Overview
Both Magento and Shopify are leading eCommerce building platforms helping businesses scale and grow in size. Magento is an open-source platform written in PHP programming language, that provides users with deeply integrated control of their websites.
Shopify on the other hand is a user-friendly platform to build online stores. It is one of the easiest solutions to building high-profile online businesses.
Although both platforms are more than capable of building a unique website, choosing between the two can get confusing. This article Magento vs Shopify highlights the key differences, compares both platforms, and helps you to decide which platform is best for you.
Five key differences
Magento vs Shopify: Which is Easier to Use?
Shopify is a lot easier to use comparatively. Shopify offers drag-and-drop features to build an online store giving you the ability to easily navigate and customize your eCommerce website as you want. It provides an interface that even most beginners can easily grasp, which is one of the major reasons why it’s used by over 1.6 million active stores.
Magento is an open-source self-hosted platform, that grants full control to the user over their website. This makes this platform flexible with the potential to be modified to meet the needs of the business. Magento requires comprehensive knowledge of coding languages making it more suitable for web developers.
Magento vs Shopify: Themes and Designs
Shopify offers a wide range of themes to choose from. It has over 13 free themes and more than 73 premium themes that cost around $150 to $350. All the themes are fully responsive on all devices and are equipped with numerous customization options like adding new pages, changing the color palette, moving and resizing elements, integrating social media feeds, and more, all this without writing or tweaking a line of code.
Magento provides ready-made themes for $100 and paid themes that can cost more than $600. It is versatile over Shopify in terms of customization according to one’s needs. Magento allows you to customize themes by editing the line of code at the backend, you can change the designs of the templates making your store unique, or you can hire web developers to do so.
Shopify is a lot easier to use and customize as it does not require advanced technical knowledge to operate. Magento on the other hand has a lot more complex features that experienced developers will find useful.
Magento vs Shopify: Sales Tools, Marketing Features, and SEO
Sales
Both Magento and Shopify are at par with each other concerning sales features. Shopify has mild advantages over Magento as it provides multi-channel selling as a built-in feature, while Magento allows that via an extension.
Shopify provides checkout customization features like changing colors, fonts, and uploading pictures, but does not allow to change steps or add features. As Magento is an open-source platform and fully flexible, it has real checkout customization to add or delete steps, alter the view of existing steps, add shipping methods, and change payment methods without the need for an extension.
Marketing
Shopify provides great marketing tools, it has in-build marketing features to run email campaigns and advertise via Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram social media platforms. Moreover, it provides further free and paid extensions also. Magento requires costly extensions to achieve marketing goals, and you also need a professional developer to integrate marketing tools if you don’t know how to code. Shopify has a lead in marketing with its built-in tools and free extensions as compared to Magento.
SEO
Magento is excellent in SEO and provides proper SEO guides to help you with the SEO. On the other hand, to optimize a Shopify website, you will have to search the app store for an appropriate add-on.
Magento vs Shopify: Apps and Extensions
Shopify offers more than 6000 apps and extensions to choose from, of which half are free. They are easy to install and use. The paid ones are usually within the range of $20-$50, but some can cost up to $400.
Magento offers over 4000 apps and extensions to choose from – of which more than 1400 are free – for marketing, SEO, shipping sales, and other requirements. The pricing varies depending on the developer, but most of them are under $40, while some cost up to $15000. To install extensions correctly you’ll need to be tech-savvy or get help from a web development agency, as coding is necessary to install them.
Magento vs Shopify: Difference in Hosting
You don’t have to worry about hosting your website, Shopify takes care of all your hosting issues. The monthly fees include CMS with its features and hosting. Shopify uses a CDN hosting service by Fastly.
Magento, on the other hand, is an open-source self-hosted platform, implying all the hosting work is done by the user. You can freely choose your hosting platform according to your needs. This makes it cost-efficient as you’ll be able to change your service when the traffic isn’t high or vice-versa if the traffic surpasses your expectations.
Shopify’s hosting is good for small and medium-sized businesses, while Magento is best for businesses with larger traffic.
Conclusion
Choosing the most suitable platform depends on the needs of your business. Magento is a highly flexible and adverse platform, capable of employing changes according to the needs of the business. You will have to know coding to build an online store or hire website developers who can do it for you, making it costly at the same time. It is usually recommended for large enterprises that can go the extra mile and spend money on developing an advanced online store.
Shopify is known as a user-friendly platform, it has advanced integrated tools and add-ons that are easy to integrate and use. Shopify is best for small to medium-size stores, and as requirement increases, you can buy higher plans to suit your needs.
Reference: Belvg
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