Choosing the right website builder is one of the most important decisions a new business owner will make. The platform you select will shape your online presence and capabilities for years to come.
In this Strikingly vs Shopify comparison, we’ll examine two popular options—Strikingly and Shopify. These platforms help entrepreneurs quickly build professional websites to establish and grow their ventures.
We’ll evaluate Strikingly and Shopify across key criteria to reveal their strengths and weaknesses. We’ll look at market position, ease of use, design capabilities, built-in features, performance benchmarks, support resources, pricing, and reviews to determine if Strikingly or Shopify is better suited for your needs.
1. Understanding the Basics
Strikingly was founded in 2012 by David Chen, Danyang Lin, and Tianquing Pu. The company is headquartered in Shanghai, China and San Francisco, USA. Strikingly aims to provide an easy website builder tailored for small businesses, online stores, and professional brands. It has over 2 million users worldwide.
Shopify launched in 2006 when founders Tobias Lütke, Daniel Weinand, and Scott Lake built an online snowboard store that proliferated. Based in Ottawa, Canada, Shopify provides an e-commerce platform for businesses to create online stores and sell products. It has over 1 million merchants globally.
Both platforms have active Facebook communities:
- Strikingly Users Group
- Shopify Entrepreneurs and E-commerce
Regarding market share, Shopify is the leader powering over 1 million online stores. But Strikingly has seen fast growth, especially in Asia, as an easy and affordable alternative. Both are popular choices for launching e-commerce businesses.
2. Ease of Use
Strikingly
Strikingly aims to provide an intuitive, beginner-friendly interface. The editor has a clean, minimalist design with large icons for adding sections, formatting, and customizing your site. You simply drag and drop elements like text, images, galleries, and ecommerce widgets. Strikingly offers preset templates called “Starter Kits” tailored for blogs, online stores, and portfolios to simplify setup.
The editor lets you visually customize colors, fonts, and layouts without coding. Strikingly has an in-browser editor so you don’t have to install software. The interface works well on desktop and mobile. While the editor is easy to use, some advanced users may desire more customization capabilities. The learning curve is gentle, but you’ll still need to spend time learning how to use Strikingly’s specific tools.
Shopify
Shopify focuses on ease of use for e-commerce, providing an intuitive dashboard to manage products, orders, and shipping. The template-driven design studio lets you visually customize and preview your store. Drag-and-drop commerce widgets make setting up shopping carts, collections, and inventory seamless. Shopify offers support to migrate from other platforms.
Shopify is beginner-friendly, with a gentler learning curve for launching basic online stores. However, unlocking Shopify’s advanced features for subscriptions, drop shipping, and POS requires more specialized knowledge. Shopify’s multi-channel selling capabilities also introduce complexity. So the learning curve really depends on your specific business model. The interface works smoothly on mobile, but the desktop provides more menu options.
Winner: Shopify
For pure ease of use, Shopify wins. Its singular focus on commerce shines through in a highly intuitive store management and editing experience optimized for beginners. Strikingly provides an easy website builder, but Shopify’s user experience is tailor-made for e-commerce. The beginner learning curve is gentler, and the interface simplifies selling products online.
3. Design and Customization
Strikingly
Strikingly provides professionally designed and fully customizable templates and themes to choose from. There are over 100 free themes spanning categories like business, portfolio, restaurant, event, and blog. You’ll find options that are perfect for small businesses and medium sized businesses alike.
Themes are modern and mobile-optimized. You can preview themes to see how they look. Once selected, you can customize colors, fonts, and layouts.
Sections are easily added via the platform’s drag-and-drop editor. You can rearrange sections and add custom CSS or HTML for advanced customization. Strikingly has good multimedia support for images, videos, and galleries. The mobile site builder ensures your site looks great on smartphones. But overall customization is more limited compared to developers building fully custom sites.
Shopify
Shopify offers a wide range of free and paid themes for e-commerce sites. Themes are professionally designed with mobile responsiveness. You can filter themes by industry, layout, and features. Paid themes start at $140+ and offer more customization abilities.
The template editor lets you visually customize colors, fonts, and imagery without coding. You can tweak CSS and HTML code as well. Shopify allows the rearrangement of sections easily. Apps and integrations further extend customization. Shopify’s customization suits most basic to moderately advanced stores but falls short of full developer-level customization.
Winner: Tie
Strikingly and Shopify are website builders that offer similarly robust design and customization capabilities suitable for small businesses. Both provide mobile-optimized templates for easy website cretion. The templates are easy to customize without coding knowledge. We declare this category a tie since neither platform clearly outshines the other for building great-looking sites. The needs of different businesses vary, so assess their templates and features against your specific requirements.
4. Features and Functionality
Blogging Tools
Strikingly
Strikingly provides built-in blogging capabilities for users to create content on their sites. The editor makes it easy to create blog posts with the drag-and-drop interface. You can categorize posts, add tags, and include images or videos.
Strikingly has basic formatting options for text styling, lists, links, and quotes. There is also support for adding code blocks. You can schedule blog posts to publish in advance and turn on notifications when new posts are published. Strikingly offers SEO customization like meta descriptions and structuring with H1 and H2 tags.
Analytics provide insight into traffic and engagement. Strikingly covers the core features needed for simple blogging but lacks advanced capabilities like in-depth analytics, custom post types, user accounts, and content reuse.
Shopify
Shopify has robust blogging tools thanks to its integration with WordPress. The Shopify blog allows you to publish posts to engage visitors. WordPress features like post scheduling, categories, excerpts, SEO settings, and tagging are supported.
You can embed rich media content and enable visitor comments. In-depth analytics provide insight into traffic sources and popular posts. Shopify also supports multiple blog contributors with user accounts. The WordPress engine makes Shopify highly capable of in-depth blogging alongside e-commerce.
Winner: Shopify
Shopify wins for blogging features thanks to the built-in WordPress integration. While Strikingly provides basic blogging capabilities, Shopify gives you the full power of WordPress to create custom post types, enable robust commenting, reuse content, manage multiple contributors, and view detailed analytics. For serious blogging alongside online sales, Shopify is the superior choice.
E-commerce Capabilities
Strikingly
Strikingly provides basic e-commerce capabilities to create an online store. It offers product management tools to add items, descriptions, pricing, inventory tracking, and shipping rates. You can collect payments via Stripe or PayPal checkout.
Strikingly supports physical and digital products. It provides options for custom coupon codes and taxes. You can display inventory availability and low stock warnings. Strikingly also offers abandoned cart recovery emails.
However, Strikingly lacks advanced e-commerce features like subscriptions, drop shipping, purchase order management, and POS integration. It covers essentials for a simple online store but is not robust enough for complex product catalogs and order volumes.
Shopify
Shopify is a dedicated e-commerce platform with extensive store management capabilities. It offers flexible product types like physical, digital, and service-based items. You can create complex, multi-variant products with attributes and options.
Shopify provides fine-tuned control over pricing, shipping, taxes, and discounts. It supports omnichannel sales across online, brick-and-mortar, social media, and marketplaces. Advanced capabilities like subscriptions, drop shipping, and barcode scanning enable diverse business models.
Robust reporting provides insights into sales, profits, and abandoned checkouts. Overall, Shopify delivers enterprise-grade tools for ecommerce businesses who manage high-volume product catalogs and sales.
Winner: Shopify
For e-commerce features, Shopify easily wins thanks to vastly greater capabilities suited for serious online selling. While Strikingly covers e-commerce basics, Shopify provides everything high-volume stores need – from intricate product catalog management to omnichannel sales and advanced order processing. Strikingly works for selling a few products, but Shopify can scale up to enterprise-level e-commerce.
SEO Tools
Strikingly
Strikingly provides basic on-page SEO customization so you can optimize your site for search engines. It lets you create SEO-friendly URLs, write meta descriptions for better snippets, and add alt text to images. You can also customize H1, H2, and H3 tags in your ecommerce store content.
Strikingly automatically generates a sitemap and robot.txt file. However, there are no advanced SEO capabilities like keyword research, content analysis, or suggestions to improve optimization. You cannot create 301 redirects or submit sitemaps to search engines. The SEO features are too basic for comprehensive optimization.
Shopify
Shopify likewise offers on-page SEO customization of titles, meta descriptions, alt text, and heading tags. for your ecommerce website. It provides automated sitemaps and robot.txt files. Shopify also lets you customize URLs for SEO-friendliness.
Advanced features include 301 redirects, custom canonical tags, and support for structured data markup to optimize product listings. Third-party SEO apps are available to enhance optimization, providing keyword research, recommendations, and competitor analysis.
Winner: Shopify
While both platforms offer basic on-page SEO customization, Shopify provides more advanced capabilities critical for optimization. The ability to set up 301 redirects, structured data, and custom canonical tags gives Shopify the edge. And the SEO app ecosystem unlocks robust SEO tools for Shopify merchants. So Shopify wins for richer optimization potential.
Integrations
Strikingly
Strikingly offers a decent selection of third-party integrations to extend functionality. For e-commerce, it integrates with payment platforms like PayPal, Alipay, and WeChat Pay. You can connect Strikingly to email marketing tools like MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, and Constant Contact.
Other supported integrations include Disqus for comments, Google Analytics for insights, and Slack for notifications. Strikingly also provides Zapier integration to connect with over 1,000 other apps. However, Strikingly lacks deep integration with critical e-commerce business systems for inventory, accounting, shipping, customer relationship management (CRM), and more.
Shopify
Shopify shines when it comes to integrations thanks to its robust app store. It seamlessly connects with any major ecommerce solution like Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest for omnichannel sales.
Hundreds of apps extend capabilities for payments, shipping, accounting, inventory, email marketing, and more. Zapier integration allows connecting Shopify with thousands of other apps. Shopify offers much deeper ecosystem integration versus Strikingly.
Winner: Shopify
Shopify easily wins for its vastly greater integration ecosystem enabling seamless connectivity with virtually any external system or platform a business needs. While Strikingly covers the basics to build and run a simple store, Shopify apps offers a turnkey solution that gives you access to critical solutions for omnichannel commerce, order and inventory management, payment processing, fulfillment, accounting, and beyond.
Analytics and Reporting
Strikingly
Strikingly provides basic website analytics to help you understand your traffic. It offers reports on visits, unique visitors, page views, referral sources, and popular pages and posts. You can view analytics directly within Strikingly or connect to Google Analytics for more data.
For e-commerce stores, Strikingly shows sales metrics, conversion rates, and abandoned checkouts. However, the analytics lack depth compared to dedicated platforms. There are no custom reports, segmentation, funnels, or advanced metrics. The reporting works for a general overview but falls short of granular insights.
Shopify
Shopify has powerful analytics and reporting tailored for e-commerce. Its dashboard provides an overview of transactions, revenue, traffic sources, top products, and more. You can drill down into reports on customers, order status, fulfillment, and marketing campaign performance.
Shopify integrates with Google Analytics for expanded reporting. Apps are also available to add advanced analytics capabilities like customizable dashboards, visualizations, predictive modeling, and more. Overall, Shopify delivers enterprise-level analytics to help merchants make data-driven decisions.
Winner: Shopify
For analytics and reporting, Shopify is the clear winner. While Strikingly offers only basic website analytics, Shopify provides robust and customizable reporting focused on e-commerce metrics and business insights. Shopify gives merchants the in-depth analytics they need to track growth and optimize decisions through data.
5. Website Performance
Website Speed and Load Times
Strikingly
Strikingly builds websites optimized for speed and faster load times. Its templates use efficient code and Strikingly hosting is tuned for performance. Images are automatically compressed and resized to streamline pages. Strikingly also supports caching for faster repeat loads.
However, the actual speed will depend on your specific site setup. Too many high-res images or bulky plugins can slow things down. Strikingly does not provide diagnostics on speed optimizations. Users report average page load times of 1-2 seconds, which is decent but not blazing fast. Overall, Strikingly sites are moderately fast out of the box.
Shopify
Shopify optimizes hosted stores for speed and provides diagnostics to improve performance. The CDN caches site files across servers to enable faster loading. Pages are lightweight with compressed images and efficient code. Shopify offers image optimization tools as well.
Shopify provides page speed grades, suggestions to fix slow elements, and ways to speed up mobile load times. Load times depend on theme, apps, traffic, and other factors but well-optimized stores average under 2 seconds. Shopify also supports acceleration via Fastly and Google Cloud integrations.
Winner: Shopify
For load speed and performance, Shopify wins thanks to built-in speed optimization combined with diagnostics and acceleration options. Though both build moderately fast sites, Shopify gives more control, insights, and tools to analyze and improve speed. This helps merchants ensure excellent site performance.
Website Reliability and Uptime
Strikingly
Strikingly aims to provide reliable uptime for websites created on its platform. It uses cloud hosting infrastructure that offers redundancy to minimize downtime risks. Strikingly also automatically backs up sites daily to ensure they can be restored if issues occur.
However, Strikingly does not provide a service level agreement (SLA) guaranteeing any uptime percentage. Users report some intermittent downtime, though major outages are rare. Strikingly status updates on its dashboard indicate when the platform is experiencing issues. Overall uptime appears to be fairly reliable but not ironclad.
Shopify
Shopify guarantees 99.98% monthly uptime for hosted stores under its service level agreement. Its infrastructure runs on redundant servers and data centers to maximize reliability. Automatic daily backups also protect against data loss.
Shopify proactively monitors uptime and notifies merchants of any issues or maintenance that may temporarily disrupt service. Merchants can receive status updates via email, Twitter, or the Shopify status webpage. The high redundancy of Shopify’s systems results in excellent uptime in practice.
Winner: Shopify
For website uptime and reliability, Shopify wins due to its 99.98% uptime guarantee backed by robust infrastructure and monitoring. While Strikingly uptime is fairly reliable, Shopify offers stronger reassurance for e-commerce sites where downtime means lost revenue. Shopify’s SLA and transparency around system status make it more dependable.
6. Customer Support and Community
Strikingly
Strikingly provides customer support via email and live chat. Support is available 24/7 to assist with technical issues and answer questions. Average response times are decent, usually within 24 hours but sometimes longer. Strikingly also has a public help center with FAQs, tutorials, and documentation.
For community support, the Strikingly Users Group on Facebook provides a forum to ask for advice and interact with over 25,000 users. Overall, Strikingly customer support covers the basics relatively well.
Shopify
Shopify offers 24/7 customer support via live chat, email, and phone. Response times are very fast, often instant chat replies and emails answered within an hour. Shopify also provides detailed help documentation and tutorials in its Shopify Help Center.
The Shopify Partners community connects over 500,000 merchants, developers, and freelancers for peer support. Shopify’s layered support resources and active user community foster excellent assistance.
Winner: Shopify
For customer service and community support, Shopify edges out Strikingly with faster direct support, more robust documentation, and a larger merchant community forum. Shopify’s laser focus on e-commerce merchant success shines through in its top-notch support ecosystem, delivering a great user experience.
7. Pricing
Strikingly
Strikingly offers a free plan that lets you build a basic website. For e-commerce features, paid plans start at $8/month for up to 100 products. The $16/month plan allows unlimited products and advanced features like abandoned cart recovery. Strikingly bills annually for a discount.
Add-ons include expanded storage, a custom domain name, and email marketing credits. Strikingly pricing is simple and affordable for small businesses on a budget. However, the free plan is quite limited, and the e-commerce plans lack some advanced capabilities relative to the price.
Shopify
Shopify offers a 14-day free trial. Paid plans start at $29/month for core e-commerce features and 2.5% transaction fees. Higher tiers at $79 and $299/month offer more advanced capabilities, lower fees, and in-person POS.
Themes, apps, shipping discounts, and transaction fees add further costs. Large Shopify stores may pay thousands in monthly fees but gain robust enterprise e-commerce tools. Compared to Strikingly, Shopify is costlier but provides significantly more complex e-commerce functionality and scalability.
Winner: Tie
Pricing is a tie between Strikingly and Shopify. Strikingly is better for smaller budgets, providing an affordable basic e-commerce site. Shopify costs notably more but scales to support sophisticated high-volume businesses. Evaluate your specific store requirements. For simpler needs, Strikingly offers value while Shopify suits advanced e-commerce.
8. Reviews and Reputation
Strikingly
Strikingly earns positive reviews for its easy-to-use website builder. Users praise the modern templates, smooth editor, and intuitive drag-and-drop interface that makes site building accessible for non-coders. Customer support also receives kudos for being responsive and helpful.
However, some users feel Strikingly lacks more advanced features and customization compared to developers. The free plan limitations also frustrate some customers. Pricing receives mixed reviews for affordability but not always matching capabilities. See Strikingly user reviews on Trustpilot and Sitejabber.
Shopify
Shopify garners rave reviews for its e-commerce focus and powerful capabilities. Merchants highlight excellent templates, ease of use, top-notch support, and robust analytics. Omnichannel selling, scaling capacity, and ecosystem integrations also receive praise.
Potential downsides mentioned include the learning curve for advanced features, clunky aspects of the CMS, and the higher pricing versus competitors. However, most reviewers feel the benefits outweigh any drawbacks for serious online selling. See Shopify reviews on Trustpilot and G2.
Winner: Shopify
Based on reputation and user feedback, Shopify narrowly beats Strikingly with its specialist e-commerce platform loved by merchants. Strikingly satisfies many looking for basic website building simplicity. But Shopify wins more effusive praise from retailers for enabling their online business dreams.
9. FAQ’s
Strikingly FAQs
- What is the maximum product limit on Strikingly? The paid Pro plan allows unlimited products on Strikingly. The basic paid plan limits you to 100 products.
- Does Strikingly offer email marketing? Yes, Strikingly integrates with email marketing platforms like MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, and Constant Contact. It does not have its own native email marketing system.
- Can I use my own domain on Strikingly? Yes, Strikingly supports connecting a custom domain name for an additional fee.
- Is there a transaction fee for Strikingly? No, Strikingly does not charge any transaction fees for purchases on your site. You only pay the flat monthly plan fee.
Shopify FAQs
- What is the transaction fee for Shopify? Shopify charges transaction fees ranging from 0.5-2% depending on your subscription plan. It’s 2.5% off the basic Shopify plan.
- Does Shopify allow third-party apps and integrations? Yes, Shopify offers an app store with thousands of integrations to extend platform functionality.
- Can I sell in-person and online with Shopify? Shopify supports omnichannel sales across online, brick-and-mortar, social media, and other channels.
- Is there a limit to how many products I can sell on Shopify? No, Shopify does not have a limit on product listings regardless of your plan.
Final Thoughts
Choose Strikingly if…
Strikingly is a great choice for basic websites, blogs, and simple online stores. If you need an intuitive drag-and-drop builder to create a professional site quickly without coding, Strikingly delivers. It works well for service businesses, restaurants, events, portfolios, and anyone wanting an affordable online presence.
You can find out more info about Strikingly in my Strikingly review.
Alternatively, check out how Strikingly compares to other site builders:
Choose Shopify if…
Shopify is the premier solution for serious e-commerce stores selling large product catalogs across multiple sales channels. With robust tools for payments, shipping, inventory, and marketing, Shopify enables sophisticated retailers to scale their operations. The expansive app ecosystem also makes Shopify customizable.
Learn more about this e-commerce builder in my Shopify review and make sure to check out some Shopify comparisons as well:
Choosing the right platform is critical for establishing your online business successfully. We hope this comprehensive comparison has revealed how Strikingly and Shopify differ so you can select the best solution for your needs. Please ask any questions in the comments, and we’ll help you make the right decision!