Magento vs. Shopify Plus in 2024

Shopify Plus and Magento 2 Commerce (now ‘Adobe Commerce’) are the two most popular platforms at the moment for enterprise brands. More and more enterprise-level brands switch from Magento to Shopify Plus, but many brands are still nervous about changing platforms since both offer highly diversified feature-sets.

To help you choose the right option venue aligned with lean ecommerce brand, we decided to break it down into an easy-to-navigate article.

Overview

Shopify Plus is Shopify edition to the enterprise with more new features, integrations, underlying code, and a dedicated support option. Some of the most famous brands using Shopify Plus are Nestle, Hawkers, Kylie Jenner, Budweiser, PepsiCo, Current Body, Gymshark, Protein World.

Magento 2 Commerce is built for rapid and cost-effective innovation. The platform combines out-of-the-box functionalities, enterprise performance and scale, and robust business tools. Some of the largest customers are Helly Hansen, Paul Smith, Hermes, End Clothing, MADE.com, BrewDog, Paperchase, Bulk Powders. 

Comparison

Cost

Shopify Plus costs only $2,000 per month and includes the licence, SaaS hosting, and Shopify support. But fees go up once you start doing over US$9.6M p/a. Still, the cost to build and maintain a Shopify Plus site is generally half the Magento cost. 

Magento Commerce licensing starts at US$40,000 per annum, or on-premise starts at US$24,000 per year. This cost increases depending on unique merchant turnover, so you do not pay the same amount as an eCommerce giant. For “on-premise,” the licensing does not include hosting costs, depending on the website size.

Support

Shopify Plus has the edge over in terms of support. You can get access to a dedicated merchant success manager available 24/7 via phone, email, or live chat. The support covers technical problems, marketing, or conversion rate optimization. 

Magento Commerce provides only developer support. You could choose to work with the Magento Enterprise Consulting Group for an additional price. 

Extensions and apps

Both platforms have ecosystems for extensions and apps. They have been integrated with the most popular third-party systems, like ERPs, fulfillment services, payment gateways, etc.  

Shopify Plus comes with thousands of apps with different functionalities to support high-growth merchants. Some of them are Transporter, Shopify Flow, Launchpad and others.

Magento Commerce does not build any exclusive apps for large-scale users, still you can choose one of 404-third party extension apps on Magento Marketplace.

Headless and PWA

Building stores as a PWA is becoming very common with both platforms. Magento is pushing this more via their PWA Studio framework, but there are also many other third-party frameworks for this platform. Magento is open for headless builds, but they do not have full API coverage. The arguments against Magento in a headless manner generally come from a loss of functionality in certain areas that not yet having APIs available. 

Headless Shopify has become a widespread approach recently. However, doing this via their storefront API isn’t a full headless approach, with things like the checkout and the account section remaining in Shopify. Still, it is a relatively light-touch approach, as the Shopify checkout helps to avoid risk with the checkout. The main argument against headless Shopify is that most apps do not have APIs available. 

Mobile-friendly

Both platforms have fully responsive base themes, and all available themes would be fully responsive, as are the admin interfaces.

Shopify Themes and Liquid Templating are engineered to display beautifully across any screen size. The Shopify Theme Store includes over 100 free and premium themes.

In the meantime, designing responsive experiences on Magento 2 can be a challenging task. Magento includes a responsive theme, but heavy page development and QA testing are required with each responsive or mobile deployment.

Scalability

Magento 2.0 is scalable, but the licence does not include hosting and managed services. Local deployments require that you architect your solution to accommodate the single highest peak in traffic. And any time you roll out a change to production, you risk impacting the overall architecture’s scalability. Magento also requires installation, setup, and configuration. Every Magento deployment is mostly dedicated to ensuring performance and scalability, rather than focusing on your core requirements.

Shopify Plus gives the scalability, reliability, and flexibility needed for high-growth merchants. Clients migrate to the platform to deal with the massive loads that come with flash sales that see thousands of concurrent checkouts. Shopify Plus gets rid of worries about infrastructure, hosting, networking, or load testing. The platform offers a fully hosted SaaS solution built to handle any volume level, allowing high-volume merchants to focus on their business. Shopify Plus ensures that Black Friday or any other volume will be handled with ease.

SEO

Shopify Plus has powerful SEO functions like custom page URLs, meta descriptions, image alt tags, and more. However, it does not allow more deep SEO techniques, forcing users finding other ways to increase organic traffic volume. 

Magento provides more flexibility as the source is open. It has features suitable for current engine trends like creating rich snippets, manually organized markup data, and fine-tuning a website robot.txt file. It is possible due to the access in your website structure.

Customization

Magento is an open-source platform giving clients access to modify all core modules. This provides freedom for custom design and development. 

However, without standard code, managing even basic content requires an in-depth knowledge of the platform architecture. Developing a custom front-end experience on Magento 2 requires advanced knowledge of its component architecture, directory structure, PHP, and other technologies. These affect implementation times and add development cycles, even when it comes to minimal changes to user experience.

For building a custom enterprise online store with Shopify Plus, you need just knowledge of HTML, CSS, and Liquid. Shopify also comes with a huge library of themes, removing the need for manual page development. In addition, Shopify Scripts allows developers to “enter” Shopify’s servers and create their own customized shopping cart. 

Shopify Plus also enables developers to build private apps using the client’s preferred language. 

Global and multichannel

With Magento, it is possible to manage multiple stores from one interface when Shopify Plus involves managing multiple stores entities under the same account.

For instance, Magento’s dashboard allows you to set product attributes like name and price at the store and global levels. To do this with Shopify Plus, you’ll need to find a new way, likely a plugin that adds to the additional cost.

Security

Magento gives the ability to deploy PCI Compliant storefronts, but still, you take responsibility for ensuring the safety and security of your site. Ensuring PCI Compliance is not cheap and consumes time. Since the duty of securing server data is on you, it distracts from your business.

With Shopify Plus, your online store will be hosted and protected in full compliance with Level 1 PCI DSS. That contains maintaining a secure network, protecting cardholder data, implementing measures of access control, regularly network testing, maintaining an information security policy, and a vulnerability management program. Also, Shopify covers the entire online experience and once your certificate is activated, all traffic will be redirected from HTTP to encrypted HTTPS.

Conclusion

Both platforms have their advantages and disadvantages. The decision should be based on a clear and detailed assessment of the specific functional requirements and in-house resources. 

Magento Commerce costs more than Shopify Plus, because you need to pay integrators and other platforms fees are higher. Shopify Plus is more suitable for quickly growing stores and requires less complex, customized, and integrated solutions. Especially if your website is already on Shopify, it is the best option. 

Planning migration?

If you plan to migrate from Magento to Shopify Plus or vice versa, VT Labs is there for you. We are a Shopify custom development company, visit www.vtlabs.org to see our works. With our help, switching to another platform will be done with a high security and accuracy level.