Shopify vs. Magento

Having your own online shop as an ad­di­tion­al presence on the web is now pretty much essential for those who own their own shop or sell their products to the public. Even for companies or in­di­vidu­als who sell their products ex­clus­ively online, having their own shop is worth­while as an al­tern­at­ive to a simple website or sales platforms such as Amazon or eBay. Those planning to create their own online shop face what seems to be a big challenge at the start, finding the right software to create, manage, and maintain their own e-commerce site.

In this guide, we’ll compare Shopify vs. Magento, two of the most popular shop solutions. In doing so, we’ll highlight the biggest pros and cons of both online shop options, as well as the biggest dif­fer­ences in various cat­egor­ies such as beginner-friend­li­ness, security, search engine suit­ab­il­ity and support – so you can best find out whether Shopify or Magento is the better choice your e-commerce venture.

Both Shopify and Magento have been among the top picks when it comes to creating and managing online shops for years. A first version of Shopify was released in June 2006, and Magento’s first edition was available around two years later. Before we go into detail to show the dif­fer­ences in the Shopify vs. Magento com­par­is­on, we will first summarise the most important strengths and weak­nesses of both to give you a general overview.

The makers of Shopify call their system an ‘all-inclusive shop system’ that provides all the functions for selling on the web. Thanks to the focus on re­li­ab­il­ity and scaling, you can be sure that your shop is always available and can grow without any problems. The hosting of the cloud-based software and your Shopify shop is handled by the globally active company itself – which is practical on the one hand, but also entails fixed monthly costs (between 29 and 299 US dollars per month) on the other. With ‘Shopify Lite’, there is also a ‘Buy Button’ solution, which is available for 9 US dollars per month.

The other pros and cons of Shopify are shown in the following table:

Magento has been owned by the computer software company Adobe since 2018. With Magento Commerce and Commerce Cloud (including managed hosting), Adobe has in­tro­duced com­mer­cial versions of the popular store platform, but the original open-source edition is still available. With this version of the software, you can design your shop as you like – thousands of free and paid Magento ex­ten­sions from the official Magento Mar­ket­place will help you with this project. However, you are left to your own devices when it comes to designing your online shop if you decide to host it on your own.

All the other pros and cons of Magento are shown in the following table:

Shopify or Magento? As is so often the case, it depends on what you’re looking for. Both solutions have their ad­vant­ages and dis­ad­vant­ages, but in principle they are perfectly suited for creating a online shop. You should therefore determine which of the two platforms is the better choice for your purposes. To make this decision as easy as possible for you, we have sum­mar­ised the most important dif­fer­ences in this ‘Shopify vs. Magento’ com­par­is­on. We’ll take a close look at key cat­egor­ies such as user-friend­li­ness, available payment methods, security, and search engine friend­li­ness.

Shopify is designed as a com­pre­hens­ive drag-and-drop online shop builder that is char­ac­ter­ised by high usability. A wizard guides newcomers through the setup process so that all functions can be dis­covered one after the other. The open-source edition of Magento does not offer a drag-and-drop editor. For this, it is necessary to install a cor­res­pond­ing extension, which makes things more com­plic­ated, es­pe­cially when starting to work with a shop system. In addition, basic pro­gram­ming skills are pretty much essential if you want to customise your own Magento shop.

Getting started in online business with Magento Open Source is also sig­ni­fic­antly more difficult than with the fully supported Shopify due to the hosting en­vir­on­ment that you’ll need to take care of yourself.

Both systems in the com­par­is­on are char­ac­ter­ised by their first-class ex­tens­ib­il­ity. There are more than 5,000 ex­ten­sions for Shopify, and just under 4,000 for Magento. This means that both shop systems can be func­tion­ally adapted to your ideas. However, Shopify’s ex­ten­sions are more often subject to a fee and also more expensive than com­par­able Magento plugins – this is where Magento’s strong community factor comes into play. Fur­ther­more, the Shopify platform can only be cus­tom­ised to a certain extent.

Looking at the range of official themes, Shopify is ahead of the game. The Magento Mar­ket­place lists eleven official design templates for Magento Open Source and Commerce, of which you can use only one free of charge for the visual design of your online shop. In the Shopify theme directory, you’ll find over 70 different re­spons­ive templates – including nine free themes.

Good Customer Re­la­tion­ship Man­age­ment (CRM) is one of the most important factors of a suc­cess­ful online business. Although neither Shopify nor Magento (open source) have an in­teg­rated CRM function, functions for customer care can be added via extension or es­tab­lished CMS solutions. Solutions such as Send­in­Blue, HubSpot, Metrilo, or Sales­force can be in­teg­rated directly into the shop platforms. With Flow, Shopify also offers its own extension for customer man­age­ment, which you can install free of charge. In the licensed editions, Magento also has a native solution.

Nowadays, anyone who buys things online assumes that the operator offers various options for payment. In par­tic­u­lar, online payment services such as PayPal are hugely popular, but offline methods of payment pro­cessing such as bank transfer, invoice, and direct debit are still used. Both Shopify and Magento are well equipped in this category and each support over 100 different payment methods, which are available by default or can be activated or unlocked via extension.

With Shopify Payments, Shopify even has its own online payment method, but this is also the only method for which no ad­di­tion­al fees are charged per trans­ac­tion. When using third-party services like PayPal, Amazon Pay, or Apple Pay, Shopify retains between 0.5 (Advanced Shopify) and 2.0 percent (Basic Shopify) of the trans­ac­tion value, depending on the plan purchased.

In terms of security, Magento’s open-source approach is crucial. The open-source version brings with it a lot of freedom for creative ad­apt­a­tion of the platform, but also a certain degree of vul­ner­ab­il­ity. Cy­ber­crim­in­als have an easier game when it comes to ex­ploit­ing dis­covered vul­ner­ab­il­it­ies in the code, par­tic­u­larly in ex­ten­sions. Un­cov­er­ing security problems in Shopify’s source code and using it to in­filt­rate malware and the like, on the other hand, is much more difficult. Fur­ther­more, Shopify has set up its own team to guarantee the security of its hosted shops. Like Magento’s paid editions, Shopify also ensures PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) com­pli­ance for all card payments.

The com­pre­hens­ive support for all Shopify shops also has a positive effect in terms of main­ten­ance. The provider ensures that the un­der­ly­ing hardware works and also takes care of updating the software if necessary. As a user of Magento Open Source and Magento Commerce, these two points fall within your area of re­spons­ib­il­ity, unless you have chosen a hosting provider to take care of the main­ten­ance.

Both Magento and Shopify offer some features out of the box that you can use to spe­cific­ally improve the search engine ranking of your online shop. For example, Shopify auto­mat­ic­ally generates an XML sitemap and canonical tags for pages with matching content. In addition, many themes generate meta titles that include your shop name, although you can also define each title manually, as well as meta de­scrip­tions, URLs, or al­tern­at­ive texts for images. In Magento, you will also find all the features mentioned – but without the high level of auto­ma­tion. If you want to have a sitemap for your Magento shop, for example, this requires a bit more work in the backend.

Those who want more than the basic functions will find various ad­di­tion­al ex­ten­sions for both shop solutions, with more than 400 ex­ten­sions in the Magento Mar­ket­place in com­par­is­on with around 120 SEO apps in the Shopify App Shop.

One of Shopify’s greatest strengths is its com­pre­hens­ive support. All users can rely on pro­fes­sion­al 24/7 support from the Shopify team. Depending on the issue, email, phone, and live chat are available as options – only the ‘Lite’ plan doesn’t offer phone support. In addition, answers to typical questions and various step-by-step in­struc­tions can be found in the Shopify Help Centre. A smaller community forum for ex­chan­ging ideas with other customers is also ac­cess­ible via the official Shopify website.

When it comes to community support, Magento also cuts a good figure. As with many ap­plic­a­tions from the open-source sector, you will find numerous offers of help on the web from dedicated users or de­velopers who are available to offer advice and support. There is also an official FAQ section for Magento. When it comes to direct support, Adobe draws a clear line between the open-source edition and the paid plans because the ticket system for support with technical problems is not available for Magento Open Source users. Phone support remains an option here, with higher priority given to paying customers.

In our Shopify vs. Magento com­par­is­on, the former shop system has shown its pop­ular­ity due to its high beginner-friend­li­ness, which not only results from the software’s user-friend­li­ness, but also from the general support of the Shopify team. Users of Magento (with the exception of Magento Commerce Cloud) will need to invest more effort. However, the fact that Magento is an open-source system is ad­vant­age­ous. Magento Open Source in par­tic­u­lar is much more cus­tom­is­able and ex­pand­able in detail than Shopify, which can be an important building block on the way to an in­di­vidu­al online shop.

The following table once again sum­mar­ises the most important aspects in the direct ‘Shopify vs. Magento’ com­par­is­on.