While on the quest of discovering the best platforms to build your dream ecommerce site, there are two names which would get your instant attention and they are none other than Shopify and Magento. Shopify powers over 1 million online stores. Magento on the other hand isn’t lacking behind by powering over 1.2% of the internet as a whole. But there is more to the story than the figures mentioned. Let’s find out in this blog which one of these two big platforms is for you.

Shopify is a proprietary platform. It is uncomplicated having a simple interface convenient for any beginner to get a hold of it and run a strong ecommerce site. Shopify supports both small scale as well as large businesses.

Magento in comparison is an open-source platform. Being open-source it though supports a large number of extensions and add ons but it is highly complicated to gain the knack of it without a proper development team. Magento supports large businesses but it needs a team to code and build the ecommerce site as per the requirements, strong and secure, without which the site built will be futile and be prone to bugs.

Still confused which one you should go with? We made it easier for you with our simple yet detailed comparison between the big boys of the ecommerce landscape in our blog. And as the comparison will unfold, you will have a strong understanding about both the platforms and will be in a better position to decide which one of the platforms is best suitable for your business.

The level of usability matters a lot while choosing a platform where you would build your online store. An easier platform makes it more efficient for the users with or without website development knowledge and is helpful to launch the website swiftly. A complicated set up won’t provide you your desired outcome.

Shopify is a simplified platform in comparison to the complicated interface of Magento. In Shopify you just simply have to set up your website by a few simple steps and easy navigation and then can effortlessly start adding your products. Shopify is very smooth with the customization.

Contrarily, Magento is not everyone’s cup of tea. It is only for highly skilled professionals who have deep knowledge about coding. The learning about Magento is perplexing. Having such an intricate platform makes it precarious in achieving all requirements about your ecommerce site.

A good theme is highly recommended as everyone gets attracted towards a great aesthetic presentation that would also elevate the image of the brand in front of the customers. The visually appealing templates on the site make customers explore more of your website.

Shopify has few free themes and over 100 premium professionally designed themes in its theme store. The cost of the premium themes of Shopify range upto 180 dollars. It is cost effective as it’s a one time investment and setup is not as complicated as Magento.

The themes are vastly customizable where you can use your creative mind and add personal touch to it while requiring no coding knowledge but only designing perspective. But you will definitely need a graphic designer to replace placeholder images with the images of your brand and products. The themes are also mobile responsive that would look spectacular while displayed in the smartphone.

In the aspect of themes, Magento too provides many ready made as well as customizable themes. But the cost of the themes in Magento is on the pricier side where the customizable themes can range upto 25,000 dollars along with hiring website developers which costs extra.

A good theme is highly recommended as everyone gets attracted towards a great aesthetic presentation that would also elevate the image of the brand in front of the customers. The visually appealing templates on the site make customers explore more of your website.

Sales tools are the most integral part of the ecommerce platform. The platform should have impressive tools that would help in the sale, as sales is the whole point, the central objective of building an ecommerce website with so much effort and precision. Let’s analyse the sales tools of both Shopify and Magento and see which one would prevail.

Mentioning here some of the best features of sales on Shopify that would help you assist in having a good sales rate:

• Abandoned cart recovery- Card abandonment transpires when a customer goes through all the check out process but leaves the cart without making the purchase. This creates a negative impact in the inventory by reducing its level. Shopify aids by sending automatic emails to buyers to recover cart abandonment.
• Multi-channel selling- This feature opens the door to a far-reaching approach. Multi-channel selling helps companies to link their ecommerce site to various social media platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Amazon.
• Selling digital products- Shopify assists you to help expand your business. Apart from selling physical products, with Shopify you can sell various digital products such as ebooks, videos, graphic designs etc.
• Partnerships- Shopify is courier partnered with USPS, DHL Express, Ups and Canada post.

Magento in sales tools have some great features as well. Magento being open-source has the capacity to sell innumerable products and supports multiple transactions at a time.
Some of the other sales tools that are well impressive of Magento are listed below:

• Abandoned cart recovery- Magento similar to Shopify sends email to the customers who abandon their cart.Multi-channel selling- In Magento in order to have multi-channel selling features, you will have to install the extensions. It is not in-built like Shopify’s thus adds to extra charges.
• Discounts- In Magento you can provide your customers some fixed price discounts.
• Customizable checkout- Magento has a custom-made checkout for your ecommerce site.

Shopify has few free themes and over 100 premium professionally designed themes in its theme store. The cost of the premium themes of Shopify range upto 180 dollars. It is cost effective as it’s a one time investment and setup is not as complicated as Magento.

The themes are vastly customizable where you can use your creative mind and add personal touch to it while requiring no coding knowledge but only designing perspective. But you will definitely need a graphic designer to replace placeholder images with the images of your brand and products. The themes are also mobile responsive that would look spectacular while displayed in the smartphone.

In the aspect of themes, Magento too provides many ready made as well as customizable themes. But the cost of the themes in Magento is on the pricier side where the customizable themes can range upto 25,000 dollars along with hiring website developers which costs extra.

In marketing, strategic moves creates all the difference. The plan of action should be backed with strong marketing tools in order to achieve the desired goal.

Shopify has some impressive powerful marketing tools which would help you reach out to a wide range of customers. Shopify natively supports ad formats. An attractive and engaging ad is really helpful for the merchants to draw customer’s attention towards them. You can roll out the ads on Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest etc. And the best part is all of the features are made very simplified in Shopify and do not incorporate many complicated steps like that of open-source platforms.

Magento on the other hand is all about extensions. There’s no native feature of ads provided. Magento has plenty of marketing features but installation of extensions is required to enable the features in your ecommerce site. Also it must not be forgotten that one needs a professional developer given to the complicated interface of Magento.

Who doesn’t want a feature rich platform. More apps and plugins makes your ecommerce site more flexible and resourceful and helps monetizing your online store. Having a platform which has and supports profuse of add ons with easy installation is given major importance.

Shopify has a very large number of apps available in its app store consisting of on an average 4,200 apps including both free and paid apps. Such a huge number of apps is advantageous for the merchants to add so many extra components in the site for email marketing, shipment, speed optimization etc. Mention must be made of few best apps of Shopify:

• Plug in SEO- This is one of the best apps of Shopify for search engine optimization. Easy to install and app performs itself and detects all the SEO problems sends you a mail alert.
• Oberlo- Oberlo is another best app of Shopify. It is a dropshipping service where the product can be shipped directly from the worldwide supplier to the customers.
• Kit- Kit is Shopify’s social media marketing app. It helps create and run successful ads on Facebook and Instagram.

Referral Candy- Referral candy is very helpful to attract more customers. Buyers who get satisfied with the purchase from your site refers it to their friends and family. Take advantage of the referral by creating custom referral programs.

In Magento you can install apps and extensions from Magento marketplace. Magento marketplace has a few thousands of apps. Out of which few are free and the larger portion of it consists of premium Magento extensions which are quite expensive. Unlike Shopify, Magento doesn’t provide any native free feature in the sell channel and a mere syncing with Facebook costs around 199 dollars.

Nonetheless, Magento has a large option open to them and is highly customizable because of allowing installation of a lot of extensions. Few of the Magento apps that caught our eyes are mentioned below:

• Best Seller Products- Best selling products attracts the customers and builds a trust to make the purchase. This extension enables the merchants to add the best selling products in the home page of his ecommerce site.
• Product Questions- Gaining customer’s trust is really important in the ecommerce business. This extension allows customers to ask specific questions for a particular product and help address their queries. It also adds Google reCaptcha which helps in avoiding spam messages.
• Multi-Vendor Marketplace- This is a great extension if any one wants to create a marketplace with many sellers involving it similar to malls. It also allows customers to buy different items from different sellers.

Shipping Suite Ultimate- While managing an ecommerce site the seller also has to be very conscious of the shipping process. Shipping is a complex process but with the help of Shipping Suite Ultimate sellers can easily create custom shipping rules.

Payment Processor facilitates the transactions in your ecommerce site. Shopify easily lets the seller connect their store with the payment processor and so does Magento. Let’s analyse which one of them would stand out in this category.

Shopify uses its own payments processor named Shopify Payments which does not impose any transaction fees. Apart from that Shopify supports more than 100 payment gateways including PayPal, Worldpay, Klarna, Amazon Pay etc. But if not Shopify Payments used, Shopify charges extra credit card processing fees. There are three versions of Shopify and each version has separate plans.

Apart from the charges of each plan here are the extra amounts that will be charged if not used Shopify Payments:

• Shopify Basics- 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction
• The Shopify Plan- 2.6% + 30¢ per transaction
• Shopify Advanced- 2.4% + 30¢ per transaction

Magento’s payment gateways need to be installed from the Magento marketplace. Magento supports an impressive number of payment gateways to integrate your store with the payment service provider, supporting over 150 payment gateways. Magento has the feature which allows you to sell directly through Amazon while using Magento based inventory.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization helps you increase the quantity and quality of the traffic by optimising the online content so that search engines show your content among the top results of searches. SEO is very vital in bringing more customers to your ecommerce site. Let’s compare both Shopify and Magento and see which one excels in SEO.

Shopify has some amazing inbuilt SEO features that helps in optimising your content. There are features which automatically take care of SEOs such as auto-generated canonical tags are added to pages to eliminate the problem of duplicate content which appears in the search results. There are more features of SEO in Shopify, you can edit the meta descriptions, title tags, and URLs for web pages, blog posts, and products. You can also alt text for images with Shopify.

Magento too equates with Shopify in the category of SEO. The SEO of Magento optimizes the product image for better search engine results. Magento has many SEO guides which helps you to understand it better. All you have to do is look for proper alt tags for the images because search engines cannot read the images and it needs alt tags to understand what the searcher is asking for. Magento also has the feature to customize URLs.

While choosing a platform to build your ecommerce site, it is very needed to check the service it provides. The help center of a platform should be very active in resolving any issue that might occur in the online shop. Both Shopify and Magento have good service but let’s look more into what they have to offer.

Shopify’s help center and support offers- 

• Contact support
• Video tutorials
• Shopify community
• Webinars
• Changelog
• 24/7 phone support
• 24/7 live chat support
• Email support

Magento doesn’t have a dedicated support because of being open-source and is managed by multiple website developers. In Magento you will have the access to SiteGround which will assist you in your issues. Also it has many user guidelines available which makes you fathom the process of building an ecommerce site in Magento. But while the guide is useful it still doesn’t make the process any smooth while developing it and one needs the assistance of a professional whatsoever.

While looking for the features, it must not skip your mind about the cost of the platform. Shopify being proprietary, one doesn’t have to think about the hosting of the platform, Shopify looks after the hosting and the cost of hosting gets included in the monthly plan. While on the other hand Magento is self-hosted and at first is free to install, it eventually gets really expensive as every other thing you do such as web hosting, security, extensions etc. in Magento needs to be paid and continues adding up to the charges.

Let’s have a detailed look into the prices of Shopify plans and that of Magento’s.

Shopify monthly plans-

• Basic Shopify- $ 29 per month
• Shopify plan- $ 79 per month
• Advanced Shopify- $ 299 per month
• Shopify Plus(Enterprise) – Starts from $2000/month

Magento plans-

• Hosting- $ 20-$ 100 per month
• Themes- $ 17- $ 399 per month
• Extensions- Upto $ 500
• In- house website development- $ 60- $ 1,00,000 per year
• Magento development company- $ 4,900- $ 1,00,000
• Maintenance of Magento- $ 35- $ 80/ hr
• Magento support- $ 250- $ 3000 per month

We presented 1 to 1 comparison between Shopify and Magento and we made it easy for you to analyse and select the platforms for your business. let’s recapitulate all the points at the end.

• Shopify is a simplified platform while Magento has a complicated interface.
• In Shopify you can quickly launch the website of a simple store and for a customized site you need the help of professionals while in Magento you need a dedicated team who are experts in coding for developing your website from the beginning.
• Shopify is cost effective while Magento is expensive.
• Shopify has a 24/7 support team while Magento being a big community it doesn’t have a dedicated support.
• In Shopify you can quickly migrate your online store from other platforms.
• In Magento it is very likely to get viruses in your system if not built properly with high security while in Shopify you don’t have to worry about any security issues. Shopify itself takes care of everything.
• Magento supports big enterprises but must have an in-house / dedicated team to maintain and support. On the other hand Shopify is maintenance free.

Shopify is one of the most robust and highly secured eCommerce platform for small, medium and enterprise businesses. On the other hand Magento is a powerful open-source eCommerce platform suitable only when there are lot of custom module development and you have all the money in your pocket to have an in-house team to manage the site regularly.  It is always preferred to go with the option that will prove to be an all-rounder and can manage all your requirements without much effort and wastage of money. Shopify here definitely wins the game here.