Magento and WooCommerce are the 2 most prominent e-commerce platforms on the market.
Magento offers tailored and leading-edge features for tech-savvy professionals. It’s ideal for businesses that are making an effort to scale up.
In contrast, WooCommerce is built as an e-commerce plugin for WordPress, making it suitable for relatively new companies.
Compare what both services can offer in our review.
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What is Magento?
Magento is a freemium e-commerce platform for open commerce innovation offering tailored Content Management System (CMS) features. Magento offers 2 editions.
Magento Open Source meets the essential functions of an e-commerce enterprise, and Magento Commerce provides out-of-the-box features to keep your business ahead of other e-commerce businesses.
Here are some features of Magento to count on:
- Scalability for large business and ambitious e-commerce
- Abundance mixes of free and paid extensions, and customized functionality
- Cutting-edge API system, easy installation, configuration and 3rd-party integration
- Strong portfolio of cloud-based omnichannel solutions
- Business analytics to analyze customers, products, promotions and uncover growth opportunities
For a tech-savvy person, Magento offers robust sets of features to make your e-commerce aspirational. It’s best for professional web developers and medium to large businesses.
What is WooCommerce?
WooCommerce is among the most popular open-source e-commerce platforms built on WordPress. It empowers SMEs to turn their WordPress website into an exclusive e-commerce site.
You can sell anything with WooCommerce because it allows you to choose from endless product variations and define your style with the storefront.
Here are some features to look for WooCommerce:
- Sell everything as it supports unlimited products
- Offers dozens of robust extensions and free themes
- Effortless modification to configure multilingual contents and currencies
- Flexible and secure payment with major credit cards, payment gateways or COD
- Integrates with Google Analytics and Google Shopping
For a beginner with no prior e-commerce experience, WooCommerce allows you to set up and run online stores effortlessly. It comes with the necessary functionality to start an online store that also provides advanced add-ons and extensions.
Magento vs. WooCommerce
Let’s look over some of their notable features on both these platforms.
Plugins
Both Magento and WooCommerce offer tons of extensions or plugins. Both enhance e-commerce functionality to suit business needs.
WooCommerce allows installation of a wide range of essential plugins based on WordPress to personalize your online store. These plugins are very much lightweight and dedicated to the blogging platform. It also lets merchants easily install and maintain plugins.
On the other hand, Magento offers out-of-the-box plugins and extensions, which are essential to speed up the business. It provides both free and paid extensions for business analytics, order management and customization. Magento saves a tremendous amount of time as opposed to custom development of plugins.
Best: Magento
Themes and Templates
The presentation of your e-commerce website matters a lot. If you want to attract audiences, a suitable theme and template play a crucial role.
Magento offers customizable, affordable, user-friendly, and highly responsive themes that are laudable to use. It covers the checklist for all the features you want to include, like product pages, images, navigation bar and color scheme. You can also buy themes and templates from ThemeForest at an affordable rate.
WooCommerce undoubtedly has upper hands over Magento when it comes to themes and templates. You can set up any WordPress theme in no time. WooCommerce offers eye-grabbing free themes using its default Storefront if you don’t want to invest in a theme.
Best: WooCommerce
Price
Price is the key consideration when it comes to choosing between Magento or WooCommerce. WooCommerce is entirely free, and Magento offers a freemium service.
If you are kicking off your e-commerce business with a tight budget, WooCommerce and Magento Open Source is an excellent option as you can rely on their dozens of extensions and features. It’s entirely possible to set up e-commerce using both platforms without spending a penny besides web hosting costs.
Yet, if you are looking for scalability and experience limitless e-commerce with no compromises, Magento could be the right option for you. It provides endless extensions and customizable features according to your need. However, this will require you to shell out at least $1,988 per month.
Best: WooCommerce and Magento Open Source
Performance
If your e-commerce is sluggish, the visitor will leave the site soon and even start losing interest. Performance and quickness is the critical factor behind the success of any e-commerce business.
WooCommerce has a range of plugins and is much lighter as it focuses on content delivery and a modular approach that allows swift execution.
In comparison, Magento also offers a wide range of extensions, but its plugins are heavier and clunkier than WooCommerce. It not only reflects on your e-commerce’s performance but also the hosting fees.
Best: WooCommerce
SEO
SEO is pivotal for any e-commerce business. Businesses spend a lot to improve their page rank by hiring SEO professionals.
Magento offers a bundle of outstanding features with SEO extensions. It lets you easily forward SEO-friendly meta keywords and descriptions to attract more site traffic and improve the site ranking. Magento boasts a brilliant SEO score of 95%.
WooCommerce is also SEO-friendly to a great extent. As it is completely built on the WordPress platform, it eliminates traffic loss and boosts SEO performance. WooCommerce’s SEO score is a sky-high 97%.
Best: WooCommerce
Support
An open-source platform benefits from its extensive community forums that support you when you run into any mess.
WooCommerce’s helping hand is its extensive documentation that allows you to help yourself. For customer support, it briefly upholds through live chat via social media.
Magento has a far more convenient and full-fledged customer support team than WooCommerce’s text-based support that requires you to wait for hours. It provides adequate and reliable support services throughout your e-commerce system lifecycle. You can also directly talk to their support team to get started or resolve an issue.
Best: Magento
Magento vs. WooCommerce: Final Takeaway
If you are kicking off your startup or online store with all the essential features for e-commerce and far-ranging themes, WooCommerce could be a better option for you. It is easier to onboard and more user-friendly. Plus, it fits the budget of any business size.
Magento is a fantastic option for more advanced and ambitious e-commerce. It offers a broad array of plugins and extensions, features, scalability, and advanced security. It could be the best option for a tech-savvy user with past experiences in e-commerce.
Ultimately, both are a solid pick for an e-commerce platform. Picking a clear winner between Magento vs. WooCommerce isn’t easy since both come with their strengths and weaknesses. We recommend you consider your requirements and expectations on how robust, scalable, reliable and affordable your e-commerce system needs to be.
