Selecting the right platform is crucially important for your ecommerce businesses. There is a plethora of available options that make it very hard for the business to narrow down one particular platform. Magento Open-Source and Shopify are two of the most popular platforms. But which platform offers the best ecommerce development features? Which one of them will prove the king of e-commerce?
Here are the answers.
But first, we look at a brief overview of Shopify and Magento Open Source and their salient features and advantages.
Shopify
Shopify is a cloud-based ecommerce platform that allows business managers to set up online stores. They can deploy Shopify ecommerce solutions to sell their products and services across various channels such as websites, social media, marketplace, and in-person.
Salient features of Shopify are as follows:
- It is a hosting solution, in other words, you don’t need to worry about installing, maintaining, and hosting any software server.
- It is a user-friendly online store development platform that gives you many themes and apps to customize the design and layout of your store.
- Shopify offers an extensive App store with a wide range of customization themes and templates. This helps business managers personalize the look and feel of their online store.
- This is a subscription-based service that includes four standard plans with different subscription fee structures.
Magento Open Source:
Magento is an open-source ecommerce platform that allows businesses to create and maintain online stores. Unlike Shopify, Magento is free to download and install, but you will have to pay and own hosting, domain, and security feature.
Highlighted features of Magento Open Source are as follows:
- Unlike Shopify, Magento demands some technical skills and resources to set up and configure before you start.
- It offers a powerful product catalog management system supportive of multiple product types, attributes, options, and inventory rules.
- It has a very vibrant community of developers and users that helps support, feedback, and some innovative solutions for your ecommerce store.
- It offers full control over the online store and a greater range of customization options.
Magento Open-Source Vs Shopify Which Will Rule the Ecommerce World?
The answer is complicated, and it depends upon multiple factors. Let’s start solving this puzzle bit by bit.
Here is a summary of key features and differences between two of the most popular ecommerce development platforms.
Web Hosting:
- Shopify secure and reliable web hosting for your online store, you don’t need to worry about downloading, installing, and maintaining software.
- Meanwhile, Magento Open Source does not provide web hosting for your store, you will have to provide for your hosting, domain name, and security features.
Shopify is the clear winner here.
Support for Unlimited Products:
- Shopify supports unlimited products. Business managers can sell an unlimited number of products on any plan. Furthermore, it also allows the selling of digital products, subscriptions, and services.
- Magento also allows the selling of unlimited products on any plan. Digital products, services, and subscriptions can also be sold through this platform.
Both platforms are suitable when it comes to unlimited products.
Unlimited Bandwidth:
- Shopify provides its users unlimited bandwidth on any plan. You don’t have to worry about traffic spikes or slow loading times. Nothing will slow down the speed and affect the performance of your store.
- Magento Open Source does not offer unlimited bandwidth. Your plan and hosting provider would determine the bandwidth. If you want to accommodate more traffic or update your hosting plan, you have to pay extra.
Here Shopify reigns supreme.
Ease of Use:
- Shopify offers a drag-and-drop interface and a wide range of themes and apps that make it extremely easy for beginners and non-technical users to deploy Shopify ecommerce solutions.
- Magento is complex. You need to hire a developer to build a Magento-based ecommerce solution.
So, when it comes to drag-and-drop, Shopify beats Magento.
First-Party POS System:
- Shopify provides a built-in First-Party POS system that enables users to accept payment without hiring the payment services of a third party. Business managers can synch their inventory and orders across their online and offline channels. In addition, Shopify offers the option of downloading the Shopify POS app for both Android and iOS operating systems.
- Magento does not have a built-in POS system. The store owners must have to use a Third-Party extension or integration for connecting offline and online sales channels.
Shopify has the evident advantage here!
Scalability and Flexibility:
- Shopify offers limited scalability and flexibility. When your business grows and you need to have advanced ecommerce features, you need to jump ship.
- Magento Open Sourcehas more scalability and flexibility. This platform enables businesses to add new features, functionality, and new products in tandem with the growth of their business. With Magento, you don’t need to switch platforms when your business grows and expands.
Here Magento has defeated Shopify by a big margin!
Deployment Cost:
- Shopify offers multiple pricing plans to suit the varying needs and budgetary constraints of users. The price starts at $29/month and it keeps on increasing depending upon the number of products, bandwidth, and storage.
- Magento is open source. So, users can download it and install it for free. But after that, you will have to pay for plugins, themes, and web hosting to enhance the functionalities and features of your online store.
Hence, when it comes to deployment cost, Magento is the clear winner here!
Payment Gateways:
- Shopify offers wide-ranging payment options numbering more than 100 such as PayPal, Stripe, Authorize.net, Amazon Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and more. Shopify has its own Shopify payment system; which means you can accept customer payments without any need to integrate with third-party payment gateways.
- Magento also supports over 100 payment gateways. But it has less extensive sections of payment options and it does not support any built-in gateway.
Shopify enjoys some margin here but is not a clearer winner, it is almost a drawn game.
Security:
- Shopify has robust security features to offer such as SSL certificates, secure checkout, data encryption, and more for keeping your online store data protected from potential threats.
- Magento has also robust security protections such as encryption, fraud detection, and PCI compliance to protect businesses and customers’ data from being breached.
In terms of security, Shopify and Magento offer secure and reliable data protection measures.
Thousands of Integrations:
- Shopify has an app store that offers thousands of integrations and extensions for helping users enhance the functionalities and features of their online. They can find apps for a variety of purposes such as marketing, sales, analytics, customer service, shipping, inventory management, and more. it provides more than 4000 integrations and extensions.
- Magento also offers support to thousands of integrations and extensions albeit via plugins. The store owners can find extensions for marketing, sales, analytics, inventory management, and more.
Tough competition here, but Shopify has a slight margin.
Customer Support:
- Shopify provides its customers with 24/7 online customer support through emails, phone, live chat, and social for all its plans. Shopify Help Center has a rich collection of articles, guides, videos, and tutorials to help its customers in any matter.
- Though Magento provides 24/7 customer support, it is not available directly for the open-source version. But the Magento community is vibrant and large enough to sort out your issue. The Magento DevDocs website is also an important source of guidance as it has a rich collection of documentation, guides, and tutorials. If you are using the paid version, of Magento Commerce, you can avail of customer service through phone, email, or Magento Technical Support Team.
Shopify has a clear margin here.
Multi-Store Environment:
- Shopify does not support a multi-store environment, and it becomes a serious handicap if the store owner has many brands and complex product lines.
- Magento provides a multi-store environment, where you can create and manage multiple stores within a single Magento platform. If you have many brands and multiple complex products to work with, you don’t need to worry about it.
Magento has a clear advantage over Shopify when it comes to support for multi-store environments.
Search Engine Optimization:
- Shopify has a user-friendly SEO interface that helps beginners and even non-technical users improve their visibility and ranking online. It has basic SEO tools for keyword optimization, sitemaps, robots.txt files, canonical tags, and SSL certificates. Meta titles, descriptions, URLs, and alt texts can also be edited for pages and products. But it has some limitations as well.
- Magento has a powerful and flexible interface for full control and customizability over the SEO of online stores. All tasks related to SEO can be performed with ease and professionally just like Shopify, but this platform is more suited for advanced levels of SEO.
Magento has a slight advantage over Shopify.
Which Platform Will Ever Rule the World? Magento or Shopify?
Both Magento and Shopify are powerful and versatile ecommerce development platforms that help organizations unlock their business potential. The particular needs, requirements, and business objectives of organizations should determine the ultimate choice of the platform.
Concludingly speaking, if you are looking for more control over the online store and advanced customization options, you should go for Magento. And if your business needs a user-friendly interface, Shopify would be the right choice.