Why Magento is much better than Shopify: Know Difference

Whether your business is small and looking to grow fast or a huge enterprise brand exploring new options, choosing the right platform is not a decision that should be taken lightly. The two eCommerce platforms on most company’s shortlist are Shopify and Magento.

Actually the fact that your online store can reach success or come to failure largely depends on the website platform basement. Shopify and Magento are platforms for mid-to-large size eCommerce businesses and ones that aspire to become large. When it comes to the battle between the two, one thing is certain, both are pro-level to the max. By this, we mean that both the platform are designed for successful stores, but for the added functionality Shopify and Magento developers for hire make the work a lot easier. 

Though these two brands are two of the most popular eCommerce platforms on the market today, there are fundamental differences between the two that you should know about before making a decision. It makes sense to do a side-by-side comparison of these two major players in the game because they not only make up a large percentage of the market share but they are also showing some interesting innovations as they adapt to a changing industry.

Brief Introduction to Magento and Shopify

Magento, launched in 2007, began as an open-source platform and is best known for its flexibility, customization, and scalability. Because of the degree of development required to harness its real functionality, it has been traditionally used by larger businesses involving a big budget. What’s more, it comes with two editions:

1. Magento Open Source: To help you build and develop a unique online store from the ground up, this free and self-hosted platform offers the right functions.

2. Magento Commerce: For merchants and developers who are looking for an all-in-one cloud solution can use this premium paid edition to optimize the performance of store websites and boost store sales.

Shopify, founded in 2004, is proprietary software, ranked second among all the eCommerce platforms, and is best known for being feature-rich, easy to use, and set up. Businesses that are totally new to eCommerce can begin by looking for Shopify developers for hire. There are two available options:

1. Shopify: To customize the online storefront, sell products, run and grow an eCommerce business, this hosted solution allows it all.

2. Shopify Plus: As compared to Shopify, this multi-channel platform has a higher level of customization, support, and other useful features.

Magento vs Shopify: The Difference

1. Themes: The first impression many customers have is on the basis of what they will see when they land on your site, and to compete for their attention you want your store to be a clean, functional, and memorable extension of your brand. For this purpose, both Magento and Shopify offer a large collection of themes and templates to give your online store a look and feel to suit your products and taste. However, the number of free themes provided by Magento open source is significantly higher than Shopify. Plus, with Shopify themes you, to add new pages, change color palette, move, resize, and much more, you need to hire Shopify developers for the level of customization.

2. Payment Gateway Options: Ecommerce platforms and sales tools go hand in hand, you can’t have one without the other. So it is important to note that both the platforms support the majority of payment gateways. If you choose Shopify you should expect additional transaction fees for each transaction made through an external gateway. While Magento maintains secure transactions without any additional fees. Note that, Shopify supports over 100 different payment gateways with all coming fees imposed. While Magento offers 150 gateways, the majority of them are aimed at large businesses.

3. Safety and Security: Security is fundamental when running an online business. To keep your site away from security lapses, you need to ensure the best security plugins and updates are used on your website. Magento gives you the flexibility to improve the website security yourself. However, you need to take more hands-on-approach to follow PCI compliance yourself. To keep you secure, Magento sends regular patches and updates.

Marketing (Search Engine Optimization): To help you get started with SEO, Magento comes with plenty of SEO guidelines. To help search engines find your web page more easily, you can edit image alt tags and customize URLs. On the contrary, Shopify is more reliant on apps for its SEO. While you can simply edit alt tags and image titles, you will need to search the app store for the majority of SEO tricks.