While creating an online shopping store and measuring the important factors responsible for either its success or failure, a suitable ecommerce platform plays a very important role as that helps create, manage and maintain the online shopping store. This is particularly important for a small business since it has to make do with limited resources and budgets.

Magento and Shopify are two biggest contenders to choose the ecommerce platform. Below listed are some of the major factors that will help you choose between Shopify and Magento:

• Shopify is a commercial product with a monthly subscription fee whereas Magento is a free open source software.
• Shopify is hosted by Shopify itself and can be set up in minutes. On the other hand, Magento requires you to set up your own hosting, then install, setup and configure everything before you can even start building and branding your online shopping store. This setup which usually needs medium to high level of web development and programming skills.
• Shopify has proven to be significantly easier to set up and use on the basis of its online store functionality as compared to Magento.
• The Shopify starter plan restricts you to a maximum of 25 items while Magento offers a virtually unlimited number of items.
• Both Shopify and Magento platforms allow flexible and powerful options for calculation of Shipping charges and these are some of the most basic and essential aspects of selling online.
• Shopify has a major edge with Payment gateway options with support of 70 payment gateways while Magento is relatively at a disadvantage with support for a far lower number of gateways.
• Shopify has over 100 apps and add ons which you can enhance and expand the functionality of your online store in various ways. Magento, on the other hand has 5000+ apps and add-ons, owning, to open source platform.
• Shopify does not offer full multilingual capabilities directly. Third party apps are needed for the same. Magento here has an advantage with more in-built multi-lingual support.

Thus, for a person considering an ecommerce website to run an online business must pay attention to the above points and accordingly decide if they want to go for Shopify or Magento platform.