Magento vs Shopify : Which one is superior to other?

The choice of a right platform for the online store is incredibly important. The platform plays to be a deciding factor to identify if your eCommerce business is going to be successful, or unsuccessful. 

For new or existing businesses, who are not happy with their current platform, there are many options available for them. Magento vs Shopify being the biggest contenders, they are often pitched head to head in the race for being the best eCommerce platform even though being completely different from each other. 

Magento has already enjoyed its popularity for quite a long time, whereas Shopify is being probably one of its biggest competitors in the market. With Magento version 2.0 release, it may reach a higher spot on the list. Hence declaring it as an ideal platform for all size businesses. 

While comparing Magento and Shopify, you must ask the following questions:

• Is Shopify easy to use?
• Can each platform be tried before taking a final call?
• How fast can any of them get you online?
• Which platform helps you grow and flourish your business?

When it comes to deciding the platform, you may want a platform that will be evolving with the growth of your eCommerce business and will also keep meeting your business needs. 

Here in this article, we will try to explain how Magento and Shopify differ and help you decide to choose the best among them. By the end of this article, you may get all your questions answered. We will discuss Magento vs Shopify, along with an in-depth comparison of their specific features. 

Firstly, let’s get to know the two core differences between Shopify vs Magento:

• Magento Community is free as well as an open-source software whereas Shopify is a commercial product that requires payment on a subscription basis.
• Shopify can be set up in minutes as it is hosted by Shopify itself, whereas Magento needs you to set up your own hosting, then install, set up as well as configure everything. This is to be done before you can even start building and branding your online store, which usually requires medium to high level of web development as well as programming skills. 

Let’s get going with the analysis of which platform is best for you. 

Popularity

When it comes to the most commonly used eCommerce platform, Magento will be the undoubted winner. It claims 14% of the top million sites versus 6% for Shopify. According to Google Trends, Magento has more overall search interests.  

Look at the businesses that use them to compare the two. Nike, Rosetta Stone, Olympus, and Ghiradelli are some big names boasted by Magento. Tesla and the Los Angeles Lakers’ Store are the few big names using Shopify but most of them are small and mid-sized businesses. Therefore, both the platforms boast successful companies.

Coding

Magento and Shopify vary vastly when it comes to coding. Magento uses PHP and is open source platform. Whereas, Shopify uses Liquid as it’s coding language and its proprietary platform. It’s important to decide the perfect platform as it determines what can be done.

The proprietary code cannot be modified, whereas Open source means the source code is available freely and can be modified also. Template code of Magento can be altered to suit specific store needs, whereas, with Shopify, it is not possible. This is the reason why Shopify is a fine solution for simple stores, but not ideal for complex ones with some advanced functions that require changes in the source code. 

Expense

Shopify is a software-as-a-service (SAAS), which means monthly subscription fee is paid by users to access the Shopify software. While starting with Shopify, you will get a free trial, but after that, you’ll have to pay for further use. The Basic price of the store is $29/month and can reach up to $179/month. 

Shopify Pricing:

• Basic $29/month
• Pro $79/month
• Unlimited $179/month

By more payment per month, Shopify users get access to more features such as abandoned cart recovery, gift cards, as well as advanced reporting. Whereas, Magento users need to pay significantly less per year to add these features. A complete abandoned cart recovery solution from CreativeMinds costs only for $39/year along with support as well as various upgrades.

For payments made through external payment gateways like PayPal, Braintree, as well as Authorize.net, transaction fees are charged by Shopify. The fee percentage varies from 2.0% to 0.5%, where more costly monthly subscriptions result in lower transaction fees. This means Shopify takes a cut, each time an online transaction is done. The fees can easily rack up to quite a lot of money if there is a lot of transactions. By using Shopify’s direct payment gateway, these fees can be avoided by users. 

Magento is a self-hosted solution whereas Shopify is hosted by the company, so users will have to pay a third-party hosting service charge. From companies like SiteGround and HostGator, it can be as little as 3.95 USD.

For a successful store, Good hosting is very essential as it affects the site speed, storage, as well as the number of products the online store can handle. Magento users can choose the hosting solution to fits their needs and it’s price, instead of the option through Shopify.

The Community Edition of Magento can be downloaded for free, which is a great option for developers as well as small businesses. The Enterprise solution cost depends on the specific online store needs.

Magento Pricing:

• Community Edition: FREE
• Hosting: $4-$100+/month

You must factor in the cost of any add-ons for both Magento as well as Shopify. There are chances that the basic software will not be enough to create the type of online store you want, therefore, the expected price will be comparatively higher. Additionally, Magento users need to engage the services of a developer to set up as well as manage the online store, therefore, this must be factored into potential costs.

How Magento 2 Stacks Up?

After being armed with some basics about each of the platforms, let’s see how well they can translate it into successful online stores.

Scalability

The consensus tends to believe that Magento is better as compared Shopify, especially for large-scale stores containing many products. 

Shopify can be a better choice if you’re about to start a small store without any fuss or commitment. Magento can be a better bet if you want an online business with the ability to grow as well as evolve with much more flexibility.

Frankly speaking, who doesn’t want to be the creator of the next big thing?

Capabilities

When it comes to business owners, Magento is a robust tool. Magento has advantageous capabilities with over 5,000 add-on extensions (free and paid). This can be compared with over 100 apps as well as add-ons for Shopify.

Any ideas of your are most likely to be integrated into your online store through affordable extensions for Magento. It’s easy with extensions, to add custom coupon error messages or multiple employee logins having different permissions, even for a non-coder. The possibilities of this are almost limitless. 

Every aspect of the website is under the control of the business owner with the help of Magento. Depending on the individual’s goals, this is what a business owner may value. Within the same admin panel, admin can create as well as manage several stores.

Additionally, when compared to Shopify, Magento has more frontend features for their customers such as coupon codes, gift cards, customer dashboards, related products, wishlists, order status modules, and many more. 

Branding and Design

Forging a unique brand that customers recognize and respects will help in creating a successful online store and its major part is design.

Many free and premium themes are offered by both Magento as well as Shopify. Most of the themes for both platforms are responsive, which means they function on a varied range of screen sizes. As more and more customers are using mobile devices for shopping online, so having a mobile-friendly online store has become really important.

A lot of tweaking isn’t allowed because Shopify themes are proprietary or paid. Nothing much can be customized beyond changing colors and font, therefore no customized themes. This can create a possible issue for the branding of the store.

The Magento 2 upgrade includes drag and drops visual editing, which allows non-coders and coders alike to create beautiful sites in no time.

User Experience

As mentioned by many people, Shopify is easier to use than Magento, therefore, preferred by non-developers. After signing up for Shopify, online shops can be set up immediately, therefore making it quicker. Shopify comes with a website-building tool which helps to customize your online store. 

Magento is a lot easier to work with, as it comes with ready-made extensions. There is no requirement for coding knowledge when there are already existing simple solutions.

For users who want better user experience can be afforded by Magento 1 and add-ons alone, also there’s Magento 2. Users had many issues with Magento 1 which are addressed by this new version.

Magento 2 simpler for new users to learn, as it comes with a user-friendly admin panel.  When compared to Shopify, it’s easier to complete a task for admin such as accessing advanced reports, managing payment processors, sort customers, market products, etc. Managing the store behind-the-scenes without advanced development skills is easy for the admin.

Much work can be accomplished by Admin in a shorter duration of time, a bonus for new businesses who are struggling to manage lengthy to-do lists to get everything off the ground. Even e-commerce stores can be managed on the go with optimization for various screen sizes.

SEO

44% of the total online purchases generally begin with an online search. This makes it incredibly important to find your online store and products via Google as well as other search engines.

When it comes to search engine optimization or SEO, some e-commerce platforms are inherently better. According to a study of the SEO scores of almost 16 shopping cart platforms, Magento grabbed the top position with Shopify and Woocommerce tied for a close second.

The examined SEO features include the following: headings, meta descriptions, page URLs, titles, etc. The SEO capabilities of Shopify, as well as Magento, will help in driving organic traffic to the online store with the comparable SEO scores.

Speed

Website speed is also one of the ranking factors for SEO. It also determines if the customers will buy from your store or not. If it takes more time to store pages and products to load, potential customers will likely to choose another website over yours. According to a research, even a 1-second delay can reduce the conversion rate by 7%.

A speedy online store will be more successful as compared to the delayed one. Magento was described as incredibly slow in the past by many users. Therefore, when it came to speed Shopify was the clear winner.

After Magento 2 release, it’s pretty unclear about which platform performs better. Magento 2 compared to Magento 1 sites, perform 20% faster on an average, up to 56% faster in some cases.

Checkout

Another factor while comparing Shopify and Magento is a quick and user-friendly checkout. Checkout of the new and improved Magento 2 is exceptional.

It comes with out of the box features such as distraction-free checkout, automatic guest checkout, one-click account creation, as well as two-step checkout. For making the process much more instinctive for customers, the discount code box is placed on the checkout. For reduced confusion shipping and payment information are separated.

Shopify also comes with a great checkout having the semi-recent introduction of a single-page responsive checkout. One con of Shopify is that business owners having lower tier pricing plans will not be able to view real-time shipping rates, which may result in higher shipping rates for the customers. 

Community

The wealth of a community is another “pro” in the Magento box when compared to Shopify. Magento owns a large, and active community. Magento developers can create solutions for most of the user needs. There are a number of resources for beginners who are looking to learn about Magento.

The broad Magento community means there will be no problem in finding a capable developer to work with, for the business owners. For help, or to access support as well as maintenance services via outside developers, users can go through Magento.

Marketplace

Some users of the E-commerce platform may want to create a multi-vendor marketplace where multiple vendors can sell their products through the single shopping cart. Both Shopify, as well as Magento 2, many add-ons are available to create a multi-vendor system.

When it comes to capabilities for marketplace stores Magento can again beat Shopify. To take the single- as well as multi-seller stores to the next level, there are many built-in promotion features such as promotional pricing as well as flexible coupons.

The updated version of Magento 2 comes with increased scalability as well as the performance which is essential for multi-vendor stores. When it comes to managing a successful marketplace, it is all about the functionality and this is definitely where Magento moves ahead in the race.

Conclusion

It is not easy to decide which e-commerce platform is best for every single online store. It depends on the goals, budget, and expertise, which platform is best for the user. Consider the most important factors for you while deciding between Shopify and Magento.

Shopify may be the best option for you, according to your needs. Magento is likely a better option to develop an online store with unlimited potential for features, scalability, as well as customization. But it solely depends on the situations. 

 Magento comes with some useful built-in features as well as limitless possibilities. It comes through the add-on extensions. These reasons prove it a great pick for e-commerce businesses in addition to the improvements with the upgraded version of Magento 2.