Shopify has been on a tear and growing their marketshare aggressively. From the news reports, one would think that Shopify is the only eCommerce platform out there and Adobe Commerce / Magento has been vanquished as an option. That is clearly not the case. Magento has a thriving community and continues to power some of the biggest and best eCommerce sites.
Here is where Shopify stacks-up against Adobe Commerce / Magento:
Shopify
PROs
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Easy to use.
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Easy to modify.
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Good base functionality.
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Large developer community
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Large apps marketplace
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Upgrades are not required
CONs
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Customizations require combinations of front-end code, 3rd party apps, tags, or Private Apps.
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When you have to build Private Apps, you can build really custom solutions, but in doing so, you negate the “low maintenance” value of the SaaS platform.
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No SDLC support (ie. no easy setup of Stage vs. Prod environments). You need to manually replicate the environments. This makes it really tough to implement strong enterprise development processes.
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Limited B2B eCommerce functionality.
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To have a highly functional store you need a lot of 3rd party modules. The conflicts between them, and their cumulative costs really add up.
Magento
PROs
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Industry-leading B2C and B2B functionality.
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Multiple types of products are available by default (ie. simple, configurable, kits, bundles)
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Engineers can fully customize the functionality. No need to work around SaaS platform’s API limitations.
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Strong headless commerce capabilities.
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Large apps marketplace to extend B2B and B2C functionality (checkout Mage Array’s Extensions)
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As a LAMP stack application, Magento integrates smoothly into modern SDLC environments
CONs
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Adobe Commerce / Magento is more complex to manage and maintain than Shopify. For any serious eCommerce Merchant that has scale and multiple systems, some level of complexity should be expected.
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Adobe Commerce / Magento must be updated periodically. These updates can be time consuming and costly.
Conclusion
There are different use cases to select Adobe Commerce / Magento versus Shopify. For any eCommerce business that targets both B2B and B2C customers, Adobe Commerce / Magento is the best eCommerce platform available. No apologies here Shopify fanboys….. Shopify clearly is a good platform, but Magento is significantly more flexible and capable that Shopify.
