When launching your business online, choosing a suitable eCommerce platform is one of the most critical factors. There are many platforms on which you can quickly build an online store. Most merchants find it difficult to choose between Magento and Shopify.
Well, there are several factors you should consider to choose an apt platform, such as ease of use, level of customisation, business needs, and value for money offered by the chosen platform.
This blog offers a detailed Magento vs Shopify comparison, so you can choose a suitable platform for your needs. Let’s start from the basics, where we study both platforms separately with their pros and cons and later analyse how they stand against each other.
What is Magento?
Magento is an open-source platform powering approximately 250K online stores globally. This platform comes with various handy features like checkout, payment gateway, and shipping one-page checkout option for quickly building online stores.
With Magento as your content management system (CMS), you also get an advanced level of customisation, modern reporting features, and more. It is a headless platform, which means store merchants have greater flexibility in managing the front end without affecting the functionality of the online stores. Magento also has a paid version called Adobe Commerce, which comes with greater security and is geared toward building enterprise-level stores.
Overall, Magento is a good choice for starting an eCommerce store and scaling your business. Magento agency UK can tailor unique online stores that offer a seamless shopping experience.
Magento Pros:
High Customization: The platform provides extensive customization options to tailor the online store to specific business needs.
Scalability: Stores built can quickly scale to accommodate large product catalogs and high traffic volumes as a business grows.
Strong SEO Capabilities: It has several built-in features to optimize search engine ranking, like you can write meta descriptions and titles.
Large Developer Community: Globally, Magento enjoys extensive community support with readily available developers and extensions.
Mobile Responsiveness: Responsive Magento store designs adapt well to different mobile devices for a seamless user experience.
Cons of Magento:
Complexity for Beginners: It can be challenging for beginners to set up and manage users without technical expertise.
Customization Complexity: Extensive customization options can become time-consuming and require skilled developers.
Hosting Requirements: Magento open-source does not come with dedicated hosting, which can increase costs.
What is Shopify?
Shopify is a globally acclaimed eCommerce platform powering 5.1 million online stores worldwide. It offers various proven tools to launch and run online stores, process sales, and grow businesses. Although it is a completely paid platform, it comes with various plans to meet different business needs and scale.
Shopify’s pricing plans offer a range between £5 to £259 per month when billed annually. This allows small, medium, and big businesses to choose suitable plans for their needs. Countries like the UK, US, France, Germany and many European nations have the most number of online Shopify stores.
Shopify Pros:
- Easy to use: Shopify is one of the most easy to use platforms and even beginners can learn it quickly without having to gain coding or design experience.
- Scalable: Shopify’s platform can grow with your business because with the growing needs, you can easily switch to the next pricing plan with greater number of features.
- Responsive customer support: This eCommerce platform offers 24/7 customer support by phone, email, and live chat. This gives it an edge in the Magento vs Shopify Plus comparison.
- Secure hosting: Shopify includes secure website hosting, which eliminates the need to buy separate hosting.
- Variety of themes: Shopify offers various free and paid themes and templates that help to quickly build online stores. A Shopify development agency can customise themes to build a growth-oriented store for your business.
Shopify Cons:
- The number of free themes available with Shopify is limited
- Compared to Magento, the level of customisation is limited on the Shopify platform.
Magento vs Shopify – What are the main differences?
Which one is simple to use?
Shopify has a simple learning curve with an easy-to-use page builder and an intuitive interface. This allows you to easily navigate through the backend and easily update details about products. Moreover the access to drag and drop blocks helps with a hassle-free customization.
Magento has a steep learning curve, which means you need expertise to set up online stores on this eCommerce platform. Further, you need to set up hosting for the online stores.
Winner: Shopify
SEO Capabilities
Search engine optimization plays a vital role in the visibility of the online store. In the Shopify vs Magento comparison, Magento offers better SEO features. For example, Magento offers the following:
- Build products and categories canonical tags
- XML Sitemap
- Rewrite URLs
- Custom meta tags for all store pages
- Product-rich snippets and more
Shopify fails to offer this level of SEO functionalities. You can edit page titles and image alt tags, but for most SEO features, you need to download apps from the Shopify store.
Winner: Magento
Third-party Extensions
Both the platforms offer smooth integrations to extend the functionality of your online stores. Shopify App Store and Magento Marketplace lets you easily add new features to the online stores. You can access different categories of extensions to help you with marketing, sales, discounts, promotions.
The difference lies in the fact that adding Shopify apps requires clicking on a few buttons which can be done by anyone. On the other hand, setting up Magento extensions requires technical expertise.
Winner: Shopify
Payment Processing
Both platforms offer tons of Payment Gateways integration to ensure secure and smooth transactions. Shopify comes with a native payment gateway — Shopify Payments that lets you manage payments without third-party integration.
The fee is imposed only when customers access the credit card processor. Using third-party Payment Gateways like Paypal, Amazon Pay, etc. requires you to pay per transaction as follows:
Shopify Basic — 2% per transaction
Shopify — 1% per transaction
Shopify Advanced — 0.6% per transaction
Magento offers over 150 payment gateways and does not impose any additional fee.
Winner: Magento
Conclusion
The ultimate winner of the Magento vs. Shopify comparison depends upon your business requirements. While Magento open source has a higher upfront cost, it is cost-effective in the long run as you do not have to pay subscription and transaction fees.
On the other hand, Shopify is a hosted platform that helps with smooth store setup. However, you have to pay per transaction, which can be discouraging to many store merchants.
