Shopify Plus vs Magento Enterprise – Which One to Pick and Why?

Although Shopify and Magento are two of the best eCommerce development platforms, they might not be all that good at managing the websites for companies on a higher level, churning out millions of dollars in sales every year. That’s where Magento Enterprise and Shopify Plus come into the picture.

Both of these platforms have been highly popular in developing high-scale eCommerce SEO websites. But which one is better? That’s what we are aiming to determine in this article. We have compared them based on factors like customisation options, user-friendliness, scalability, pricing, etc.

What Is Shopify Plus?

Released in February 2014, Shopify Plus is a premium paid version of the popular eCommerce development platform Shopify and provides additional features, integration, and dedicated support to the companies. But Shopify plus has the same basic features and dashboard as Shopify free version.

A few of the most popular companies and websites using Shopify Plus are Hawkers, Budweiser, Current Body, Protein World, Nestle, Kylie Jenner, PepsiCo, Gymshark, etc.

What Is Magento Enterprise?

Initially launched in April 2009, Magento Enterprise, also known as Adobe Commerce, is a premium version of Magento used for creating quick and cost-effective eCommerce websites with unique functionalities, better performance, and highly-powerful business tools. That ensures the website is of good enough quality to stay ahead of the competition.

Some of the biggest clients of Magento Enterprise are Helly Hansen, End Clothing, BrewDog, Bulk Powders, Paul Smith, MADE.com, and Paperchase.

Comparison Of Shopify Plus And Magento Enterprise

Let’s take a look at a comprehensive table comparing Shopify Plus & Magento Enterprise.

Pros & Cons Of Shopify Plus

Let’s check out the pros of Shopify Plus:

• Fantastic Customer Support: With features like Launch Manager and Merchant Success Manager, Shopify Plus’ customer support is regarded amongst the best in the world.

• Security: Shopify Plus has a Level 1 PCI DSS security compliance, which lets the business owner protect their customers’ private data from cyber threats or fraud. 

• Marketing: Shopify Plus is highly regarded for providing its users with excellent marketing abilities, along with a basic set of SEO features.

• Scalability: With Shopify Plus, you can expect just about 100% uptime, unlimited bandwidth, and unlimited sales to grow the business for more traffic and sales.

• Analytics and Reports: Shopify Plus provides users with the ability to analyze your customers and their patterns on your website. That will help you create better strategies to reach out to them in order to increase sales and revenue.
• APIs: The APIs and SDKs offered by Shopify Plus can be used for any kind of strategy you may have in mind.
• Customizations: Shopify Plus lets you customize your eCommerce store extensively to ensure a better user experience and better functionalities.

After the pros, let’s check out the cons of Shopify Plus:

• Limited Product Variants: Shopify Plus, just like basic Shopify, does not let business owners add more than 100 product variants.

• Platform Lock-in: Just like any other hosted platform, if Shopify runs into any financial troubles, your store, along with the platform, would go into lock-in, making it harder for you to conduct any sales.

• Wholesale Restrictions: Shopify Plus is an excellent platform for B2C sales. But when it comes to selling products from businesses to businesses (also known as B2B), you will need to add certain third-party extensions or applications for smooth operation, which can be a downside to this platform. However, Shopify Plus gets constant updates, which could help solve this issue.

Now that we have covered the benefits and drawbacks of Shopify Plus let’s take a look at the pros and cons of Magento Enterprise.

Pros & Cons of Magento Enterprise

Let’s take a look at the pros of Magento Enterprise:

• Customizability: With Magento Enterprise’s extensive range of customization options, you can fulfill your desires for whatever kind of customization you want to perform on your eCommerce store.

• Performance: Magento Enterprise’s robust architecture lets you create and manage eCommerce websites that can handle high-intensity traffic and still ensure quick loading times.

• Scalability: Magento Enterprise offers unlimited product variants to ensure large businesses are able to add any product to their inventory at any point in time.

• Security: With a high level of security, you can protect your critical website information and customer data from cyber attacks.

After the pros, let’s discuss the cons of Magento Enterprise:

• Complexity: Since Magento Enterprise involves a steep learning curve, people without suitable technical expertise may find it harder to create and manage eCommerce websites.

• Limited hosting options: Magento Enterprise may not be compatible with all the hosting options available.

• Cost: With the platform fees starting from over $20,000, Magento Enterprise is quite an expensive eCommerce development platform, especially compared to Shopify Plus.

Now that we have checked out the pros and cons of both Shopify Plus and Magento Enterprise, it would be easier to make a decision.

Top Features of Shopify Plus And Magento Enterprise

Here are the top features of Magento Enterprise:

• Targeted Strategy: With this advanced feature, Magento Enterprise can help the eCommerce website automatically personalize the content displayed on the main page and the promotions offered to the customers based on the customers’ order history, address, and the contents in their shopping carts.

• Cutting-edge Content Management: Unlike the basic Magento package, you will find drag-and-drop content management in Magento Enterprise, which allows the developers to stand and preview the content before publishing them.

• Advanced Search: With its elastic search feature, Magento Enterprise lets you offer the customer a better user experience. A few of the common subfeatures of Advanced search by Magento Enterprise are quick to autocomplete, product attribute option search, and automatic search suggestions (or Did You Mean?) in case of mistyping or misspelling.

• Advanced Merchandising and Promotion Tools: Magento Enterprise is an excellent eCommerce development platform with advanced features like flexible pricing and promotions, customer segmentation tools, Drag and drop merchandising, and rules-based cross-sales and up-sales. These tools help create automated strategies to improve the traffic and sales on your eCommerce website.

• B2B Support: One of the most significant features of Magento Enterprise is the advanced B2B support. So if you are looking to conduct business-to-business (B2B) sales, this platform would be excellent with functionalities like quotes, product exclusivity, requisition lists, negotiated pricing, and corporate accounts.

After Magento Enterprise, let’s check out the top features of Shopify Plus:

• Store replication: Shopify Plus has a merchant success manager, which helps replicate your store so you can make the necessary changes to your scripts. It replicates every part of your eStore, including the products, themes, and sensitive information. After making the changes in the scripts, you can test them and use them on the live store. Replicating the store and making multiple scripts won’t cost you anything extra.

• Multiple Stores: One of the best features of Shopify Plus is that it lets you open multiple eStores without paying anything extra. So you can diversify your business through different sites in different countries and regions. For example, the main website is Amazon.com, but the site in India is Amazon.in, and the one in the UK is Amazon.co.uk.

• Advanced Security: Shopify Plus includes a site-wide Level 1 PCI DSS, which makes the websites more trustworthy.

• Dedicated Success Manager: This dedicated success manager helps launch the website quite smoothly.

• Script Editing: Shopify Plus lets you edit or update the script as per your requirements to improve every aspect of the website, including the payment gateway, customer fields, shipping options, etc.

• Effortless Integration: Shopify Plus lets you integrate the website with multiple applications to improve its appearance and functionalities to the fullest. Moreover, you can integrate third-party platforms like ERP, WMS, PIM, 3PL, etc., into your eCommerce website.

• Wholesale management: Another one of the significant features of Shopify Plus is wholesale management. As you already know, you can create multiple stores through Shopify Plus. One of those stores could be a wholesale store for B2B operations to scale up and diversify the business more effortlessly.

Now that you know the advantages and disadvantages of Magento Enterprise and Shopify Plus, as well as the top features, it might be easier to choose between these two eCommerce development platforms.

Conclusion

Shopify Plus & Magento Enterprise are the advanced versions of already popular eCommerce website development platforms. Although both of them can help design and create highly-functional eCommerce websites, if you want to choose between them, you would have to consider your requirements and expectations from the platform.

If you want to create a customized, scalable, integrated eStore, you would be better off with Shopify Plus. But if you are a million-dollar revenue business looking for a large-scale website, it would be better to consider Magento Enterprise.

But whichever platform you choose, better consider factors like pricing, flexibility, and scalability, merchandising, SEO, extensions, multi-store management, and B2B functionalities.

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