Choosing the wrong ecommerce platform can lead to countless headaches, lost sales, and stunted growth for your online store. With so many options available, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and unsure which platform best suits your needs.
Magento and Shopify are popular choices, but they have key differences that can make or break your success.
To help, we have broken down the pros and cons of each platform for you, comparing their ease of use, features, pricing, and more. This way, you can confidently choose the platform that will best help your business thrive.
In this post:
● Magento vs. Shopify: a quick overview
● Magento vs. Shopify: features comparison
● Magento vs. Shopify: pricing
● Ease of use
● Apps, plugins, and integrations
● Themes, templates, and customization
● Security
● Magento vs. Shopify: pros and cons
● Wrap up
Shopify vs Magento: a quick overview
Both Shopify and Magento are well-suited to building online stores. But before we dive deeper, let’s take a look at their main differences.
- Shopify is a proprietary platform for building online stores. The monthly subscription provides access to ecommerce software for small- to mid-sized online stores, with many templates… but fewer ways to customize.
- Magento is free (with paid options), open-source, and much more customizable. Accordingly, it’s often the better fit for enterprise-level ecommerce stores aiming for more personalized shopping experiences.
Either Shopify or Magento could serve as a solid foundation for your online store. But they’re not equally great in all aspects.
Here’s a quick rundown of what you can expect from either platform:
| Magento | Shopify | |
| Is it beginner-friendly? | No | Yes |
| Does it offer scalability? | Yes | Yes, with add-ons |
| Is it secure? | Yes, and can be further improved with add-ons | Yes |
| Does it have robust inventory and product management? | Yes | Yes |
| Is it budget-friendly? | No | Yes |
| Can you track the performance of your ecommerce store? | Yes | Yes, with add-ons |
| Can you create multi-stores? | Yes | Yes, with add-ons |
| Does it provide reliable payment gateways? | Yes | Yes |
| Will you get support? | Yes | Yes |
| Does it offer SEO capabilities? | Yes | Yes, with add-ons |
| Does it support product promotions? | Yes | Yes, with add-ons |
With all that in mind, here’s our in-depth comparison of Shopify vs Magento.
Magento vs. Shopify: features comparison
Both Magento and Shopify are full-service ecommerce platforms and come with everything that merchants need to set up a fully functional online store. When comparing Shopify vs. Magento, you’ll notice the following differences in features:
Shopify features
Shopify offers an extensive feature set that makes it one of the most popular ecommerce solutions:
- Multi-channel selling: Sell across multiple marketplaces and social channels, including Amazon, eBay, Facebook, and Instagram
- Powerful analytics: Access insights about your store’s performance, customers, and marketing effectiveness
- Streamlined order management: Easily manage and fulfill orders, track inventory, and handle shipping and taxes
- Mobile optimization: Shopify themes are responsive and optimized for mobile, plus you can manage your store on the go with the Shopify mobile app
- SEO features: Built-in SEO best practices help your store rank in search results. Edit meta titles and descriptions, create 301 redirects, and generate sitemaps
- Expansive app store: Over 8,000 apps to extend and customize your store’s functionality
- Reliable hosting: 99.99% uptime and fast load times, with unlimited bandwidth on all plans
Magento features
Magento boasts robust features designed for enterprise-level businesses:
- Customer segmentation: Group customers based on attributes such as location, gender, order history, and lifetime spending. Use features to offer targeted promotions and content
- Flexible APIs: Integrate with ERPs, CRMs, and other business systems
- B2B functionality: Set custom catalogs and pricing for different companies. Provide quote requests, requisition lists, and quick ordering
- Global selling: Localize your store for international markets with multiple languages, currencies, and tax rates
- Strong SEO: Customize URLs, metadata, sitemaps, and redirects. Take advantage of layered navigation, canonical tags, and rich snippets
- Marketing tools: Create landing pages, banners, targeted coupons, promos, and loyalty programs, and send automated email reminders
- Admin permissions: Set roles and permissions for different admin users to control access to backend features
Magento vs. Shopify: pricing
Magento pricing
Magento comes in three packages: Magento Open Source, Adobe Commerce (previously Magento Commerce), and Adobe Commerce Cloud.
Magento Open Source is free to install but might be expensive in the long run. This is because the platform uses the Ryanair model: the base costs are low, but the expenses add up quickly if you want the complete feature package. All these add-ons can cost you around $2,000 per month or more.
For example, you’ll have to pay for hosting your website or hiring Magento developers and designers to help you customize your online store. Still, this doesn’t mean that Magento can’t be a good fit for your business.
If you decide to use this platform in the long term, you’ll need to calculate your potential short- and long-term costs.
Shopify pricing
Shopify pricing is subscription-based and starts at $29 per month for the Basic plan.
The plan includes access to most features, such as the ability to use Shopify Payments, sell unlimited products, and use discount codes. However, you don’t get international pricing, country-specific domains, or performance reports.
Shopify’s standard plan for small teams starts at $79 per month, and the Advanced plan costs $299 per month. If you decide to upgrade, you can access more competitive payment processing fees, advanced reporting features, and larger shipping discounts.
You can choose the Shopify Lite version if you already have a website. It starts at $9 per month, works with any platform, and lets you sell a limited number of products and accept credit card payments.
There’s also Shopify Plus, which is available for large enterprises. This plan is custom-tailored for every business and starts at $2,300 per month on a three-year term.
Ease of use
Most ecommerce merchants aren’t web designers or developers. But even if you’re familiar with web development, you’ll want your platform to be as user-friendly as possible.
When it comes to ease of use, Magento is much less user-friendly than Shopify, especially for non-developers.
However, all this complexity comes with complete control over your website. Magento lets you create a truly unique online store if you have the technical knowledge or the budget to hire developers.
Shopify is much simpler and easier to use than Magento. It’s built for everyone — laypeople and tech wizards.
Consequently, Shopify is pretty foolproof, so you’ll have no trouble building your online store.
Apps, plugins, and integrations
Both Magento Marketplace and the Shopify App Store offer extensive libraries of third-party apps, plugins, and integrations to improve and grow your online store.
The Shopify app store has over 8,000 apps for online merchants to choose from, and many of them are free to install. To enhance your store experience even more, you can install some of the best Shopify apps.
Magento Marketplace offers more than 4,000 free and paid extensions. These cover a broad spectrum of categories, including customer support, marketing, website optimization, analytics, and anything else you might need to build your online store.
Both platforms offer a massive collection of add-ons, so you should be able to find an app for anything on either Magento or Shopify.
Themes, templates, and customization
Both Magento and Shopify have a sizable collection of templates and themes to help you beautify your online store. While Shopify carries fewer free themes than Magento, they’re better designed than those in the Magento Marketplace.
Magento themes start at $17, whereas paid themes on Shopify will cost a minimum of $140.
Magento and Shopify both provide plenty of templates, but Shopify presents higher-quality options.
Security
No one wants to get hacked.
If you want your store to be safe from potential threats, platform security should be at the top of your must-have list. And patching is one of the cornerstones of keeping your online store secure from any hacking attempts.
While Shopify manages patches and updates for you, Magento requires you to install security fixes manually. As a result, you’ll have to invest more time and attention with Magento to keep your online store well-protected.
That said, Magento can draw on the resources of its massive open-source community to find and fix any security holes.
Shopify, on the other hand, relies on a much smaller team of in-house talent and a public bounty program. While this doesn’t mean that Shopify is an insecure ecommerce platform, Magento has a clear advantage in this aspect.
However, just because both these platforms are relatively secure doesn’t mean you can afford to be careless on your end. Most security breaches happen due to insider or user error, so you’ll have to implement basic security measures like strong passwords and two-factor authentication to protect your store from unauthorized access attempts before they happen.
Whether you end up using Magento or Shopify, don’t underestimate the importance of your security practices.
Magento vs. Shopify: pros and cons
Consider the following when comparing Shopify to Magento for your ecommerce needs.
Magento
Pros:
- Highly customizable open-source platform
- No extra transaction fees apart from standard rates from payment gateways
- Large extensions marketplace
- Notable B2B features, such as custom catalogs and pricing
- Localization capabilities for international selling
Cons:
- Requires development knowledge to set up and maintain
- Hosting and security is your responsibility
- Can be expensive with add-ons and developer costs
Shopify
Pros:
- User-friendly interface for non-technical users
- Reliable hosting with 99.99% uptime
- App store with thousands of add-ons
- Competitive pricing plans
- Multi-channel integration with marketplaces and social media
Cons:
- Less control over site customization
- Extra transaction fees if not using Shopify Payments
- Reliant on third-party apps for advanced features
Wrap up
The choice between Shopify and Magento depends on what you need.
If you’re looking for an easy-to-use yet powerful B2C ecommerce platform, Shopify is your best bet. On the other hand, Magento is more suitable if you have a massive online store and the technical knowledge and resources to customize it.
Source from Omnisend
Disclaimer: The information set forth above is provided by omnisend.com independently of Chovm.com. Chovm.com makes no representation and warranties as to the quality and reliability of the seller and products.
