Today we’ll go through another great battle of the e-commerce industry in recent years - the confrontation “ Magento vs. Shopify”. Both have a lot going for them, but which one to choose when building an online store? Let’s take a little look at each of them.

Talking about the Design and Themes, there are many ready-to-use themes for both Shopify and Magento, but Magento also allows you to have custom designs of your own. 

Next comparison step is Cost and Fees
Magento Open Source is available for a free download. Still, your business may need to splash out a little extra cash if you want to use premium plugins and themes or if you need to hire a developer to build out some custom functionality. 
Shopify is more of a monthly thing, in that you pay a monthly fee and they give you all the functionality you’ll need, at least for a smaller business. If you’re a more significant business, you might be better off going for Magento if you want to customize your build heavily.

The next major battleground “Ease of Use” and it’s one where there’s a clear winner. 
Shopify is undoubtedly one of the most intuitive ecommerce platforms that we’ve come across. It sets something of a benchmark and is only a little trickier to pick up than WordPress. Shopify wins the battle of Shopify vs Magento, but that win comes at a cost. 

Now we came to the “Third-Party Integrations” factor
This one’s pretty simple, and indeed there’s almost no competition in terms of Magento vs Shopify. With Shopify, what you see is what you get. Third-party integrations are few and far between, and so if it’s not included in the core installation, then you might be out of luck.
With Magento 2, however, there’s a whole community around the core product, with literally thousands of third-party Magento developers working on extra functionality, from new themes to plugins. 

What about Merchandising features?
Magento 2 comes with the Visual Merchandiser, a suite of tools to add and modify products and categories as smoothly as possible. There is a range of other ecommerce essentials, from product tags and order tracking to their dedicated visual mode, which allows you to view all of your products in a grid.
Shopify has a visual merchandising plugin of its own, and both platforms offer pretty similar features for creating a library of products. 

Okay, almost all comparison parts are done. The one we've missed is Market Scalability
Both Magento and Shopify have pretty decent scalability, and we’d be hard-pressed to pick a winner here. If we had to pick just one, we’d go for Magento – but only because again, it’s so customizable that even if some aspect or another doesn’t scale, you can probably tweak the code to change that. 

The last but not less important is SEO inbuilt tools battleground
Shopify is arguably easier to just pick up and run with, mainly because an essential part of SEO is creating and deploying high-quality content. 
Magento 2 is more robust and feature heavy, and while it can take a little longer to wrap your head around it, there’s no reason why it can’t be a powerful centerpiece for a solid SEO strategy. 

Summary

By now, you know everything you need to know about the pros and cons of Magento Open Source and Shopify, and so you should also be ready to make the call one way or the other.

Hear you in a couple of weeks, another Friday.