Shopify Plus vs. Magento

Shopify Plus is the world’s most scalable and robust platform

Sell across 20 channels without custom code
Deliver blazing-fast service with 99.99% uptime
Integrate third-party systems with an open API
Customize your front end with limitless possibilities
Leverage and experiment quickly with 10000+ apps
Get 24/7 global priority technical support
Rest secure in a cloud-based solution with zero update or security headaches

Shopify. (2024). Magento Vs Shopify Plus, Retrieved May, 2024

Overview

An increasing number of enterprise-level brands are transitioning from Magento Community and Magento Enterprise to Shopify Plus. However, many brands still have concerns about switching platforms, and comparisons can be difficult to find. Therefore, we decided to simplify everything into one comprehensive article.

Magento is the leader in on-premise ecommerce, designed for developers and offering significant flexibility. However, the rise of software as a service (SaaS) is transforming the landscape. Many retailers seek a simpler, more manageable way to deliver exceptional customer experiences at scale.

Shopify Plus is revolutionizing enterprise commerce. Instead of investing in costly infrastructure and development, they enable retailers to focus their resources on strategy, customer engagement, social influence, and data-driven marketing.

With the release of Magento 2, tens of thousands of Magento 1.x clients face a difficult decision: Should they replatform to Magento 2 or explore other market options?

Scalability

Both Magento Enterprise and Community support enterprise businesses operating at scale. Magento 2.0 is built with scalability in mind—but it comes at a cost. Hosting and managed services are specialized competencies that demand significant care and attention. As a licensed, on-premise solution, Magento does not include hosting and managed services with its licensing.

Magento clients need to pay a reliable provider to host and handle peak traffic. Aside from the additional cost, focusing on your infrastructure can divert attention from your core business.

On-premise deployments require you to design your solution to accommodate the highest traffic peak. This involves building and managing infrastructure that you might only fully utilize once a year. Any time you implement a change to production, you risk affecting the overall architecture’s scalability.

Magento also requires installation, setup, and configuration, which is challenging across a distributed architecture. A significant portion of every Magento deployment is dedicated to ensuring performance and scalability, rather than focusing on your core requirements.

Shopify Plus clients benefit from Shopify’s extensive architecture. Shopify Plus provides high-growth, high-volume merchants with the scalability, reliability, and flexibility they need, without the hassle, long timeline, or expense of an on-premise solution.

Many Shopify Plus clients migrate to the platform to accommodate the massive loads associated with flash sales, which often see thousands of checkouts per minute. Switching to Shopify Plus means never having to worry about infrastructure, hosting, networking, or load testing again.

Shopify Plus offers a fully hosted SaaS solution built to handle any level of volume, allowing high-volume merchants to concentrate on their business, not their IT. Built on the same infrastructure that supports millions of Shopify merchants, Shopify Plus ensures that flash sales, Black Friday, or heavy daily volume can be managed effortlessly.

Offloading concerns around scalability and performance allows you to focus your time and energy on product innovation, marketing, and customer experience.

Customization

Designed for developers, Magento is an open-source platform, allowing clients to access and modify all of Magento’s core modules. This level of access provides significant freedom in designing and customizing a website.

However, managing even basic content on Magento 2 requires an in-depth understanding of the platform’s architecture due to the lack of standard code. The skills needed to develop a custom front-end experience on Magento 2, including advanced knowledge of its component architecture, directory structure, PHP, and other technologies, are much higher than those needed for Magento 1.x.

This complexity slows implementation times and adds costly development cycles, even for minor changes to user experience or product offerings.

As a result, most merchants hire Magento developers to build customizations. However, development and architectural resources can be expensive, both for the initial launch of new projects and their maintenance. Running Magento sites on private servers means you must manage, support, and scale any extensions or customizations yourself, along with their impact on the existing code base. This creates risk and increases dependency on QA and load testing.

Outsourcing or insourcing a team to manage customizations not only preoccupies development resources and consumes your budget, but it also distracts you from more critical efforts that provide direct value to consumers.

Brands focused on speed shouldn’t require a development project and testing cycle for basic content changes. As time to market becomes increasingly important, on-premise platforms will struggle to keep up.

To build a custom enterprise online store with Shopify Plus, all you need is knowledge of HTML, CSS, and Liquid, Shopify’s intuitive coding language. Shopify also offers an extensive library of themes, which can largely eliminate the need for manual page development.

In addition to full front-end code control, Shopify Scripts allows developers to create customized shopping carts. This provides advanced functionality and flexibility without compromising stability.

With Shopify Plus, developers can also build custom apps in their preferred programming language. The Embedded App SDK lets individual client extensions appear directly in the Shopify admin, enhancing the customization experience.

Global and Omnichannel

More than ever, merchants need to reach customers and early adopters on the channels they already use. This is why Shopify enables ecommerce on any social network, blog, app, or third-party marketplace.

Shopify Plus customers can list, sell, and manage their products on over 20 sales channels like Facebook, Messenger, Pinterest, and Instagram, as well as popular marketplaces like eBay, Houzz, Ebates, and Wanelo.

Shopify’s Sales Channel SDK allows you to add commerce to any mobile app, marketplace, or website, connecting your users to millions of products right where they are. Shopify handles the complex aspects, including payments, shipping, taxes, inventory, and analytics.

Shopify’s Buy Button strategy lets retailers add ecommerce to any website using only a snippet of code. Embedded products, collections, and even an on-site shopping cart can be added in just minutes. The JavaScript Buy SDK is a lightweight library that allows you to retrieve products and collections from your shop, add products to a cart, and check out.

Magento currently lacks integration with common social channels and marketplaces. As the number of channels grows, on-premise platforms like Magento will soon fall behind. In a world of omnichannel selling, managing one-off integrations with Magento can become cost-prohibitive.

To sell in multiple currencies, merchants need to set up separate currencies in a new store view on Magento, resulting in more views to manage. Managing an international or rest-of-world store natively isn’t easy, and switching currencies on the online store is only available through apps.

On Shopify Plus, our multi-currency solution is easy to implement and maintain on a single store natively, without apps. Merchants can sell in multiple currencies on one store and get paid in their own currency, with no additional views required.

Mobile Optimization

Shopify themes and templates are responsive on any device. When customers browse your store on a smartphone or tablet, the design automatically adapts to optimize the mobile experience. The Shopify Theme Store offers over 100 free and premium themes, each crafted to display beautifully on any screen size.

Shopify also provides a Mobile App SDK that allows you to easily develop custom commerce apps or integrate Shopify’s checkout into your existing mobile app. With just a few lines of code, you can insert native Buy Buttons or embed a responsive online store into your app.

Given the complexity of page development, designing responsive experiences on Magento 2 can be challenging. While Magento includes a responsive theme for all merchants, substantial page development and QA testing are required with each responsive or mobile deployment.

Security

Strong brands require a relationship built on trust. Customers must feel safe and secure when transacting with your brand. Therefore, security is fundamental to ecommerce. PCI Compliance is our industry’s way of verifying security standards for organizations handling online payments. PCI Compliance goes beyond the software itself, creating dependencies on how the software is managed, deployed, and hosted.

While Magento allows the deployment of PCI compliant storefronts, you, as the vendor, are responsible for ensuring your site is safe and secure. Ensuring PCI compliance is costly and time-consuming. Since the burden of securing server data falls entirely on you, it creates distractions from your core business.

As an open-source solution, Magento is also prone to malware. Security breaches to the software itself are a regular concern. Over 10,000 Magento sites fell victim to the Guruncsite malware in 2015. Google was forced to blacklist over 8,000 storefronts in the first 90 days of the breach alone. According to the most recent Trustwave Global Security Report:

“In the ecommerce space, the Magento open-source ecommerce platform was the target of choice for attackers, with Magento installations accounting for 85% of compromised systems.”

With Shopify Plus, your site will be hosted and protected in full compliance with Level 1 PCI DSS. This includes:

Maintaining a secure network
Protecting cardholder data
Maintaining a vulnerability management program
Implementing strong access control measures
Regularly monitoring and testing networks
Maintaining an information security policy

While most ecommerce websites use SSL encryption technology to protect a shopper’s personal information during checkout, Shopify covers the entire online experience. Once your certificate is activated, all traffic will be redirected from HTTP to encrypted HTTPS.

Implementation

Implementing a new Magento 2 deployment typically takes 4–8 months and involves developers, architects, deployment specialists, QA resources, and more.

Implementing an on-premise ecommerce solution is akin to custom app development. Building customizations in Magento is less efficient due to the lack of a standard codebase. While you can hire a developer, all the code runs on your own environment, making it your responsibility to manage and maintain changes to the core architecture.

Load testing is crucial for Magento customizations, meaning that even if your customization works fine today, it might not perform well under peak traffic and transactions.

Shopify Plus prioritizes speed. By removing concerns about ecommerce architecture, hosting, and security, deployments typically take 2–4 months, depending on complexity. This allows merchants to prioritize customer needs.

Support

Support is another major point of consideration. Magento offers technical support, but like many on-premise solutions, once licensed, you are largely on your own. A third-party agency or integrator is required for any ongoing expertise on the platform and your deployment.

That’s why Shopify Plus offers the industry’s largest network of support, including an expert team of launch engineers, solution engineers, front-end developers, and dedicated support staff, to ensure your transition is smooth, fast, and painless. This support starts with migration and launch but doesn’t end there:

Launch engineers are assigned to every new project and serve as a technical point of contact for migration and replatforming coordination.
The merchant acceleration team regularly creates exclusive courses for Shopify Plus merchants.
In-person and digital meetups ensure you never have to face scaling alone.

Ecosystem

One of Magento’s greatest strengths has always been its ecosystem, featuring hundreds of systems integrators and certified developers. With almost 280,000 Magento community sites, the number of developers and architects who have worked with Magento 1.x is staggering.

However, Magento 2 changes the equation. Radical architectural changes and deep technical competencies have impacted this community, leaving much to be desired in terms of support, expertise, and execution.

In contrast, Shopify now has millions of customers on its platform and a thriving community of thousands of Shopify Experts. To ensure that Shopify Plus can meet the needs of large retailers, we created the Shopify Plus Partner program, an award-winning, carefully vetted collection of agencies, solutions, and technical providers. These include:

Solutions partners: Designers and developers specializing in Shopify Plus themes, app integration, and customization.
Technology partners: Ecommerce tools, providers, and integrations that extend the value of Shopify Plus to our merchants.
Agency partners: Full-service agencies offering a comprehensive suite of creative, marketing, and development services.

Within the Magento Marketplace, you’ll find a variety of extensions that allow your store to function as a custom online store should. However, these rarely feature turn-key operations. Most require some (or a lot of) coding to get up and running.

As a result, Magento extensions place added dependence on your development team and can conflict with your customizations, necessitating extensive tweaks to ensure stability. Extensions should be tested with each deployment by development and QA resources.

Shopify maintains a library of over 5,300 professional apps, all designed to minimize dependency on developers. The Shopify App Store offers a wide array of solutions specializing in marketing, sales, social media, shipping, inventory, and supply-chain management. Shopify’s third-party apps are available to help streamline all your enterprise needs.

Updates

Magento has an aggressive development cycle for its 2.x roadmap, with plans to deploy multiple point releases and security patches each year. Like many on-premise solutions, new releases can be challenging when the platform has been extended or customized.

With each release, the client must organize a significant project to assess how it might impact the existing code base. Depending on the situation, these upgrades can take days or weeks. In many instances, the client may need to rewrite existing customizations, necessitating QA and load testing for each individual release.

Shopify Plus eliminates the need for upgrades, patches, and point releases. The platform is designed to allow retailers to launch new features as they become available directly from the Shopify admin. This approach saves time and money typically associated with upgrades and patches and removes the opportunity costs that software deployment can bring.

If you have questions or need assistance executing these strategies, our team is available at hello@tidalcommerce.ca.