In today’s world to ease the online business of selling products in a theme based system, we require an e-commerce platform. There are such platforms available in the market like WooCommerce, Magento, Shopify, Drupal and many more., which makes your work easy and feasible at a minimal cost. Here we came up with WooCommerce vs Magento, two of the most popular e-commerce platforms. Although they have many similar properties as they both have open source free versions and are based on PHP programming language moreover they both run the software such as Nexcess or WPEngine using the hosting packages.
Although there are some similarities, Magento is comparatively more complex and stronger e-commerce platform than WooCommerce, which is actually just a plugin at the top of core WordPress software. In essence, despite their similarity, they are very different and the use of both platforms often differs greatly due to their strengths and weaknesses.
What you look for in your eCommerce platform?
If you are just starting, you will want to choose a platform. These basic factors are important when it is decided which e-commerce solution will be better for your business.
- Budget – The cost of starting your own store and recurring expenses
- Ease of use – how easy it is for beginners
- Methods of payment – It should support multiple payment gateways. If you need some payment methods, then you need to make sure that it supports them.
- Scalability – Your eCommerce platform should be able to scale up with your growing business needs.
These are a few basic things you must try considering. Depending on your business, you might also want to consider how the platform does other things like inventory, taxes, invoices and more.
In comparison to this Magento versus WooCommerce, we will review how both platforms compare these basic requirements.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a great plugin for WordPress and is actually the most used eCommerce platform. This is a very useful tool because it really is a plugin for WordPress so that you can use the benefits of WordPress and the extra e-commerce capabilities of WooCommerce. WooCommerce is itself a very light e-commerce platform, so it’s great for simple e-commerce sites that require a great deal of content.
WooCommerce depends on many plugins in many cases because the core WooCommerce plugin is very limited refer WordPress help for the same. This is where WooCommerce can be difficult to scale, you may need many plugins to get the desired functionality and eventually keeping all these plugins together will be quite cumbersome. In addition, WooCommerce’s catalog and order management capabilities are quite limited.
key features:
- Supports an unlimited number of products.
- WordPress plugin comes with a strong extension system based on the format.
- You enable the use of extensions to take any payment processors you want.
- Offers dozens of premiums and free themes.
Pros:
- Setting up a store is free from your web hosting costs.
- If you have any experience with WordPress, it is easy to pick up.
- Extensive documentation is available for its users. Also, if you have any additional questions, you can contact the team behind the project.
- Integration with Google Analytics using extensions
- Includes SSL support, but you need to get your own certificate.
Cons:
- If you do not use WordPress, you need to learn two new platforms.
- Premium themes and expansion costs can quickly add up.
Magento
Magento is an incredibly powerful software with both open source sources and even more powerful Enterprise versions that you can either host yourself or use as a cloud version through Magento. Magento is the most powerful SMB e-commerce platform in the market so far and gives rights to both small business websites and large eCommerce websites.
The biggest difference between Magento and WooCommerce is that Magento has been packed with many eCommerce features, which lacks WooCommerce, making it a much more powerful solution. However, due to such a large application, it is often the most expensive software to maintain and develop. Magento’s biggest drawback is that it is built above WordPress which is not a strong CMS compared to WooCommerce. Occasionally businesses integrate into Magneto to create WordPress on this issue.
key features:
- Supports an unlimited number of products, as any self-respecting platform should do!
- Comes with its own theming and layout system.
- Efficient APIs that can be integrated with any third-party solution.
- Intuitive Administration Interface and Product Creation Tools
Pros:
- It is designed for scalability. Magento should not have any problem handling large stores, as long as your host can manage them.
- Shopkeepers can investigate faster due to a systematic process. Additionally, guest checkout is turned on by default.
- Integrates outside the box with Paypal, Authorize.net, and Braintree.
Cons:
- Magento feels more competent to developers compared to regular users, with its learning curve.
- Its enterprise version can be quite expensive, but it is expected due to their target market.
