Confused between Magento and Shopify?
Which is the right platform for you?
Which platform should you choose?
Don’t worry!
We are with you on this. We know that choosing the right eCommerce platform for your online store is very important.
Having so many questions is normal when you have such excellent options. These both are the most popular eCommerce Platform in the market.
Where Magento development is popular for a long time, Shopify has also become one of its biggest competitors in recent years. With the announcement of Magento 2, an enhanced version of the original platform, it is even higher on the list.
Magento is an open-source platform and it’s free just like WordPress. But it needs someone with good knowledge. If you have your in-house development team, it is great.
Shopify is a good option to build an online store and it is easy to use.
Coding:
Magento and Shopify both are very different from each other.
Magento is an open-source platform and uses the Php language where Shopify is a restrictive platform in comparison and uses Liquid. It is very important to know which coding language is better for your website.
Open-source is basically free, so it is easily available and we can modify the template code which is not possible with Shopify.
Shopify is easy because of its drag-and-drop feature so that you can easily customize your store.
Cost:
While choosing the right platform, Cost is the main factor that how much you wanna spend on your website.
Magento is free as it is an open-source platform. Another cost depends on your advanced requirements for your eCommerce website.
Shopify provides 14 days free trial and after that, there is a monthly subscription to use its service.
It has 3 different types of payment level:
Basic Shopify at $29 per month
Shopify at $79 per month
Advanced Shopify at $179 per month
Hosting:
Hosting is imperative for a successful eCommerce store.
Magento uses a third-party hosting service or cloud hosting. It also provides facilities to select a hosting option according to their budget and needs. You have to find a hosting service based on how you use the platform.
Where Shopify provides cloud-based hosting with subscription fees, so you don’t have to manage to host & deal with third-party.
Magento is a PaaS (platform-as-a-service), Shopify is a SaaS (software-as-a-service).
Extensions & Add-ons:
Both platforms present basic features for your website but advanced and multiple functionalities demand extensions and add-ons.
Magento provides thousands of extensions with a mix of free and paid which allows you to extend the out-of-the-box functionality without worry to write code. There are many types of extensions available to you.
Magento Extensions make your customers stand up and take notice and never want to leave your store and increase your business exponentially.
Shopify provides a collection of apps to extend & improve your website in different areas. It keeps developing new apps with a simple installation process for users such as email marketing, accounting, etc.
Security:
Safeguarding your website is one of the best ways to stay clear of security lapses. You need to assure that the best security plugins and updates are used for your website to keep away your website from security lapses because, in reality, thousands of websites are hacked daily.
Magento gives you the flexibility to develop your website security yourself, but keep in mind that it will add more responsibility to you. Still, Magento has strong and robust security that requires knowledge and expertise.
The Security Scan tool is available for free from the dashboard of your Magento account.
Magento includes “.htaccess” files to protect system files when using the Apache webserver. If you use a different web server such as NGINX, make sure that all system files and directories are protected.
Shopify’s compliance covers all six PCI standard categories and applies to every store using it. Shopify uses SSL encryption to protect your site automatically and publish it securely using HTTPS instead of HTTP. For the e-commerce business to handle consumers’ sensitive information carefully this platform is excellent support.
Themes:
Everyone wants an eye-catching website look from both the customer & store owner’s perspective.
Both Magento and Shopify present a large number of free themes and templates. But remember one thing, free themes have limitations. If you want to go further then, you must purchase premium themes. Both provide responsive themes as customers are using their mobile to shop online.
Magento 2 has thousands of Magento extensions & themes available. With the release of Magento 2, it introduced drag and drop options to design an attractive website. Shopify currently offers 65 templates and it provides fewer modification options.
Performance:
Performance and speed are two important factors for the success of an eCommerce website. As we all want quick & faster loading websites because no one likes to wait.
Websites taking high loading time, are in loss because customers get bored and leave the site.
Magento has more features compared to Shopify but there is a difference between load time and performance. Thus we can say Shopify is faster than Magento.