Upgrading your e-commerce store on the Magento platform to a Progressive Web App is the new trend and vital adjustment, which helps to grow your sales revenue.  There are plenty of options with different prices to build a Magento PWA. But, what will be the most effective solution to your business?

An effective investment is achieved when you get your desired result while spending the lowest cost. Therefore, you need to find out which PWA development solution can provide you with a smooth store transformation within the minimum price.

In this article, we will compare four popular methods for developing the Magento 2 PWA, which are using Magento PWA template, PWA extension, PWA Studio, and creating a PWA from the ground up (without using PWA Studio or ready-made themes and templates).

Let’s look through the price, expected outcome (regarding design and function), and several pros and cons of each PWA solution, to figure out which is the best one.

	PWA Studio	PWA Extension	PWA Theme	Custom Development
Price	Free	Varied (Free-$200).   Installation and customization fee is NOT included.	Varied, from $0 (open source) to $2,500, depending on the quality and available features of the theme.   Installation fee is NOT included, except for paid themes. Customization can be added but requires extra costs.	High cost (Min $20,000).   Providing custom-built design and function of PWA.
Design	Basic and simple design (Venia demo). Optimized for mobile only.	No change to current website.	Various PWA storefront designs.	Following your requirements and expectations.
Function	Only supporting PWA and default Magento functions.	Supporting several features of PWA such as adding to home screen, pushing notification, offline mode (for certain pages) etc. No changes to any function on the current website.	Supporting PWA, Magento default, and advanced features (depending on your selected theme).	Following your requirements and expectations.

General Evaluation On 4 Magento PWA Solutions

Magento PWA Studio

• Pros: This is a free tool as well as the only PWA development tool provided by Magento. It will facilitate your new storefront development following Magento standards. Moreover, PWA Studio is updated regularly with a wide range of new features.
• Cons: The design of PWA Studio is too basic so by default, it can hardly be used or needs heavy customization. Therefore, you will need to hire experienced Magento Progressive Web App developers to customize and scale up the design. Regarding functions, PWA Studio does not support a number of Magento default features. Also, if your website has some extensions or custom functions, it’s likely that those will be not compatible with the Venia PWA storefront and it will take several months to make them work together.

Magento PWA Extension

• Pros: The cost of Magento 2 Progressive Web App Extensions is reasonable (from $0 to $200) and it takes just a few hours to install on your site.
• Cons: Magento 2 PWA Extensions only support some PWA-mimic features, which therefore are not able to turn your website into a real PWA app. Additionally, most extensions are using Google APIs so they might be not stable.

Magento PWA Theme

• Pros: Up to now, utilizing Progressive Web App templates seems to be the most potential solution to integrate PWA in Magento 2 website. It delivers all the expected PWA capabilities: lightning-fast loading speed, adding shortcuts on the homescreen, connection independence, synchronization to the background, and ease to update. Regarding the design aspect, there are various design and customization options. Besides, some themes are already compatible with Magento extensions, there is no need for custom work. Another plus is that the theme installation is quick. As a result, it reduces significantly development time and money to build a full-featured PWA website.
• Cons: Although most PWA Themes can meet your expectations for PWA functions, not all of them have beautiful designs so it still takes time to customize the look. Moreover, some PWA templates are providing nearly the same basic features as the PWA Studio, and only changes to their storefront design are taken place.

If you go for this solution, only PWA themes built with Magento PWA Studio are highly recommended. The reason is that the types that are not based on the PWA Studio are not quality tested and easy to conflict with Magento functions.

In addition, you should choose themes having similar features to your website’s existing features to minimize time and cost for customization.

Custom Magento PWA Development

• Pros: Custom-built PWA App Development is often reserved for large businesses that have strict requirements for the app design and functions.
• Cons: The highest cost and the longest amount of time are needed to deploy this PWA solution. Also, because the PWA Studio tool will not be used, conflicts with the Magento version can arise later. Then, you must keep in contact with your PWA developers to update the app frequently and spend more on maintenance costs.

Which Is The Optimal PWA Solution?

Each Magento Progressive Web App development solution has its own unique pros and cons that you can select.

However, the Magento PWA theme application appears to be the most favorable option since it delivers good outcomes after a short period of time and requires a modest investment.

Last but not least, you should spend money buying quality PWA themes for Magento rather than using free ones.