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How Magento Compares With WooCommerce

WooCommerce and Magento are two of the most popular eCommerce platforms out there. Both of these platforms are somewhat similar in many respects. For example, they both have an open-source, free version, and both of them are based on the PHP programming language. Apart from that, they also require their own individual hosting packages (such as Nexcess or WPEngine, for instance) to be run.

However, there is more than meets the eye once the user moves on beyond the more obvious similarities. If we were to look under the hood, we would see that Magento is a more complicated as well as a robust eCommerce platform than its WooCommerce counterpart. The latter is basically just a simple plug-in that has been placed on top of the main WordPress software. In other words, in spite of their more obvious similarities, both these platforms are also very different from each other, and both have their own respective strengths and weaknesses.

Magento

Magento is a state of the art eCommerce solution. It is an incredibly powerful software that comes in an open-source edition that is completely free which makes it a great option for budding entrepreneurs. Furthermore, there is an even more powerful Enterprise edition that is available for medium and long term businesses. Magento is widely considered by most experts to be the single most powerful SMB eCommerce platform currently available in the market today. It powers business websites all across the spectrum, ranging from very small online retail outlets to very large eCommerce-based websites.

The key difference between the Magento and WooCommerce platforms is that Magento is packed with many value-added eCommerce features that are not available in WooCommerce. This alone makes it a great choice. Some of the salient features of the Magento platform include the following:

  • Enterprise-focused with a very high degree of scalability
  • It has multiple versions including the Open Source, Enterprise, and Cloud editions
  • It already has a very large community of high-quality developers and Magento consultancies
  • It is equipped with out-of-the-box functionality regarding many eCommerce related applications
  • The platform has been primarily built around eCommerce first products unlike WooCommerce and WordPress
  • It boasts very strong business to business (B2B) eCommerce capabilities
  • Multistore capability
  • Strong product data resources for several large and complex catalogs
  • A very robust order management system
  • Many more advanced payment and shipping capabilities when compared to other platforms
  • More robust online promotion capabilities

WooCommerce

This is a great plug-in for WordPress and a useful tool in most eCommerce setups because it allows the merger of WordPress’s own features while simultaneously allowing additional eCommerce capabilities. However, it suffers from the following structural drawbacks:

  • Very weak database architecture for dealing with high order volumes
  • Very few out of the box features
  • Only one version of WooCommerce is available (no enterprise edition)
  • Scalability is tough for larger sites

Conclusion

In light of the above, we can safely state that Magento is significantly superior to WooCommerce. If you want any additional information on the Magento platform, you can get in touch with us here.