Compare eCommerce Platforms

One of the most widely used ecommerce platform in the world, WooCommerce is completely open source. It is built on top of WordPress, most popular website builder and CMS platform. Store owners can easily create their online store, with just a few clicks on WooCommerce. They can add plugins, customize the store as per their will, and even scale the store to cater to the growing traffic without breaking the structure of the store. Both WordPress and WooCommerce are completely free for use.

Launched around a decade ago, Magento is one of the most powerful open source ecommerce platforms available in the industry today. The beauty of this platform is that it is fully customizable, self-hosted, and scalable. Store owners can easily add customizable themes and extensions, accept payments through multiple methods, and manage thousands of products without breaking the store. The Community edition also known as Magento Open Source platform is available for free and if your store requires, you can also opt for the Enterprise Edition also known as Magento Commerce at a premium.

Not many store owners have coding skills and deep technical knowledge. Thus, ease of use is one of the most important aspects to consider and choose an eCommerce solution. The more intuitive and convenient, the more preferable.

When you start with Magento, you may feel overwhelmed by so many new business terms and technical concepts. There are a lot of functions and features available in Magento that require professional users to do the necessary configurations. However, if you spend time to get to the bottom of them, you’ll see that everything is clearly organized and connected for further expansion in the future.

On the other hand, WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin so the installation process is much simpler than Magento. Someone who doesn’t know much about eCommerce platforms or technology can set up and run an online store using WooCommerce. WooCommerce provides a setup wizard to make the installation process effortless and comfortable. You just need to follow each step exactly to configure everything.

WooCommerce wins this round for the ease of use!

Magento is built with many eCommerce features that WooCommerce doesn’t develop, which makes Magento a much more powerful platform than WooCommerce. Sometimes to compensate for this problem, some businesses find ways to integrate WordPress into Magento.

Therefore, if you have a large catalog and require complex eCommerce integration, Magento is the more suitable choice to start with. Till now, Magento has maintained its position as the most robust small-to-medium-business (SMB) eCommerce platform on the market.

1. Inventory management

Both platforms have no limit on the number of products on the website. You can add as many products to your website as you like.

WooCommerce

• Weak inventory management for large and complex catalog
• Poor database architecture for order management at high volume
• Plugin required for multi-store management and B2B features

Magento

• Strong inventory management for large and complex product catalog
• Robust order management and multi-store management
• B2B features in Magento Commerce and Magento Commerce Cloud

2. Discounts and coupon codes

With Magento, you can set promotions flexibly for customer groups and based on:

• Catalog price rule
• Shopping cart price rule
• You can even apply multiple coupon codes for one order.

WooCommerce also has this feature, but it’s very basic and does not address the needs and purposes of actual usage. Coupon codes are case-sensitive and set based on product IDs only.

3. Themes and templates

WooCommerce and Magento platforms provide you with a wide variety of templates and themes. Some simple themes are free themes. You can find and pay for more sophisticated ones in their marketplaces.

4. Multi-languages support

While Magento has built-in support for most popular languages, WooCommerce requires you to purchase WPML to run the WooCommerce site in multiple currencies and languages.

5. SEO capabilities

Magento is at the top in the field of SEO. It has good SEO capabilities by default and provides many advanced SEO extensions in case you have more complex requirements. With the SEO-friendly power of Magento, your store will easily achieve high search engine rankings and increase traffic attraction.

On the other hand, WooCommerce inherits the SEO feature of the WordPress platform, so it also has pretty good SEO capabilities in the box.

In terms of essential features to run an online business, Magento wins over WooCommerce!

Most website visitors will quickly leave your website or won’t even return to purchase if the loading speed is slow. That causes a significant drop in conversion rate and loss of potential revenue for your business. Therefore, performance and speed are factors when choosing a platform for your online stores.

However, no matter which platform you choose, your website performance and speed depend on various aspects, such as:

• The displaying image (optimized or not)
• The number of installed extensions and modules
• The quality of web hosting provider

Overall, there are so many factors that tie in this round. No clear winner in this round!

In the 2021 Threat Report, Sophos indicates that more than 40,000 sites are hacked every day. Thus, website security is the most important and challenging task for any eCommerce business. Your online store contains a lot of information about payment details and customer information so optimal security should be a top priority.

You can implement some security measures with both Magento and WooCommerce, mostly through manual processes and extensions. Overall, Magento provides stronger security for online stores than WooCommerce. Magento releases Magento Patches periodically to keep your website with the most updated technology. These free security patches help you to:

• Monitor your website
• Find unauthorized access
• Scan for malware
• For more sophisticated security requirements, you can add Magento premium security extensions to protect your online store easily and better.

Magento wins the round of security!

The core of eCommerce platforms will only provide you with basic features to run an online business. Woocommerce and Magento allow third-party developers to create extensions to fill in the gaps of business expectations. They both have a large number of add-ons to enhance website appearance and functionality.

WooCommerce and Magento are both open source platforms that attract a large number of development communities. In case of any issues, you can search for answers in the community and get support from all over the world.

WooCommerce

• Public knowledge base and community for yourself
• Support only available for paid extensions

Magento

• For Open Source edition, you can get support from the community or hire third-party developers.
• For Commerce and Commerce Cloud editions, you’ll have dedicated and direct support via tickets, email, and phone.

The core of eCommerce platforms will only provide you with basic features to run an online business. Woocommerce and Magento allow third-party developers to create extensions to fill in the gaps of business expectations. They both have a large number of add-ons to enhance website appearance and functionality.

Magento offers 3,931 free and paid extensions for:

• Website optimization
• Marketing
• Payment
• Accounting and finance
• Security
• Shipping and fulfillment
• Customer support

There are many features in Magento extensions for you to speed up your business and discover new functionality in essential business categories.

WooCommerce marketplace sells over 400 extensions to customize or personalize their website according to their brand identity and business requirements. WooCommerce plugin prices are usually a lot cheaper than Magento 2. 

In addition to the 400 WooCommerce plugins, there are thousands of eCommerce plugins that can be installed to optimize your website. The options are limitless.

Overall, the higher cost of Magento extensions is well worth it because Magento extensions make your Magento store more powerful than WooCommerce store. However, WooCommerce and Wordpress has a large selection of plugins that can meet any of your needs. For that reason, there is no clear winner.

The latest version of Magento requires a virtual private server (VPS) or dedicated server to run smoothly. Whereas, WooCommerce can run on a shared server with minimum resources.

As a result, Magento is more resource intensive than WooCommerce.