Magento vs other shop software

A search for the right webshop software is not easy. The product range is enormous and every shop software has its advantages and disadvantages.

In this article, you get insight into the differences between the most used e-commerce platforms at this moment. We have taken Magento as the basis.

This way, you know exactly which software complies with your requirements and wishes.

We compare the e-commerce software on 8 different properties. It is up to you to determine which property is the most important for you.

That will depend on your requirements, wishes, budget and more.

We will take a closer look at the following properties:

1. Costs
2. Product Management
3. Usability
4. SEO
5. Performance
6. Community
7. Available extensions
8. Security

Table of contents

Magento vs WooCommerce

Magento vs Shopify

Magento vs Shopware

Magento vs BigCommerce

Magento vs. WooCommerce

Let’s kick off with two incredibly popular software plans. The difference between Magento and WooCommerce might seem big, but in the meantime, they both have arranged everything well.

The main difference between both platforms is that WooCommerce is an extension to WordPress, while Magento is a more robust and advanced e-commerce system. This makes it more powerful, but also more complex at the same time.

Costs

There are barely costs involved with both platforms. The purchase of a license is free, because the software is open-source.

For Magento webshops, there is a Commerce License that costs approximately €12.000. You only see this license at the really large online shops.

Please notice there are additional costs involved that cause a difference between both platforms. Examples of these costs are: hosting, purchase of plugins and possible hiring costs of a developer.

In general, you can say that the additional costs for Magento are higher. However, there is an extremely powerful platform that is at your disposal in return for those costs.

SEO

When it comes to SEO, Magento and WooCommerce have little to fear from each other. The standard installation of both software is sufficiently designed to deal with SEO best practices.

If you want more SEO functionalities, there are more than enough plugins available for both Magento and WooCommerce to help you with this.

Performance

Both platforms are different in this. Magento requires more resources to perform well in general.

WooCommerce is less powerful and heavy and therefore requires less resources for hosting.

The performance also depends on many other factors. The performance of Magento can be increased significantly, but also WooCommerce has many plugins to boost the performance.

Of course, not only plugins result in performance optimization. Also caching (Varnish and Redis) and the quality of the code has a major impact on it.

One thing is for sure; the right e-commerce hosting is the main role to achieve the best performance. So, do not choose a hosting plan right away, but research the possibilities and see which hosting fits your requirements and wishes the best.

Community

Both Magento and WooCommerce have an enormous community behind them. Because they are open source, there is a community that contributes a lot and also benefits you a lot.

WooCommerce mainly benefits from the WordPress community, while Magento has grown among developers during the past years.

Links & extensions

Due to the popularity of both platforms and the available community, there is a wide choice of links and extensions.

We have experienced that the quantity of WooCommerce links & extensions is greater, but the quality is higher at Magento.

We also see differences in the costs of those links and extensions. Magento’s links and extensions are slightly more expensive than WooCommerce’s.

Product management

Product Management at Magento is much better organized. You can easily add thousands of products to your catalog, without any additional plugins.

With WooCommerce it is harder to add and manage big product catalogs. Causing scaling your webshop becomes more difficult.

For a large complex product catalog, we absolutely recommend the use of Magento.

Usability

The learning curve of Magento is higher than the one of WooCommerce. Due to the complex backend environment of Magento, it takes some extra time to get familiar with it.

However, when you need a big set of functionalities, a powerful system and you set up a complex webshop. Then, Magento might be better for you.

This is because Magento has built in almost all complex functionalities out of the box, while for WooCommerce you have to use many extra plugins.

Magento vs WooCommerce: a summary

Conclusion

The choice for Magento or WooCommerce mainly depends on the size of your webshop and the available budget.

Are you planning to set up a big webshop, that has to do a lot out of the box and which you can scale easily? Magento would be a better choice than WooCommerce.

Do you have less technical knowledge, a lower budget and don’t you expect a big shop? WooCommerce would be better for you.

It might seem like you will pay a lot compared to the free Magento software, but when you choose for Magento, you still have to arrange your hosting yourself. You have to take these hosting costs into account for having a fair comparison.

SEO

Recent research on SEO shows Shopify is the best in the field of SEO.

We find Magento in a great shared third place.

Shopify has all the needed functionalities for a good SEO by default. It looked at how the platforms deal with navigation links, page titles, URLs, headings, canonical tags, XML sitemaps, 301 redirects and more.

Although both platforms have organized their SEO well, there is a slight advantage for Shopify regarding this.

Performance

Since the introduction of Magento 2, both platforms are not inferior to each other in terms of performance.

In case you want to scale your shop, Magento handles this better in general. Magento 2 is easier to scale without having a big impact on the page speed or performance.

Community

As mentioned, the Magento community is extremely large and powerful. Almost every problem has been faced by someone else before, so bugs and questions will be solved in no-time.

Shopify's community is smaller. You are dependent on the support Shopify offers itself. An advantage of this is you can easily and quickly start a chat to get the support you need.

Do you really need support? or looking for a solution yourself? Then Magento will help you better. The large community is an absolute plus over Shopify.

Links & extensions

Both Shopify and Magento have enormous market places where you can find everything, from marketing extensions to accounting and financial extensions to bring your webshop to higher grounds.

There are about 2,400 free and paid extensions in the Shopify App Store. A big advantage is that they can be added to your shop with only one click on the button.

Magento offers about 3,000 free and paid extensions. Magento offers some plugins that go way further than Shopify. With this you can take your shop to an even higher level.

Security

Basically, both platforms have arranged this well. Where you are partly dependent on your own choices such as hosting at Magento, Shopify will arrange this for you. But with the right hosting and security settings, both platforms are not inferior to each other in this respect.

Product Management

Both Shopify and Magento have arranged this well. Do you want to manage thousands of products easily and quickly, you would be better off with Magento.

Usability

As mentioned, Magento has a high and large learning curve. At Shopify, this curve is way lower. Setting up the shop, configuring and managing is relatively easy.

Yet here, too, it applies that as the complexity of your webshop increases, you will also encounter limitations that Magento handles better.

Magento vs. Shopify: a summary

Conclusion

The choice between Magento and Shopify is not an easy one. Both platforms are close to each other.

You will do well by taking a look at the wishes and requirements you have. What are your goals? What is your budget? And what is your experience?

Do you want to set up a webshop quickly, with at most 200 products? Then Shopify is probably a better choice than Magento.

Do you want to have maximum scalability, endless possibilities and have the control yourself? You’d better choose for Magento.

Magento vs Shopware

If we compare Magento with Shopware, we might even compare the old-hand with the emerging talent. Because that's how you can describe Shopware 6: the talent that is on the rise.

The German e-commerce platform is making huge progress in the Netherlands and that has not gone unnoticed.

We already explained the differences between Magento and Shopware in a previous article, but also here, we will briefly discuss the differences.

Costs

The Shopware community edition is free. The more extensive license will cost you €1295,- per year.

Just like the Shopware license, the basic Magento license is free.

A big difference only occurs when the turnover of your online shop grows. So keep this in mind.

SEO

In terms of SEO, there is hardly any difference between both parties. Actually, both are doing great. Titles, Meta descriptions, standard logical site structure, canonical tags, 301 managers and more. All included by default.

Performance

Both platforms score well on this. Both support Varnish Cache as a standard.

Both platforms are also excellent at merging CSS and JavaScript files, also image compressions are also handled well.

Recent research has shown that the TTFB on both platforms is practically the same (measured under the same circumstances).

Community

Which community is more useful (or better) depends on your needs.

The Shopware community consists of more than 40,000 members and is growing rapidly. You get free support in the form of a forum and a developer guide, or you use the paid plan to make sure you are always up to date.

The advantage of the Magento community compared to the Shopware community is the fact it is much larger and mainly available in English. The majority of the Shopware community exists of German-speaking members.

Links & Extensions

As mentioned before, with Magento you will benefit from a huge range of links and extensions. But, there are also many Shopware plugins available nowadays.

A small disadvantage of Shopware is that the community is mainly focused on the European market. This makes it sometimes difficult to get links and/or extensions suitable for international payment providers.

Magento is just a bit more extensive in this area and therefore more complete.

Security

Both platforms have done this well. Of course, with the comment they have to keep it up to date and provide it with secure, high-quality hosting.

Product management

Concerning product management, there are no significant differences.

Usability

Shopware characterizes itself by the easy-to-use administrator environment. This environment is not only flexible, but also simple to manage.

This makes it a great system to work with for the technically less skilled web store owners.

Regarding the development of the shop, you need less technical knowledge for Shopware than for Magento.

However, if you hire a developer, they can rely on a better community and better and faster codes.

Magento vs Shopware: a summary

Conclusion

Magento and Shopware are not inferior to each other. Market leader Magento will maintain its position as the market leader for the upcoming years. However, Shopware is growing fast, and so coming.

Due to the innovative nature of Shopware, it is interesting to see where they are going.

Both platforms are open source and are developing rapidly. May you have to choose between those platforms, you will never make a bad decision.

The success of your shop will not be dependent on that, in any case.

Magento vs BigCommerce

In the Netherlands, it might be less known, but BigCommerce has gained a place in the best e-commerce platforms of the world. Together with Magento, WooCommerce and Shopify, BigCommerce is the most used platform at the moment.

Basically, the platforms do not differ much, but there is one big difference: BigCommerce is, just as Shopify, a complete platform, including hosting.

Let’s take a closer look at the differences between Magento and BigCommerce.

Price

The price of BigCommerce is in line with Shopify. You pay an amount of money to run your webshop on BigCommerce. The advantage is that hosting is included in any case.

Are you looking for a fixed, low price per month, BigCommerce will be right for you. The downside is you are delivered to the hosting of BigCommerce itself. This gives you less freedom in optimizations and performance improvements.

If you are looking for flexibility and want to be in control? Magento will be a better choice for you.

SEO

Both Magento and BigCommerce do this well. A small advantage of BigCommerce compared to Magento is that all functionalities regarding SEO are standard in BigCommerce. If you want to achieve the same SEO performance with Magento as BigCommerce, that is possible by realizing the installation of some extra plugins or custom development.

Performance

Both platforms perform excellently in terms of performance. The disadvantage of BigCommerce is, may you want to adjust something, it is not always easy to do. In that respect, you will have much more freedom with Magento and everything can be adjusting how you’d like to.

Community

BigCommerce is doing good business here. BigCommerce offers 24/7 phone support and live support via chat for all pricing plans. It means you will be helped quickly, regardless of the hour.

Magento mainly offers support through the community and its users. It heavily depends on the forum and video tutorials, which is probably not enough for most of the problems.

Links & Extensions

For BigCommerce, there are less extensions available than Magento offers. That’s not really surprising, because features like product reviews, digital marketing and loyalty programs are already available at BigCommerce itself.

You are not dependent on applications or extensions, meaning no extra costs.

An important plugin for BigCommerce, and probably also immediately its strength: BigCommerce has a plugin for WordPress. This allows you to link the extensive CMS functionality of WordPress to the powerful webshop functionalities of BigCommerce.

The advantage of these extensions / plugins of BigCommerce is that they are installed easily, with only one push on the button.

If you want to set up a scalable webshop quickly, without having to worry about extra plugins, BigCommerce is a better solution than Magento.

Security

BigCommerce knows how to deal with the security of a website. All important security requirements are available, like PCI compliance, payments-gateways and hosting related security measures.

Also here is applicable, Magento is at least as secure as BigCommerce, provided you have sufficient knowledge to secure it yourself. There are more things involved in this (like hosting) than with BigCommerce, where everything is sorted for you.

as BigCommerce hosts and maintains your platform, it ensures all merchants are PCI-compatible. With Magento, merchants are solely responsible for meeting the standards of PCI-compliance themselves. For example, you must keep yourself informed of any patches or bug fixes that affect security.

Product management

Both e-commerce platforms do this very well. Both Magento and BigCommerce can handle complex catalogs that are nevertheless relatively easy to manage.

Usability

Both platforms still have something to gain here. Particularly due to the use of unnecessary difficult terms, it is sometimes hard to find your way in the backend of both platforms.

BigCommerce is easier to use than Magento, mainly because it doesn’t require its own hosting migration.

Also, to use BigCommerce you don't need to know any code to adjust your website. Everything for this can be easily found in the BigCommerce dashboard.

Magento vs Bigcommerce: a summary

Conclusion

Again, there is no good or bad choice, or a clear winner. The choice between Magento and BigCommerce depends on many factors; are you fast-growing, do you want to scale easily, don’t you have a large budget and do you have little technical knowledge? BigCommerce is a good choice for you.

If you are an established retailer, you want maximum control over your shop, you have sufficient technical knowledge and enough time to set up the shop, then Magento is the right choice.