Head to Head Comparison between The Magento And Shopify Versions

What Are The 5 Main Differences Between Shopify And Magento?

If you are a busy person you know that time is becoming an extremely important asset nowadays. Time is money and nobody wants to waste money, right? This is the reason why we try to spend less time in everyday activities and turn to technology for help.

Online shopping has proven to be a reliable and effective time saver. Millions of people purchase goods over the internet and the number of online shops is increasing with every day. This is why selecting the right online platform is a very important decision and needs to be de taken quite seriously.

There are hundreds of options when it comes to e-commerce platforms but two names are standing up among the rest – Magento and Shopify. If you are hesitating between these two, this head to head comparison will hopefully help you.

1. The Price Has Never Been So Important

The Shopify development platform is a software as a service product, which means it does not include any setup cost and works with monthly fees. If you prefer to be a Shopify developer you can even use a 14-day free testing period and judge the options for yourself.

Using the Magento development system doesn’t require any setup expenses as it is totally free. On the other hand the cheapest Shopify plan is $9 per month and will fix you up with a Facebook store.

The main difference comes from the fact that while Shopify charges you monthly, it provides hosting, SSL certificate, file storage and domain name, while with Magento you have to arrange your own hosting and will probably need to pay bandwidth expenses.

2. Support Should Be Always Considered

The Shopify development team can be reached in many ways including direct chat (4 min response time), email (29 hours response time) and their support telephone line is open for business 24/7.

Magento does not offer constant support but they have provided a customer support and policy guides that could be downloaded from their website. Besides that, Magento has a huge community and a Magento developer might see your ticket in the forums.

3. How Much Technical Knowledge You Will Need

When speaking of “user-friendly” Shopify is a real synonym as the only thing that you need to do is to fill in the wanted content, choose the theme that suits you and you can start selling.

As we already mentioned there is no server to be maintained and you just need to enter your basic domain information. Piece of cake!

If you plan to use its “Community Edition”, your Magento development process will need some technical know-how in order to work properly. You can still set it up and see how the website will display some of your content, but it is quite possible that you will need a full-time Magento developer in order to take the most of it.

4. Security Should Be a Top Priority

With Shopify, security shouldn’t be a real problem. Every store has SLL encryption across all pages and it is Level 1 PCI DSS compliant so you can be sure that your online store will not be hacked.

Magento, on the other hand, is self-hosted, as we already mentioned. This means that it is your responsibility to secure the hosting. Buying a more expensive hosting plan should help, but any security cracks will be down to you. Sadly, due to its open-source code we heard of some security breaches.

5. Some Other Differences In Their Features

1. The Magento development community falls behind Shopify in terms of payment gateway options. Shopify supports 70 payment gateways while you have to use third-party add-ons in order to extend their number in Magento.
2. The Shopify development community does not provide full multi-lingual capabilities and third-party apps need to be used. On the other hand, Magento has a better built-in multi-lingual support.
3. The Magento development community provides coupons, discount code creation and calculation functionalities while Shopify does not offer such options in its starter plan. It is still available in the plans that are more expensive.

6. Conclusion – As Hard As It Can Get!

Both platforms are outstanding when it comes to eCommerce and have huge similarities. This is why we discussed only the differences between the Shopify and Magento development experiences.

One might say that Shopify is the more practical option since it is a hosted and fully managed service. It will save you time and offers the better security and user-friendliness.

On the other hand working successfully with Magento will make you a real Magento developer as it requires much more technical knowledge and unfortunately time. So for the technically savvy people this disadvantage might be interesting and an opportunity to shine.

In any case you have to think whether you have the enthusiasm to build your online store from scratch or need to start selling as soon as possible.