Shopify Vs Magento - A Comparative Study to Find the Better e-Commerce Platform

A new online store pops up every second day in this era of total technological dominance. But not all reach the desired success levels. Many factors play a key role in the success of an online business, but choosing the right content management system platform for your online store is as important as the type of business you have chosen to take up itself. Shopify and Magento are two such CMS platforms that are widely used for e-commerce store creation and let's dissect them further to compare and find out what are the main differences.

Shopify Vs Magento – An Introduction

To start, Shopify is a commercial product and is a hosted solution, i.e., your online store will be hosted by them. Magento is a community-backed, free, open-source software that requires you to do the hosting, installation, configuration and setup. Hence, you need a resourceful open source development company to help you create the store.

Shopify Vs Magento – Features

The features of Shopify and Magento can be further classified for simple understanding.

The functionality of the Online Store

Both Shopify and Magento score points here as they both offer powerful and easy-to-maintain online store functionalities.

Managing the Inventory

Magento offers an unlimited amount of items while Shopify's starter plan offers you a maximum of 25 stores items and the other plans offers unlimited items, that can be added and sold through your store. One has to be mindful of the server speed when using the Magento as it may cause many complexities if you add too many products.

Multiple Payment Gateway Options

Shopify supports up to 70 various payment gateways and that is significantly more than what Magento can support. However, more payment gateway options can be added to Magento through third-party add-ons.

Web Templates and Themes

Both Shopify and Magento offer a large collection of themes and template that can help you enhance the look and feel of your online store. They offer both free and paid template and Magento holds the advantage in both the versions. Shopify's paid theme starts at $80 compared to $1 for the paid theme by Magento.

Apps and Add-ons

Being a community-driven online platform, what Magento brings to the table is a whooping 5000+ app and add-ons.

Capabilities – SEO, Customization, Multi-Lingual

Both Magento and Shopify offer exhaustive SEO capabilities for you to draw a more potential traffic to your online store.

When it comes to customization, again, both the platforms scores well as they both offer the best customization. Shopify has a slight advantage, as it offers a menu-driven method to create the desired changes, while Magento's total freedom to customize can be put to full use only by those with deep knowledge of working with it.

Shopify doesn’t offer full, multi-lingual capabilities. One has to use third party apps for achieving it. Magento, on the other hand, offers more built-in multi-lingual support.

Shopify Vs Magento – User Experience

It's very clear that both the platforms, Shopify, and Magento offer a user interface that is well-designed and easy to use. Shopify's advantage here is the wizard mode, that allows even novice users to setup their store easily. Using Magento, which doesn’t offer a hosting solution, it's quite hard for the end users to set up the store on their own.

Shopify Vs Magento – Cost

The only noticeable cost, using the Magento will be for the hosting and the other services accompanying it. The cost for using Shopify is spread across the setup fees, monthly fees, bandwidth charges, and transaction fees.

Final Words

It's fairly clear by now, both Magento and Shopify are two powerful e-commerce platforms. While Shopify is easy to use and offer full hosting and managing services, Magento offers multiple free services. It's up to you to decide which content management service will best-suit your online store and plan accordingly.