Shopify Vs Magento

Which One Is Go To Platfrom for You? Magneto OR Shopify.

It always a confusing question that occurs initially when you’re opting for eCommerce platform.

With the popularity of these two platform, it’s hard to decide which one is the correct choice for you.

If you’re facing hesitation in selecting one of the platforms than you’re not alone?

Let me guide you through out this article, I can’t change your decision but definetly make your decison process a little easier.

In today’s market, these two brands are the most popular eCommerce platforms available.

Shopify, on one hand it is the easiest solution to use for building an online stores.

Magento, on the other hand is an open source platform like WordPress, is free to install on your pc.

But if you want to use magento to its full capability, you’ll need to pay for web hosting, security, and extensions.

It needs professionals, because of this it is best suitable for enterprise-level businesses.

What are the Pros & Cons of Magento VS Shopify?

Magento Pros & Cons

Pros	Cons
Large user community – it has a comprehensive answer for just about anything	Expensive– Magento is available in many versions. The community version of Magento is free, while the enterprise version of Magento cost you more than fifteen thousand dollars approximately.
Magento has a lot of variations with features such as multiple stores, and support different locations, multingual, different pricings and currencies.	With slow response time, its customizations are difficult, in comparison to other e-commerce platforms
It’s mobile friendliness ensures the success of e-commerce.	It needs a dedicated server for hosting. Other normal hosting platforms should not be used to host it.
Magento’s capability to handle growth and scaling of the business.	The product support for Magento is quite expensive to afford.

Shopify Pros & Cons

Pros	Cons
Simplicity of usage– Simply business owners wants to increase sales without any technical takedown or other diffrenent factors.	For non-technical people Shopify is an excellent platform. But if you’re looking for more features for your store you might consider some self-hosted platforms.
Different choice of storefront themes- Shopify has beautiful storefront themes they provide. They make your website look beautiful and professional, which helps you retain customers and also in increasing sales.	But there are only ten free theme templates.
24/7 support- It has an incredible dedicated support team. With availablibility over live chat, and email.	It lacks in solving techincal issues.
Marketing and discounts- With marketing tools that will increase your website SEO rankings, sharing on social media, and automated other tasks.	Extended SEO features is only available in paid version.

Which One Is Easier To Use? Shopify Vs Magento.

Picking a platform that’s too hard to use will make it impossible for you to create a ecommerce store of your choice, and it can cost you damage of your brand image.

Shopify is lot easier to use than Magento. It’s a fact.

Shopify is an drag-and-drop website builder, and it is easily customizable .

Research defines that Shopify is suitable for users of all technical abilities, while Magento is for tech-savvy people, probably for web developers only.

With Magento, the learning curve is pretty hard compared to Shopify

Magento vs Shopify – Ease of use: Verdict
Shopify is easier to use than Magento.

Magento provides more flexibility than Shopify, it enables you more options to customize your store with coding, but it’s a little trickier to use.

Which one has the best features? Shopify Vs Magento.

In retail industry people have various needs and priorities when it comes to features.

Magento wide range of features, such as its support product catalogs with multiple modifications, native product bundles, cross-selling and upselling features user experience.

Let’s have a look at some of the General Magento features:

• Marketing, Promotions, and Conversion Tools
• Site Management
• Optimization
• Catalog Management
• Product Browsing
• Catalog Browsing
• Checkout, Payment, and Shipping
• Order Management
• Customer Accounts
• Customer Service
• International Support
• Analytics and Reporting
• Mobile Commerce
  
  
  

The mentioned features above are general. The Magento Commerce version has more additional features. If you want to find out more about the detailed feature list of Magento, please check out article on Magento.

Shopify features that makes a difference to you online store, and other ones can be added through its app store.

Have a look at some General Shopify features:

• Unlimited products 
• Staff accounts 
• 24/7 support 
• Sales channels 
• Manual order creation 
• Discount codes 
• Free SSL certificate 
• Abandoned cart recovery 
• Gift cards 
• Professional reports 
• Advanced report builder 
• Third-party calculated shipping rates

Sales Tools for Shopify & Magento.

E-commerce platforms and sales tools work simoultaneously.

You can’t have one without the other, right?

Now, let’s see what all does Shopify and Magento have for Us.

Here are some of the prolific features on Shopify which enable you to sell your

products and make the impact:

1.Abandoned cart recovery-manages the recovery of potentially lost sales by

sending automated emails to users that left your website before finalizing a

purchase.

2.Multi-channel selling- make sales on different channels (like Amazon,

Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram) as a built-in feature.

3.Sell digital products

4.Partnerships with USPS, DHL Express, UPS, and Canada Post

aids to save you the from the hassle of finding your own courier service.

Magento’s inventory system is pretty impressive, it comes with some of the best

features such as product import from your database, multiple product variants, total revenue reports, and total visitor count.

Magento sales tools that have made a huge impact:

1.Multi-channel selling options install extensions in order to integrate your

store with Facebook, Instagram, and eBay.

2.Checkout customization create a totally bespoke checkout for your online store.

3.Abandoned cart recovery

4.Set percentage and fixed price discounts

Best hosting solution between Shopify & Magento?

Shopify, a cloud-based platform, that means you won’t get any third-party hosting. The platform itself takes care of your servers, optimizing it for performance, and security breaches. It is run, maintained, and monitored by Shopify. Retail companies with sensitive data storage needs, Shopify is for them.

Magento has on-site hosting solution, cloud, or through a third-party. In cloud hosting, your online store is fully hosted and depends on Magento, you need to purchase hosting and domain in open source. The benefit is to get complete access to the server directory, thus yoy have to do core programming for a customized store. However, you need to pay separately for security and hosting.

Realiability Of Marketing Features: Shopify Vs Magento

Marketing is most essential aspect for any online business or even for offline.

And thats the bottom line.

Shopify has some great marketing tools, that includes email campaigning, selling options on various platform such as Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.
It’s ability to support multilingual sites, help you reach global audience that speaks different languages.

On the opposite side, Magneto has a strong base on its marketplace for most of its marketing tools.

You need to install extensions to run email campaigns. You need to depend on the skills of professionals or web developers to integrate marketing tools.

Single handedly, Shopify wins this requirement.

But both Shopify and Magento relies on their app market for marketing tools.

Shopify Vs Mangento: Impact on Scalability of business

One of common mistakes that an ecommerce company can make, especially when starting their online business, is to neglect scalability.

If you’re considering expanding your business near future, which ecommerce solution also depends on the scale of that growth.

Luckily, both Magento and Shopify provide you the scope for scaling up or down is simple.With Shopify, the plan for expanding your ecommerce business is easy. It makes easy to choose up or down by choosing the lower or higher plans, which differ in price a lot from $29 – $200 per month.

Always remember, the lower your Shopify plan, the higher are the transaction fees per financial operation. Shopify Plus offers enterprise-grade solutions for scalability, providing hosted solution designed to any level of volume.

Due to its robust architecture, Magento can handle massive number of products. In fact, Magento 2 Commerce with scalability in mind and can deal up to 250,000 products.

With Magento 2, if your sales increase by ten times from one day to another, Magento can easily manage it smoothly without causing any issues.

Magento 2 Commerce supports merchants, making certain that sell-offs, Black Friday, or large volumes are managed without hassles.

Which One Provide Best Security To Your Online Business?

Security should be the primary priority for your ecommerce website. According to Blue Corona, 84% of online customers wouldn’t prefer at an ecommerce store that is not secure.

In fact, websites get hacked. To prevent a security breach, security patches packs are applied to your website.

Shopify supports all six categories of PCI (Peripheral component interconnect) standards and follows with SSL encryption to manage customers’ during their buyer’s journey. As a hosted platform, Shopify protects your website from hacker attacks and regularly sends patches and updates to guarantee high security.

Due to the fact that Shopify is a cloud-based platform, there is less room for fixing security issues. Shopify also introduces a bounty program that rewards users who find security vulnerabilities the Shopify store.

With Magento, web hosting plays a key role when it keeping your store secure. Magento requires you to take a more practical approach to meet PCI compliance. Of course, Magento presents patches and updates for known security risks (SQL site injection vulnerability) however, it’s up to your development team your site safe. Magento also releases dedicated security patches systematically.

How Much Shopify & Magento Costs You?

A crucial aspect when selecting an ecommerce platform is it’s cost.

The license cost of Magento depends on which edition. Magento Open Source Edition (Community) is download from Magento’s website, but you’ll cover all development, design, hosting, security, and maintenance fees.

Magento is self-hosted, so merchants buy a hosting solution for Magento. As a rule, our customers pay between $20 – $150 for shared Magento hosting and from $500 – $800 for dedicated servers.
Magento Commerce Edition (Enterprise) support package but is considerably. The license of Magento Commerce starts from $22,000 – $125,000 per year.

Magento also offers the cloud-hosted Magento Cloud Edition, which is built on a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) model. The Cloud Edition is more expensive and the cost ranges from $40,000 – $150,000 per year.

Shopify has different pricing models the business model. A Basic Shopify Plan starts at $29 and has basic features. The more advanced plan starts at $79 –$299 per month. Shopify Plus, designed for mid-to-large businesses, starts at $2,000 per month. Shopify provides a 14-day free trial so test it before choosing model.

Support & Community

You cannot compare Magento’s client support with Shopify’s. Shopify provides 24/7 support via phone, live chat, and email. Shopify supports often gives you instant solution.

Meanwhile, Magento doesn’t have 24/7 phone support, and even other support options charges a particular amount of fee.

These two are powering thousands of live websites and having two massive communities growing beside them. Having a active community gives users themselves advantage. is, the community makes number of Extensions and Apps.

Its lot easier for a Shopify user and Magento 2 user, to find experienced and skilled people within the community who can provide you some custom solutions.

Comparison Table for Shopify VS Magento:

Characterstics	Magento	Shopify
Ease of use	Complex	Easy
Source code accessible	Open-source	Proprietary source
Hosting	On-site, third-party, Cloud-based	Cloud-based
Extensions	5,000 +	3,000 +
Cost	Free and Premium	From $29
Features	Feature-rich	Feature-rich
Ease of Integration	Flexible	Limited to Shopify API
Theme selection	12	60+
Payment Gateways	Support for a far lower number of gateways, but they can be added through third-party apps	Supports more than 70 payment gateways
Security	Advanced Security and Updates	SSL Certificate included
Multilingual capabilities	Built-in multi-lingual support.	It does not provide full multilingual capabilities. Third-party apps can be integrated for multi-lingual support.
Product Variants	Unlimited	Limited to 100
Available Devices	Windows, Android, iPhone/iPad, Mac, Web-based	Windows, Android, iPhone/iPad, Mac, Web-based
Ideal Ecommerce Size	A large enterprise with lots of resources	Small companies wanting to go online

Its High Time To Make a Correct Choice.

Both platforms have their own respective pros and cons.

But to settle on any one between Shopify vs Magento is certainly up to your situation. For instance , your strategic plan, what your product is, resources, scalability of your business. For small to middle-size businesses, both Shopify and Magento provide a good platform.

Shopify is super friendly and simple to use, so if ou’ve got standard products, like just one or 2 storefronts, a medium-size product list, and no tech team or specialist. Shopify indeed is that the most accurate selection for you.

The monthly expense for Shopify & Paid Add-on is suitable for the bulk of small to middle businesses. But if you’ve got complex products, multi-store or multi-brand, huge amount of SKU, I would offer you, the liberal to use, Magento Open source.

A liberal to use edition but still a very powerful one. Magento can provide you limitless customization possibilities along with a full control over your website, that creates it to be an excellent choice for ecommerce businesses.