Shopify vs Magento: Which is Best for your E-commerce Business?

If you’re looking for an E-com platform – Shopify and Magento are two platforms most companies rely on. Both the platforms offer pro-level to maximum, but you must know the differences for best results.

Covid pandemic has entirely changed the E-commerce scene. Creating and managing an E-commerce business has become more critical than ever. As most people prefer online shopping, there has been a paradigm shift in how people relate to an E-commerce website.

While choosing a suitable platform – you’ll have to consider the two most significant factors – flexibility and user experience. Moreover, you must rely on a robust platform that quickly sells all your products and services.

What is Shopify?

Shopify is the most popular and fully hosted E-com platform that offers – online storage, web hosting services, and unlimited bandwidth options in a single plan. As it’s fully hosted – it’s easy to create and maintain your E-commerce store. And, with no coding feature – you can create your store without any technical know-how.

With experience, you can add more useful functionality to your site. In addition, it supports different business needs – whether a big business or a startup.

Shopify is capable of supporting high-volume businesses with simplified features. It was launched in 2004 and supports more than 5 lakh websites in the webspace.

Also read: What are the Unique features of Shopify

What is Magento?

As Magento is open-sourced platform – it is a good choice for enterprise eCommerce brands. Being open-sourced – you’ll have to set up and create your website. Besides, it lets you create customized websites and manage marketing and catalog.

It uses multiple PHP frameworks that provide complete flexibility. Most WordPress users choose Magento for building an E-commerce store as it offers better functionality with WordPress.

Moreover, it offers complete security and extensions to make your website more scalable. It was launched in 2008 and chains more than 100K online stores. Further, in 2015, Magento released Magento 2 with improved scalability and coding structure.

Also read: Top 5 Ecommerce Platforms

Points of Differences

Expediency

The E-commerce platform you choose should provide you with complete expediency. If the solution is simple, you’ll be more comfortable experimenting with new features.

Shopify offers simple site-building solutions. As a result, you can easily create, manage, and maintain an eCommerce website. Besides, it comes with a drag & drops site builder and extensions to customize your store. Moreover, you can amend things quickly and find add-ons in your dashboard area.

Magento’s learning curve can be tricky for new users. You need to know coding expertise for store creation and management of features. Though the platform has a simple interface – it requires you to navigate effectively. As the setup is complex – you may need added guidance.

Performance and Speed

Speed is the most crucial factor for an E-commerce store. Even a single-second delay can lead to a decrease in conversion rates, which affects sales. In addition, slow speed can lead to a customer leaving your website.

Shopify is a hosted solution – so the performance and speed are guaranteed. But, in most cases, expect a reliable and stable performance on the platform.

For Magento – the speed and performance depend on the hosting solution provider. Besides, if the hosting company offers website optimization – you can expect guaranteed performance and speed for your store.

Also read: 5 Reasons to redesign your Shopify Website

Design Elements

Shopify comes with a plethora of theme options you can choose from. It offers more than 100+ free and premium design elements and themes you can explore. And, with the intuitive theme editor – you can customize a theme depending on your E-store requirement.

Also, you can add new logos, customized images, and content. In addition, it offers a drag & drops feature that makes it easy to add new site elements. Moreover, you can adjust colors to fit your brand concept.

Compared to Shopify, Magento offers limited theme options. It provides more than 16 themes available in paid and free options. However, more than ten themes are mobile responsive, which is an added advantage for your site.

Features

Shopify comes with essential features and is not as advanced as Magento:

• Access to shopping carts, product pages, checkout modules, and collections
• Allows adding unlimited products through inventory management feature
• Offers discount coupons and multilingual support
• Access to site maps, social media integration, Metadata, and customized headers
• Detailed analytics and reporting

Magento offers features depending on particular business requirement or website:

• Access to shopping carts, collections, checkouts, build in features, and product pages
• Build unlimited products and sell them through inventory management
• Customers get discounts and coupon codes
• Offers multilingual support that reaches global customers
• Enables upsells, wish lists and cross-sells
• Order tracking, email notification, customer segmentation, and advanced reporting

Marketing Capabilities

Both platforms offer a range of marketing features. Shopify comes with a build-in email tool you can use for product promotion. It lets you share new updates and lets you integrate with third-party apps for social sharing.

Besides, it allows new E-stores to sell in many languages. So you can adapt to a marketing plan to suit the range of your customer’s needs.

With Magento, you’ll need to run different campaigns for marketing. You can integrate with applications and extensions to market your products. Besides, you can edit the descriptions and page titles on both platforms.

Apps and Tools

Integration of apps with the website is significant for scaling. Shopify offers more than six thousand apps and tools (free and paid). Besides, it provides apps for marketing and customer service, which helps you to get exposure on the web. It provides access to single-click installation that saves time.

On the other hand, Magento comes with more than 4000 apps and extensions (free and paid). In addition, it provides access to payment processing and customized tools. But, you will require basic coding knowledge to install and set up apps on the platform.

Payment and Fees

It is essential to compare Shopify and Magento based on the hosting plans they offer.

There are three plans available for Shopify website development:

• Shopify basic starts at $29 and offers two accounts and 4 inventory locations
• Shopify plan starts at $79 and provides 5 accounts, and 5 inventory locations
• Advanced Shopify begins at $299 with 15 accounts and 8 inventory locations
• Shopify supports more than 100 payment gateways for payment processing

Magento has three editions – one free and two paid ones.

• The startup edition is available at $5 per month. For a bigger E-com website – you can choose an advanced plan starting at $200 per month
• Magento supports more than 150 gateways for payment processing

SEO

Shopify relies on its applications for SEO functionality. You can integrate with SEO apps and plugins – for editing images and alt tags.

Alternatively, Magento excels in the optimization feature. With its features, you can edit the image alt tags and customize URLs according to website needs. It also offers built-in features for SEO to increase site visibility in SERP.

Pros and cons

Shopify Pros

• 70+ mobile responsive themes
• Multichannel selling
• Extensive range of apps
• Simple interface

Shopify Cons

• Higher transaction fees
• Limited SEO support

Magento Pros

• Flexible platform with no limitations
• Large user community base
• Ideal for startups and large businesses
• Offers complete SEO support

Magento Cons

• Need coding background
• Complex installation of apps

Shopify vs Magento: The Final Verdict

It’s a tie, but it can be tricky depending on your business’s features, budget, skills, and scale. If you are a non-coder – go with Shopify as it offers a simple setup and easy integration. It applies to small-scale companies, freelancers, and startups.

Magento requires you to have some coding expertise for setup and integration. Besides being an open-source platform – its cost depends on your website requirements.

Magento is ideal for enterprise-level businesses that also offer you customizable solutions. Moreover, you can hire a website developer to build a Magento-based E-commerce website. Lastly, for startups – Shopify is a better choice.

Your ecommerce business should offer the seamless user experience while meeting your business and revenue goals. To enjoy the competitive edge and give your customer the experience they offer, you need an ecommerce development company like Webuters. Talk to our experts today!