Hydrogen vs Liquid: when to make the jump

Hydrogen is the right answer when your storefront needs capabilities that Liquid genuinely can't provide: a custom checkout experience, tight integration with a non-Shopify data source, or UI interactions that require a full React component model.

Most Shopify stores should stay on Liquid. The stores that benefit from Hydrogen are the ones with catalog complexity, heavy personalization requirements, or ambitions that genuinely exceed what the platform's native architecture can support.