Shopify vs Joomla

With the advancement of technology, different sectors are shifting from traditional marketing to digital marketing. Each and every organization whether small or big wants to have a digital presence so they want to build their websites, portfolios, blogs etc. but making websites or web applications is a complex and time-consuming task which requires coding skills. Hence to solve this problem, many organizations have provided website building and content management platforms which make it easy to create web applications. Two such platforms are Joomla and Shopify which provides different services to build websites and web applications for personal or commercial use.

Shopify can be understood as an e-commerce platform which is used to provide customers services to sell their products online without creating their own store. It is a paid platform where users can make their accounts and choose from a number of templates and can build their e-commerce website to sell their products. Shopify provides all the necessary tools and equipment needed to build an online store.

Advantages of Shopify

• It provides an easy interface to build e-commerce stores.
• Set up and configuring Shopify is very easy and fast.
• It comes with robust tools for customizing templates according to the user’s needs.
• It has advanced SEO features which increase the indexing of the e-commerce store.
• It provides an in-built payment gateway.

Disadvantages of Shopify

• It does not provide free plans, everything is paid.
• It charges a transaction fee if used a payment gateway other than provided by Shopify.

Joomla can be understood as a content management platform which helps in building interactive web applications and websites. The development credit of this platform goes to Open Source Matters Incorporation. It was initially launched in 2005. It was developed using the OOPS concept of programming languages and is written in PHP. MySQL and PostgreSQL are used as databases to store information.

Advantages of Joomla:

• It has a large number of ready to use themes so no need to build from scratch.
• It provides advanced
•  marketing tools to increase customer reach.
• It provides tracking tools to evaluate performance.
• Nearly 2 million websites being built with this platform are currently active.
• It comes with enhanced security features to prevent unauthorized access.  

Disadvantages of Joomla:

• Loading speed is slow as compared to other platforms.
• Basic features are free but hosting charges are paid. 

Below is a table of differentiation between Joomla and Shopify:

	Shopify	Joomla
1.	It is an e-commerce platform which provides services to make an online store to sell goods.	It is a content management platform for building websites and web applications.
2.	It was founded by Tobias Lutke, Daniel Weinand and Scott Lake.	It was developed by the members of the Open Source Matters Incorporation and Joomla community.
3.	It provides only 17 pre-built free templates.	It provides an unlimited number of free templates.
4.	It is a paid platform and no free service is available.	It is a free and open-source platform.
5.	It provides the best SEO functionalities for increasing online visibility.	It provides good SEO features to rank the websites.
6.	It supports web-based, android based and iPhone based platforms.	It only supports web-based platforms.
7.	It provides a large number of integrations including Instagram, HubSpot CRM, meta for business etc.	The number of integrations is less as compared to Shopify.
8.	It does not provide commenting feature but allows categorization and Cataloging.	It provides commenting feature.