Are you planning to build an online store? Do you find it difficult to find the best ecommerce platform for your store? certainly, when it comes to ecommerce development, it can be a bit difficult to choose the right platform to set it up as best since minor differences in features and performance can have a huge impact on the bottom line of your business.
Many vendors in the market offer various ecommerce development platforms to suit your business. Each platform has its own pros and cons, and people can choose the best one that caters to their needs. In that regard, we will discuss in detail the two platforms that are WooCommerce and Magento, which are currently popular and the forefront of ecommerce development.
We have decided to compare features, performance, ease of use, design, themes, and integration of WooCommerce and Magento. At the end of this article, you will understand which platform meets your needs, does the best, and provides value for dominating your niche and helps you to choose the right ecommerce development site suitable for your business without any confusion. Let’s dig deeper.
What you get from this article?
- 1. Features and comparison of WooCommerce and Magento
- 2. Pros and cons of WooCommerce and Magento
What is an ecommerce platform?
An ecommerce platform is a software application that has all the essential and robust features needed to run a business effectively. It allows you to manage your website, marketing, sales, execute orders, and all other functionalities that are handle in a business.
Why Use an Ecommerce Platform?
If you are expanding your business from a brick-and-mortar store to online and want to take your brand to a global audience, you need to create an online store. To run an online store, you need a software application, i.e. an ecommerce platform, which is incorporated with robust features required to run a business.
There are numerous ecommerce development platforms to set up a website suitable for your business. You can reap plenty of benefits for your business if you choose the right ecommerce development platform wisely.
What is WooCommerce?
WooCommerce is a robust open-source ecommerce development platform built on WordPress. This powerful plugin of WordPress is well-designed with all the powerful features you need for e-commerce. Furthermore, it also has many advanced capabilities through its extension system, suitable for small to large-sized online vendors using WordPress.
How popular is WooCommerce?
It rapidly became popular over a period of time due to its special features such as easy installation, customization, ease of use, and most importantly it’s a free platform.
Ecommerce is growing rapidly worldwide, and WooCommerce as one of the plugins of WordPress has over 39 million downloads and is currently active on over three million websites. According to BuiltWith statistics of January 2020, the average number of websites built with WooCommerce is estimated at 3,876,748, or 68,000 of the best million websites in the world.
The main reason for its popularity is considered to be its open-source and customizable nature. By downloading it for free, you can use and modify and expand the basic functionality of the WooCommerce plugin.
Features of WooCommerce
Sell anything
You can sell anything with WooCommerce from physical products and digital downloads to subscriptions, content, and appointments without any restrictions.
Complete support
Supports unlimited products, and as you have complete control over your site, you can add unlimited products and users and take unlimited orders.
Robust CMS
As the most popular content management system in the world, WooCommerce integrates business with the best content. In short, you will get everything you need in one place.
Ease-of-use
People unfamiliar with WordPress will struggle with technical issues, including purchasing hosting, installing WordPress, and setting up your theme and plug-ins. Whereas, if you are familiar with the WordPress platform, WooCommerce is a breeze for you. You need to install it, add your own products, and adjust your settings.
SEO-friendly
WooCommerce is very SEO friendly, it is built using SEO optimized code, WooCommerce really shines in its integration with WordPress and all of the available plugins. However, you can definitely use additional plugins and techniques for further improvement of WooCommerce SEO.
Pros of WooCommerce
- 1. WooCommerce is a completely free platform, and the underlying WordPress software is also free.
- 2. You do not need to be an expert developer or technically competent person to start a store, as WooCommerce is a developer-friendly.
- 3. As WooCommerce is an open-source platform, anyone can go in and audit, modify or extend the code, you have complete control over your data, and it is accessible.
- 4. WooCommerce is Extensible. It includes nearly 330 extensions and over 1,000 plug-ins. With a wide range of “plug-ins” available, you can add all kinds of new functionality to your store without the need for any technical knowledge.
- 5. WooCommerce is a completely free platform, and the underlying WordPress software is also free.
- 6. You do not need to be an expert developer or technically competent person to start a store, as WooCommerce is a developer-friendly.
- 7. As WooCommerce is an open-source platform, anyone can go in and audit, modify or extend the code, you have complete control over your data, and it is accessible.
- 8. WooCommerce is Extensible. It includes nearly 330 extensions and over 1,000 plug-ins. With a wide range of “plug-ins” available, you can add all kinds of new functionality to your store without the need for any technical knowledge.
- 9. WooCommerce runs on all devices. As more and more people shop on smartphones, You can also satisfy those people with the WooCommerce service.
- 10. There is a wide range of themes associated with the WordPress Plugin, so you can control how your store should look without much need of technical knowledge. Thus WooCommerce will give you the exact look you want for your store.
- 11. WooCommerce is very secure. Beyond being open-source, it uses powerful resources to protect your store. Also, You will get secure payments, configurable shipping options, and more, out of the box for completely free from the WooCommerce platform.
- 12. WooCommerce is fully customizable. You can extend the functionality of your store by adding features from official extensions of WooCommerce Marketplace.
- 13. The software is frequently updated for new features and functionalities.
Cons of WooCommerce
- 1. WooCommerce plugin offers a wide variety of premium themes and ecommerce features. Though it is an open-source and free to install the site, Users have to pay to get certain features.
- 2. For efficient management, it requires basic knowledge of both WordPress and WooCommerce platforms.
- 3. The Wishlist functionality in WooCommerce is hard to use.
- 4. Software updates can be a major effort, sometimes requiring a developer to assist with implementation, testing, and troubleshooting.
- 5. Multi-currency is difficult to implement in WooCommerce.
- 6. Newcomers to e-commerce development should not underestimate the importance of setting up an online store, because there are so many settings and functionalities to manage customers, orders, freight, sales tax, and shipping.
What is Magento?
Magento is an ecommerce platform built on open-source technology and written in PHP. It provides a flexible ecommerce website for online merchants, which control over the appearance, content, and the entire functionality of the online store. Besides, Magento offers powerful marketing, search engine optimization, and other effective tools.
How popular is Magento?
Magento has been popular since 2008, retaining the best e-commerce software solution for internet vendors. Magento is the most popular and used ecommerce platform with a market share of 31%.
Magento is downloaded almost 5,000 times every day. Nearly 7,500 retailers migrated to Magento from other ecommerce sites last year, and Magento e-solutions are used by more than 250,000 merchants worldwide.
Features of Magento
Mobile-friendly
Magento is mobile-friendly as it allows you to create a mobile website without any hassle and provide the best mobile experience to your customers. Magento offers smooth storefront integration that can be handled on different devices such as iPhones, iPads, and Androids.
Feature-packed
Magento provides comprehensive and powerful tools for creating and running your online store effectively. It offers plenty of essential features to run your business, such as multiple stores, numerous locations, different languages, product types, color swatches, etc.,
Advanced SEO Features
Magento provides you with all the advanced SEO features you need. It is designed with SEO in mind and allows traders to design SEO friendly URL structures, meta implementation, and with all other SEO factors.
Highly flexible
The platform is open-source. Therefore, you can modify the code, customize the templates, and create the functionality the way you want. Also, Magento provides API for many third-party integrations such as CRM, inventory management, and much more.
Optimal scalability
Magento is highly scalable, so even if you sell 100 items or 1,000,000, Magento can handle it effortlessly. In fact, Magento can support approximately 500,000 products and thousands of transactions per hour. This is an important advantage because you can scale the background smoothly without any interruption.
Large community of users
Magento is an excellent ecommerce site, so naturally, there is a wide and vibrant community of users and expert Magento developers who have contributed to the development of extensions and plug-ins.
Pros of Magento
- 1. Magento community version is absolutely free, whereas the enterprise version is a premium option.
- 2. With Magento, you can customize multi-level security permissions. That is, it provides additional protection against unwanted security breaches and site attacks.
- 3. Magento offers an intuitive and easy backend admin and tons of useful features on the front page for customers to get pleasure from the shopping process.
- 4. Magento is powerful enough to handle all your ecommerce needs including the ability to process a large number of orders at once, efficient handling of a large inventory, and delivery of all major payment gateways.
Cons of Magento
- 1. Slow loading time is considered one of the drawbacks of Magento.
- 2. Unfortunately, hosting is not included in the Magento platform, Magento customers have to host their websites in hosting.
- 3. The Magento developer should have complete knowledge of all technical fields and terminologies.
- 4. Magento community version is free. But the enterprise version of Magento costs you high.
WooCommerce Vs Magento
Which is easy to use?
One of the most important considerations when choosing your e-commerce platform is the ease of use. That way, if you start with Magento, its steep learning curve will complicate you. To make the site more potential, you need to learn at least some code and technical terms. Whereas in WooCommerce, being a WordPress plugin it comes with a simple installation process compared to Magento. Even a non-technical person who does not know much about e-commerce platform can set up and run your online store without much effort.
So, in terms of ease of use criteria, WooCommerce is a winner.
Which is good in terms of speed and performance?
Speed and performance are important factors that determine which platform people choose for their online stores. The speed and performance of a website depend on a number of factors, such as a web hosting provider and whether the images and videos you post are optimal.
Also, the number of modules and extensions you use significantly affects the speed and performance of the e-commerce platform. Therefore, there is no clear winner in this situation because speed and performance depend on many other factors.
What about Plugins and Extensions?
Both ecommerce platforms are comparable in the number of extensions and plugins offerings that allow you to strengthen your store. However, Magento offers great features for customer support, payments, security, marketing, accounting, finance, and many more.
Whereas WooCommerce offers over 50K free plugins built on WordPress sites, and in addition to these, there are additional paid plugins. However, WooCommerce is slightly behind in comparison.
So, in this scenario, Magento beat WooCommerce.
Which is better in security?
Keeping your site secure is a challenging and important task for any online store owner. Optimal security should be a priority as your e-commerce website has a lot of customer information and payment details. If you look at it that way, Both WooCommerce and Magento allow you to implement many security measures, but mostly through extensions and manual processes.
But in comparison, Magento offers strong security for the online store with Magento Patches, which is a free security scan tool to track your site, update malware links, and detect unauthorized access.
So, Here Magento beat WooCommerce in terms of security.
What about prices?
WooCommerce is an open-source and completely free platform – anyone can download and set it up on any server they want. however, your web hosting costs will depend entirely on the size of your enterprise and the packages your provider offers.
The community version of Magento is open-source and free for anyone to use. On the other hand, users interested in the enterprise version will have to pay quite high. The thing is there are plenty of free extensions for Magento and WooCommerce, but the premium offers are expensive.
Which is good for beginners?
For beginners, the best choice is WooCommerce. It is easy to use and inexpensive to set up, making it perfect for small functions. Even a non-technical person can easily handle it. But, Magento is not easy to use if you are a beginner. It provides a complete system of technical knowledge to instruct developers.
Final Thoughts
Not every ecommerce platform is suitable for every user or situation. So, it is good to explore and use which ecommerce platform works best and tailored to your personal needs.
I hope you find the pros, cons, and features of the above two ecommerce development platforms useful. When choosing an ecommerce development site for your business, you need to consider a number of criteria, including performance, security, product management, and your overall budget, as well as your own personal needs.
