What’s the difference between Magento and Shopify?

Introduction

You’re not the only one who can’t choose between Magento and Shopify. Thousands of eCommerce business owners face the same dilemma. Find out which platform to build your eCommerce website and where these two overlap in the next section.

The eCommerce landscape is dominated by Magento and Shopify, both of which enjoy loyal customer bases of millions.

Shopify and Magento both offer unique ecommerce store experiences, but they differ in some key ways. It is possible for Magento to work for some businesses, but not for others. The same can be said for Shopify. Before choosing between the following eCommerce platforms, businesses need to consider multiple factors.

To assist with your eCommerce website building decision, we’ll compare Magento and Shopify in this blog.

A Basic Comparison of Magento and Shopify

A self-driving car and a manual car can help us understand the differences between Magento and Shopify.

As a self-driving car, Shopify takes care of the programming, coding, and back-end procedures for you. Even if you don’t know anything about coding, you will be able to build and set up your website on it.

Magento, on the other hand, is a manual car that allows inputs and customization. Nevertheless, it requires coding expertise to work with.

Listed below is a comparison table of Magento and Shopify to help you understand their similarities and differences.

Magento versus Shopify: what's the difference?

1. What it costs

Free, open-source Magento can help you launch your eCommerce business, but you will need to pay for domain names, hosting, themes, and add-ons.

For enhanced functionality and business expansion, you have to upgrade to a paid version. There are two types of paid versions: Magento Commerce and Magento Commerce Cloud. Prices vary according to the customizations you make.

Each Magento version’s pricing is listed below:

Shopify offers a 14-day free trial and then charges a subscription fee for customized Magento-powered eCommerce solutions. For an accurate estimate, you need to contact Magento development companies with experience developing customized Magento-powered eCommerce solutions. The product is a plug-and-play solution that eliminates external costs like outsourcing or in-house developer management.

Despite the fact that Shopify pricing varies from plan to plan, here is an overview of the pricing:

The plans here include everything you need to launch an online store, including shipping, payment gateway integrations, mobile applications, and advanced point-of-sale features.

Is Magento or Shopify more expensive?

Compared to Shopify and Magento, both platforms offer distinct pricing models, so it’s hard to determine which is more affordable. While Magento is open-source, the pricing depends on your needs, Shopify has fixed pricing, which may seem cheaper, but you must also pay for themes and apps.

2. Topics

If you want to build a Magento theme from scratch, you will need experience with coding or a budget to hire Magento developers. Magento’s mobile responsive themes cost up to $499.

Magento themes stand out for a few reasons:

• The platform can be customized in a variety of ways (but a solid technical foundation is required).
• Add animations to your store to make it more engaging.
• Homepage slider option for featured products.
• Your webpage footer can include newsletter options.
• Your product pages can also include cross-selling blocks.

A Shopify theme costs approximately $150-350 and is mobile-friendly. It offers nine free themes and 88 premium themes.

Shopify themes and templates have the following features:

• Edit your Shopify theme using drag-and-drop.
• Based on your business requirements, you can add new pages and modify the color palette and images.
• Shopify themes can easily integrate social media feeds.

Choosing Magento themes over Shopify themes

Shopify offers more themes at an affordable price than Magento, so you don’t need to hire developers or have strong coding skills. Instead, you can design your site according to your brand’s needs.

3. Extensions and apps

Installing and implementing Magento extensions doesn’t require any coding knowledge.

Some of the most popular extensions are:

• Multi-Coupon Amasty: Make your customers feel valued and encourage repeat purchases with this plugin. Custom discount coupons can be applied to orders and multiple coupons can be applied to the same order.
• Plugin for pre-ordering products: This plugin lets you send an automatic email when new products are available to potential customers.
• Remarkety: You can integrate social feeds with your e-mail marketing campaigns using Remarkety.

Magezon Builder, an Adobe Exchange Partner, is a quality Magento extension you can download.

You can boost sales by adding new features to your website by using the Shopify App Store, which offers over 4200+ free and paid apps.

The following Shopify extensions are popular:

• Visitors and potential customers are more likely to abandon carts when Trust Hero is shown to them.
• Incorporate your email marketing campaigns with MailChimp, a marketing automation platform.
• Customers can track the location of their orders with Trackr, a real-time order tracking tool.
• Your Shopify dashboard can be enhanced with Analytics Buddy, which fetches the data from your Google Analytics account.

Shopify Apps vs. Magento Extensions

Magento has more extensions than Shopify. However, most Magento extensions require in-depth coding expertise to install. Shopify’s app market is more user-friendly, and it offers more polished extensions than Magento’s.

4. Features that attract customers

The Magento Marketplace offers a variety of marketing features, such as extensions like Remarkety that can be used with email campaigns. In order to integrate these tools, you will have to hire a web developer.

A Shopify store, however, gives you built-in marketing tools that allow you to promote directly on social media. It also integrates with an email marketing tool such as Seguno and Klaviyo. Furthermore, Shopify offers multilingual support.

Marketing features compared between Magento and Shopify

Despite its in-built marketing features, Shopify has limitations when it comes to SEO options. Shopify may appear to be the winner in the marketing feature category, but there’s more to it. Shopify’s default features, such as its URL structure, hierarchy, and server configuration, cannot be changed.

As opposed to Shopify, Magento offers business owners a more flexible and powerful marketing platform. Magento allows you to make changes to your eCommerce site structure, meta tags, images, and URLs, unlike Shopify.

5. User-Friendly

To gain access to the community-contributed code, Magento developers need good coding and technical skills.

Magento’s Content Management System (CMS) may not be user-friendly. However, a developer’s freedom to experiment and apply their creative skills is one of the positive things about Magento.

The Magento development community is active around the world and an active support center provides all-time assistance at any time.

With Shopify, you don’t have to worry about technical aspects of setting up an online store, as it’s easy to work with, regardless of whether your customers are B2B or B2C.

It provides 24/7 customer support, live chat option, and email support, allowing you to create a store, add products, and set up payment methods.

Ease of use comparison between Magento and Shopify

Especially for someone with little technical experience, Shopify is an excellent choice.

6. Functions core to the system

The following two core features are supported by Magento:

• The Magento platform has a strong inventory management system. It supports unlimited products and customer attributes. You can sort your data, assign customers to products, and offer a personalized user experience by offering extensions.
• This eCommerce platform allows you to create and bulk-upload product catalogs for different channels, and integrate your shop with comparison shopping sites, social media channels, and marketplaces.

The following are some of Shopify’s core features:

• Send automatic emails to customers who abandoned their carts for some reason to reduce cart abandonment rate.
• Simplifying order fulfillment and offering discounts through partnerships with UPS, USPS, DHL Express, and Canada Post.

The only difference between Shopify and Magento is that Shopify offers its own POS system, while Magento uses extensions to provide third-party POS.

7. Toolkits for sales

In addition to the above, Magento offers some fantastic sales tools, such as bulk product import from the database, multiple product variations, total visitor count, and total revenue reports.

• By installing extensions, you can connect your store to Facebook, Instagram, and eBay to offer multi-channel selling options.
• You can customize the checkout process of your online store to make it more convenient for you.
• There are several options for recovering abandoned cart rates.
• Discounts can be set as percentages or fixed prices.

You can make money with Shopify by using these tools:

• Options for recovering lost sales from abandoned carts.
• A multi-channel sales option that allows you to sell your products across multiple channels, including Amazon, Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram.
• Shopify allows you to sell physical and digital products.
• You can have your products delivered by any courier service, including UPS, DHL Express, and USPS.

Comparison of Magento Sales Tools and Shopify Sales Tools

Magento requires you to install expensive extensions in order to access the full range of sales tools offered by Shopify.

8. Transaction fees and payment processors

You can use a Magento Marketplace payment processor to accept payments, but you have to pay a transaction fee.

If you choose not to use Shopify payments, here are the fees you must pay in the event that you do not use the Shopify payment processor:

• 2.9 percent plus 30 percent each transaction for Shopify Basic
• Approximately 2.6% plus 30 cents for each transaction on Shopify
• With Shopify Advanced, you will pay 2.4% + 30¢ per transaction

You can also integrate standard payment processors like Stripe or Square from the Magento Marketplace if you prefer. Magento supports over 150 payment gateways, most of them targeted at large businesses.

In addition to PayPal, Stripe, Amazon Pay, and Apple Pay, Shopify supports 100+ payment gateways.

Payments comparison between Magento and Shopify

There are fewer payment gateway options available with Magento and transaction fees are higher than with Shopify.

9. A support system for the community

The Magento platform is open-source, so you have a large community of developers to help you. In addition to browsing past threads, you can ask a new question. Magento users are active worldwide, so you will get replies quickly. You can find FAQs, troubleshooting tips, and best practices in Magento’s help center.

There is full customer support available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week via phone, email, and live chat. Forums, video tutorials, and help centers are also available. Professionals are also available to assist you should you find any problems.

Community Support for Magento vs Shopify

You can get immediate assistance and support from Shopify’s community.

10. Safety

You can make security changes to your website with Magento’s flexibility, even though it doesn’t come with a built-in security mechanism. You can also install security extensions to protect your valuable data with Magento 2. Magento releases updates and patches regularly, so that your website stays safe.

The Shopify platform, however, comes with built-in SSL encryption and PCI-DSS compliance level 1. Moreover, this resource is an invaluable resource for eCommerce businesses looking to learn how to handle customer data sensitively through the entire process of interacting with store websites.

Shopify vs Magento security verdict

Magento offers the best community support and regular updates, while Shopify offers easy access to security.

11. Revisions

Since Magento 1 will no longer be supported after 30th June 2020, it is imperative to migrate from Magento 1 to Magento 2.

New features include a better product catalog, framework updates, and streamlined admin activities. The migration involves a one-time cost, but will lead to positive ROIs in the long run. Many eCommerce platforms have made this significant shift to take advantage of this opportunity.

A newer version of Shopify’s eCommerce platform, however, has been introduced, suitable for businesses that are outgrowing Shopify’s standard version and are making it big on the market, for example, $1-2 million in annual revenue. Shopify Plus is the newer version.

It is an enticing upgrade to consider considering Shopify Plus due to its abundance of possibilities. Heinz, the American food processing company, uses Shopify Plus. Within seven days of the announcement of the pandemic, Heinz’s store, “Heinz to Home,” opened, allowing customers the fastest way to get supplies. There are many extensions and features available on Shopify Plus, so it is evident that its price would also be higher.

Depending on your needs, Shopify Plus can range from as little as $2000/month and as much as $40,000.

Upgrade comparison between Magento and Shopify

The key difference between Magento and Shopify Plus is that Magento provides a global reach for all your stores, while Shopify Plus stores need to be managed independently, whereas Magento does offer a holistic option.

A Magento 2-powered footwear company, Legend Footwear, has gained success after we optimized their store. Here’s a detailed insight into how Revinfotech ‘ Magento certified team improved site speed, streamlined the checkout process, created a mobile-friendly website, and improved the user experience:

The advantages and disadvantages of Magento versus Shopify

To narrow down your research, here’s a comprehensive chart highlighting the differences between Magento and Shopify.

How powerful is Magento compared to Shopify?

There are many differences between the two eCommerce platforms, so you should carefully examine each before choosing which platform to use. Consider the following factors before making a decision:

• How much are you willing to spend?
• Can you tell me about the size of your store and the business needs it entails?
• Is a plug-and-play solution right for you, or do you need developers?
• Do you plan to customize the product to a certain degree?
• In the coming years, how do you envision your eCommerce store?

Getting help from Shopify or Magento-certified companies is the best way to determine which eCommerce platform is most appropriate for your business.