Comparison: Shopify Plus vs Magento 2

Are you planning to launch an e-commerce store? If so, you may want to look for a platform to run your business. There are many choices for you but Shopify Plus and Magento 2 are two giants in building e-commerce websites. They are highly appreciated for their capabilities but each has different pros and cons. 

If you are wondering and have not decided which platform is suitable for your business, we will help you specifically compare the differences between Shopify Plus and Magento 2 through this article.

Overview of Shopify Plus and Magento 2

1. What is Shopify Plus?

Shopify is an e-commerce platform that serves small to large businesses. Although there is no open-source version, it offers many plans at different prices to meet all the needs of e-commerce businesses.

Shopify Plus is an advanced version for medium and large businesses that is highly scalable. It provides powerful tools and features to help merchants grow and scale their online stores. Moreover, Shopify Plus is also known for its intuitive interface, quick setup, and extensive customization options.

Some popular websites that use Shopify Plus include Gymshark, Kylie Cosmetics, Staples, Heinz, Rebecca Minkoff, Kash Beauty, Bombas, Olly, etc.

2. What is Magento 2?

Magento 2 is an open-source e-commerce platform renowned for its flexibility and scalability. It provides merchants with unparalleled control over their online stores, allowing for extensive customization and integration capabilities. Magento 2 suits businesses of all sizes, from small startups to large enterprises.

Some of the largest Magento Commerce customers are Helly Hansen, Paul Smith, End Clothing, MADE.com, BrewDog, Paperchase, and Bulk Powders.

Shopify Plus vs Magento 2: 11 Key Differences

Both Magento 2 and Shopify Plus cater to businesses operating on a large scale. However, they differ in some points below:

1. Ease of Use 

Shopify Plus is famous for its user-friendly interface and intuitive setup process. With its visual drag-and-drop editor, you can easily customize the design and layout of your website without the need for any technical expertise.

In contrast, Magento 2 demands more technical proficiency for setup and customization. This might pose challenges for beginners and require more time and effort to master.

While both platforms have their strengths and weaknesses in terms of ease of use and user-friendly, Shopify Plus stands out as a more accessible platform compared to Magento 2. This makes it particularly attractive to merchants who prioritize their business operations over technical development.

2. Scalability & Flexibility 

Magento 2 offers store owners unlimited variation options, which might consist of distinct colors, sizes, or types. Despite its exceptional scalability, Magento does not provide hosting and management services as part of its package.

On the other hand, Shopify Plus imposes strict limits, allowing only up to 100 variations and three options for specific configurable products. While this facilitates the quick listing of products and the addition of variations, it presents a significant obstacle to the growth of high-volume stores on the platform.

3. Customizing and Development

Magento 2 offers unparalleled customization capabilities, allowing merchants to tailor every aspect of their store’s design and functionality. It’s a preferred choice for businesses with unique branding requirements. However, it requires knowledge of coding, so if you don’t know anything about code, you need to lend a professional programmer. 

With Shopify Plus drag-and-drop editor, merchants can create visually appealing storefronts without any coding skills required. Moreover, it provides a wide selection of customizable themes and templates, that help build online stores easily from scratch.

4. Pricing

One of the most important aspects you need to consider when choosing a platform is price.

Here are the costs you can expect to pay when using Shopify Plus and Magento 2:

Shopify Plus

• Platform fees: The minimum charge for Shopify Plus is $2000. However, the charge will turn into a revenue-based model after you score $800,000/month in sales. This means you will pay 0.25% of your monthly revenue to Shopify, but no more than $40,000.
• Credit Card Processing: The fees associated with payment processing can vary depending on the payment method you choose. Shopify offers its payment provider – Shopify Payments, and various third-party options.

With Shopify Payments, you will pay based on the plan you choose. This rate on Shopify Payment can be negotiable if you have a high sales volume and a good merchant history. 

Shopify Payments pricing plan

For transactions involving American Express (AMEX) and international cards, there’s an additional fee of 1%. Additionally, when using third-party payment gateways such as PayPal, 2Checkout, Skrill, etc., there will be an extra charge of 0.15%.

• Hosting: Shopify Plus offers a fully hosted solution, which means you don’t need to pay for hosting services. The hosting, networking, and load testing are managed by Shopify’s authority. 
• Development: While Shopify themes cost from $0 to $180, some popular ones do not contain certain necessary features specific to your business. You can use these themes to start your eCommerce business first and later explore customized solutions, which can vary between $10,000 to $250,000. One thing to bear in mind the price will be changed according to the complexity and features you require. 
• Additional Shopify-specific Cost: All basic costs provided above are everything you need to get started your business with this platform. Yet, when your business grows, you should be mindful of other additional charges.
• Third-Party Applications: With a wide range of Shopify applications, you can improve your business outcomes by integrating them into your online store. These apps’ monthly costs are around  $1000. 
• Apps for International Stores: While many application companies are open to negotiating terms and conditions, Shopify charges for apps on a per-store basis. This can lead to increased costs over time, making it important for businesses to carefully consider their app usage and potential expenses.

Magento 2

There are three versions of Magento to choose from:

• Magento Open Source: This is the free version of Magento, offering high scalability and customizability. If you don’t require extensive design and development services, you can save on fees by choosing a ready-to-use theme for your store and limiting customizations.
• Adobe Commerce: This is a paid version of Magento that requires businesses to find their own hosting provider. The licensing cost typically starts at around $22,000 per year, with additional fees for hosting and support.
• Adobe Commerce Cloud: This is another paid version of Magento, previously known as Magento Commerce Cloud, this version provides hosting as part of the package.

Both paid versions of Magento offer the benefits of open-source platforms, including unlimited customization capabilities and scalability. You can add new features, customize existing ones, expand functionality with modules, and much more.

Below is a detailed breakdown of Magento pricing:

Annual Gross Revenue	Adobe Commerce	Adobe Commerce Cloud
<< $1M	$22,000	$40,000
$1M – $5M	$32,000	$55,000
$5M – $10M	$49,000	$80,000
$10M – $25M	$75,000	$120,000
> $25M	$125,000	$190,000

In reality, the actual cost to be paid will not be fixed like the table above but will fluctuate around it because it depends on the customer’s needs. In short, each customer will have a suitable price quote for themselves.

• Hosting

Unlike Shopify Plus, hosting service is not contained in Magento’s platform charge. With Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce, merchants may consider selecting third-party hosting services that cost around $1000 per month. Also, another choice is Adobe Commerce Cloud with costs ranging from $500 to over $10,000 per month. Based on business size number of store views, product catalog, customizations, and third-party integrations the hosting expenses can change. 

• Development cost

Regarding development costs, the average Magento Open Source website build cost varies between $100,000 and $500,000, and can also be much higher. Although it is much more expensive than Shopify Plus, Magento offers greater scalability for custom feature development.

5. Performance 

Research has demonstrated that users usually wait only 3 seconds before losing patience and abandoning a website. Therefore, website speed significantly affects the success of an e-commerce store. So, who emerges victorious in the performance race between Shopify Plus and Magento 2?

With its Saas hosting technology, Shopify Plus guarantees stable and consistent website performance for users. 

On the contrary, the speed of Magento 2 websites heavily relies on the hosting services chosen. Opting for a robust host with effective website optimization, including streamlined codes and optimized images, is crucial for ensuring excellent performance for your site. 

Ultimately, while both platforms offer different approaches to performance optimization, Shopify’s hosting technology may provide a more straightforward solution for users seeking reliable website speed.

6. Merchandising

Merchandising is the act of promoting the sales of goods and plays a crucial role in a company’s brand development and long-term growth. Businesses are striving to innovate and enhance their sales strategies to enhance revenue. In this situation, what platform should they choose between Shopify Plus and Magento 2? 

While Shopify Plus does not provide multiple product types, facilitates merchandising in some ways. It offers some facilities to merchandise the products. Merchants can choose from base ordering options and also manually reorder products in their collections. It empowers you to set a base order and then switch to manual and re-order from there, which satisfies a lot of customers. 

The options for base ordering are:

• Best selling
• Product Name A-Z and Z-A
• Price high-low and low-high
• Newest and oldest

Plus, if you want to add special products to your Shopify online store, you only achieve it through the use of customizations and third-party applications. You should also need to carefully consider discounting and catalog management, especially regarding bundles.

Unlike Shopify Plus, Magento 2 provides a variety of product types including: 

• Simple products
• Configurable products
• Bundled products
• Downloaded products
• Virtual products
• Grouped products
• Gift cards

Whether using Adobe Commerce Edition or Magento Open Source, setting up related products and reducing manual work is straightforward, making it particularly beneficial for sellers with large product categories. Additionally, Magento offers visual merchandising, enabling merchants to determine product placement within category listings through drag-and-drop functionality.

7. Support and Community 

When comparing customer support between Shopify Plus and Magento 2, distinct approaches emerge. Shopify helps merchants save development costs, while Magento offers many support options in different fields, but it might have potential fees.

On the other hand, the Magento community is genuinely helpful and consists of numerous developers from around the world. If you have any questions, find the answer on the web or ask community members. Additionally, Adobe Commerce DevDocs provides a lot of valuable guides for users.

Furthermore, you can also collaborate with a Magento development company to get assistance and peace of mind.

8. Security 

Shopify Plus includes the following security features:

• Fraud analysis
• PCI Compliance
• GDPR Compliant
• SSL Certificates are available for every Shopify sites

Magento 2 includes the following security features:

• Security extensions
• Magento Security Scan
• PCI Compliant (Commerce edition)
• Regular updates

9. SEO

Shopify Plus offers SEO features that are primarily configured at the server level, limiting customization options for aspects like URL structure, hierarchy, and caching headers. Its basic set of SEO tools allows for editing meta tags and optimizing inventory and product pages, but building a Shopify Plus store on a sub-directory is not feasible.

Meanwhile, Magento’s open-source system provides greater flexibility for enhancing SEO performance. Additional features such as no-follow links, redirect links, and canonical tags contribute to improved indexing by search engines like Google and Bing. Furthermore, your Magento store does not need to be on a local ccTLD (country code top-level domain) or a subdomain. Therefore, it’s possible to build your store on a sub-directory, offering the advantage of more frequent crawling and inheriting SEO authority from your primary site.

10. Multilingual and Multicurrency Support

In this comparison, the winner is Magento 2. Let’s explore the reasons why in the table below.

Aspect	Shopify Plus	Magento 2
Multilingual support	Need to integrate third-party apps	Inbuilt multi-languages
Multicurrency Support	133 currencies	200 currencies

11. Apps and Extensions 

A wide range of popular third-party systems, like ERPs, fulfillment services, payment gateways, and so on are now offered on the app store and marketplace of both Commerce Magento and Shopify Plus.

Shopify Plus Apps 

As a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering, Shopify Plus supports merchants by offering thousands of pre-vetted apps at a low cost. Furthermore, high-growth merchants are provided exclusive advanced Shopify Plus apps with additional support:

• Shopify Flow: An eCommerce automation platform not only automates tasks and ideas within your store and across apps but also allows you to focus on growing your business.
• Launchpad: A scheduling tool is integrated with your Shopify admin to schedule product visibility, Shopify Scripts, themes, discounts, etc. This tool is quite helpful in automating sales campaigns such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
• Script Editor: An exclusive app for Shopify Plus merchants. With line item scripts, shipping scripts, and payment scripts, it helps you to custom logic and customize personalized customers’ checkout journeys.
• Transported: Data migration tools to simplify switching to Shopify Plus. However, you need technical expertise to convert legacy platform data into Shopify-friendly CSV files.

Magento Ecommerce Extensions

Unlike Shopify Plus, Magento Commerce does not provide any exclusive apps for big businesses. Nevertheless, there are hundreds of third-party extensions available on Magento Marketplace that support both self-hosting and cloud-hosting versions. 

If you want to find third-party extensions to enhance the capabilities of your Magento store, Magezon might be one of the great choices. It provides various outstanding extensions that cater to various needs. Some of our best-selling products include Quick Order, Auto Invoice and Shipment, Custom Options, Elavon Converge Payment, etc. These extensions’ main mission is to optimize online store performance and improve customer experience to enhance revenue. 

Determining the Right Fit for Your Business

That’s all about the key differences between Magento 2 vs Shopify Plus. Have you chosen the best platform for your business? 

Due to low upfront and operational costs, merchant-first approach, and little technical and maintenance overhead Shopify Plus is suitable for small to medium or start-up businesses.

On the contrary, although Magento provides many services and features, you must pay for Magento developers. In return, you will get unlimited scalability and customization. Magento empowers you to build your wish store to serve all business requirements.   

If you’re apprehensive about the significant investment required to get started on Adobe Commerce, you can get started with the free Magento Open Source platform and then transfer to Adobe Commerce or Adobe Commerce Cloud whenever you feel ready for it.

Conclusion

In the battle between Shopify Plus and Magento 2, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Each platform offers unique strengths and capabilities tailored to different business needs. You can make an informed decision that sets your business on the path to e-commerce success by carefully evaluating the key differences outlined above and aligning them with your specific requirements and objectives. Whether you choose the user-friendly simplicity of Shopify Plus or the unparalleled customization of Magento 2, investing in a robust e-commerce platform is essential for driving growth, maximizing revenue, and delivering exceptional shopping experiences to your customers.