Shopify and Magento are two leading e-commerce solutions having built a reputation for creating and managing online store for your businesses. Being the most widely acknowledged platforms, both have their shares of virtue and vices when it comes to online selling. Before you decide to choose either one of them for your business, you need to understand the fundamental differences between both the platforms and the services rendered by them. Let us understand a few things that will help you making a right decision for your business.
1. Shopify is a paid platform though they provide free trial for 14 days. Nonetheless, it is well established with slick themes and professionally designed interface to help you get the best of your business. Magento, on the other hand, is free of cost. Magento, known as Magento Community Edition, is open-source software which uses extensions for a richer online presence.

2. Shopify provides a neat and user-friendly interface so it is fairly easier to set up as compared to Magento. Both of these platforms offer basic store functionalities with ease of access but if you are not willing to invest so much time building high-end technical API and you want things to be easy to administer, then go for Shopify.

3. The biggest strength of Shopify is user’s full control over template engine. The customization is super easy with impressive API and you can use it with little or less knowledge of high-end web designing skills. With Magento you need to invest time getting to know-how or learn the template structure in general. So comparatively less tech worries with Shopify in this case unless you have lot of time to spend learning Magento.
Another side to this feature is the cost factor. While Magento lets you buy themes at just $1, paid themes at Shopify start at whooping $80. That’s huge but point to be noted here is that the themes provided by Shopify are more contemporary than those of Magento.

4. Shopify has robust payment gateway system with support for nearly 70 payment gateways which is far more than that provided by Magento. However, you can add diverse payment gateways on Magento using the third party add-ons.

5. Both provide flexible options to calculate shipping charges as an e-commerce storefront. However, things can be bit tricky and lengthy while issuing a costumer refund on Magento as compared to Shopify which exhibits one-click ‘Refund’ button on the order page itself.

6. Magento provides provision for using coupon and discount codes to shoppers while Shopify does not provide this feature on all other plans except for their Starter plan.

7. Magento offers you unlimited number of items to be sold via their store. Shopify is at a bit of disadvantage here as its Starter plan restricts you to maximum of 25 items.

8. Managing things can be a grave concern even if your e-commerce storefront provides you with plethora of features. That’s the downside of using Magento. The server performance and site loading issues are common with Magento unlike that of Shopify. Shopify is fully hosted and way better at inventory management as it will take care of the code maintenance and server security issues.

9. Adding extensions is a child’s play on Shopify, just a couple of clicks and you are done. On Magento, chances are that you will run into extension incompatibility issues more than often which will restrict your functionality and implementation of new features on your virtual shop.

10. Shopify provides enhanced Google Analytics support with better fraud detection mechanism.

Well, taking all these sweeping changes to get to the conclusion, Shopify is definitely a winner!