Woo commerce and Magento proudly stand as two of the most popular e-commerce solutions.
When put together, they power 40% of all E- commerce websites online.
While both have their strengths and weaknesses, it becomes quite challenging for a merchant to choose which is the best one between the two. We aim to help you give the answer based on what’s better for your business?
Firstly, both WooCommerce and Magento are open source products, so consequently they’re both initially free to use. Both are deeply customisable and have an abundance of community help, but what makes them different.
Magento is a content management system built specifically for e-commerce, while WooCommerce is an ecommerce framework built on top of WordPress.
WordPress is another very popular open source CMS thus you first need to install WordPress and then add a WooCommerce plugin.
Woo commerce is an add-on plugin that can be installed within WordPress CMS. WooCommerce is very light on server that loads quickly and takes up little disk space, that’s why even a shared hosting may be perfectly good to keep the store running smoothly.
Magento requires significantly more powerful hosting than WooCommerce, though you’ll most likely want to use a dedicated server to ensure a good store performance otherwise your online retailer may get sluggish.
The winner in hosting category is WooCommerce.
When it comes to e-commerce features, Magento is a clear winner here, with some of the main features such as built-in multi-store capability, multi language options, complex configurable products and layered navigation to name a few and even more that you’ll find in out of the box Magento .
WooCommerce does not have the same features as Magento, that doesn’t make WooCommerce a lesser choice though most of these superb features can still be obtained with the help of plugins and extensions and installed to your WordPress CMS
WooCommerce has other benefits to compensate this kind of inferiority for example WooCommerce can score more in SEO due to its fast performance and impressive blogging functionality, but nonetheless, Magento rightfully wins in the features category.
Ease-of-use
Magento definitely does take some time getting used to, and it’s also quite complicated from a development standpoint, but if you’re serious about putting in a bit of effort and climb over the steep learning curve, Magento will repay off your efforts many times over.
We like that WooCommerce puts a huge emphasis on intuitive design and navigation; for example adding a product in WooCommerce is simple and fast – just click on products menu then add a product – you can give it a name, write descriptions, choose type for your product, set attributes price, add cross-sells and upsells etc. All through a super simple to use user interface.
Adding a product in Magento is quite simple as well, go to catalogue manage products here you can either edit existing products or add a new one by clicking add product button at first you’ll have to pick an attribute set and choose a product type afterwards you’ll have to go through a time-consuming yet comprehensible process of product setup. Since Magento is made for large scale stores to it may not be as visually appealing as WordPress but the product options can hold much more information and configuration options that WordPress simply does not have.
WooCommerce strikes back and wins in ease-of-use category.
Security
Magento is a platform built for e-commerce, it is considered to be more secure than WooCommerce. Moreover Magento store often requires fewer plugins which logically reduces the number of possible security holes that can be exploited.
WordPress is standalone vanilla CMS built mainly for blogging. Due to its popularity and widespread use in blogging a ton of commerce plugins are available for WordPress. Often these plugins are not developed but highly experienced developers who can rightfully determine security flaws. In short, since the platform is not purpose built for handling ecommerce transactions – it’s not a highly secure platform by itself.
WordPress is a victim of frauds and hacker attacks more than Magento. This flaw can be addressed with the help of security plugins which however would increase your expenses and use additional resources needed for other extensions.
Magento the winner in the security category.
Extensions and plugins
Both Magento and WooCommerce have an incomparable number of extensions and plugins able to power up your store considerably, so if you have a specific need, it’s likely that there’s an extension or plugin available on either platform, being similar in diversity – they’re different in price.
WooCommerce add-ons are cheaper and easier to install than those of Magento.
To add a plug-in or an extension on WooCommerce you need to go to your admin panel click on plugins menu then add new here you may search for any plug-in available
when you find the required plugin, click ‘Install Now’ button, but as an alternative you can also install WooCommerce plugins via FTP.
Magento is not so straightforward, and in fact quite often you may need a developer to handle installations and proceed to configure them correctly.
The installation of a plug-in depends on the extension type as there are community and commercial extensions, community extensions are built for the Magento community and are free to install. You need to look through the Magento Marketplace ‘Magento Connect’ to find the needed Magento extension on then click ‘Install Now’ button.
Always check the license agreement box and click get extension key, now copy the extension key and go to your Magento admin, navigate to the system Magento connect and then select Magento connect manager here you’ll be asked to enter your Magento credentials once again, then enter your extension key into an appropriate field. Click install and when the extension is found click proceed button the installation process will begin and show a message when it’s finished. Commercial Magento extensions can’t be installed like that – you can browse them via Magento connect, but after clicking the get extension button, you’ll be redirected to a merchant site to perform a purchase.
Merchants will send you a zip file containing instructions and extension files. Most often, all you have to do is extract a zip file into a root folder via FTP manager.
WooCommerce and Magento both have some awesome plugins and extensions, however the wordpress community is huge and have extensions for most if not all scenarios covered.
WooCommerce is the winner.
Popular extension for woocommerce
- Metrilo WooCommerce Analytics
- YITH WooCommerce Zoom Magnifier
- YITH WooCommerce Ajax Product Filter
- WooCommerce Multilingual – run WooCommerce with WPML
- Beeketing for WooCommerce
- WooCommerce Checkout Manager
- Stripe Payment Gateway
- WooCommerce Menu Cart
- Woocommerce CSV Importer
- Genesis Connect for WooCommerce
- DHL WooCommerce Shipping Method
- WooCommerce Direct Checkout
- WooCommerce Currency Switcher
- WooCommerce PDF & Print
- WooCommerce Product Slider
- YITH Infinite Scrolling
- Enhanced Ecommerce Google Analytics Plugin for WooCommerce
- WooCommerce PDF Invoices
- WooCommerce Product Gift Wrap
- Woo Social Media Marketing
- Dynamic Pricing and Discounts Plugin by XAdapter
- Breeze – Free WordPress Cache Plugin
Popular extension for Magento2
- Realex payments extension
- Elavon payment extension
- PagSeguro payment for Magento 2
- Magento 2 Customer persuasion and Loyalty programs
- Upsell & cross-sell popups
- Stock & price countdown
- Free gifts and coupons
- MageMob App Builder
- MageMob Admin
Scalability
Magento is known to be by far – the most scalable eCommerce platform out there. With a decent hosting, it can handle thousands and thousands of products and orders with an incredible ease for truly huge stores and then there’s even more powerful Magento Enterprise Edition. All these make Magento a perfect choice for middle and big sized online retailers.
WooCommerce has a comfortable upper limit for it’s platform – which is around 2500 products, and after passing this number the limitations of WooCommerce functionality tend to result in your website feeling a little clunky, that’s why most WooCommerce stores are small or middle sized with a few exceptions.
Magento wins in scalability category.
Themes
Both platforms have a vast array of themes.
Magento themes are more likely to be ready to go out of the box while, WooCommerce tend to require widgets that add content and features to your website on the other hand WooCommerce themes are much easier to edit and tailor quite often they’re cheaper too to add.
A theme on WooCommerce you need to go to appearance themes add new theme here simply choose the one you like and click install.
The installation of Magento theme is somewhat similar to adding an extension, you need to find it on Magento connect then copy the extension key and go to system Magento connect Magento connect manager here enter the key into an appropriate field and click install.
No clear winner, both platforms offer a vast variety of beautiful customizable and responsive themes.
price
While both Magento and WooCommerce are free initially the long term costs vary considerably.
WooCommerce requires less expensive hosting has less expensive plugins and generally lower development costs.
Magento, unless you stick to its out-of-the-box functionality costs of platform maintenance may escalate quickly it happens due to expensive extensions higher development costs and generally more expensive hosting requirements.
The winner in price category is WooCommerce which is one of the most cost effective shopping carts.
Conclusion
while both platforms have their merits and flaws, it essentially comes down to your business model. If you’re running a small business with a limited budget and little developing experience then WooCommerce with WordPress is definitely the way to go.
It does the job of selling simple products and can be significantly enhanced with the help of numerous plugins and extensions available.
Medium and large size businesses with a large number of products and greater financial resources are better off using Magento as it has a more features.
We handle automated shopping cart migrations to Magento as well as to WooCommerce everyday. This proves the severe competition between the two top eCommerce Solutions.
