Magento Vs Shopify Vs BigCommerce – Which is the best E-Commerce platform for you? (cgcolors.com)

Picking out an unerring E-Commerce platform for your business may involve taking prudent decisions. Before taking the final call, one must consider determining a host of essential factors including the range of Themes, payment gateway integration, customization of features, simplicity, and many more. To have a grandstanding platform, your chosen E-commerce platform should be more than just simple and relevant. With a substantial contribution made by big names like Magento, Big Commerce, and Shopify, this write-up shall give you an honest and transparent review of what could be the most elite choice for your business based on its experience level.

That being said, let’s take a plunge to read on to know how these platforms can be different and commendable in their own ways:

Shopify

1. Templates: create the first impression on your website’s viewers which also turns out to be a deciding factor in whether the viewers might choose to stay onyour website or simply quit. A choice that can easily make your website striking from the rest is trusting Shopify’s templates. Made by independent creative designers, Shopify templates are modernistic, compact, and fresh. On top of it, customizing Shopify templates is easy Apart from their 26 free templates they also offer you a diverse range of paid templates from third-partywebsites, allowing you to explore more options to choose your dream design. The templates are customized using a language called Liquid.
2. Features: Shopify offers about 70 payment gateway options which however might vary from country to country. The most extensively used payment gateway sinclude Paypal, Stripe, Authorize.net, and Shopify’s very own payment gateway. With its built-in blogging options, Shopify easily makes the E-commerce website more interactive and SEO enabled. Include Shopify’s efficient point of sale transactions, the most outstanding of all features is the 500 Apps  (read our Most popular Shopify apps) that Shopify gifts its E-commerce owners, by which they can conveniently carry out their day-to-day business tasks.
3. User Friendliness: If your E-commerce site should define simplicity, by all means, Shopify is the platform that you will adore. Despite its unconventional approach to adding sub-pages and inserting multi-page contents, it is of great use for new comers in the E-commerce business who have no practical knowledge of coding. With elementary procedures and an easy-breezy content management system, your site maintenance can be an effortless task in contrast to other platforms. If need be, you can simply grasp the “Liquid” programming codes (a darn easy language) and customize your themes.
4. SEO friendliness: Shopify generates superb SEO  advantages through its multitudinous apps likeemailmarketing, social media integration, and discounted coupons and gift cards to attract more customers. It also provides an SEO-boosted content management system and in-built analytics that keeps track of the website’s periodic progress in sales.
5. Pricing: Depending on the experience level of your business, Shopify allows you to choose from the most imposing pricing plans of other platforms like Lite ($9/month), Basic($29/month), Pro($79/month) and unlimited($179/month). Whether you want a small website with no online store management or an E-commerce website that covers advanced options like carrier shipping, Shopify offers great flexibility in its pricing structures.
6. Development Cost: Although Shopify makes it easy for building an E-commerce platform by yourself, however, making sure that all the technologies are flawlessly integrated with your E-commerce platform, we assure you an impeccable custom shopify store development at $50/hour.

Bigcommerce

1. Templates: With 7 free templates and 67 paid templates, BigCommerce allows fewer varieties in theme options, unlike Shopify. Although its templates are professional and admirable, their designs lack jauntiness and stylishness, whereas Shopify is an old winner. It uses a simple HTML and CSS framework to customize the templates, unlike the advanced versions that are used by Magento.
2. Features: Bigcommerce allows about 40 payment gateway options. In Paypal, BigCommerce offers some impressive payment process rates, which make E-commerce owners more favorable to it. With the recent launch of BigCommerce next, a great built-in blogging platform, Big-commerce is now giving a hard time to Shopify’s widely used built-in blogging feature. For abandoned cart recovery features, Bigcommerce follows up thrice with its automated emails in contrast to Shopify’s one-time automated emails. With rapidly growing app development dedicated to BigCommerce helping it to become a great success. Check out some of the best  BigCommerce apps which can supercharge your store
3. User-friendliness: BigCommerce offers attention to detail customization features. Although Shoppify rules with its simplified features, however it often makes simple tasks like adding several product images slightly difficult. To look after these small features along with a few additional , BigCommerce masters with its advanced functionalities giving a profound user experience.
4. Pricing: With lesser pricing plans, BigCommerce primarily includes plans like Silver ($29.99), Gold ($79.99), and platinum ($199.99) versions. BigCommerce also accommodates custom pricing for advanced-level businesses.
5. SEO-Friendliness: Despite Big commerce’s previous record on average SEO results, it has now competed with Magento and Shopify with some newly introduced features that optimize a higher return with greater chances of lead conversion. Promising almost 1/4th the cost that Magento offers, BigCommerce is undoubtedly creating its mark with its un-parallel SEO-friendliness.
6. Development Cost: Although BigCommerce is based on an intermediate-level understanding of HTML and CSS, however, you would surely need to rely on capable hands to trust your E-commerce website’s proper functioning. Our hourly rate for building a fantastic BigCommerce e-commerce store is $50/hour.

Magento

1. Templates: Magento (community edition) offers scores of free templates that exceed the number of free templates offered by both BigCommerce and Shopify. Although Shopify still wins the race with its offbeat and contemporary designs however Magento promises a surprisingly reasonable rate with its paid themes that start at $1 in contrast to Shopify’s paid themes starting at $80.
2. Features: Magento cracks the deal with its completely defined features to control the inventories, exhibit products, track down orders, fix the prices, and even manage international shipping information. It allows an unlimited addition and selling of items. However, unlike Shopify and BigCommerce, it gives restricted options in payment gateways. Overall, the editions for Community and enterprise give an amazing insight to build an exceptionally well-managed advanced E-commerce site for your online business.
3. User-friendliness: Although Magento is open source, it demands dexterous professionals with adequate knowledge in Advanced HTML and CSS for its modifications. This is quite a contrast to Shopify where its easy customization features make it score higher than any other E-commerce platform. Magento makes intricate details matter a lot and defines unique user-friendliness that other platforms may lack.
4. SEO Friendliness: Magento competes with Shopify neck to neck with its SEO friendliness. However with about 5000 apps it creates more horizons to a better SEO for your E-Commerce business.
5. Pricing: Magento is resource hungry platform that always needs exceptional coders along with high-speed servers, however surprisingly Magento community edition is free and open-source, so you wouldn’t have to worry about any monthly fee on top of development/hosting. Even though the Magento Enterprise edition involves custom pricing, many companies swear by its free version.
6. Development Cost: With the varying costs in hourly rates taken by different coders, we offer a reasonable solution of $75/hour for building a fully-fledged custom Magento E-commerce store.