Shopware 6 vs Magento 2: Can the New Player Dethrone the Leading CMS?

Having an eCommerce store allows you to sell products 24/7 to a global audience and to spend fewer costs compared to running a physical shop. Yet, the variety of existing eCommerce CMS is so wide that it’s hard to decide which one to choose. In this article, we’ll compare two of the most attractive options on the current cart CMS market – Shopware 6 vs Magento 2. Read on, if you want to build a web store or migrate from Magento 1 which won’t be supported after 2020.

Both CMS have a lot in common. They are open-source that allows endless customization opportunities and scaling the store as your business expands. Both have communities of developers and shop owners around them. Even community events including “Magento Live” as well as “Meet Magento” have analogs regarding Shopware.

Having solid expertise in the eCommerce development at Dinarys, we know all the ins and outs of both CMS. We’ve chosen only the most valuable decision making criteria to help you make a balanced solution. Ready? Let’s dive in!

Developed in 2008, Magento is one of the leading eCommerce platforms in the world. It has 12% of the global eCommerce market share and powers over 250,000 online stores. Magento can be called the industry standard regarding eCommerce CMS. The number of Magento 2 features and configurations seems nearly endless. It has the biggest popularity in the US and Great Britain, according to builtwith.com. Among the Magento customers are Nike, Burger King, Christian Louboutin, Rosetta Stone, Vizio and many others.

Shopware was founded in Germany in 2000. It has above 80,000 installations. It’s the leading CMS in the German-Speaking Countries including Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. It is among the top 4 leading eCommerce platforms in Germany with a market share of 6,17%.

But in the last few years, Shopware has become recognized as a good alternative to the more expensive and complex Magento. On the table below, 1,384 webshop owners decided to perform Magento 2 migration to Shopware. Besides, customers migrate to Shopware from other platforms like osCommerce, PrestaShop, etc.

Usability

Admin panel usability lets you tweak configurations and manage content of your e-Store easier. Its helps you or your employees to spend less time on such operations.

Shopware

Shopware boasts to have a simple-to-use admin dashboard from the initial release. Because of this, it’s much easier to start using this CMS for new users. Shopware backend is compatible with any OS and browser.

Shopware has a great feature that enables you to open numerous menu items simultaneously with no page reloads. Also, it supports double-click and drag-and-drop features. It can help to spend your time more productively compared to Magento.

Magento

Magento 2 has received slightly better UI compared to the previous version. But still,  Magento’s UI is much more complex as it contains probably thousands of different settings. Thus, you’ll have to refer to the Magento 2 documentation or search help online. Performing the Magento 2 installation and making configurations is also challenging if you’re not familiar with coding.

Performance

Performance and consequently page load speed heavily affect eCommerce site user experience and conversion rates in the result. Check yourself, would you like to wait for 10s after entering each site you find at Google? The same goes for your customers. So if conversion rates and amount of sales are important metrics to you, make sure your site loads as quickly as it can.

Both CMS have a built-in Varnish Cache that is a necessity for any website, especially for eCommerce one. However, Shopware’s shopping worlds take additional time to run after page load. But it’s rather a minor disadvantage.

Shopware and Magento both offer enough performance for online stores with more than thousands of orders per day. They also enable CSS and JS files merging, image compression to improve it further.

In the image below, you can view the performance testing results of ShopWare 5 vs Magento 2.3.2 made on Medium. According to them, Shopware’s response time is faster concerning almost every tested web page.

Cost

Reducing costs is undoubtedly valuable for every business as it can increase your profit. However, product value and its benefits are also valuable and shouldn’t be neglected.

Both Magento 2 Community Edition and the Shopware CE are free. However, as your business grows you may need more advanced features.

Magento

Magento 2 Enterprise price is €17,870 per year

Shopware

Shopware is undoubtedly much cheaper. The Shopware Professional Edition costs €1,925 paid one-time. And the Professional+ Edition is €5,995. These prices also include a 12-month manufacturer support. There’s also the Enterprise Edition but the price is not specified on the official site. Hence, if you have a small to medium business or looking for a cheaper solution pay a close look at Shopware.

By the way, at Dinarys we have an advanced business analysis expertise in eCommerce. If you need a consultancy to choose between Shopware and Magento depending on your business peculiarities, you can drop us a line.

Community

Community aspect is important for everyone who want to quickly find a needed plugin or ask help from other users. This is doubly important regarding the open-source nature of Magento and Shopware and, therefore, wide customization opportunities.

Magento

There are more than 150,000 Magento 2 developers, making it one of the largest programmer communities globally. Magento Enterprise users can ask assistance at the official help desk. Nonetheless, the CE users can also search for solutions at developers’ portals or post there a question.

Shopware

The community of Shopware is more than 40,000 developers. That’s OK because they are mainly from Germany, while the Magento community is international. Nevertheless, Shopware’s official site also has the English localization. There you can find documentation and webinars covering Shopware as well as download Shopware plugins. For Professional and Professional+ Editions you can order a support service. According to the data we’ve found, It costs around €636 – €3264 per year.

Magento 2 SEO vs Shopware SEO

If your web store is difficult to find in the search engines then it doesn’t matter how beautiful or functional it is. SEO is one of the most popular ways to drive traffic to your site.

Magento

The ecommerce-platforms research shows that Magento is ranked 4th in the top eCommerce CMS with a score of 95 concerning SEO. Among Magento SEO capabilities are editing robots.txt file, adding Magento 2 sitemap, image optimization, canonical tags, working with meta tags, etc. However, all of them need to be configured manually. And with such a variety of these settings, it takes a decent amount of time and effort.

Shopware

In contrast, Shopware has all SEO settings configured automatically. You can still change them by hand. Nevertheless, shop owners with no SEO proficiency will surely benefit these automatic configs.

Cre: dinarys