Magento vs Shopify

It is crucial to choose the best ecommerce platform for setting up, running, and maintaining an online store because this decision could determine the success or failure of your company. Due to their constrained finances and resources, small enterprises must pay particular attention to this.

The two most well-known ecommerce platforms that we cover on our website are Shopify and Magento. When it comes to larger, more complex ecommerce sites, Magento is the leading competitor to Shopify in the "hosted, all-in-one" platform market. Although they are extremely different systems, we want to compare Magento and Shopify to find which is best for your company.

You may be weighing your alternatives if you intend to open an online store soon or move your existing one to a different platform. These days, two highly regarded and popular ecommerce store development and administration platforms are Shopify (see our Shopify reviews) and Magento Open Source (read our Magento review). However, before comparing and contrasting these systems, you should be fully aware of certain significant fundamental distinctions between them:

Shopify is a for-profit product that you must purchase, but Magento Open Source is open-source software that is available for free.

While Magento requires you to provide your own hosting, instal, setup, and configure everything before you can really start developing your store, this demands medium to high level web development and programming expertise, Shopify is a hosted solution (where they host your store for you).

With a straightforward user interface, Shopify is more suited for beginners than Magento, which is more feature-rich but better suited for experienced developers.

There is a premium version of Magento, but it is only suitable for huge businesses who can afford to spend tens of thousands of dollars every month on a website because it is so expensive. Since the majority of start-ups and small enterprises lack the funding, we won't be reviewing the paid version. The majority of small firms should consider using Magento's opensource version if they have a skilled developer on staff or if they have those talents themselves. If not, Shopify is a far better choice for your complete online store.

Here is our head-to-head comparison between Magento and Shopify taking these distinctions into account.

Magento vs Shopify: Pros and Cons

Let's start with a brief overview of the advantages and disadvantages of each method. Both Magento and Shopify have a number of advantages to take into account, but they also have some areas where your eCommerce website may find them wanting.

Shopify Pros:

There are many gorgeous responsive store themes available.
A comprehensive eCommerce builder
Excellent software shop for adding features to your website
Excellent client service
Simple to use
Many choices for checkout and payment
A large community of dedicated fans

Shopify Cons:

Most themes have an associated cost.
It becomes more challenging when apps are integrated into your store.
Every transaction is subject to a charge (unless you use Shopify payments)

Magento Pros:

Fantastic community with a tonne of user support
Numerous customization options on a flexible platform
Good selection of themes available Phone support
Magento Commerce does not require extensive coding experience.
Magento is open-source and free to use
Extensions for Magento 2

Magento Cons:

Some learning to be done
Quite challenging for beginners
Requires a lot of preparation time.
There are many expenses involved with opening your store.

Magento vs Shopify: A Feature Comparison

Basic online store features - Both Shopify and Magento provide fundamental store features that are quite easy to use and keep up-to-date. Compared to Magento, Shopify is a lot simpler to set up and use. Both Magento and Shopify come with the same fundamental functionalities, such as shopping carts, checkout modules, collections, and product pages. The primary distinction is that Magento has significantly more sophisticated and intermediate functions included within the platform. With Shopify, more functionality is frequently only available through an app.

Inventory control - Your store can have an unlimited number of products under any of the Shopify plans. You can build and sell an endless number of products with Magento. Both systems make it simple to build goods and collections, but Shopify wins this round due to its direct interaction with dropshipping inventory apps like Oberlo.

It should be mentioned that while Shopify is a fully managed and hosted solution, Magento provides for a virtually endless amount of products. However, if you add too many products to your Magento store, your host (server) performance and site loading speed may become severe concerns.

Calculation of shipping fees - One of the most fundamental and important components of selling physical goods through an e-commerce shop, both platforms provide versatile and powerful solutions for the calculation of shipping fees. If you want to be as accurate as possible for your consumers, Shopify also interfaces with several dropshipping solutions (including delivery estimates) and more precise shipping calculators.

Provision for coupons and discount codes – Shopify, a bit of an underdog here, does not offer this feature on its Lite plan, but it is available on all other plans. Magento allows discount code creation and calculation functionalities from the start.

Payment gateway options – With support for over 70 payment gateways, Shopify has a significant advantage over Magento, who is comparatively at a disadvantage due to its support for a much smaller number of gateways. However, more gateways can be added to a Magento store via add-ons from outside parties. The primary issue I have with Shopify is that you are essentially forced to use the built-in payment mechanism. While third-party gateways charge fees, Shopify's gateway has no transaction costs.

Themes and Templates - Both Shopify and Magento include a sizable selection of themes and templates that can be used to customise the look and feel of your online store to match your preferences and product offerings. Although Shopify offers far fewer free themes than Magento Open Source, it should be noted that the free Shopify themes are typically more modern than the themes made available by Magento Open Source.

The fact that Shopify premium themes start at $80 while Magento paid themes start at an almost astounding $1 puts Shopify at a significant disadvantage in this area.

Plugins and Apps - Shopify offers well over 100 add-ons and apps. The Shopify apps help in numerous ways to improve and increase the functionality of your online store. With apps for things like loyalty programmes, accountancy, and email marketing, the Shopify App store is continually expanding. You won't instal a useless programme that will harm your website because Shopify moderates its app store rather well.

With a staggering 5000+ apps and add-ons, Magento once more has a significant advantage in this situation. This is mostly due to the platform's size, open source, and community-driven nature. Both platforms provide a combination of paid and free applications and add-ons.

Availability in multiple languages - Shopify does not immediately provide in-depth multilingual features. For Shopify, third-party/paid apps are available for building completely multilingual stores. Shopify also offers the option of custom-coding your theme to support many languages. To execute the task, you would likely need to hire a skilled Shopify developer. Again, Magento has an edge because it has more multilingual support built right in.

SEO capabilities - Both e-commerce platforms include strong SEO features and benefits to help you increase organic traffic to your store from search engines. These features and advantages are comprehensively covered in this article: Choosing the best e-commerce platform for SEO capabilities.

Customization options - Both platforms include strong customization options with an advanced interface that lets you change the raw HTML/CSS code directly, giving you complete control over the layout and overall appearance of your business.

The customization options with Magento are as good as they get because all of its code is open source, any of which you can modify in any way you like. However, as was already mentioned, Shopify performs better in this area by offering a straightforward, menu-driven method to change the basic attributes of your store such as fonts, colours, etc. very easily. However, only individuals with a solid foundation in web development and HTML/CSS coding are able to take use of this unconstrained freedom to customise.

Additionally, Shopify provides a theme editor that enables you to experiment with your theme's appearance. This editor also allows you to conceal areas so that you may work on upcoming upgrades without having to duplicate the theme or use a staging server.

The drag and drop sections that Shopify offers are nice for structuring the material on your website. Although it isn't exactly a drag-and-drop builder, it provides a far simpler design interface than Magento.

Blogging - Shopify offers simple blogging capabilities as an integrated feature. Magento can be used to accomplish this. Your Magento blog should be far more customisable than what Shopify offers, provided you have a developer on staff.

Which One is Best?

Both Shopify and Magento are fairly capable ecommerce platforms, but as Shopify is a hosted and fully managed service, it offers more usability.

Although it is free, Magento demands that you purchase hosting and complete all software/system setup and installation tasks on your own, which only moderately tech-savvy persons (and not ordinary end users) would be able to do.

This, together with some of the previously mentioned qualities, make Shopify a standout ecommerce platform for creating your online store with the utmost ease of use and potent capabilities. Comment below with any additional queries you may have concerning our comparison of Magento and Shopify.