Marketplace or Multi Store/Multi Website Solution in Magento 2 - Know which to use

Just like I had been all this while, you too must be confused between Marketplace or Multi Vendor/Multi Website solution, and unable to make your choice. In this post I will explain to you as to whether you should go for a Marketplace or Multi Store/Multi Website solution. There can be many reasons, but the ones below, were the ones that made me eventually go for a marketplace, in spite of successfully building a Multi Vendor Solution.

1. Marketplace: You should go for a marketplace solution if you are looking to provide the following features/services in your website:

• Multi Vendor Solution
• Ability for users to register as vendors and start selling their products on your website. All this can be done from your site's frontend which isn't the case with Multi Store/Website.
• Amazon/Ebay kind of solution

Fig: Multi Website/Multi Store (click on image to enlarge)

 2. Multi Store/Multi Website: You should go for a multi store/multi website solution in the following case:

• Use a single Magento installation to create several stores & websites which eases website maintenance related tasks.
  
• The following features are shared in a multi store setup:
• Payment Gateway (shared)
• Shipment (shared)
• Category (optional)
• Catalog is shared or not shared depending upon how you have set up your Category. If you have same category for all the stores then the products will be shared between all the stores. If you have separate categories for separate stores then the product can be restricted to each store. 
• Users are shared across all the store enabling single account log in across stores.
  
•  The following features are shared/not shared in a multi website setup, depending upon your configuration:
• Payment Gateway (Can be unique for each website)
• Shipping (Can be unique for each website)
• User account (Can be restricted or shared across websites depending upon your configuration)