Shopify vs Magento (Adobe Commerce) - Which E-commerce Platform is Best?

Are you looking for an e-commerce platform and wondering whether Shopify or Magento (Adobe Commerce) is a better fit for your business?

The answer depends on a variety of factors, including your business needs, budget, technical expertise, and others.

In this article, we’ll compare Shopify and Magento (Adobe Commerce) based on their user-friendliness, pricing, customization options, e-commerce functionalities, and much more.

Making an informed decision about using Shopify or Magento (Adobe Commerce) is essential for supporting the growth of your e-commerce journey. So let’s dive into the details.

While you can get the same functionalities and more with the Magento extensions, each one will require your individual attention to set up and integrate in your store correctly.

With Shopify, you can get your store up and running in a matter of days if not hours, if you have a general idea of what you’re doing. Shopify’s intuitive admin panel makes setting up and customizing your store a simple task that requires a few clicks.

On the other hand, Magento’s open-source version requires a lot of effort from the start. You’ll need to set up your domain and hosting and select themes and plugins to give your store the exact e-commerce functionalities you want.

From processing payments to shipping orders, you’ll have to configure each step by yourself. Shopify takes care of all of that for you automatically or with a few clicks from the admin panel.

While Magento’s open-source version is free to use, you’ll still have to pay for

• Domain

• Hosting

• The help of a web developer to set up your store

• Premium extensions for extra functionalities

• Processor fees

The industry standard for payment processing fees in the US is 2.9% of the order value + 30 cents per order.

However, the exact amount of these fees depends on the payment processor you use like PayPal, Stripe, or Shopify Payments, as well as the market you sell to.

For example, PayPal charges 3.49% + 49 cents on checkout for sales within the US.

Another caveat with Magento’s pricing is that it offers a paid plan called Adobe Commerce.

This plan is suited for larger retailers and corporations and offers an arsenal of features.

However, Adobe keeps the pricing of their plan hidden as you have to contact their sales representatives to find out its exact price.

Different 3-rd party sources claim that Adobe Commerce has tiered plans that start from $20,000 per year.

Shopify’s pricing plans are more straightforward to understand and you can see them at a glance:

Each of these plans has various features that enable you to sell more in different ways. For more details about each Shopify plan, you can read up on Shopify pricing. Just keep in mind that Shopify Starter doesn't allow you to build a standalone store, so in most cases, you'll need at least Shopify Basic.

Moreover, Shopify uses its proprietary payment processor Shopify Payments with which it offers competitive card processing fees for the US market, and becomes better as you upgrade your plan.

However, there is an extra transaction fee when you aren’t using Shopify Payments but a third-party payment processor instead.

All of the percentages are based on the total value of your order.

If you’re curious about getting started with Shopify, they push your startup costs even lower with their 3-day free trial, followed up by a 3-month for $1 deal, so you can check Shopify out before you commit to it.

However, the Shopify themes enjoy distinct advantages such as being vetted for performance and quality from Shopify itself.

In comparison, Magento’s themes are open-source, meaning that they drastically vary in quality, security, and maintenance, since there is no centralized authority to inspect them.

Shopify's themes get seamlessly updated all the time, while updates on the Magento themes can bring your store bugs, malfunctions, or even a complete crash.

While Shopify’s themes might be better on average, the platform itself has some built-in limitations when it comes to customization.

Parts of its code are unavailable for web developers to access, which adds robustness to the platform, but also limits its flexibility.

Magento and Shopify both have excellent sales and marketing tools and features. The bigger difference between the two is that Shopify comes with most of them equipped out of the box.

Even its lower plans enjoy features like abandoned cart recovery, discount codes, and multi-channel sales integrations.

Whereas with Magento, you’ll need to add these functionalities to your store manually, which requires some technical elbow grease.

In a nutshell, both Shopify and Magento allow you to:

• Sell products

• Change shipping rates

• Process payments securely

• Run discounts and promotions

• Create product variations and personalization

• Create and accept gift cards

• Generate automatic or manual tax rates

• Include cross-sell and upsell functionality

On paper, the differences between Shopify’s and Magento’s functionalities are so subtle, that they only become relevant at the large retail level.

But in reality, everything you do in the Shopify dashboard is much easier, be it to customize your site's functionality, or how your products appear, to everything else.

Shopify’s app store has over 8,000 vetted apps, dedicated to every part of the e-commerce success.

Magento’s open-source plugins are also in the thousands but aren’t vetted as Shopify’s, which means that updating them can cause your onlinestore to break or they have security issues.

However, Adobe Commerce, which is Adobe’s premium e-commerce solution, also has an extensions marketplace with around 4,000 extensions, which in essence work the same way as the Shopify apps.

Overall, the Shopify app store has more third-party apps, which are vetted, and better maintained than Magento and Adobe Commerce's.

In both platforms, the apps or extensions can be either free or paid, so you’ll have to check them out one by one.

When it comes to payment processors and transaction fees, Magento comes out ahead due to the wider variety of payment gateways you can integrate into your online store.

Having this variety is especially important for international e-commerce since locally recognized payment providers help instill customer trust and improve conversions.

An important caveat is that Shopify has its own payment gateway called Shopify Payments.

As of 2024, Shopify Payments offers very competitive card processing fees, which are even better than PayPal’s for example.

However, if you don’t use Shopify Payments, but opt to use a third-party processor, you’ll have to pay an extra transaction fee with Shopify that’s between 2% and 0.5%.

The problem for some merchants is that Shopify Payments is only available in certain countries. While amazing and streamlined, it does remain exclusive to certain regions.

Magento doesn’t have separate transaction fees, but you will have to pay a fee to your payment processor for every order that passes through your website.

Compared to Shopify Payments, their fees are often less competitive, but are more balanced, if you aren’t using Shopify Payments.

Both Magento and Shopify come with robust inventory management systems. Moreover, both of them allow you to add custom rules for shipment and fulfillment through third-party apps and integrations. Moreover, they can help you automatically calculate any taxes, tariffs, and shipping fees and include them in your product’s price.

In contrast, Magento is somewhat better suited for larger businesses or those with specific, complex shipping requirements.

Its open-source nature allows you to customize your shipment and fulfillment even more than what Shopify offers you.

Both platforms can accommodate all of your paid advertising needs.

However, Shopify comes out with better features and integrations for multichannel sales out of the box.

At every step, Shopify’s platform is built for maximum conversions, which means a greater ROI for your advertising efforts.

Moreover, their checkout is the best-performing one in the world.

Furthermore, Shopify comes with free native server-side tracking that allows you to track and analyze the results of your ad campaigns on every mainstream social media channel.

Magento can match Shopify’s features, but you’ll have to add them in manually, which requires some technical expertise and is drastically more complicated than doing it with Shopify.

In general, every operation on Magento ends up costing you more company resources.

SEO is crucial for stores that rely on search engines like Google to get discovered by buyers.

Both Magento and Shopify allow you to tweak your store’s SEO, but Shopify falls behind in a few aspects related to off-page and technical SEO.

However, there are some SEO workarounds and extensions for Shopify, if you use some third-party apps like Yoast.

Magento’s open-source version doesn’t have a dedicated support team but relies on community support through forums.

However, their enterprise product Adobe Commerce, does have good customer support.

Magento is an open-source platform where you can customize all of its bits, but are responsible for putting them together and maintaining them, which can be a difficult and expensive process, especially if you lack a coding background.

The upside is that you get total creative freedom. Shopify is a SaaS solution that makes creating, managing, and maintaining online stores a breeze.

While it is pricier than Magento’s open-source version, you get great utility from it and get to solve all of your problems with a few clicks or with the help of Shopify’s stellar customer support.

All in all, Shopify is decisively the better choice for solopreneurs and small and mid-sized businesses.

However, at the enterprise level, there is an argument to be made both for Adobe Commerce and for Shopify Plus.

If you prioritize total control and flexibility and have bigger engineering teams, Magento might be better for you.

If you prefer reliability, speed, ease of use, and a more set-it-and-forget-it solution, Shopify is the better alternative.

See also: Shopify vs. Amazon comparison