Magento vs WooCommerce: the best solution for your business?

Published by Yassine
5 Mins

Contents

Discover Magento and Woocommerce
Design and user-friendliness
Cost
Hosting
Blogging skills
Examples of sites using Woocommerce or Magento
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E-commerce is a growing field as more and more businesses are going digital to reach a wider audience and strengthen their profit-making capabilities.

However, with so many eCommerce platforms available, which ones should businesses use when designing their website?

Currently, there are many e-commerce platforms available, all of which offer similar features and options. Some solutions involve going with a hosted version, such as Shopify, one of the best hosted options In the cloud. With this solution you can control all aspects of your store, and your hosting, security and SSL certificates will be taken care of for you. However, the customization options are limited, as you don't have access to the backend code.

If you really want to unleash the potential of your online store and have full control over its appearance and functionality, you should consider a self-hosted solution. At this level, the two main competitors in the industry are WooCommerce and Magento. They both offer a lot of features to make effective online stores. However, while they are similar in many ways, each has specific advantages that make them the perfect choice for some businesses.

In this article, we will explain the differences between these two solutions so that you can make a more informed decision as to which solution to choose in your design.

Discover Magento and Woocommerce

Woocommerce

WooCommerce is a newcomer to the world of e-commerce, appearing in 2011. It is one of the most popular WordPress plugins, which adds e-commerce functionality to your site. It is known for its flexibility and customization options, custom features, intuitive interface and almost no transaction fees.

Woocommerce remains highly valued by WordPress users and also supported by this community.

Magento

Like WordPress, Magento is an open source project, but it is a complete content management system designed specifically for e-commerce, rather than an e-Commerce Framework that fits on a WordPress site. There are two versions: Community, which can be downloaded for free, and Enterprise, a paid version. Since it was acquired by eBay, a huge community has grown up around it, and Magento Connect functions as a central point for extensions and themes.

According to a study conducted by Datanyze, the two solutions represent almost one third of the ecommerce platforms included in the study universe.

In other figures published by BuiltWithwe notice that the geographical distribution of the two platforms varies according to the regions.

Design and user-friendliness

Woocommerce

WooCommerce is a well-developed and popular plugin that is excellent for small and medium-sized businesses. It is intuitive and easy to use and configure. If you're already a WordPress user, adding e-commerce functionality to your site would be as simple as launching the plugin, and the Framework will create the basic pages you need. Even if you're not currently working with WordPress, learning how to use WooCommerce is still pretty simple.

The default design is clean and elegant, and there are a range of customization options, with several free themes, plus a number of paid premium themes. It can also be integrated into virtually any WordPress theme.

While WordPress is renowned for the number and variety of plugins and extensions to enhance the look and functionality of its sites, this is also true for WooCommerce. The basic WooCommerce plugin comes with limited functionality, so you'll need additional plugins and possibly custom development to exploit its full potential. The major advantage is the number of WordPress developers who have the skills and knowledge to work with you to achieve your goals.

But, once set up, using the Woocommerce interface to manage your store and run your reports becomes a breeze, and even if you have no basic knowledge of WordPress, you can easily manage your own store in a few hours.

Magento

Magento is a more comprehensive solution for online stores, aimed at larger e-commerce retailers and requiring a lot of customization and functionality. It is easily the most in-depth option of the E-Commerce solutions available in the market. It has the power to handle an unlimited number of products, and can work with different currencies, payment options and in multiple languages. You can also run multiple storefronts via one dashboard, which is very effective if you manage multiple websites or have local variations of your stores.

As with WordPress, the initial setup is fairly easy, thanks to videos and tutorials available online. The initial product is very powerful, with many features, but which require additional plugins, included as standard on WooCommerce .

The difficulty with Magento is that adding these extensions and customizing the store is much more difficult, and it's a steep learning curve for those new to e-commerce or without programming experience. If you're not familiar with the code, you'll need to hire a Magento developer to help you set up your store, and because of the complexity of the platform, that could drive up the bill. So even though it's feature-rich, flexible, powerful, and highly scalable, it comes at a cost in return. Which brings us to another equally important element: cost.

Cost

Woocommerce

WooCommerce is a free plugin, although its basic options are quite limited, so you need to use the available plugins and extensions to take full advantage of it. While many of the options are free, others are not. As an example, the basic version of WooCommerce only allows payments via PayPal and bank transfers, and you'll need to purchase extensions if you want a more comprehensive range of payment solutions.

Magento

The cost of the Magento platform varies depending on the edition you use and the hosting option you choose. Magento 2 Community Edition (CE) continues to be open-source and free. However, you'll need to add extensions to customize and manage your store as your business grows, and that's where your costs start to climb.

For very large e-commerce businesses, there is an Enterprise option that offers enhanced content management, a higher level of support, and improved search functionality. Magento 2 Enterprise Edition (EE) licenses range from $22,000 to $125,000 per year based on projected annual gross revenue. Magento 2 now offers a cloud hosting option called Enterprise Cloud Edition (ECE) that bundles licenses and AWS managed hosting and ranges from $40,000 to $190,000 per year based on expected annual gross revenue.

It is noted here that Licenses for new installations of Magento Version 1 are no longer available since Magento 2 was launched in November 2015. Existing websites using Version 1.x EE will be able to renew their licenses for 3 years from the launch date of Version 2, after which they must upgrade their stores to M2.

Hosting

Woocommerce

In terms of hosting, WooCommerce is a small, efficient plugin that uses little disk space and is light on your server space. It can run quickly and smoothly on virtually any server, unless your products reach thousands when the functionality of your site may start to feel the need for a more powerful solution.

Magento

Magento is a more complex platform, and its complexity means that even modestly sized stores consume several GB of disk space, while more complex operations strain your server loads. So you really need dedicated servers or a cloud plan, otherwise your site will run slowly and you risk losing customers. All of this adds to your secondary expenses, but it pays to be willing to spend a little more on a high-performance hosting company with large amounts of storage.

Blogging skills

Woocommerce

For your e-commerce store to be truly successful, you need to have a blog to help you sell your products and maintain better SEO. Indeed, many sites may only have an e-commerce component, with the rest of the site dedicated to advertising and selling that product. When it comes to true integration, there is only one winner: WooCommerce. It integrates seamlessly with WordPress so you can easily set up and manage other pages and run a blog, taking advantage of the many plugins to get your website exactly how you want it.

Magento

While Magento has great e-commerce capabilities, its CMS is much more difficult to set up and use, and you'll need an extension to be able to publish a blog.

Examples of sites using Woocommerce or Magento

Woocommerce

duracelllighting.com

Magento

hellyhansen.com

So Woocommerce or Magento?

In reality, there is no answer to this question. The choice between the two depends largely on your business needs, time, money and skills.

WooCommerce tends to be a better option for small to medium sized businesses and those with little programming experience. It's a great solution if you already have a WordPress site and are familiar with its interface. With the plugins and extensions available you can provide a better experience for your customers.

Magento tends to be more popular with larger e-commerce retailers, or those who use agencies to set up and manage their stores. It has a wider range of core functionality, and while it has fewer extensions, it's generally more powerful than WooCommerce. It's very scalable, so if you're a small business with big plans and have a decent budget to set things up, it's a good option. It also gives you the ability to manage multiple stores through a single dashboard, which is great for those with more complex needs.

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