Magento or Shopify: Which One Offers the Best Ecommerce Solution?

There are numerous eCommerce platforms that cater to businesses that aim to have a productive online store and sell products and services by meeting all kinds of customer orders. Of these platforms, hundreds and thousands of online businesses trust Magento and Shopify. Both of them facilitate businesses through extensive customization options, seamless integration, friendly resources, and effective business process management. However, when it comes to Magento vs Shopify, it mainly depends on factors like business capacity, the size of operations, budget, and functional strategies.

Concerning flexibility, and ease of use, a lot can be said to be different when comparing Magento and Shopify. Magento eCommerce vs Shopify is where Magento presents an extensive amount of customization for large-scale businesses, but Shopify is more concerned about ease of use and faster setup for smaller businesses or those new to eCommerce. Whether it is Magento to Shopify migration or a head-to-head comparison of Magento vs Shopify, you should know its pros and cons. In case you can’t decide, you might even take professional advice from MilesWeb Magento hosting experts and they can help you decide which one is better suited to your needs. Magento vs Shopify- Which is better? Now let’s take a look at some of the strengths and weaknesses of both.

Magento vs Shopify: Key Contrasts

For eCommerce businesses looking for powerful solutions, Magento and Shopify continue to lead the market delivering excellent and unique offerings for efficiently managing countless brands across industries around the world. 

Below is the Google Trends stats comparing Magento vs Shopify popularity over the last ten years: Magento had more or less steady interest and small benefits over Shopify till around 2018. Then, around 2018, big shifts occurred: Shopify started spiking in popularity and took over Magento, and then continued slowly increasing.

Both of these ecommerce platforms offer many tools you will require to begin with, grow, and scale an online shop effortlessly all over the world. Magento always used to be the eCommerce online leader but in recent years, Shopify has become one leading champion with its user-friendly features and scalable tech stack.

Related: Magento For eCommerce Website – Is It The Right Choice?

Shopify provides out-of-the-box hosting, so you don’t have to look around for web hosting providers to store the files of the code on their servers. It provides the advantages of Shopify Online Store 2.0, a big library of themes to choose from, and a secure and powerful checkout built with integrated payment gateways that have proven it can convert more customers online. Shopify was originally created for micro businesses looking to begin an enterprise and sell online but following on from the release of Shopify Plus and Shopify Hydrogen, Shopify is now championing enterprise-size brands who are making the move to the platform, including Gymshark & SKIMS. Global brands are selecting Shopify as it offers the agile approach toward scaling multi-million-pound businesses easily and natively integrates with other enterprise-level technology.

On the other hand, Magento is an open-source platform whereby you have total control over the basic setup of its foundation including hosting, a domain name, payment processors, and databases. This platform has been experiencing a decline in the number of brands using it since other players have taken a share in the market. However, the open-source nature of Magento means developers can access all of the code because of this, a lot more customization is available for the developers. The direct access ensures enhanced server security plus an application of patches to the Magento core codebase whilst all of this is taken care of for the customer on Shopify.

Before we begin comparing the features, pros, and cons that the two eCommerce platforms offer, it is essential to dig deep into a general overview of what each platform provides, the types of features they include, and how they may help improve our comparison of Shopify vs Magento.

Understanding What is Shopify?

Shopify, an all-inclusive eCommerce platform, aspires to help businesses sell online and offline, in addition to offering every tool and architecture required in growing and scaling. Millions of businesses rely on the platform each day, using Shopify’s powers to build online stores, sell in multiple places across the world, and sell on several devices such as on the web, on phones, on tablets, and brick-and-mortar stores or pop-up shops too. Shopify is an administrative center for running a business, and selling it to many other different channels like social media channels & online marketplaces as well!

Shopify is not just an eCommerce platform; it is a complete architecture that helps you set up your brand and manage it. Shopify’s core product is letting people sell online, with instant access to templates for hundreds of thousands of designs and features. It also has a full back-end admin that lets brands manage their inventory, payments, and everything associated with orders. Shopify’s checkout is renowned as the world’s highest converting checkout, too, with accelerated payment options. Shopify also comes with marketing tools for SEO, social media channels, and content writing.

Shopify also looks at the whole business and offers upgrades with features that are geared towards helping brands grow. To this end, there exists an upgrade to Shopify Plus, which gives brands advanced checkout customizations, increased capacity to take in orders, and dedicated enterprise-level support.

While the technology is, of course, excellent and scalable, one of the big advantages is the quality and quantity of third-party app providers that come with the platform via the Shopify App Store. There are thousands of applications and features built by third-party developers to customize the store without ever once touching the code. There is also a marketplace of Shopify Experts that the user community can hire to build custom solutions for their businesses.

Shopify allows brands to build unique and seamless online experiences for their customers and scale the business almost infinitely by leveraging the power of the servers and checkout security. Brands can market their products to multiple channels, host their domain securely, and sell around the world with Shopify Markets.

Understanding What is Magento?

Founded & launched in 2008 by Varien, Magento is a bit different from Shopify since it is an open-source eCommerce platform, meaning users will have complete access to the backend, whereas Shopify is a closed hosted-for-you tool. Magento is used by top brands like Omega & Dior and has grown to become one of the most popular eCommerce platforms. Its platform was just recently released with a ton of negative input because of too many bugs, problems, and difficulties that the business owners faced while upgrading. This did affect the image of the platform. The platform was written in PHP programming language using other frameworks like Laminas and Symfony. Magento employs MySQL or MariaDB database management systems that require installation on the part of the developer to be accessed. 

As you might expect, Magento also offers a large number of different functionalities specifically geared towards eCommerce users such as a back-end CMS, shopping cart, checkout, support for multiple payment gateways, and order/inventory management capabilities. In addition to these logistical management tools Magento boasts, that it also offers marketing features, such as SEO controls, catalog management, and much more. Magento is highly focused on enterprise-level businesses with technical features like caching that can scale to large enterprise levels. As Magento is open-source, developers do have full access to the way it works, arguably creating an open opportunity for customizability. Magento is a robust platform with an enormous range of features and capabilities, where eCommerce brands can come in, grow, and scale their business. Magento is currently an owned subsidiary of Adobe which acquired it in 2018 and continues to invest and grow the platform further.

Related: Is Magento The Right CMS For Me?

Magento or Shopify: Highlighting How Each of Them Stack Up?

Magento Ecommerce vs Shopify: Head-To-Head Ecommerce Capability Comparison

1. Utility

Magento and Shopify, both platforms offer refined and business-centric user interfaces for excellent consumer experiences. However, the final decision is based on personal requirements. But Shopify’s interface is clean and straightforward regularly garnering positive feedback for its classic and user-friendly layout, which makes it a favorite among several eCommerce owners.

As stated earlier, Shopify is recognized for its simple and user-friendly interface whereby makes it easy to find major areas including orders, products, and collections. Shopify has inspired third parties to utilize their UI toolkit named Polaris in helping third-party applications remain similar, streamlined, and also user-friendly. Shopify’s CMS branded online store 2.0, is said to be lovely, highly visual, and easy to use with drag-and-drop functionality.

Using Magento is more complex and requires a longer period to familiarize yourself with its functions. Because some of its functionalities will require technical and developmental knowledge in order to learn how to properly use it. That said there is an argument that Magento offers more customizability from the backend to build new functionalities to meet the needs of your business, whereas Shopify is a lot more restrictive. It stated that learning Magento could be a steep learning curve for users who are trying to understand how Magento works. If development resources are available, then both platforms can be used to make usability as easy as possible.

2. Pricing Structure

Shopify has several plans according to business type, scope, complexity, and feature requirements. The entry-level plan of Shopify is very low cost. The plans then scale up to allow more user-advanced analytics and additional storage. Shopify Plus gives access to more advanced features such as the ability to customize checkout for bigger brands. 

Magento also has several tiers. Businesses can even choose the free option to opt for the most elementary version, i.e., Magento Open Source. However, it also offers other much higher tiers that require a lot more investment, such as Magento Commerce and Magento Commerce Cloud.

Generally, the higher the plan or tier, you’ll get more advanced features, but it’ll differ from business to business. This is the most attractive element about Shopify: it provides web hosting, security, patching, and upgrades for free, whereas you need to do all of this for yourself with Magento. Most of the upgrades that the developers need to do are done automatically in Shopify. On the other hand, consider the transaction fees or cost of third-party payment gateway when budgeting for Shopify as these expenses can increase considerably when compared to third-party services.

3. Integrated Tools

Magento comes with built-in features including an advanced inventory system, which supports the display of the owner’s total visitor count, and revenue reports, importing high-volume databases related to products, and comparing different product variants.

It is another option for business professionals to get sales solutions through the Magento marketplace. Once a sales tool is accessed, you can set up fixed percentages and discount prices, recover abandoned carts, customize checkouts, and improvement in boosting customer journey.

The sales solutions in Magento also support multi-channel selling. You can use the marketplace Shopify to easily sell a huge number of products, recover lost sales, and check out abandoned carts.

You can sell physical products using Shopify, and at the same time, you can design a Shopify store for selling digital products. More to that, is that Shopify has partnerships with UPS, USPS, and DHL Express. With this, store owners can efficiently deliver their products through courier services. More than Magneto, Shopify has more powerful sales tools. 

4. Themes

One of the most crucial aspects of retaining users is your online store’s theme. You see, if you were to be a successful player in the eCommerce game, you would need a layout and design elements that can garner more attention from your users.

Shopify has the longest list of premium and free themes. Although Magento carries pretty impressive themes, it doesn’t even come close to what Shopify has in store for its users. So, if you want to completely customize a theme, then you most likely will love Magento.

Magento comes with 11 different themes, which cost from $30 to $500. You can still use Magento to build your ideal online store, avail yourself of the features, and make some adjustments until you meet your particular brand image.

However, if you only want to be presented with a wide range of paid themes, then Shopify is the better choice than Magento. Additionally, you won’t require any coding skills to change around with Shopify themes.

5. Payment Gateways

A payment gateway is, essentially, a service that allows the acceptance and processing of payments by a business from the customers and the reception of money. Without it, eCommerce stores cannot exist. For the eCommerce use case, a payment gateway can be used as an intermediary between the customer, the business, and their financial institutions.

Shopify integrates with more than 100 payment gateways, so online business owners can allow customers to pay in a way that is convenient and trusted by them. Shopify has its own payment gateway called Shopify Payments, enabling brands to offer all major debit/credit cards and accelerated payments without having a third-party gateway. But if you’re interested in offering a third-party payment gateway, Shopify natively connects to hundreds, including PayPal, Amazon Pay, and Klarna. Shopify Payments is powered by Stripe. Shopify has a wide variety of payment gateways that make this platform very attractive to businesses around the world, as each region usually has specific payment types unique to that territory. However, if there’s a payment gateway outside of Shopify’s list, then sorry but you cannot use it as the Shopify checkout is locked to the gateways that they have approved and this can be frustrating when trading in restricted categories such as CBD sales.

Adobe Commerce or Magento, on the contrary, integrates with PayPal, Braintree, and Authorize.Net payment service providers and natively does not offer its payment gateway. If a merchant does want to integrate an additional gateway beyond those 3, then they’ll have to rely on a developer integrating a third-party gateway which is normally way more complicated than Shopify’s large integration list. The benefit here is that Magento is much more flexible if you want to integrate an unsupported gateway however the complexity is higher.

Whereas Shopify will ease integration with a third party, remember that they charge extra if you use something other than Shopify Payments to offer your customers. But if you go with Shopify Payments, then you can skip the additional third-party payment fee.

6. Customization Options

Customization is important, as it not only distinguishes you from the rest but also gives the best experience to the customers. Customizations may be perceived as the visual look and feel that a customer sees when they land at your store, or even customizations may be about the features that you offer in your store. The main reason why brands like to personalize their stores is to provide a smooth branded experience for their customers, with the aim of maximizing key eCommerce KPIs such as conversion rates, average order values, and engagement on their store. 

Shopify is very highly customizable in terms of how you can present a unique look and feel online. First, you’ll be able to create a custom theme that is purely the designers’ and developers’ job to build something uniquely for your brand. 

Important Note – You’ll have to stay within the normal types of pages that Shopify provides but the look and feel can be yours to come up with, or you may choose one of the themes they have in-house. 

Shopify keeps its theme library fresh and contains numerous design styles that fit your brand, some of the themes are free either. Once you have chosen your theme, using Shopify’s Theme Editor it is possible to quickly personalize and add more content. For instance, Shopify’s back-end control panel is a bit more repressive, making it difficult to override the native way in which Shopify functions. For instance, if you want to change one of its core features-for example, desire to change the URL structure, then that would not be possible. However, recent updates coming from Shopify are heading towards more freedom to control the admin.

Because Magento’s code is open-source, and skilled Magento developers do have a little more room to control how the platform operates. Just like with Shopify, you may build customized themes for Magento or choose from their collection of approved themes too. entrepreneurs appreciate how checkout offers a level of customization that can give unique experiences to customers – especially suited to businesses that don’t sell in an orthodox manner. However, while Magento does support being able to be customizable – it all requires the skills and investment into developers to complete this. It can also be a significant overhead to keep maintaining the customizations since Magento updates the platform, your customizations may need updating too.

7. Marketing Tools

Marketing tools or features are one of the most important considerations in choosing an e-commerce platform. When you have access to great marketing tools directly, you can easily do what’s necessary to expand your base of users and improve your bottom line.

Shopify also has excellent marketing tools that one can integrate with third-party integration. For example, you can use different tools such as Klaviyo and Seguno to sell your products on Instagram and Facebook. You can market to different languages using multilingual websites supported by Shopify.

On the flip side, Magento has an exclusive marketplace for marketing tools. So, if you want to roll out email campaigns, you’ll first have to install Magento extensions. You’ll also need to hire a skilled web developer who can integrate marketing tools. If you want simplicity, you’ll probably lean more towards Shopify’s integrated marketing tools.

When you compare Magento and Shopify, you have to consider what your business needs. Compare Shopify and Magento through a strategic process, where you have to decide “which” best suits your requirements. In the ultimate Magento vs Shopify comparison, focus on the features, pricing, add-ons, and inbuilt tools you’ll need to make a decision. The next time someone writes, “Which is better Magento or Shopify,” don’t generalize.

8. Client Support

Shopify is well known for great customer support to its merchants. Brands on Shopify get 24/7 support via email, live chat, as well as phone support. Shopify has offered an AI-assisted help center in order to support merchants with fast answers and give them a longer life cycle of support requests. 

Magento has customer service but this is not 24/7 from Adobe. Magento has a very solid knowledge base and helps center, which brands can bank into. Those brands, however, will most likely find themselves very dependent on their agency partners for such support. For enterprise-level plans, Adobe does have dedicated account managers, but that comes with a cost. The flexibility in support requirements will vary with different companies.

Related: Supercharging Magento: Expert Solutions To Accelerate Your Magento Store

Difference Between Magento and Shopify: Is Magento Better Than Shopify?

The choice between Magento vs Shopify is largely determined by your business needs. Magento, being flexible with customization, is a strong candidate for larger enterprises that will provide a structured and complex requirement with scalability. Whereas Shopify comes more as a user-friendly platform, with a simpler, more of faster setup, having a managed hosting environment in place, so ideal for easier setups even for smaller businesses. The final decision on is Magento is better than Shopify depends on the size, budget, and control level desired in relation to the features of an online store.

What to Expect When Migrating From Magento to Shopify

Migrating from Magento to Shopify involves transferring important data, such as product details, user information, and order history, to Shopify.  Personalizing design could lead to challenges because Shopify offers less versatility compared to Magento. But having said that, Shopify’s simplicity and in-built features streamline daily operations. A strategic planning toward data migration, comprehensive testing, and staff training are crucial for a seamless website migration.