Magento and Shopware - store systems in comparison

When it comes to choosing the right store system, there are several aspects that need to be considered. Whether it is the tech stack or features that are elementary for one's own business success. The store system is the heart of any e-commerce business and is primarily responsible for the shopping experience of your customers. Therefore, you should ask yourself how fast, clear and comfortable is the user and shopping experience for your customers?

For this, we have compared two e-commerce systems that are often shortlisted and highly recommended for you in this post. These are Magento or Adobe Commerce and Shopware.

Magento and Shopware are among the most widely used store systems. Both offer similar features and both enable performant, large e-commerce platforms. However, they differ in details that gain weight depending on market niche, budget, target group and special requirements.

Magento / Adobe Commerce

As of spring 2021, Magento Commerce has been renamed Adobe Commerce. Magento now only refers to the open source version.

Magento & Adobe Commerce are modern open source solutions for performant online stores and e-commerce companies. Magento offers an enormous number of features and basics to meet individual requirements and is very flexible, customizable and scalable. Thus, the store system is primarily aimed at medium-sized companies, but is now also appealing to more and more enterprise customers.

Shopware

Shopware is a modern e-commerce platform and web store solution from Germany. With the latest version, Shopware 6, there is a modern and easily maintainable technology stack with Symfony and Vue.js.

In addition, Shopware offers an intuitive user interface in the backend and the perfect customer experience by merging content and commerce in the frontend. Shopware was founded in 2003 in Germany. The target group are small and medium-sized companies from B2B and B2C worldwide, who welcome the comparatively low costs and necessary development resources. However, enterprise companies are also increasingly turning to the simple, flexible and yet enormously versatile solution.

Magento vs. Shopware - differences

When comparing and ultimately choosing a store system, you should ask yourself the following questions: How high are the sales and goods throughput, which license model fits best and with which hosting partner do I find the best performing solution? The administration of the store can also be decisive: Do many employees have to work directly with the system and how technically skilled are they?

Probably the most striking difference is the corporate background of the two systems: Magento belongs to Adobe and is particularly widespread internationally. As a result, there are more developers for Magento internationally. Despite the global focus of the platform, there are ready-made plugins specifically for Germany, for example, for German VAT, returns, etc. Magento is ideally designed for stores with an international target group, since multilingualism is already integrated in the standard version.

As a German provider, Shopware, on the other hand, is also an attractive choice with its product with German headquarters and German support. In Germany, Shopware is the market leader. The German developer landscape for Shopware is also particularly diverse. A special feature of Shopware is the so-called "shopping world". This is a visual editor for product pages and landing pages that makes it easy to expand the store in WYSIWYG style without deep technical knowledge. This is helped by drag-and-drop of images and widgets, grids for layout and much more.

With Magento, this visual aspect is not as pronounced, but can be supplemented to some extent by plugins. With the "Page Builder", Magento now also offers a form of drag-and-drop for store pages. Shopware is therefore currently still somewhat better suited for maintaining the inventory and the appearance of the store without a technical background. Shopware is also ahead of the game when it comes to connecting to social media platforms, where there is direct integration, whereas Magento lacks this out of the box.

As direct competitors, the two store system providers have more in common than they have differences. This applies to both the functional and technical levels. Finally, both allow store operators to create an unlimited number of categories and products. Product comparisons in the front end are also offered by both systems. The list of similarities is long when it comes to Magento vs Shopware. They are both solutions open source applications. Both are based on PHP, both offer integrated Varnish cache and image compression to limit delivery times of store pages and the transferred data volume. CSS and Javascript compression, further factors for the loading time of the store pages, also exist in both solutions. Among other things, both use Symfony as a framework. A decision for one of the two store systems is complex. You can't say that one store system is better than the other. Despite our comparison between Magento Shopware, it depends on your individual requirements. Of course, in Germany the support of a manufacturer from Schöppingen is easier. However, this should not be an argument against Magento, as the developer community is much larger overall and there is also a very large Magento ecosystem in Germany.

Magento

Outlook

Magento and Adobe Commerce are on very solid footing thanks to the acquisition by Adobe, and constant further development is thus guaranteed. Although Adobe's focus is somewhat more in the direction of enterprise customers, SMB customers will also continue to receive far-reaching improvements with Magento.

• Through the takeover by Adobe, Magento has gained some implementation strength.
• Development is going strong, especially for Enterprise.

Shopware

Outlook

Shopware has been around longer than Magento, but version 6 is relatively new. It offers a modern and clean foundation and is constantly being upgraded, but some features are still under development.

Shopware 6 has great potential with its new technology stack and approach and will develop rapidly. Especially the easy upgradeability is perfect for e-commerce beginners with ambitions as well as for medium sized companies with growth strategy.

Features

Magento vs. Shopware

Conclusion - Shop Hosting from the Cloud

Both shop systems are very good e-commerce solutions for implementing an online store. Both systems are available in an open source version, which already covers the most important cases. Both offer high performance, but also have their strengths and weaknesses. Such a powerful store system requires the right infrastructure. On the one hand, scalability and elasticity are particularly important. In each case, this means that the infrastructure can be adapted to requirements. After all, in day-to-day business and online commerce, no two days are ever the same. Seasonal business and promotion days mean that the rush on the store can change from one day to the next.

Timeouts, long loading times during shopping or server errors during checkout inevitably mean direct loss of sales. Infrastructure must never stand in the way of business success. To achieve this, companies need a robust and scalable substructure for their store. Elasticity, scalability and the right experience with the specific application are just as important here as permanent availability.

Which store system you ultimately choose depends above all on your requirements and your planning for the store project. We are happy to help you with the initial considerations for your individual store project or a relaunch request. We start with a non-binding initial consultation in which we determine your most important requirements. As experts, we at CCE support you not only with reliable Magento hosting or Shopware hosting, but also with the architecture of the appropriate setup for the chosen store system.