As e-commerce is growing at a rapid rate, online stores are in need of finding a suitable platform, in which Magento vs Shopify seems to be the two favorite ones to start and expand their business in the year 2024.
Whether you are a newbie in the market or your enterprises are going global with a massive number of potential customers, it might be a hard decision when it comes to the most proper website platform. As many e-commerce stores face difficulties in making the right decision, we will provide you with a detailed comparison of Magento vs Shopify to distinguish each option and which platform is the best for your business demands.
Table of Contents
1. What is Magento?
Magento is an open-source platform that was first created in 2008 to help online businesses build up their own websites. Magento is chosen by a number of big enterprises to start their e-commerce stores like Samsung or Nike thanks to its flexibility and customization. Traditionally, this platform is mostly used by enterprise-level businesses because it takes a huge amount of money and effort to develop all the functions included. In 2013, 12% of top one million eCommerce websites use Magento, according to Alexa.
(source: Alexa)
Currently, Magento has two available options, Magento Open Source, and Magento Commerce.
2. What is Shopify?
First launched in 2006, Shopify is an online website platform basement that allows anyone to create and customize their own e-commerce stores. As Shopify is designed for businesses of all sizes, this platform doesn’t require much technical knowledge in order to start and run an online store. Shopify is a cloud-based and hosted platform, so e-commerce sellers don’t need to worry about the maintenance or update of the server.
In 2007, Shopify reported 400,000 merchants with around one billion active users on the platform.
Shopify offers users two available versions at this moment, namely Shopify and Shopify plus.
3. Magento vs Shopify: Comparison
a) Magento vs Shopify: Ease of use
One of the most important factors when it comes to choosing an e-commerce platform is the ease of use of that platform basement.
In terms of coding, Magento is an open-source using PHP, which means the source code is available and can be changed according to the purpose of the store owner and the need of a specific business. As Magento does not provide on-site coders, you will need to have some knowledge in coding or hire a team of developers to set up and build your Magento stores. However, if Magento stores run into any problem, there will not be any hotline to help you constantly. All the solutions can be found at the Magento forum or Magento help center.
Shopify, on the other hand, is proprietary and it uses a coding language called Liquid. It provides wizard mode that allows anyone to set up and revise their online stores thanks to its drag-and-drop website editor and ready-to-use tools. Shopify users are free to modify the store website without coding and receive 24/7 support from Shopify hotlines and live chat.
Therefore, Shopify seems to be a proper platform for small online stores, while Magento is more preferred by larger enterprises.
b) Magento vs Shopify: Pricing
The question of how much money you can afford to build your online store is never easy to answer. Magento vs Shopify, each platform offers different pricing lists that vary based on some other factors.
Shopify offers their users 15 trials to investigate all the features available, which greatly helps you in experiencing the online platform before making a decision. After the trial period, you will pay a monthly fee for Shopify with the pricing package below.
- Shopify Basic $29/month
- Shopify $79/month
- Shopify Unlimited $179/month
The higher option package means you will be able to access advanced features like gift cards and abandoned cart recovery. One thing to take into consideration is that Shopify will charge transaction fees for payments made through payment gateways like Paypal or Braintree. This fee can go up to a huge amount if your stores meet a lot of transactions.
Magento Community Edition, however, is free for anyone and the Enterprise Edition price will be based on the size and specific needs of your Magento stores. As Magento is self-hosted, Magento users only have to pay a third-party hosting service. Store owners can pick any hosting solutions that provide satisfying site speed, storage, and product number to fulfill their stores’ needs.
c) Magento vs Shopify: App and Add-ons
Add-ons extension will be a perfect solution for online stores in order to provide additional functions in your store websites.
Long well-known for its strong and community-driven platform, Magento comes with over 5831 free and paid extensions that you can easily access in Magento marketplace. Without comprehensive knowledge in coding, you still can apply and implement remarkable extensions that integrate smoothly in Magento backend. Many useful extensions for Magento 2 store can be found on Landofcoder Magento 2 extensions for you to discover.
The Shopify App is also growing at a rate rapid to continually update new extensions to their collection. The installation process is very simple and handy for all admins to control. Your Shopify websites will be improved and revised thanks to great help from Shopify App extension, even though the number of useful apps is quite small compared to Magento. Therefore, Magento is better than Shopify regarding App and Add-ons.
d) Magento vs Shopify: Security
It is undeniable that any online business has to pay great attention to security to prevent hackers security lapses. Empower the best security plugins to protect your online store websites by choosing the right platform.
If you decide to start your online store on Magento, the safety of your site will depend on how safe your developers can make it. Magento will frequently send you updated patches to keep your site up-to-date with any security bugs and problems. Even though Magento’s security is believed to be robust, it’s important to keep in mind that you need to store customer information on your own, while Shopify will take care of that for their users.
Shopify, on the other hand, is a closed-source, and it is controlled by Shopify only. Therefore, there no need to worry about any security vulnerability that might happen at your stores, because Shopify team will have it covered. Even store admin does not have any permission to view customer’s credit card information.
e) Magento vs Shopify: Payment Solution
Shopify users will experience variant payment solutions in this online platform basement. There are more than 100 payment gateways that your customer can choose when they make an order in Shopify. However, be aware that you need to pay a transaction fee from 0,5-2% for each transaction. the fee will depend on the Shopify monthly plan you pick, so if you choose the expensive package, the transaction fee will be much lower.
Magento doesn’t provide its own payment solution, but you can download and install the payment extension with ease. Currently, there are around 300+ payment apps in the Magento market for their users. An interesting factor in Magento payment is that it can support multi-language. If your store aims at the global market with target customers coming from different countries, it’s much more convenient to support multiple languages.
f) Magento vs Shopify: Performance
Once joining the e-commerce market, you will realize that speed and performance play an important role in your store’s success. It’s noted that future customers prefer fast-loading websites and a quicker purchasing and browsing experience. Therefore, your online page performance might keep or push away potential customers based on the platform you choose.
Magento is famous for its hosting speed and flexibility. You are free to select a server of your choice that provide a better loading speed and browsing time. It’s up to Magento users to adjust and customize the site to provide your customers with a better shopping experience.
Shopify, on the other hand, is a self-hosted platform. Generally, the performance of any online store website will be covered by Shopify team. At the same time, you will count the speed and loading time of your store on the Shopify platform since you do not any control over the performance environment.
4. Magento vs Shopify: Which one is better?
As you can see, there are a lot of factors we need to take into consideration when choosing the right platform in the e-commerce market. As there is almost no one-size-fits-all platform, you need to bear in mind the pros and cons of each platform to make a fine decision.
Shopify seems to be easier to use, especially for small stores trying to go online. Small businesses with small employee sizes and zero experience in online shopping can consider this platform to start.
Magento, however, can provide better opportunities for a well-established team with large resources and good developers. You can freely design and customize your store website based on your business demands with total support from Magento extensions and build up a satisfying performance website for your customers. If you want your business to go global, Magento will be your perfect solution!.
5. Best Magento Extension providers
Land Of Coder provides one of the best Magento extensions in the market. With a handful of free extensions to try on and a variety of products up to 300$, we promise to offer you a 30-day trial as well as free support and free updates items you purchase from our sites.
2. AheadWorks
AheadWorks offers you both Magento 1 and Magento 2 extensions at a reasonable price. Although the number of extensions is quite small, they are really useful in organizing campaigns to promote products.
3. MagePlaza
If you are new on the market, you can look for a lot of free Magento extensions on MagePlaza. Other than that, their market holds up to 100+ extensions within the price range of $49-$199 to help you set up and reconstruct your Magento store.
4. WebKul
WebKul is one of the top-ranked Magento extension providers in the market. Most of their products come with a fee starting at 29$, but you can believe that their extensions will improve your Magento site in a short time.
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