Magento vs. Shopware: Choosing the Right E-Commerce Platform for Your Business

There are so many options for developing an online store that it can be difficult to decide on a specific platform.

It's like a simple trip to the market. For example, if you want to buy ingredients for a cake without preparing a list and when you see a variety of products in the supermarket, you may not be able to choose the ones that best suit your goals. On the other hand, if you have a list of specific products at hand, you will have no doubts and will not waste your valuable time comparing products. You already know exactly what you need.

A study comparing e-commerce platforms conducted by Builtwith shows that Magento e-commerce is one of the most popular e-commerce platforms on the web. But in the last few years, Shopware rapidly is growing in popularity. 

Shopware and Magento – both are exceptional in terms of usable features and are extremely popular. It is not easy to choose the best option and comparing the features of each platform can create a lot of confusion, while making decision on which platform you should choose for your website ever more difficult.

Magento shop system at a glance 

Magento is the most well-known e-commerce platform, certainly in terms of self-hosted solutions. Magento handles over $100 billion in gross merchandise volume each year. 

Using Magento for online shop offers many advantages. In addition to the exclusive features for a software entirely focused on ecommerce sales, it has significant differences from other platforms. It has one of the best security and SEO technologies among all ecommerce platforms. 

Advantages of Magento: 

• All-in-one e-commerce solution with countless functions
• Flexible adaptability and expandability
• Multi-shop and multi-language capability i
• Extensive marketing, promotion and social commerce features
• High usability
• Self-hosting on any PHP hosting
• Easy to find available developers in case customization is needed
• The software is free to start
• Widespread and well-known platform
• An active community 
• Highly scalable 

In addition to the features preinstalled on the platform, Magento has a marketplace full of paid or free modules to extend the functionality and to fulfil your needs. Modules for shipping, payments, billing methods or various marketing extensions can be purchased to promote products and content more dynamically.

A great advantage of Magento eCommerce is that the default theme of the platform is already well developed and edited. However, if there is a wish to change the look of the website, there are several themes to choose on Magento Marketplace  

Source: BuiltWith https://trends.builtwith.com/shop/Magento             

Explanation of the scheme: TOP 10K, 100K, 1m - means: TOP of websites by traffic, so among the 100K most popular websites, for example, Magento-based websites took about 1750 in 2022. Among the TOP 1m in the same year - about 8750.   

The most important Magento functions at a glance:

• Inventory management
• Processing of shipping costs
• Voucher
• Multiple payment options
• API for web services
• Optimized for mobile phones and tablets
• Built-in SEO functions
• Customer groups
• Newsletter management
• Marketing tools
• Order processing
• Customer service
• Integrated payment methods and shipping methods. 

You can read more about this in our article .

Magento is more business oriented. It offers a free Community Edition, which is very powerful, and an Enterprise Edition for large companies. 

Magento Community Edition is open source and is free for anyone to use, so the only cost will depend on your current hosting provider. The Enterprise Edition, on the other hand, is not free. In our article  “ Costs for creating and supporting Magento online shops ” one can read more about the costs of this shop system. Magento shop solution is mainly used by large retailers like Samsung and Nespresso as well as countless small and medium-sized e-commerce companies.

Shopware shop system at a glance 

Shopware is the leading e-commerce platform in Germany, which is making a big leap in the global market. It is a modular online shop system with over 91,000 customers worldwide that was first released in 2004 as open source software. In February 2022, Shopware AG took a significant step in its strategic development in a partnership with the two renowned investors Carlyle and PayPal. In addition, Shopware is very actively developing the English-speaking market and has very good chances of becoming the most used e-commerce software. 

Source: BuiltWith https://trends.builtwith.com/shop/Shopware           

Explanation of the scheme: TOP 10K, 100K, 1m - means: TOP of the websites in terms of traffic, i.e. among the 100K most popular websites, for example, the Shopware-based websites took almost 125 in 2021. Among the TOP 1m in the same year - over 1000.               

Here are some advantages at a glance:

• Over 55,000 satisfied customers, the system is precisely tailored to the needs and requirements of the German market.
• Clear and easy-to-use backend 
• Many responsive templates 
• Shopping worlds 
• Integrated blog   
• Intuitive and clear structure in the front-end 
• Affiliate and voucher system                
• Effective Google ranking 
• Multi-shop and multi-language capable 
• Product variants, stock levels, availability status and prices can be adjusted or added flexibly and quickly.                 
• Integrated payment methods and shipping methods. You can read more about this in our article .  
• Numerous plugins in the Shopware Store, which extend the shop functionality. You can read more about this in our article “ The most popular plugins for Shopware 6 at a glance ” 
• From version Shopware 6 Professional Edition (also Shopware Cloud and Enterprise) there are options for designing individualized products - this is possible with the premium extension “ Custom Products ”, which is available in the Shopware Store. In our article “ Shopware product configurator as an essential tool for your online shop ” you will learn about further possibilities of a product configurator. 

There are the following editions of Shopware:

• Shopware Community Edition (free)
• Shopware Rise
• Shopware Evolve
• Shopware Beyond

We have created an article “ Costs for creating and supporting Shopware 6 shops ” with a comparison of the prices. If you are interested in a B2B shop with Shopware, we recommend our article " Shopware 6 B2B - the solution for your company ".

Since Magento is packed with features, using this software is quite complicated. If you are not tech savvy then using Magento may not be user friendly for you. Magento interface is complex as it contains thousands of different settings. Magento setup and customization can present real difficulties. Shopware is much simpler in that sense. In addition, it also has better performance: 

If you already have an online shop based on Magento and are thinking of migrating to Shopware, we recommend our article “ Advantages of migrating from Magento to Shopware ”. Here we have compared the two systems in detail. 

Our agency has been dealing with various e-commerce software solutions for years, we are also conversion optimization experts and would be happy to advise you on Shopware, Magento and other e-commerce software. As a conversion optimization agency, we offer services in this area. Our references tell more about us.