Choosing the right platform to start an online business has never been easy especially when you are new to E-commerce. The most common questions arise regarding the open-source platforms against the hosted carts. Magento and Shopify are the two best-in-class platforms that are the choice of thousands of merchants to settle in. Both the platforms have gained popularity as they offer superior functionalities for a feature-rich online store. In this blog, we will provide you with a comprehensive comparison of Shopify and Magento that helps you in figuring out which one is most appropriate for your business.
Below we have mentioned some of the important criteria on which these two platforms can be compared –
Pricing is a very important factor to consider while choosing a shopping cart. For Magento, you need not take a monthly subscription, you can download, install and set up your store for free. To publish your website, you just need to pay for the domain and a hosting provider and the price depends on your selection. There are several apps available on the Magento store that enhance your store’s capabilities and the price can cost up to $15000.
The pricing of Shopify is subscription-based, there are 5 tiers ranging from $9 to $2000 per month. This plan includes both hosting fees and domain so you don’t need to purchase these elements separately. There is a more affordable set of website templates and themes with only $180 for the best website template in the market. Whereas, the maximum price for a theme on Magento can go up to $499.
After budget and ease-of-use, the next thing companies care about is how their platform will look like. Shopify offers a wide range of themes including 9 free and 64 premium themes. The Shopify store owners need to pay around $100-$180 to purchase a theme for their attractive storefronts. The features of Shopify themes are –
Magento has 11 mobile responsive themes with charges up to $499 for 10 premium options. With appropriate coding knowledge, the themes can also be created from scratch. The features which Magento themes offers are –
Shopify is clearly very easy to use against Magento, this E-commerce solution is easy to use because of the nature of a hosted platform. This E-commerce platform is built for everyone including tech-savvy and also people with only little technical background. The merchants will not face any difficulty while building their store.
Magento is not as easy and user-friendly as Shopify, especially for people with a non-technical background. This platform gives the user complete control over their website but it requires an all-inclusive knowledge of technology to install and set up their online store.
Themes give the look and feel to your website but for the additional functionality, you need to add the extensions. App stores and extensions are offered by all the systems and most of the apps are just a click away that enable you to add multiple features to your E-commerce store. Magento provides around 4000 extensions and no comprehensive coding knowledge is required to install and implement these. There are some important and helpful extensions like Mage plaza which enable you to promote the products by giving custom discount options etc.
The Shopify app store provides 4200+ free and paid apps to take control of the store, add features and boost sales. There are some popular apps like Trust Hero which enable you to show the trust icons to your visitors and potential customers to reduce the cart abandonment rate.
SEO allows you to optimize your E-commerce website SEO which affects your store ranking. In this aspect, Shopify and Magento both offer similar options. On both platforms, you can easily edit the title and description of a page to define how the store will be displayed in the search results. You can also add alt text to the images which help the search engines to understand what they are all about. In the Shopify app store and Magento’s marketplace, you can buy SEO apps. One of the examples is the SEO booster for Shopify which helps in finding issues related to SEO so that problems can be solved on time.
Both Magento and Shopify are fairly powerful platforms but Shopify offers greater ease of use as it is a hosted platform. Magento is free but requires purchasing hosting and the setup and installation procedures yourself which can only be done by tech-savvy people. But at the same time, Magento offers more opportunities for customization, feature expansion and scalability. You can have add-ons and payment gateways without any extra fees. You should use Shopify if you want your store to get up and run quickly or you are just starting out on E-commerce but want a full-fledged E-commerce store. You should use Magento if you have the required coding skills and want to build the store for your large-sized or medium-sized business.
Digital Crafters is a well-known Shopify as well as Magento Development company offering professional and efficient E-commerce development services across the globe. Our services include launching new E-commerce stores, creating brand experiences, experimenting with new models of business, expanding into new geographies and more. Whether you are a startup, small business or an enterprise, we offer highly customizable E-commerce services and even migrate your existing store. Digital Crafters has got your back for all your requirements.
