Magento vs Shopify

The battle between Magento and Shopify is ongoing. The comparison between them is inevitable as they are two of the best ecommerce platforms available for creating a website.

Both are powerful softwares and just by the look of their respective sites, you can’t tell them apart. However, the difference lies majorly in their design, features & support.

Magento has an open source architecture, is freely available and requires a separate hosting; whereas Shopify is self hosted, closed source (‘software as a service’ based) and comes with a price.

The user interface is simple and friendly in Shopify, as it offers a streamlined approach to setting up an online store; while Magento requires the knowledge of a web developer, making installation a complex process.

Magento has a big pool of customizable themes, templates & add ons, that increases the store function alities and enhances the overall look of a website. Shopify relies on premium third party plugins, as it has limited number of default themes & templates that restrict the capabilities as well as the customizations of a store.

Both Magento and Shopify offer inbuilt features for SEO, marketing, data reporting, but Magento tools are far more superior and advanced. Shopify on the other hand, has social media properties and an intuitive out-of box blogging tool, both of which are lacking in Magento.

The support system is round the clock for Shopify, and while Magento’s community edition has a vast support of developers, the ‘Vendor support’ is restricted only to the Enterprise.

Simply put, though time consuming, Magento is feature-rich and has the flexibility to setup multiple stores in multiple languages within the same platform, enabling you to manipulate each store exactly the way you want.

Shopify is apt for not-too-ambitious small business retailers, who want a quick and an easy setup with less complications and ample support.

Following infographic compares these popular ecommerce platforms-