In the course of comparing existing eCommerce platforms, we drilled down to so many popular and widely used systems as Shopify, Prestashop, BigCommerce, OpenCart and other ones. We are now ready for the Clash of the Titans: Magento vs WooCommerce. These are the two most used tools in the category of eCommerce worldwide. Both of them are open source systems, meaning that everyone can access the system code and modify and customize it. Both platforms have a lot of professional developers who can release vast array of options and customizations for your web store and both of them are equally flexible with the wide range of ready solutions, so if you couldn’t find the required feature installed by default, it’s highly likely someone has already developed such extension and it is available at the system marketplace. Both platforms are supported by incredibly big communities that can easily help you to resolve your issues. When choosing between these two solutions, you are safe anyways - it doesn’t matter whether you prefer WooCommerce or Magento, since both systems allow to upload and manage infinite number of products, run a blog, perform SEO and marketing activities. But let us find differences between these top eCommerce platforms.
| Magento | WooCommerce | |
|---|---|---|
| Features List |
|
|
| Supported Integrations |
|
|
| Price |
|
|
| Business Size | Large Enterprises | Medium Business | Small Business | Medium Business |
| Installation & Ease of Use | Easy for developers and tech-savvy merchants. It takes about 10 minutes to install a base version of Magento or a few hours to run a whole store. | Easy to handle for WordPress users. Installation and managing are available via WordPress admin panel |
| Community & Customer support | Magento developers community is one of the biggest developers community in the world. It`s easy to find answers for any questions. Magento supports multiple languages and currencies. Despite Magento official support received only for expensive Enterprise Edition stores, you will not be left alone if you choose free Community Edition. A lot of enthusiastic web developers can help you to solve any issue. Magento Community has 130.000 members. | Powerful WooCommerce developers community that is backed by the mass of WordPress users. Customer support released via help desk, documentation, video tutorials. |
| Customization capabilities | Requires extensive customization to meet specific business goals as the great variety of Magento features makes it more complex. | You can customize WooCommerce store but you can meet with WordPress plugins limitations. |
| Design | There are 1500+ free/paid and fully customizable Magento themes. Magento CE, 1.9 and later versions handle responsiveness “automatically”. | Around 52 themes are in the library, some of which are free. Templates are easy to customize, CSS/HTML code is open. |
| Flexibility | Magento is a perfect choice for product editing and capable of handling heavy-loaded databases gracefully. | Fully flexible |
| Extensions | More than 15.000 Magento plugins and extensions. | MWooCommerce is a free, powerful WordPress eCommerce plugin. So to customize your store you can use any of 45 000 WordPress modules. |
| One step checkout | Can be implemented with numerous available modules. | WooCommerce One Page Checkout extension. |
| Search Engine Optimization (SEO) | Magento SEO solution set is a lot more powerful than ones offered by other popular eCommerce platforms. Its SEO friendly URLs guarantees traffic increase. | WooCommerce plugin runs on WordPress, which is famous for its SEO prowess. |
| Popular Customers | Christian Louboutin, Vizio, Rosetta Stone, Easton, Nike, Olympus, Gant, Ford Accessories, Sisley Paris, Eastwood, TractorTool, Webprint, Mothercare, Burger King | UCanon, CSS Tricks, AdventureFeeds, PagePink Pro4Mance, FilterGrade, Shareware on sale |
Well, as you may see it now, finding a winner when comparing such advanced tools as Magento and WooCommerce is basically impossible. Any of these two eCommerce shopping carts can be an ideal solution for different user groups. WooCommerce is a leading eCommerce platform in the entire web, while Magento sites are leading in top 10K, 100K and 1M sites. WooCommerce target audience consists of WordPress users and small companies that have got familiar with this CMS. It’s super simple to run. Simply install a shopping cart plugin, customize it to your liking and requirements and you are ready to create products. Manage orders, coupons, reports, inventory, linked products, shipping, settings, add-ons, add tags and categories to all of your products effortlessly. Sounds fun!
Another obvious benefit of WooCommerce is that developers’ help definitely won’t cost you as much as Magento development team.
When covering hosting and security aspect, WooCommerce and Magento are quite similar, you have to find secure hosting platform or install systems on your own servers. Also you must buy a domain name. Security depends mainly on hosting company. For Magento-based store it is may be seen as slightly more appropriate to have a hosting on own company’s server or cloud based system. It provides high site performance in heavy traffic cases, when you operate thousands of products. But this performance intensification needs serious investing.
If you’re new to eCommerce environment or you targeting on a marketing niche in general, or have a slim range of products it may be reasonable to try WooCommerce.
Magento is developed specifically for eCommerce requirements. It’s the best solution for big enterprises. It’s an absolutely ideal platform for eCommerce purposes. Magento provides huge array of features for e-merchants. As though it may sound ambitious, the sky is not a limit for extending Magento functionality. With Magento and professional Magento developers you’ll get a more advanced web store, the perfect one you imagine and the best among your competitors. Functionality, product features, searching and shopping processes can be customized fully for your business requirements.
