-sizes) + width (B / D / 2E / 4E for men, AA / B / D for women) + sometimes by-activity (trail / road / cross-training). 3 axes, 80–200 SKUs per product family.
• Equipment fit: by rider height + inseam + skill level (cycling), by skier height + skill + on-piste-vs-all-mountain (skiing), by hand size + grip type (tennis), by foot strike + arch type (running shoes). 2–4 axes, 20–60 SKUs per product family.

Magento configurable products + EAV attributes per axis handles all three cleanly. Per-category size charts with body-measurement inputs live as CMS blocks rendered conditionally on PDP based on the product attribute set. Fitment quiz on PDP routes the customer to the right SKU before they hit the dropdown — cuts size-driven returns 18–28% in the data I see.

Shopify hits its 100-variant ceiling fast on footwear at this scale (Plus: 2,000, still tight). Forces brands into multi-product workarounds that fragment SEO and analytics.

3-year all-in TCO at $200M GMV, comparable scope (B2C with light B2B, 3 regions, mid-complexity catalog):

Adobe Commerce 3-year TCO at $200M: license $80–150k/yr → $240–450k. Adobe Commerce Cloud infra $30–80k/yr → $90–240k. Implementation (mid-tier or tier-1 SI) $400k–$800k one-time. Ongoing engineering retainer $30k–$80k/mo → $1.08M–$2.88M over 3 years. Adobe Marketplace extensions $50k–$150k. Total: ~$1.9M – $3.7M.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud 3-year TCO at $200M: license / revenue-share $500k–$1M/yr → $1.5M–$3M. Implementation (tier-1 SI: Capgemini, Accenture, Publicis Sapient) $800k–$2M one-time. Ongoing SI retainer $50k–$150k/mo → $1.8M–$5.4M over 3 years. Cartridges + integrations $100k–$300k. Total: ~$4.2M – $10.7M.

The TCO gap at $200M GMV typically lands at 2–3× in favor of Adobe Commerce. The gap narrows above $1B GMV but rarely closes — SFCC’s revenue-share pricing scales linearly with GMV; AC’s license tiers cap out.

Magento handles 50k+ SKUs cleanly when three things are tuned correctly: EAV indexing, Elasticsearch, and Hyvä. Without those, default Luma + MariaDB will start choking around 30k SKUs — category pages take 2–5 seconds, layered nav lags 1–2 seconds per filter click.

• EAV index: schedule the catalog_product_attribute + catalog_product_price + catalog_category_product indexers to "Update on Schedule" with a cron run every 1 minute. Avoid "Update on Save" at 50k+ — admin saves stall.
• Elasticsearch / OpenSearch: required from Magento 2.4+. Tune refresh_interval to 30s, allocate 4–8GB RAM. Re-index rate target: 50k SKUs in <10 minutes.
• Hyvä theme: replaces Luma’s 3MB+ JS with ~150kB Tailwind/Alpine. Catalog list-view renders 60% faster. INP drops from 280ms to 80ms on a 50k-SKU store.
• Hosting floor: 8 vCPU / 16GB RAM / NVMe SSD, Redis for cache + sessions, dedicated MariaDB or Aurora. Cloudways "Pro" plan or Hetzner CX52 minimum.

With those four in place, a 50k-SKU electronics store hits Lighthouse 90+ on category and product pages. I’ve shipped one with 78k SKUs that holds 95+ Lighthouse mobile.