Shopify vs Magento Comparison Chart

Pros

Easy to use with lots of optional apps to add functionality. Definitely the platform to use if you want to able to run your own ecommerce shop with little programming ability. It has plenty of integration possibilities too which works great with our POS systems.

Cons

It can start to get quite expensive once you add a lot of paid apps. Also the standard themes are a bit basic so you do have to purchase the better ones from 3rd party developers which then means Shopifys customer help centre can't always o much to help with any layout issues.

Rating breakdown

Time used: 2+ years

Frequency of use: Daily

Likelihood to recommend

Shopify

Everything you need to sell anywhere. Trusted by 160k stores

Pros

VALUE. Shopify allowed us to have a free developer account to test and work through our hesitations before paying a penny for the cart. The POS system comes with the cart for free, it works flawlessly on any apple device, I haven't tried the android offering, but I'm sure it's great as well. The account comes with multiple logins for managing employees with specified permissions for keeping eyes and fingers out of places they shouldn't be. And to top it all off it has a fantastic API connection that allows us to connect it to our Fishbowl Inventory Management system, which brings in the orders from both cart and POS and sorts the inventory out, handles the shipping with shipstation, posts back tracking and fulfills the orders in shopify and all the while capturing all the financial data in QB. I could seriously fire multiple employees for all the time and work this automation is doing for me.

Cons

If I had to complain it would be that there are some things you can't customize that you might be able to with one of the self hosted carts such as magento, woocommerce, or even magento 2.

Rating breakdown

Time used: 6-12 months

Frequency of use: Daily

Likelihood to recommend

Shopify

Everything you need to sell anywhere. Trusted by 160k stores

Pros

Just how polished and sophisticated and extensible it is.

Cons

Nothing really, they do charge a bit too much but convenience comes at a price.

Rating breakdown

Time used: 6-12 months

Frequency of use: Weekly

Likelihood to recommend

Shopify

Everything you need to sell anywhere. Trusted by 160k stores

Pros

We moved our system from Magento, shopify is simpler and its third party app structure is an excellent innovation.

Cons

Can be a bit tricky if there isnt an out of the box solution to a functionality problem, however there are many developer communities online and there is help available.

Rating breakdown

Time used: 6-12 months

Frequency of use: Daily

Likelihood to recommend

Shopify

Everything you need to sell anywhere. Trusted by 160k stores

Pros

It doesn't require a lot of development. Pretty much anyone can set it up on their own.

Cons

It's not as robust as Magento, but for most small to mid-sized ecom sites in the US, that's fine.

Rating breakdown

Time used: Less than 6 months

Frequency of use: Other

Likelihood to recommend

Shopify

Everything you need to sell anywhere. Trusted by 160k stores

Pros

I have been using Shopify for a few years now and find it to be easy to use, reliable and scalable.

Cons

My main worry about using Shopify is that I don't really own the platform so anything can happen in terms of changes in their business model etc.

Rating breakdown

Time used: 2+ years

Frequency of use: Daily

Likelihood to recommend

Shopify

Everything you need to sell anywhere. Trusted by 160k stores

Pros

Coming from Magento, the Shopify User Interface was immediately a step in the right direction.

Cons

While Shopify is certainly powerful right out of the box, it doesn't take long to discover some specific needs that aren't provided, that require third party apps to achieve. While the app store is chock full of great apps, most of them aren't very cheap, and require a monthly subscription, which adds to the Shopify bill.

Rating breakdown

Time used: 2+ years

Frequency of use: Daily

Likelihood to recommend

Shopify

Everything you need to sell anywhere. Trusted by 160k stores

Pros

Not only is Shopify easy to setup and utilize, but the best feature is that it's so pervasive. This allows them to offer thousands of custom services through 3rd parties on their app store that would normally cost a lot to have someone program for you directly on a site like WordPress. It's a very reliable service as many Fortune 500 companies depend on them for their eCommerce sites.

Cons

But overall much simpler to use than Magento and any other service I've tried.

Rating breakdown

Time used: 2+ years

Frequency of use: Monthly

Likelihood to recommend

Shopify

Everything you need to sell anywhere. Trusted by 160k stores

Pros

Ease of use - we used to have magento and it was not easy to use at all.

Cons

Honestly, we have not found anything that we don't like yet. We also use the marketing automation for our customers which is a great tool.

Rating breakdown

Time used: 1-2 years

Frequency of use: Daily

Likelihood to recommend

Shopify

Everything you need to sell anywhere. Trusted by 160k stores

Pros

UI is easy to use and intuitive. Good for beginners.

Cons

We switched from Magento where we could wait to review orders before they are sent to warehouse, could modify orders, etc.

Rating breakdown

Time used: Less than 6 months

Likelihood to recommend

Recommendations to others considering Shopify

Allow/create apps for customization, such as the issues I explained in the previous box.

Shopify

Everything you need to sell anywhere. Trusted by 160k stores

Pros

The best thing about shopify is the backend UX/UI is intuitive and product uploads are easier comapred to WooCommerce or Magento.

Cons

There's nothing really to dislike about Shopify right out of the box. Most components are flexible and easy to customize for a basic shop. Advanced control will require knowledge of Shopify's Liquid syntax, but it's not hard to pick up.

Rating breakdown

Time used: 2+ years

Frequency of use: Daily

Likelihood to recommend

Shopify

Everything you need to sell anywhere. Trusted by 160k stores

Pros

- Ease of use - you can launch an e-commerce site within the hour - Scalable - there's no needing to worry about scaling up hardware to deal with concurrent users - Flexibility - It's still simply to customise your heart's content - Support available on all packages - A huge array of apps available for integrations

Cons

- Extended trials aren't obvious, but are extremely valuable. A single user might not know that they can start with a development site - Checkout fees add up on smaller packages - The support accessible when on a smaller package often don't understand the technical intricacies—they're very much support and not expert users themselves

Rating breakdown

Time used: 2+ years

Frequency of use: Daily

Likelihood to recommend

Shopify

Everything you need to sell anywhere. Trusted by 160k stores

Pros

I switched my ecommerce site over from Magento to Shopify and the set up was extremely easy.

Cons

I don't have any negatives thus far! I think it's a great solution for those who want to get an ecommerce site up and running quickly!

Rating breakdown

Time used: 6-12 months

Frequency of use: Daily

Shopify

Everything you need to sell anywhere. Trusted by 160k stores

Pros

I downloaded the free trial to play around exploring my options since Magento required a pricey upgrade.

Cons

I've been using it for 2+ years, haven't found cons.

Rating breakdown

Time used: 2+ years

Frequency of use: Daily

Likelihood to recommend

Shopify

Everything you need to sell anywhere. Trusted by 160k stores

Pros

Shopify is the fastest and easiest way to start an eCommerce based business. It was built for people who might not be tech savvy and don't have a lot of startup funding. Simply choose a template, select a few options, and upload your logo and pictures. Type in your prices, and select shipping options.

Cons

Compared to open-source shopping cart platforms like Magento, in which you are given complete access to the php source code, Shopify is run on Shopify's own servers without giving web developers freedom to customize the functionality.

Rating breakdown

Time used: 2+ years

Frequency of use: Weekly

Likelihood to recommend

Shopify

Everything you need to sell anywhere. Trusted by 160k stores

Pros

Those are the two week points of who is probably their main competitor (Magento). I know by hard experience that those two points (lack of speed and need of constantly reparining techical issues) can kill a business.

Cons

There are some points that I do not like from the very begining. One is that they charge you a precentage of your sales, in adition to your monthly fee. And second thing is that they do not offer multi-language by default and you are foreced to use a paid extension or to open a second shop, and that can be messy for stocks. At the same time I am aware that they are developing now multilanguage feature. Also, some people say that it is not good for B2B. I have not tested that part.

Rating breakdown

Time used: Free Trial

Frequency of use: Other

Likelihood to recommend

Shopify

Everything you need to sell anywhere. Trusted by 160k stores

Pros

I've used WooCommerce and Magento and I always prefer Shopify.

Cons

Price. I'm not the biggest fan of Shopify's billing structure. Whereas WooCommerce can be used on as many stores as you want, Shopify requires you to create a new billing plan for every store. Additionally, apps are more expensive than WordPress apps which means you may be spending hundreds per month on SHopify vs. 10% of that cost on WordPress.

Rating breakdown

Time used: 2+ years

Frequency of use: Weekly

Likelihood to recommend

Shopify

Everything you need to sell anywhere. Trusted by 160k stores

Pros

It was way easier for me to learn than magento was. There are plenty of plans for all sizes of your business and they all are pretty affordable.

Cons

Im not sure if they have fixed it now as it has been about 3 months since I've used it, but I wish when a user made changes, it showed which user made these changes. Sometimes when you have a few people using the account, things get messed up and it would be nice to see who messed things up so we can teach them how to use the software properly instead of a whole team getting reprimanded.

Rating breakdown

Time used: 1-2 years

Frequency of use: Weekly

Likelihood to recommend

Shopify

Everything you need to sell anywhere. Trusted by 160k stores

Pros

Shopify is perfect for: - Artisans looking to sell their homemade goods - Small to medium apparel businesses - Small to medium hard goods retailers If your products are complex (many customizable options or modifiers) or you have a large catalog or a large sales volume, you may soon outgrow Shopify and should look at WooCommerce (for WordPress) or Magento as an eCommerce platform.

Cons

As a digital marketer, Shopify is more difficult to use with Tag Managers like Google's and more difficult to do proper, thorough SEO on. This is balanced out by Shopify's integration with Google shopping, which is easy to set up and can help with your products' visibility. Garnering analytics is also more of a chore, as Shopify likes to keep all of their data in their ecosystem and doesn't make it easy to install pixels, tracking scripts, etc.

Rating breakdown

Time used: 6-12 months

Frequency of use: Monthly

Likelihood to recommend

Shopify

Everything you need to sell anywhere. Trusted by 160k stores

Pros

I have dealt with large companies who use Magento or OpenCart to small Etsy shop owners who need a boutique solution.

Cons

I don't like the rigidity of Shopify's domain registry and hosting solutions. If you ever need to move your cart away from Shopify, you will find an endless loop of hurdles to gain back control of your domain or hosting. It's the same with Squarespace. I understand why there's very little peaking under the hood with their integration, but it's annoying when you want to "do more" with your online presence by moving to a more powerful platform. I recommend registering your domain and hosting elsewhere and integrating them with the Shopify platform for "down the road" flexibility.

Rating breakdown

Time used: 2+ years

Frequency of use: Other

Likelihood to recommend

Shopify

Everything you need to sell anywhere. Trusted by 160k stores

Pros

Compared to the Magentos and Demandwares out there, Shopify is a fast build.

Cons

The refund and store credit reporting needs improvement. My finance team got a lot of headaches trying to reconcile everything at the end of the month. If you have a 3rd party return app, Shopify may not play well with reporting units returned to stock and amount refunded.

Rating breakdown

Time used: 2+ years

Frequency of use: Daily

Likelihood to recommend

Shopify

Everything you need to sell anywhere. Trusted by 160k stores

Pros

- Perfect solution for any business to access the e-commerce space. - Nice dashboards providing all the information you need. - If you really want, you can set up a store within a day. - AMAZING 24/7 support. They changed my entire way on how I look to customer service.

Cons

- Their App store can use more apps, but hey it will never be enough. - Limited access to certain pages like the checkout pages. - Shopify Plus solves a lot of problems and gives you access to more pages, however is quite pricy. So it depends on how ambitious you are.

Rating breakdown

Time used: 1-2 years

Shopify

Everything you need to sell anywhere. Trusted by 160k stores

Pros

Competitive pricing and sleek design for every store need makes shopify perfect choice. It is highly customisable and self hosted.

Cons

Most features fit in expect knowledge need to work around but we need to learn for perfect output. Also it fails to offer some flexiblity in moving to different e-commerce solutions.

Rating breakdown

Time used: 6-12 months

Frequency of use: Weekly

Likelihood to recommend

Recommendations to others considering Shopify

Setup can be more hassle free.

Shopify

Everything you need to sell anywhere. Trusted by 160k stores

Pros

-Attractive interface -Attractive buy buttons

Cons

-Terrible programmers -Huge wait times for service -Customer service reps are poorly trained and fail to assist with almost all issues -Extremely buggy software

Rating breakdown

Time used: 2+ years

Frequency of use: Daily

Likelihood to recommend

Shopify

Everything you need to sell anywhere. Trusted by 160k stores

Pros

Shopify websites have a very clean and polished look. They have basic templates that are super nice. The website control panel has lots of features to get going in the world of Ecommerce. We like that there is a huge community of developers and designers ready to help with any project. There are so many integrations and compatible products. Customer support replied pretty fast to any questions that we had. This is the most popular shopping cart platform in the world, so that comes with a piece of mind that they won't be shutting it down anytime soon,

Cons

Unlike Magento, most Shopify third party developers want recurring monthly payments for basic features that Shopify should already have.

Rating breakdown

Time used: Less than 6 months

Frequency of use: Daily

Shopify

Everything you need to sell anywhere. Trusted by 160k stores

Pros

Magento was easy to use and I was able to get an ecommerce store setup quickly. Definitely meant for small-medium businesses. Allows you to fully customize your store and truly give your store a unique look.

Cons

Non-technical users may have a hard time using the platform and require assistant from a programmer; especially if you require additional functionality that any plugins cannot provide.

Rating breakdown

Time used: Free Trial

Frequency of use: Weekly

Likelihood to recommend

Magento

eCommerce software solutions for large & growing companies

Pros

- Open Source and Free - Best Community Support - Latest Version updates - Multistore - Multi language - Multi Currency and many more feature which can only Achieve by custom costly development - Best Payment Gateways inbuilt like Paypal, Brain tree, Kalrna etc Best Available Ecommerece Solution in the Market

Cons

- Speed of magento is horrible - Theme is Expensive - Extension are expensive - Developers are Expensive - Complicated Structure

Rating breakdown

Time used: 2+ years

Frequency of use: Daily

Likelihood to recommend

Magento

eCommerce software solutions for large & growing companies

Pros

As a developer i did not want a out of the block low-coding to start off with (wordpress/shopify) so its a great tool to keep up with.

Cons

Magento initially always tends to be pretty slow. The admin procedures such as exports, updating, backup, etc all seem a little unstable at times. Understanding your current state and limit of scalability(before improving it some other way) always seems questionable or hard to gauge at first.

Rating breakdown

Time used: 2+ years

Frequency of use: Daily

Likelihood to recommend

Magento

eCommerce software solutions for large & growing companies

Pros

Are you looking for a solution in eCommerce? Magento provides you the solution of eCommerce. Magento makes your investments very worthwhile even if it is your main business. It has been recommended as one of the best solutions to eCommerce since it is flexible and scalable. It has also become so much popular for the fact many companies bear its name. Pros - 1. It is user-friendly. Magento’s administration is has a very simple back end which is easy to navigate and has very perfectly arranged store management features. 2. It is affordable for anyone. The community version Magento doesn’t require any money to afford since it is free. 3. It is flexible. You have the chance to create anything in Magento because it has been designed in a way that you can customize anything you want. 4. It also gives the ability to fully control the code thereby developing the type of functionality you require. 5. It is easy to scale. Magento designed in a scalable way on any amount of products you are selling.

Cons

Cons- 1. Only the community version of Magento is cheap. The other versions of Magento including support and enterprise and the premium enterprise versions aren’t freely available. Their prices are very high for every person to afford. 2. Magento can only be hosted on dedicated servers. Since it is large, it can’t be hosted in small servers that aren’t dedicated because it needs to be configured. 3. It requires a lot of time to customize using magneto. The architecture who have designed it have made it complicated and hence it takes a lot of time to learn the learning curve and make customizations as compared to other eCommerce solutions.

Rating breakdown

Time used: 1-2 years

Frequency of use: Other

Likelihood to recommend

Magento

eCommerce software solutions for large & growing companies

Pros

Lots of features, and plugins to extend the feature set. This has all the features you will likely need to launch a successful ecommerce store.

Cons

If you're hosting a mid to small project, then look for Shopify or woocommerce.

Rating breakdown

Time used: Less than 6 months

Frequency of use: Weekly

Likelihood to recommend

Magento

eCommerce software solutions for large & growing companies

Pros

If you are planning to start your small e-commerce business you have couple of options like Magento and Shopify. Great advantage of Magenta is it being self-hosted service, meaning you have full control over your store and it fully belongs to you.

Cons

In comparison to Shopify, this maintenance work is done by them, so you can focus on your sales.

Rating breakdown

Time used: Less than 6 months

Frequency of use: Weekly

Likelihood to recommend

Magento

eCommerce software solutions for large & growing companies

Rating breakdown

Magento

eCommerce software solutions for large & growing companies

Pros

Magento is clearly one of the most powerful and robust ecommerce tools out there. The Shopify approach, while great, takes a lot of the tools out your hands—tools you may need to make important technical changes to your store.

Cons

Where Shopify hides or locks certain technical settings from you, Magento gives you more access.

Rating breakdown

Time used: 2+ years

Frequency of use: Daily

Likelihood to recommend

Magento

eCommerce software solutions for large & growing companies

Pros

Great platform to built your Ecommerce website. If you have programming knowledge you are all set! If not, you can hire a Magento Developer to get exactly what you want out of your website. Lots of extensions to customize the user and backend experience. V2.0 has made the backend experience on par with other platforms.

Cons

It is not as easy as shopify to setup and get running.

Rating breakdown

Time used: 2+ years

Frequency of use: Daily

Likelihood to recommend

Magento

eCommerce software solutions for large & growing companies

Rating breakdown

Magento

eCommerce software solutions for large & growing companies

Pros

This platform is super customizable, which is a big deal for a fashion brand who is very stringent on their look and feel.

Cons

The time and money it takes to make changes is much more than, say, Shopify. You also have to factor in costs of server performance, which is difficult if you are trying to grow a business and need to forecast traffic in order to make sure your site does not crash during a rush.

Rating breakdown

Time used: 2+ years

Frequency of use: Daily

Likelihood to recommend

Magento

eCommerce software solutions for large & growing companies

Pros

Magento is perfect for huge eCommerce websites for large businesses and can be very reliable if you have a team to maintain it.

Cons

It's very expensive. Not just in upfront costs, but it's not the easiest platform to update. Bugs in themes and extensions can take the entire website offline and be cumbersome to troubleshoot. Simply removing the extension won't necessarily resolve the issue. Unlike the WordPress repository, there seems to be a weaker system for third-party quality control. There are way less developers experienced with Magento, so they're more expensive to hire or contract. This also translates in a smaller community to help when problems do arise. If you run your website on Magento, you'll want to have at least one developer on hand because many of the issues you encounter cannot simply be resolved on the backend. You'll also have to invest more money in high end web hosting solutions.

Rating breakdown

Time used: Less than 6 months

Frequency of use: Weekly

Likelihood to recommend

Magento

eCommerce software solutions for large & growing companies

Pros

I'm a Magento 2 Enterprise Cloud user, and I find the bundled services (CDN, Caching, Reporting, etc) to be of great value. They are also PCI compliant and support a wide range of payment methods, shipping, and integrations. The platform is just booming right now and seems to have a great future.

Cons

You will find WooCommerce, Shopify, and Prestashop click based approach more efficient in this aspect.

Rating breakdown

Time used: 1-2 years

Frequency of use: Daily

Magento

eCommerce software solutions for large & growing companies

Pros

One of the most important things is really well prepared for handling the most common ecommerce businesses requirements out of the box even in the free version (paid version provides thinks like RMA support also), especially important supports international business setups. The things that are not handled out of the box can be completed through modules, some free/ some paid.

Cons

In comparison to tools like shopify, Magento is much more complex.

Rating breakdown

Time used: 2+ years

Frequency of use: Daily

Likelihood to recommend

Magento

eCommerce software solutions for large & growing companies

Pros

For Store that has over 500 or 1000 products, Magento is perfect from them. Adding bulk products is quite easy. So many customizations and classes available for generation coupon cases or sale cases. Can easily handle big traffic.

Cons

Have to have basic knowledge of PHP and html. Server has to be good. Atleast VPS or Dedicated. Very complex user interface. Extensions and Themes are extremely expensive.

Rating breakdown

Time used: 2+ years

Frequency of use: Weekly

Likelihood to recommend

Magento

eCommerce software solutions for large & growing companies

Pros

So it's not restricted like Shopify or WooCommerce.

Cons

Patches in 1.9, updates and security issues. I always needed to optimize for speed, mostly with caching so that would have been something.

Rating breakdown

Time used: 2+ years

Frequency of use: Monthly

Magento

eCommerce software solutions for large & growing companies

Pros

We are a small family business and reliant (for many things) on our ability to manage the back end of our site. Neither of us have a background in building sites, managing integration, etc. but we have been able to get very comfortable with the back end of the site. For a novice or inexperienced person, I was surprised that I could pick it up quickly. We use the community version which has been critical to controlling costs. At that same time, we haven't sacrificed functionality in that there are some incredible plug-ins that ultimately replaced the Enterprise functionality (which we moved away from because of the annual price tag). We also work with a small development company locally who manage the set up of the plug-ins (but quite honestly it seems fairly straightforward). As the site "breaks" (for lack of a better word), we have our developer do it.

Cons

In the next few years, we need to make a decision to stay on Magento or move and Shopify has a managed version that is very intriguing.

Rating breakdown

Time used: 2+ years

Frequency of use: Daily

Likelihood to recommend

Magento

eCommerce software solutions for large & growing companies

Pros

Magento Review Shopify, Bigcommerce and other e-commerce platforms have made it very easy to open up online stores.

Cons

The setup and customization process of Magento is not very simple. If you don’t have any idea about web development, you will find it difficult to customize. The enterprise version of Magento is expensive. The free version is also not entirely free. You need to pay for the domain names, web hosting, SSL certificate, and add-ons. It takes a long time to learn all the features of Magento. So, if any change needs to be made on the site, it takes a long time. As Magento is self-hosted, you should be concerned about the site’s security. It’s your responsibility to install the SSL certificate. Magento doesn’t have many features to attract the small businesses.

Rating breakdown

Time used: 1-2 years

Frequency of use: Weekly

Likelihood to recommend

Magento

eCommerce software solutions for large & growing companies