Magento vs Shopify talent pool comparison

I’ve planned for a while to write a comparison between two very popular eCommerce platform, Magento vs Shopify. As a part of this bigger job, I’ve decided to find out how many professionals with that skills are available on the market. It may be often overlooked, but if you are a business owner it is important to understand, how easy is to find a talent to operate, support and develop your store. Even if you are a small business owner and plan to manage the store yourself, there will be a point when you need a hand with your online store due to different reasons:

• Your business runs well, so you need to expand your team;
• You decided to implement a feature that isn’t available out-of-the-box;
• For some reason you can’t continue to work with your existing solution provider or your in-house talent with platform skill left you

In all this and many other cases you’ll need to hire a person on the market and for your business it will be better if she or he has already know the platform. If there is a skill shortage your business development will be stalled, you’ll have to pay a premium for scarce talent or spend time and resources to train people.

Hence I decided to compare, how may people with Shopify and Magento skills are available on the market. Thanks to LinkedIn it is rather easy to do, so I went there, selected relevant geographical location and ran keyword search with “Magento” and “Shopify”. I did the search globally and for different countries, the results of what I’ve found are presented on the chart below:

The same results as a table if you want to see exact numbers. In the last column (M/S) you’ll find how many people with Magento skill is listed on LinkedIn per one person with Shopify skill.

Source: LinkedIn, as per 11 Nov 2014

Summary of findings

• There are much more people with Magento than Shopify skill, the ratio (Magento/Shopify) varies from 1.7 in Canada to 184 in Netherlands
• Shopify is relatively more popular among professionals in North America, New Zealand and Australia and not popular in Europe (both Eastern and Western) and the rest of the World
• Naturally, Shopify has the highest ratio to Magento in Canada, the company was founded there, so Canada is a Shopify’s stronghold
• On the Magento’s side, Netherlands looks like a country with a special love to this platform. It goes in pair with France and overtakes Germany, much bigger countries.

The main effect of this situation is that in the most countries you, as a business owner will probably have less problems to find employees or contractors who know Magento rather than Shopify. Probably because Shopify is easier to learn it isn’t a big deal for standard operations, but if you need a serious extension of functionality, there may be a challenge to find right people.