logo
logo
Sign in

Difference Between Magento and Shopify Based on their Features

avatar
John Phil

Looking for the most reliable eCommerce platform for creating, managing, and maintaining an online store successfully? Ecommerce platforms can be the responsible factor for either success or failure of your website. Ecommerce platform is particularly necessary for small businesses since they have to make it possible with limited resources and budgets.

The professionals help you outline all sorts of ecommerce platforms on your website, but none are more renowned as Magento and Shopify. Magento is considered to be one of the biggest players when it comes to larger or more complex ecommerce websites, while Shopify has a bit of a stranglehold in the all-in-one platform market. There are multiple platforms available out in the market but this article will help you know the difference between Magento and Shopify.
As someone, if you are planning to create an online store or migrate your current store or business to another level shortly then you might consider the below-mentioned points such:

Magento and Shopify both are open-source and widely acclaimed. They are widely acclaimed and used eCommerce store creation and management platforms. There are, however, some fundamental differences between these platforms that you should be well aware of before making a comparative evaluation of the two:

  • Magento is open-source software that is FREE for everyone while Shopify is a commercial product.
  • Magento requires its own hosting, installation, setup and configuration, and everything else before you can actually start your business while Shopify is a hosted solution.
  • Magento is fully packed with features but is more suitable for advanced developers while Shopify is more for beginners.

Magento VS Shopify: Pros and Cons

Magento

Shopify

Pros

  • Excellent community with huge support for users
  • Serve you with a flexible platform
  • Great range of themes to choose
  • No real coding knowledge required for Magento commerce
  • It is open-source and free to use
  • Magento 2 extensions
  • You get a variety of beautiful responsive store themes to choose from
  • Serve you with an extraordinary app store for extending the functionality of your website
  • Serve you with great customer support
  • Easy to use platform
  • Lots of checkout and payment options

Cons

  • Has a bit of a learning curve
  • It’s quite difficult for beginners to use
  • Requires a lot of time to set up
  • Many themes have prices attached to them
  • Includes integrating apps into your store

What is the difference between Magento and Shopify?

There is multiple differences between Magento and Shopify which you can see in the below mentioned table:

Features

Magento VS Shopify

The basic online store functionality

Both Shopify and Magento offer basic store functionalities that are fairly powerful to use and maintain on an ongoing basis. However, Shopify is remarkably easier to set up and use when compared to Magento. You’ll find some basic features like shopping carts, checkout modules, collections, and product pages are all included with both Magento and Shopify. However, the main difference between Magento Vs Shopify is that Magento has far more intermediate and advanced features built into the system than Shopify.

Inventory management

Shopify and Magento both allow you to access unlimited products in your store. This means you can easily create products and collections on both of the platforms, but the reason Shopify gets more appreciation for this one is because of its direct integration to dropshipping inventory application.

Moreover, you should take this to your notice that Magento allows a virtually unlimited number of products, your server performance, and site loading speed might turn out to be a serious issue. This could happen when you add too many products to your Magento store, something you don’t have to worry about with Shopify, since it is a fully managed and hosted solution for all users.

Calculation of Shipping Charges

Both platforms Magento and Shopify allow flexible and powerful options for the calculation of shipping charges. This is considered to be one of the most basic and important aspects of selling physical goods via an ecommerce storefront.

Shopify also integrates with some shipping estimates and more exact shipping calculators, which might be helpful if you’re trying to be as accurate as possible for your customers.

Provision for coupons and discount codes

Shopify supports its customers with over 70 payment gateways while Magento is relatively at a disadvantage with support for a far lower number of gateways. More gateways, however, can be added to Magento stores via third-party add-ons.

The main issue with Shopify is that it kind of forces you to go with its built-in payment gateway. Shopify’s gateway has 0% transaction fees, while they make you pay fees for third-party gateways efficiently

Themes and Templates

Both Shopify and Magento offer a wide range of themes and templates to give your online store a look and feel to suit your products and taste.

While the number of free themes provided by Shopify is usually smaller than that of Magento Open Source, it can be noted that the free Shopify themes are significantly more contemporary as compared to the themes offered by Magento Open Source.

Multilingual capabilities

Shopify does not offer full multilingual capabilities to its users. However, for creating fully multi-lingual stores, third-party/paid applications are available for Shopify.

Another option available at Shopify is to use custom code for your theme so that it has multilingual capabilities. However, you would most likely have to find an expert Shopify developer to do so. Magento is again at an advantage here, with more built-in multi-lingual support.

SEO capabilities

Both the platforms offer extensive SEO functionalities to help you drive more organic traffic to your store via a search engine, neck-to-neck on powerful SEO features and benefits.

Conclusion:

While both Shopify vs. Magento is equally powerful and most demanded eCommerce platforms. As Magento is a free platform, it requires a hosting purchase and carries out all the software/system setup and installation procedures. Shopify provides greater ease of use since it is a hosted and fully managed service at an affordable price.

As discussed, all the points related to Shopify and Magento, we have concluded that Shopify comes out as a winning platform for building your online store with maximum ease of use and powerful capabilities. However, it doesn’t mean that you make your decision based on our conclusion. You should make your own choice based on your requirements.

collect
0
avatar
John Phil
guide
Zupyak is the world’s largest content marketing community, with over 400 000 members and 3 million articles. Explore and get your content discovered.
Read more