Automated Migration Tools vs Done-For-You: What Each One Actually Covers

If you search for migration help you land in two very different markets. One sells software that moves your data for a fixed per-record fee. The other sells a person who moves your site. They are frequently compared as if they are alternatives, and they are not. They cover different parts of the same job.

Knowing which parts are which is most of the decision.

What the automated tools genuinely do well#

Services like Cart2Cart and LitExtension connect to your source platform, read your entities, and write them into the destination. For catalogue data this works, and it works at volumes that would be miserable by hand.

They handle products with variants, categories and collections, customers, order history, and often reviews, mapping between two schemas that do not agree about anything, then repeating it a few thousand times without getting bored. If you have 3,000 SKUs and five years of orders, this is genuinely the right tool, and paying for it is cheaper than any alternative.

They are also fast. A catalogue that would take days to reshape by hand runs in hours, and most services offer a free demo migration so you can see the mapping before you commit.

That is a real product solving a real problem. The issue is not quality. It is scope.

What they do not touch#

A migration is not a data transfer with some decoration around it. Data is one phase of five, and it is not the phase that determines whether your search traffic survives.

The audit. No tool crawls your live site and tells you what exists before it starts. Nobody inventories the pages Google actually sends traffic to, notices the three PDFs that rank, or finds the form that quietly feeds your CRM. If it is not in the source platform's database as an exportable entity, automation cannot see it.

The design. Nothing about your layout, brand or page structure comes across. You still need a theme configured or a site built. This surprises people who read "complete migration" on a pricing page.

The redirects. Most services offer an SEO or redirect add-on. Read what it covers: typically it maps entity URLs where both platforms have an obvious equivalent: old product URL to new product URL. That is useful and it is not a redirect map. Your content pages, your dated blog archive, your category paths, the campaign landing page from 2023 that still earns links. None of those are entities in a catalogue, so nothing maps them. They 404 quietly, and the first sign is a traffic chart six weeks later.

The verification. No tool re-crawls the old URL list after launch to confirm every redirect resolves, checks that staging's noindex did not ship to production, resubmits your sitemap, or watches Search Console while Google re-crawls. This is the least glamorous phase and the one that catches the mistakes that actually cost money.

The honest cost comparison#

Automated tools price by record count, so a large catalogue costs more than a small one, typically a few hundred dollars for a serious store, plus your own time on everything else.

Done-for-you pricing covers the whole job. Ours is destination and size based: WordPress rebuilds start at $499, store migrations at $1,499, custom builds at $2,499, with the audit, redirect map and post-launch verification included at every tier rather than sold as add-ons.

The comparison people should actually run is not tool price against service price. It is tool price plus your hours against service price, and then honestly, whether those hours exist. A migration half-finished because the busy season arrived is the most expensive outcome of all, because the site is live either way.

Which fits your site#

Use an automated tool when your catalogue is large, your design is being rebuilt separately anyway, your URL structure maps predictably between platforms, and you have someone technical who will own the redirect map and the post-launch checks. It is the right tool for exactly this shape of job, and paying for it beats hand-reshaping thousands of rows.

Use done-for-you when your search traffic is a meaningful source of business, your site has accumulated pages that are not catalogue entities, you cannot afford a bad week while someone learns which parts were not covered, or you simply want one fixed number and a date.

Do it entirely by hand when the site is small: under about ten pages with no store. At that size, tooling is overhead. Crawl it, list the URLs, rebuild it, map the redirects. Our free redirect generator covers the fiddliest part, and the migration risk score will tell you in two minutes whether you have the pieces in place.

The test worth running#

Whichever route you pick, run this check before committing: open Search Console, sort your pages by clicks, and take the top twenty URLs. For each one, write down where it will live after the move.

If you can answer for all twenty, your plan is sound and any approach will work. If several are pages no automated tool would recognise as entities (a services page, a guide, a location page, an old campaign that still earns links), then the data transfer was never your risk, and buying a tool to solve it will leave you exactly where you started.

Once you are comparing providers rather than deciding whether to hire at all, what a migration quote should include covers the six lines to look for and the phrasing that signals corners being cut.

That list, incidentally, is the first artifact we produce on every job. If you would rather not build it yourself, send us the URL and it arrives as part of the quote.