magento vs shopify
Setting up a new online store or thinking about migrating from Shopify? We’ve done the research to show you that Magento is the right choice for your eCommerce.
Migrate to Magento in 4 weeks
Experience Driven
A winning customer experience is critical in today’s market. Consumers want to buy experiences, not products. With a flexible platform, you can customize your user experience and delight your customers. Don’t choose a commerce platform that restricts your creative freedom.
Magento’s open source approach enables limitless possibilities for customization, whereas Shopify has limitations on what can be modified.
Magento
- Flexible, open platform to quickly bring innovations to market
- Differentiated customer experience to set your brand apart
- Pre-integrated modules to activate with a single click (payments, tax, shipping)
- Over 3,600 high quality, vetted extensions available to quickly expand store capabilities
- Large global network of partners and developers provide additional resources
Shopify
- Built as standard set of templates
- Undifferentiated customer experience
- Limited extensibility and integrations with 3rd party solutions
- Smaller network of partners and developers with limited global support
“Shopify’s platform lacks the sophisticated features required by many large businesses. Features such as DOM, support for complex and digital products, multi brand and multi sites, predictive and advanced analytics, logistics and fulfillment, integration APIs, and customization are weak or nonexistent.”
2017 Gartner MQ for eCommerce Software
Future Growth
Don’t let your commerce platform limit your future growth. Choose the solution that meets your needs and your customers’ needs from Day One. Magento extensions are supported by a deep ecosystem of developers and partners who are continually innovating and improving their offerings.
Shopify Plus lacks key features, namely omni-channel, order management capability, wholesale functions, support for complex and digital products, advanced analytics, and BI.
Magento
- Endlessly customizable platform – no limit to features and functions
- Merchants retain full control over their Magento environment
- Wide variety of third-party solutions integration
- Integration of digital tools to further enhance customer experience
- Engineered to support B2B, B2C, or both your commerce needs
Shopify
- Forced to upgrade to more expensive Shopify Plus plans
- Features required by large and growing companies are not supported
- Few large, global companies use Shopify
- Incapable of handling the complexity of B2B transactions, workflow with templates, and apps
- Engineered to support B2C, but not B2B
Magento powers 315,000 sites around the world, including 70 companies on the Internet Retailer Top B2C eCommerce 500 list and 40 companies on the Internet Retailer B2B eCommerce 300 list.
Shopify powers 10 companies on the Internet Retailer Top 500 list.
Performance
Delivering great experiences 24/7 requires a platform that is robust, reliable, and scalable. Determining true costs can be complex and involves many variables, which affects partner-related costs and fees. Any customization or deviation from Shopify’s basic templates will incur additional customization and implementation costs. Magento Commerce now includes enhanced content management tools, allowing users to make changes quickly.
Magento
- Global cloud infrastructure and services ensure 99.99% operational uptime
- Site deploys wherever your business operates
- Magento Commerce runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Merchants retain total control over their Magento environments
- Powerful business tools help larger, more complex stores save time and improve business agility
Shopify
- Multi-tenant architecture means that peak demand on another merchant’s store can degrade the performance of your store
- Throttles the data exchanged between its core app and add-ons apps
- Significantly slows your site performance during high traffic periods
- Technology stack is locked down, leaving merchants with no way to monitor, manage, or optimize site performance
- Requires more custom coding and added costs
- Limits on product attributes and catalog size with large and complex product sets or unique selling requirements
“Sigma Beauty chose Magento because we needed a scalable platform that would fulfill the needs of both our growing B2C and B2B businesses. Hosting on the Magento Commerce Cloud AWS-based infrastructure was an exceptional bonus for our performance – something that will benefit our global network of customers both immediately, and long-term.”
Dan Amundsen / Web Development Manager, Sigma Beauty
Support
Magento has the assistance when you need it. Whether you require help in implementing, maintaining, or extending your commerce experience, there are a multitude of ways Magento can provide support.
Magento
- A large global community of Solution Partners
- Solution Partners available and willing to help during any stage of your digital commerce journey
- More than 260,000 developers worldwide to help with projects of all sizes
Shopify
- A small partner community, located mainly within North America
- Less experience in implementing commerce experiences and providing merchant services
- Its proprietary language, Liquid, leaves a limited pool of developers equipped to help with projects
Major Features Shopify is Missing Out of the Box
Staging
and preview
Flexible pricing rules, coupons, promotions
Drag and drop visual merchandising tools
Multi site/store management under a single account
Store credit
Supporting B2C and B2B selling models
Multi-currency support depends on payment gateway provider
Detailed permissions and logging
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