SHOPIFY VS MAGENTO:
WHAT TO USE FOR YOUR ECOMMERCE
BUSINESS

London's 'Liberty' with its charming Tudor exterior and Christmassy 'Harrods' with 10k+ lights are good examples of how the shopping experience can be outstanding.

As for online store wow factors, they are mostly embodied in top-notch UX and appropriate functionality.

So, how to stuff your eCommerce business with the best features while saving resources? Why are Magento and Shopify the most usable eCommerce platforms worldwide? Finally, which one is best for your business?

Let's explore all these Hows and Whys below.

When it comes to e-commerce, you have an endless number of options on how to set up your store and what eCommerce platform to choose. And surely you will face such titans of the market as Shopify and Magento.

Magento and Shopify are two of the most popular eCommerce platforms used by thousands of e-merchants. To choose between them you should know the key details of their underhood, relevant use cases, and main benefits.

Let's start such an overview with brief introductory info.

From the idea to open an online store for snowboarding equipment to the development of a new eCommerce platform — that is how Shopify was born.

It was founded in 2006 in Canada, and today it powers 1,000,000+ businesses worldwide.

Since this time, apart from directly store-building services, the company has launched such 'additions' as Shop Pay (payment service), Shopify Capital (a cash advance service), Shopify Studios (TV and film production service), Shopify Fulfillment Network (shipping & logistics service), Shopify Chat (native chat function 'merchants-customers').

Also, during this time Shopify managed integration with Amazon, as well as integration partnerships with Facebook, Google, Snapchat, JD.com, and Alipay for providing multichannel selling.

Criticism campaigns, legal affairs, and a case of data breach didn't pass it. Today it is among the top 20 largest Canadian companies by market capitalization.

Open source and unrivaled flexibility — these are the key features Magento is famous for. Acquired by Adobe in 2018, Magento remains Open source.

It was originally developed in California, with assistance from volunteers and contributors. Magento platform was a kind of promising multi-purposing CMS until it was bought by eBay. The latter was highly focused on eCommerce and tailored Magento to this domain.

Today it provides two platforms: Magento Open Source and Magento Commerce. The latter is available in an on-premises version or as a PaaS. It's a fully-featured solution with enhanced options, including optimized cloud architecture, and hosting AI-powered analytics and merchandising.

Magento Open Source is a freely used e-commerce platform that allows developers to contribute to and extend its functionality, introducing new features and upgraded ones, fixing bugs, enhancing test coverage, and suggesting points for optimization. Such an ever-evolving 'open-minded' ecosystem.

It delivers all the basic eCommerce capabilities for creating an online store from the scratch but requires some programming knowledge to be well set up.

Magento is mostly tailored to medium-sized and large businesses because of its benefits of customizability and scalability.

Both eCommerce platforms allow you to sell, ship, and process payments. But each has its specific features that can be crucial in your case. Well, let's look at the pros and cons to see which one is right for your business.

Ok, that's the good news. The bad news next. And if all joking aside — just specific features that may cause difficulties or limitations.

Shopify created an open-source template language Liquid, which is written in Ruby. Magento is a PHP-based platform. But let us outline obvious differences that lay just beneath the surface and will help you to make a quick comparative evaluation of the two platforms.