Clash of Titans: Shopify vs Magento

This article was originated by a lively discussion on a Facebook group.?

TL;DR - I think Shopify is the best, and some professionals disagree.

That’s fine! Disagreements are the portals into fascinating conversations where people can truly share their personal experiences.

Let me walk you through what happened.

Someone shared a blog post about the news regarding Shopify’s checkout being the best in the with world:

The phrasing used was:

Shopify confirms it’s the best Ecommerce solution. An idea I truly share as you know.

However, a seasoned professional in the Ecommerce world tried to burst my beloved bubble.

That’s not a good way of saying it - the fact they may have the best checkout doesn’t mean they’re the best solution.

Totally reasonable statement. But… I was to be Shopify’s fan boy as usual, and speak up.

What followed was a 19 messages conversation about why we disagree. I won’t copy paste here the discussion. If you like, you can check it here (in Czech):

I’m going to break down here the main 7 points of contention and present my perspectives.

1. Price

On the surface it may seem that Shopify is the more expensive solution here: for the Magento Community (differently than their enterprise bespoke plans) you pay only for the hosting, while on Shopify you have a clear pricing structure as you’d expect from any SAAS. Also there are those pesky Shopify transactions fees, theme and apps costs, etc.

Why I think that Shopify is still the economic solution for small businesses and bigger corporations?

• Shopify’s cheaper to maintain - no need for an army of developers to keep it running
• Shopify’s easier to manage - your marketing and design teams can create desired chances much more easily and faster
• Shopify doesn’t require expensive tooling updates every X years (think about the transition from Magento 1 to 2 for example)

2. Partners network

In this point we indeed have a tie: both Shopify and Magento have very strong communities of experts ready to help with anything you need. However, from my very biased perspective I see our community thriving and growing at a inexplicable pace.

Definitely both these networks are a huge plus in comparison with smaller to completely custom Ecommerce systems.

3. Localisation

You can translate absolutely anything you want on Shopify for your customers. I’m waiting for someone still to convince me otherwise and show me other limitations I may not know about. For sake of transparency, of course I have to list the few disadvantages from Shopify in regards to this:

• Shopify support isn’t available in all languages of course, but they cover the most spoken worldwide
• The Shopify admin (the interface for merchants) is available “only” on these languages:

• You can’t translate part of the URLs (unless you go headless). So some words like “collections”, “products” and “blogs” that belong to the links structure can’t be changed yet.

For more info regarding localisation and expansion with Shopify check this article (in Czech) from my colleague Jakub Li?ka from Sounds Good Agency | Shopify Experts :

4. Advanced marketing tools

It was argued that Magento has a much better level of integrations with advanced marketing tools. Unfortunately, there was no specific mentioning of any examples, so I can’t portray them here. I’m sure someone will chime in, in the comments section. What I can say though is that Shopify has over 12 thousands plugins on their App Store, being a great part of them specific marketing tools. I don’t think you’ll run into any scarcity in that area.

5. Security

Shopify is a very secure platform. Magento isn’t a platform - you need to manage all the security by yourself. Here you can find some if the current Magento security troubles:

I got the answer that this depends mainly on the implementation of the solution done by the company that builds it for you. In any case, you don’t even need to think about it in Shopify’s case.

6. Scalability

Shopify can handle tens of thousands of checkouts per minute on its Plus plan. No matter how much bandwidth you need or how variable is your traffic, Shopify for you covered. In the case of Magento, it all depends on how food is tire hosting solutions and its implementation. Definitely not a deal breaker, but once again, it’s an headache that Shopify doesn’t want you to have. That’s why they even built their Oxygen hosting solution for headless Ecommerce.

7. System integrations

Shopify is an API-first platform. You can indeed integrate it with any modern system you want. It’s not rocket science and it won’t break your bank. My counterpart in this discussion argued that theirs APIs are messy and devs waste too much time to achieve anything at all. My agency has a completely different experience. Having worked with Shopify for more than 7 years, we’ve built many integrations and solutions leveraging almost all APIs Shopify offers. And we do it efficiently and cheaper than other agencies do for custom solutions.

Conclusion

We ended up connecting on LinkedIn and may even cooperate in the future. The conversation was great and nuanced. It allowed us to agree on a couple of things:

• from my personal perspective of writing with Shopify for 7+ years, generally speaking I believe they’re the best, even though there are always aspects to improve
• from his personal experience of working for many years with huge brands, Magento is the most robust solution, even though not for everybody
• For the Czech market, which both of us work on, Shopify indeed seems to be the best bet for the majority of medium and big size businesses out there

For more details check out this great comparison between Shopify and Magento:

Take your own conclusions, and let me know what you think in the comments.

And if you want to see the personal experience of someone who moved to Shopify after 12 years using Magento you can check this post: