
Magento Commerce vs. Shopify
Shopify is a template-based, SaaS commerce platform offering payment, marketing, and customer engagement tools required for running an online store. Shopify’s capabilities do not compare to Magento Commerce.
Compromised Simplicity
Ease of use is a Shopify hallmark, but understand what you'd give up if you choose Shopify instead of Magento Commerce:
Control over the Shopping Experience
Shopify’s template-based architecture:
- Lacks flexibility to fully customize, compromising your shopping experience
- Limits your ability to differentiate your site from other Shopify merchants
- Forces you to use Shopify’s programming language (Liquid) to make customizations, which require sourcing specialized developers from a much smaller development ecosystem than Magento’s
Performance Limitations
Companies planning rapid growth may hit performance ceilings with Shopify:
- Shopify throttles API data exchange calls between the core platform and apps/integrations, potentially degrading site performance and the customer experience
- Shopify’s locked down technology stack prevents you from monitoring, managing, or optimizing site performance
Missing or Deficient Capabilities
Shopify lacks the native features you need for maintaining a competitive eCommerce presence:
- No content staging and preview
- No drag and drop visual merchandising tools
- No advanced pricing rules, coupons, promotions, and store credit option
- No true built-in business intelligence capabilities
- No native support for complex product catalogues, subsite functionality, complex order management, or omnichannel capabilities
- Limited ability to centrally manage multiple sites (e.g. different brands, regions, or currencies) from a single instance
- Limited extensibility and integration with 3rd party solutions
- Rudimentary B2B capabilities
Limited Commerce Ecosystem
Magento has a large, vibrant ecommerce ecosystem that helps merchants achieve success. Compared to Magento, Shopify’s ecosystem is smaller:
- Shopify’s use of a proprietary programming language (Liquid), and its low adoption in the market, translates to a smaller developer community with fewer resources to support Shopify merchant success
- Shopify’s App marketplace offers only hundreds of commerce applications compared to Magento’s thousands, thus limiting the use cases Shopify can address without custom coding

Control, Capabilities, and Community - Native to Magento Commerce 2
Magento Commerce offers rich features out of the box, empowering growth-oriented merchants across the globe.
- Retain complete control to deliver superior shopping experiences with no limits to what can be customized
- Benefit from a large, global commerce ecosystem – The Magento ecosystem is a vibrant developer and partner community available to directly drive merchant success across a wide variety of use cases, industries, and geographies
- Fast-track sales growth with capabilities that help you convert more visitors and rapidly expand into new markets and sales channels
- Deliver outstanding performance at scale with an optimized infrastructure and modernized core architecture that provides visibility and doesn’t throttle performance