First I would like to know components Solidus consists of 🙂

Shopify is a service, they host it

Solidus is more of a framework for building e-commerce sites on

it extends Ruby on Rails

( generally, I guess you could use it outside rails? never tried )

You're basically comparing Wix to wordpress

I was asked to evaluate Shopify in terms of checkout extensibility and I found that Solidus is highly customizable in the area. That led me to thought: "If we could just have something that is OpeSource and pack it (eg helm) so that upon installing it in cluster we could have quickly basic ecommerce shop with the extensions capability then maybe I could suggest Solidus as alternative to Shopify"

if you write that it is rather

framework

then my undestanding is that having initial setup is very time consuming even if we could have some prepackaged installation ( containerized -> image -> helm chart)

but the "out of the box" experience with solidus is more like a Lego kit than a whole toy.

anyway - thanks for your input @Jesse Raleigh!

But again, like @Jesse Raleigh mentioned, you are really comparing apples to oranges. I think it may be worth comparing the features of the two platforms provide OOTB rather than the architecture 🤔