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Magento vs. Shopify Community Edition: Which is the Best?
Selecting the most suitable ecommerce platform for creating, managing and maintaining your online store is a very important process that can make or break the success of your business. This is especially important for small businesses, given their limited resources and budget.
If you are someone who is planning to create an online store, or are planning to migrate your current store to another platform in the near future, you may be considering your options. Shopify and Magento Community Edition (also known as Magento) are two widely accepted and popular ecommerce building and management platforms today. However, there are many fundamental differences between the two, and there are several things you should be aware of before evaluating and comparing their functionality:
- Shopify is an e-commerce platform that can be tried for free. If you want to continue using it or use it in full, you can immediately connect to the Shopify Implementation Service provider . However, Magento Community is free and open-source software.
- Shopify takes care of the hosting itself (your store is hosted through Shopify), while Magento lets you provide your own hosting, install, set up and configure everything before you start building your actual online store, and some require intermediate to advanced web developer and coding skills.
Given the differences to consider the two camps, here’s an in-depth comparison of each aspect of the two:
attribute
Basic online store functionality – Both Shopify and Magento have basic product management functionality that is fairly powerful, both in terms of ease of use and ongoing maintenance, but Shopify is arguably easier to set up and use than Magento.
Advertising space management
Shopify’s starter package limits you to a maximum of 25 items, while Magento has unlimited items. The rest of Shopify’s plans allow you to add and sell any number of products through your store. However, Shopify now also offers a free app called Oberlo for new users to help make dropshipping easier.
It’s worth noting that while Magento allows for an unlimited number of products, host (server) performance and site loading speed can become serious issues if you add too many products to your Magento store – something you don’t have to worry about with Shopify as it is a fully managed and hosted solution.
Shipping cost calculation
Both platforms offer flexible and efficient options for calculating shipping costs, which is a fundamental and essential aspect of selling physical products through an e-commerce storefront. Coupon and discount code requirements.
Shopify is at a disadvantage here because it doesn’t include this feature in the starter package but is included in the rest of the packages, unlike Magento CE which allows for the creation of discount codes and calculation functions.
Payment channel options
Shopify stands out for supporting over 70 payment gateways, while Magento Community supports fewer payment gateways but can be developed and connected through Magento Service providers.
Themes and Templates
Both Shopify and Magento CE offer a wide range of themes and templates to help you create a website and online store look that suits your products and tastes. While the number of free themes on Shopify is significantly lower than that of Magento CE, you can see that the free themes on Shopify have a more contemporary design.
Both camps have premium themes that cost money. At this point, both Magento and Shopify can find Premium Themes starting at 2,400 baht and up.
And today, responsive web design (design that works well across the devices most commonly used by online users) is essential, and both Shopify and Magento have a good number of responsive templates, both free and paid.
App และ Add-on
Shopify has over 100 apps and add-ons that can be used to enhance and extend the capabilities of your online store in various ways. However, Magento once again has the upper hand here, with over 5000 apps and add-ons that have no usage limitations, plus it is an open source and community-driven platform. However, both platforms have both free and paid apps/add-ons.
Multilingual capabilities
Shopify doesn’t have a direct multilingual dashboard, but for a fully multilingual store, third-party/paid apps are available on Shopify. Another option available on Shopify is to customize your theme/template with a simple and advanced interface. Finally, Magento has another advantage here, with multilingual support built right into the platform.
SEO capabilities
Both platforms offer extensive SEO capabilities to help you drive organic traffic to your store via search engines, and we rate them on their powerful SEO features and benefits.
Customizability
Both platforms offer powerful customization capabilities, using advanced interfaces that allow you to directly edit the source HTML/CSS code to give you complete control over the design and appearance of your store.
However, as mentioned above, Shopify scores better in this area by providing a simple menu-based approach to easily change basic features of your store, such as fonts, colors, etc. While the customization capabilities with Magento are higher than expected, all the code is open-source, so you can edit it any way you want. However, this freedom of unlimited customization is only available to those who are experienced in HTML and CSS programming with a Magento service.
Shopify also has a theme editor that lets you play around with the look and feel of your theme, and even has the ability to hide sections so you can improve in the future without having to duplicate themes or work on a server.
Blog writing function
Easy blogging functionality was available as an integrated feature on Shopify, but now it’s also possible with Magento using a (free) plug-in.
Easy to use
As mentioned in previous reviews, both Shopify and Magento CE are equally powerful e-commerce platforms. Both come with well-designed user interfaces that make it easy for users to run their online stores.
However, it is worth noting that Shopify has an assistant mode that allows users of all ages to easily set up a store, while Magento CE lacks this feature.
Also, because Magento is not a hosting service, it has to be done by yourself, and creating a store is a process that the average user cannot easily or conveniently do by themselves.
expenses
Setup Fees – Shopify doesn’t charge any setup fees, and offers a 14-day free trial that lets you test and evaluate the functionality and features offered by the ecommerce platform. There are no fees for Magento either, as it’s free (you’ll need to provide and pay for your own hosting, as discussed below)
Monthly service fee
Shopify offers four different packages with monthly fees ranging from $420 to $5370:
- Lite Plan: 270 baht
- Basic Shopify Plan : 870 baht
- Shopify Plan : 2,370 baht
- Advanced Shopify Plan : 8,970 baht
Start your Shopify trial by clicking here .
For Magento, you will need to provide your own hosting. There are many services to choose from, and they are monthly services, with costs ranging from 150 baht to 300 baht.
BlueHost is one of the most reliable, popular and efficient Ecommerce Hosting providers where you can buy space for your Magento storage at a very affordable price.
Cost of adding signal (Bandwidth)
Shopify doesn’t charge bandwidth fees on any of its packages, but for Magento CE, the cost depends on the hosting provider you use to store your data.
Transaction Fee
Shopify does not charge any additional transaction fees when using the platform’s payment gateway. If using any other payment gateway or method (e.g. COD), the transaction fees are as follows:
- Lite Plan (270 baht/month): 2%
- Basic Shopify Plan (870 baht/month): 2%
- Shopify Plan (2,370 baht/month): 1%
- Advanced Shopify Plan (8,970 baht/month): 0.5%
For Magento Community Edition, there are no transaction fees, apart from gateway provider fees (which vary from gateway to gateway), which can also be incurred by Shopify.
Theme/Template Pricing – Both platforms offer quality free and paid themes, starting at $240 and $30 respectively.
Conclusion
Overall, it can be said that both Shopify and the Magento community are quite powerful. Shopify may be more convenient to use because it is a self-hosted service and has full management, suitable for beginners.
As for Magento, since it is free of charge, you are required to purchase your own hosting space and install the software/system and various steps yourself, which is something that only those with knowledge of technology (and not beginners) can do in this regard. Any changes can be made by the system developer or the company that provides the Magento Service.
