You know you need a powerful environment where you can build a customizable store, and online presence. WooCommerce promises all the flexibility and scalability of the WordPress landscape. Magento promises some of the most powerful tools for developing your brand.
Both of these titans can offer business leaders the tools they need to start selling online – and fast. Which is probably why it’s so difficult to choose one over the other.
Fortunately, we’re here to help.
Today, we’ll be exploring some of the biggest differences between Magento and WooCommerce, to help you make a more informed decision.
WooCommerce vs Magento: An Introduction
Let’s start with the basics. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to building the perfect website. Every software solution on the market has its own collection of die-hard fans ready to argue that it’s the best. The same is true for WooCommerce and Magento.
Both of these tools are designed to help business owners, like you, develop a profitable presence online. You can use both WooCommerce and Magento to develop a brand online. Plus, there’s support for eCommerce sales through both offerings, so you should have no problem creating an effective store.
What is WooCommerce?
WooCommerce is a plugin solution designed to convert a WordPress site into a store. Known throughout the world for offering some of the most flexible, and user-friendly functionality, WooCommerce supports hundreds of thousands of companies.
WooCommerce can support unlimited numbers of products on your store, and comes with a robust extension system, based around the WordPress format for plugins. That means that you can connect WooCommerce to many of the WordPress add-ons you already use. WooCommerce also gives you access to countless payment processors, on top of a host of premium and free themes.
WooCommerce Pros 👍
- It’s free to initially set up your store
- You can easily get started if you’re familiar with WordPress
- Extensive documentation is available
- You can adapt and expand your store however you choose
- Tons of great features for online sales
- Very simple back-end environment
- SSL support, although you need to source your certificate
- Premium and free themes available
- Dozens of payment processors
WooCommerce Cons 👎
- If you’re not familiar with WordPress, you’ll need to learn that first
- Premium extensions and themes can add up
What is Magento?
Magento isn’t connected to another CMS, it’s a full solution designed for businesses. This eCommerce offering appears to be best suited to larger companies that are building out on an international basis. However, small companies can enjoy the functionality too.
Magento is an open-source platform, similar to WooCommerce. You can modify the source code however you choose and create custom templates or unique functionality. Magento also allows for integrations and API access.
You can use Magento to manage multiple stores at once and accept payments in international currencies. There’s also an intuitive admin interface for creatives.
Magento Pros 👍
- Support for an unlimited number of products
- Dedicated theming and layout system
- Efficient APIs and integration options
- Built for scalability if you have a larger store
- Streamlined checkout for customers
- Integrates with plenty of payment options including PayPal and Authorize.Net
- Guest checkout enabled by default
Magento Cons 👎
- More geared towards developers than business owners
- Can be quite costly at times
WooCommerce vs Magento: WooCommerce Features
Both Magento and WooCommerce are open-source ecommerce platforms, designed to give you more flexibility over the way you build your store. Although your preference will depend on various factors, let’s start by looking at the features you can expect from WooCommerce:
- Built-in blog: Content marketing and SEO are often valuable tools for bringing attention to your business. As a WordPress plugin, WooCommerce provides both as standard.
- Tons of customization: With the right access to APIs and integrations, and very little coding knowledge, you can build a highly functional store with a lot of different advanced features. There are even options to add in integrations with the tools you already use on WordPress.
- Sell anything: You can sell physical and digital products, subscriptions, appointments, and more. There are no limits to what you can do online. Affiliate products are available, and you can set unlimited variations on things like size and color.
- Countless themes: Make a store that’s unique to your brand with endless free and paid themes to choose from. You can then customize any part of your store to suit your needs, embed different functionalities, and even create landing pages.
- Organize your store: Adding categories, tags, and attributes will make your products easier to find for customers. You can also access product sorting and filtering and showcase your items with unlimited images and galleries.
- Shipping options: Give customers a variety of shipping options, including local delivery, express shipping, and free shipping. There’s also a host of geo-location features for keeping your local connections on track.
- Customer management: You can support customers in registering for accounts on your website and let them choose their own usernames and passwords. WooCommerce also offers order management, inventory management, and employee shop management.
- One click purchases or refund: Deliver optimized selling experiences with one-click purchase or refunds. WooCommerce also supports coupons, related products, and product highlighting for upsells.
- Reporting and optimization: View sales, refunds, coupons, and other valuable data over time, and access SEO to boost your chances of appearing online.
- Thriving community: Part of what makes WooCommerce so special is its community. There are tons of people ready to help you online, as well as lots of documentation to get you started.
WooCommerce vs Magento: Magento Features
Magento checks plenty of boxes for features too. The eCommerce solution provides meaningful shopping experiences to customers powered by the Adobe Experience Cloud. In fact, Magento has been named a leader in digital commerce by Gartner. Some top Magento features include:
- Powerful page builder: Create custom pages with drag-and-drop tools, content staging, and preview options. You can add product recommendations, segmentation to ensure you reach the right customers, and more.
- Store management: Magento gives you full control over your online store with order management and fulfilment sections, inventory management, and even access to a host of documentation to assist you.
- Multi-channel selling: Aside from selling on your own website Magento also gives you the functionality you need to take your online store further, with access to selling on Amazon and other pages too.
- Tons of security: You don’t have to worry about putting your brand or your customers at risk. Security standards ensure that you give your customers the protection they need. There’s even PCI compliance.
- Optimized performance: Magento operates on the Adobe cloud to give your store the speed and performance factors it needs. Everything is optimized, and fully managed services make it easy to run your store with confidence.
- Capabilities marketplace: If you need to add extra functionality to your store, Magento can help with that too. There are tons of integrations and extensions that you can work with if you know a little code.
WooCommerce vs Magento Pricing
Choosing the best ecommerce platform often means thinking about how much functionality you can get for your business needs, without breaking the bank. Both Magento and WooCommerce can be a little difficult to understand when you’re looking at pricing.
WooCommerce, as mentioned above, is an open-source service. This means you can download the solution and access it for free. However, there are various premium services you’ll only be able to access with some extra cash. Magento has its own free community edition, then you’ll need to speak to a professional about Magento enterprise edition, or premium options.
Although you can get a store up and running with both WooCommerce and Magento without spending much, you will eventually have some cash to pay. As Magento evolves, going from Magento 1 to Magento 2 and so on, you may find that you need to pay for extra functionality again.
It’s also important to keep in mind that although you can get the Magento open source or WooCommerce open source software for free, this doesn’t mean you can run your online business without spending anything. You’ll need to pay for your hosting, domain name, and other functionality. How much you spend on these things will depend on you.
If you’re running a multi store environment with paid extensions, product management features, and SEO tools for search engines, it’s going to cost a lot more. On the other hand, if you keep things simple with a few basic functionalities, like a checkout page and a wishlist, you won’t have as much to pay.
WooCommerce vs Magento: Ease of Use
Having a huge number of great features to tap into is great, but it becomes a little redundant if you don’t know how to use them. WooCommerce and Magento take a very different approach to store building and management.
WooCommerce offers a very straightforward and easy-to-use experience for people who have even basic coding knowledge. Open-source solutions are often a little tougher to work with when you’re building a store. That’s because you need some technical knowledge to access various features and capabilities. However, with the wide community to help you, and the simple backend, WooCommerce shouldn’t be too much of a problem.
WooCommerce will appeal most to people who are already comfortable designing sites on WordPress. If you know how to use WordPress, you’ll be comfortable with this plugin, as it works within your WordPress dashboard.
WooCommerce makes it quick and simple to build a site and test its functionality. You can also make as many changes as you like, until you’re fully satisfied with the functionality.
When it comes to making your site look attractive, WooCommerce has a variety of storefront themes to choose from, but you do need to pay for these premium options. The premium templates are quite affordable, at around $39 for 14 options, and they’re highly customizable, provided you have the right technical knowledge.
Magento is very similar to WooCommerce from an ease-of-use perspective. The solution is also open source, so you’re going to need some technical knowledge to leverage all the features. Compared to WooCommerce, Magento can seem a little tougher, as the admin area is a little daunting at first.
When you’re ready to customize your store, there aren’t a lot of built-in themes available on the system itself, but you can integrate all the themes you might like from third-party providers. There are tons of premium and free options out there intended to work with Magento.
If you have a developer background, you shouldn’t struggle too much with Magento. There are also drag-and-drop components for your designs, which can make the whole experience a little easier to grasp. On the plus side, finding the things you need within the Magento interface is easy, because everything is consolidated onto a single navigational menu.
WooCommerce vs Magento: Site Performance & Security
No-one can afford to take risks when it comes to site performance.
Your website or ecommerce store needs to run fast to earn the trust of your customers. Speed can also impact your chances of sales, and your SEO strategy. Both WooCommerce and Magento fortunately perform quite well in this environment.
Magento and WooCommerce are designed to respond with speed. However, the performance of your website will ultimately rely on your hosting provider, and the bandwidth you have available. If you find your store isn’t running as quickly as you’d like, try removing some WordPress plugins with WooCommerce, or using a CDN.
You can also look into changing your hosting provider with Magento 2, as this will increase the scalability of your site. Adjusting your web hosting can sometimes give you access to more advanced security too.
Security is another thing that today’s companies can’t afford to compromise on. WooCommerce and Magento both allow you to handle security with the add-ons that suit you. While security tools don’t come as a massive part of the package for these ecommerce business tools, it is available.
You can access dedicated security patches from Magento that keep your ecommerce solution secure. There are also various integrations and add-ons that you can use to protect your website, such as SSL certificates. However, you will need to source the security elements for your eCommerce websites yourself.
WooCommerce vs Magento: Extensions
When you’re shopping for the best ecommerce platform, it’s a good idea to look for something that already has everything you need built in. However, as small businesses grow, they often begin to look for additional advanced functions too.
Magento commerce and WooCommerce both offer opportunities for extending the capabilities of your website. Most of the extensions you need for Magento are already included as part of the pricing. On the other hand, WooCommerce will require you to purchase and download addons separately. The booking feature of WooCommerce isn’t included, for instance.
It’s worth noting that WooCommerce does have quite an impressive range of add-ons available, for store owners, however. If you want to build your own functionality, rather than having everything you need built in like you would with a Magento or Shopify store, WooCommerce is a great choice.
You can expand your platform functionality with tools that make it easier to manage your products and inventories, or experiment with new payment gateways. Magento does have more functionality already included however, like grouped items, product reviews, wish lists, and pricing rules.
WooCommerce vs Magento: Which is Best?
There are so many popular ecommerce platforms to choose from today, that it’s easy for any business leader or startup to get confused. If you’re looking for something without a steep learning curve, then you might look into hosted services like Shopify. However, if you want something that you can customize from the ground up to suit your user base, it’s always worth considering open-source.
Both WooCommerce and Magento give you a lot of flexibility compared to other online sales tools. This means that you can build a truly special Magento or WordPress website, and add functionality over time. There are tons of Woo style add-ons and Magento enhancements available.
The WooCommerce plugin is probably a good choice for you if you like the idea of running your own WordPress website with a host of extra features. You’ll have zero transaction fees to worry about, full control over the code, thousands of free themes to choose from, an easy-to-use back-end and so much more. Plus, the community is huge, for extra support.
If a WooCommerce store doesn’t appeal to you, Magento is still an excellent choice. The Magento community is fantastic for getting support, and there’s a ton of catalog and product management features built into the service. You can design multi-store environments, and access some amazing core functionality for blogging and sales. Your Magento store will also have access to a bunch of integrations, and there’s a free version to get you started.
Which product appeals most to you?
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