Magento or WooCommerce: Which platform to go with while developing an e-commerce store?

Starting a business with an effective e-commerce website is an indispensable factor for the success of any business in this digital era. The digital boom has created a massive effect on consumer buying behavior. So it is inevitable to build an efficient and cost-effective e-commerce website, which largely depends on the platform behind it.

Several platforms offering many promising features are widely available, and without a second thought, the best among them are Magento and WooCommerce. You might come across different biased opinions supporting each platform, and that is why we thought to provide an unbiased take on the functionality and effectiveness of both platforms. Today let’s dive deep into both these platforms to figure out which one works best as per your business requirements.

Magento and WooCommerce- Know Them Better

 WooCommerce and Magento are the dominant e-commerce platforms based on the PHP programming language with open-source systems. Both the platforms provide open-source free versions and are entirely customizable. Even though Magento and WooCommerce are regarded as the best choice for an e-commerce platform, both exhibit different expertise.

WooCommerce is an open-sourced, flexible, and extendable platform that can easily turn the WordPress website into an e-commerce website. Two editions of Magento are available: Magento Open Source and Magento Commerce. Magento Open Source provides a free platform to function an e-commerce website, whereas Magento Commerce is a premium paid edition with impressive features providing solutions for complex commerce operations and growing customer needs.

Magento Vs WooCommerce- What Makes The Difference

Magento offers features ideal for web development professionals and enterprise-level companies, whereas WooCommerce performs best as a powerful plugin for the WordPress platform. When we compare both these platforms, Magento is highly preferred as it is a content management system (CMS) specifically built for e-commerce purposes unlike WooCommerce, which functions as a WordPress plugin.

Compared to WooCommerce, Magento has powerful hosting needs, making it a lot more complex process. Let’s break down and compare Magento and WooCommerce further based on Features, Cost/Pricing, Usability, Scalability, Payment Solutions and Integrations, and many more.

Feature Comparison:

  A successful e-commerce website depends on the functionality of the platforms. So it is of utmost importance to choose a platform that offers flexibility and advanced customization options. Both Magento and WooCommerce showcase a variety of features to build effective e-commerce websites.

Magento

Magento offers some exceptionally beneficial features, making it the best choice for a corporate-level e-commerce solution. It enables to build of a customized e-commerce website as per the business demands. Following are the key features of Magneto for e-commerce websites:

• Marketing, Promotions, and Conversion Tool
• Content Management System (CMS)
• Search Engine Optimization
• Catalogue Management
• Product Browsing
• Catalogue Browsing
• Checkout, Payment, and Shipping
• Order Management
• Customer Accounts and Service
• International Support
• Analytics and Reporting
• Mobile-responsiveness

WooCommerce

 WooCommerce is best suitable for small stores and limited requirements. Following are the key features of WooCommerce for e-commerce websites:

• Search Engine Optimization
• Cart Behavior
• Product Data Panel
• Custom Tax Calculations
• Discount Coupons and Codes
• Geo-location Support
• Shipping Calculations and Prices
• Store Management
• Analytics and Reporting
• Inventory Management and more

Themes and Template selections

 Both WooCommerce and Magento have dozens of both free and paid mobile-friendly themes and templates to design and create your e-commerce website the way you wanted.

Plugins And Extensions

Magento and WooCommerce offer a variety of plugins and extensions to facilitate the serviceability and appearance of the website. But when compared to each other, Magento outsmarts WooCommerce with its exceptional facilities of multi-store capabilities from one admin panel, layered navigation, language options, and complex configurable products.

Magento enables both free and paid extensions for payments and security, customer support, shipping and fulfillment, accounting and finance, marketing, and even site optimization. But the Magento extensions can only be installed and worked with the help of Magento developers, whereas the store owners can easily install WooCommerce extensions. Magento is quite expensive when compared to WooCommerce, but in functionality, Magento tends to be more powerful than WooCommerce.

Payment Methods

The security of payments is of prime importance when it comes to an e-commerce website. The product order depends on secure payment methods. Both Magento and WooCommerce provide several payment methods. By default Braintree, PayPal, Authorize.net, bank transfer, and cash on delivery are supported by Magento. Also, through third-party extensions, Magento provides the facility to integrate many popular payment gateways such as 2Checkout, Stripe, Dwolla, Square, and more.

WooCommerce by default supports PayPal and Stripe payment gateways and through extensions 2Checkout, Braintree, Amazon payments, and Alipay can also be integrated.

Scalability

Both Magento and WooCommerce are efficient platforms that maintain a high volume of traffic on your website. Magento outperforms WooCommerce when handling a larger amount of products. Magento can handle any volume of traffic as they design it with the capability to handle up to 300,000 products, which is beyond the capacity of WooCommerce. So any increase in sales or traffic won’t be an issue with Magento.

SEO

SEO is an essential factor for the visibility of any e-commerce website. Both Magento and WooCommerce are SEO-friendly platforms. Magento weighs more in this department with its SEO extension feature. With its advanced SEO tools, it can integrate your store with Google Sitemap, easily rewrite URLs, optimize images, generate meta descriptions, and provides your product data more visibility in the search engines. But with WooCommerce in order to fully optimize your e-commerce website, you have to manually set site structure, products and category pages, tags, and many more.

Security

Security is the primary concern of the customers when they buy anything from e-commerce websites as they provide many sensitive pieces of information. So it is very important to choose a platform with regular security updates with an improved security system.

Both Magento and WooCommerce provide secured platforms, but Magento has an advanced security system. Magento is more guarded from cyberattacks when compared with WooCommerce. There is a possibility of malware intrusion with the outdated WooCommerce extensions and themes. Magento provides the latest Free security scan tools to monitor unauthorized access and update malware patches.

Performance and Hosting

Customers choose their online sites mostly based on performance and navigation speed. So it is a crucial factor to opt for a platform that provides high performance and smooth navigation. By default, Magento and WooCommerce are pretty fast as both of them are self-hosted platforms.

Magento provides better performance when compared to WooCommerce and is always the first choice for big companies and a large number of products. The performance of WooCommerce can be enhanced by integrating extensions.

Pricing

Both Magento and WooCommerce are open source platforms, and we can download the source code of both platforms for free. Magento 2 free version is always a reasonable choice for the merchants than WooCommerce with its advanced features. WooCommerce is comparatively an economical option, but you may spend more to upgrade your website.

Usability

Ease of use is one of the important factors to take under consideration while selecting an e-commerce platform. Magento is a more complex platform in terms of usability. Basic knowledge of codes and technical terms is necessary for using most of the platform’s potential. Comparatively, the WooCommerce installation process is quite easy.

Which One To Choose

Magento and WooCommerce platforms have their niche and work best when chosen wisely. If your business needs a full range of built-in features, advanced security, great customization, high scalability, and a strong order management framework, Magento would be the right choice for you.

WooCommerce platform suit only a small business with a temporary solution. WooCommerce can be considered a user-friendly platform, whereas Magento is a platform with powerful features and extensions.