If you are considering starting your own online business and cannot find an e-commerce solution to start; WooCommerce or Magento, then you are on the right page. When creating an online presence, it is important to make the correct decision on which platform to pick.
An eCommerce development company often meet clients web requirements who find it difficult to choose between these best eCommerce platforms. Magento is the most popular solution among enterprise-class companies, while WooCommerce is ideal for WordPress-based stores.
In this article, we will show you the functionality of both platforms and describe the major differences. We hope this guide clears things up and helps you decide what best suits your business requirements. Let’s start!
What WooCommerce and Magento Offer?
WooCommerce was and still is a WordPress plugin that can be called an eCommerce platform out of respect for the developers. Without WordPress, the WooCommerce plugin cannot work.
It is one of the more popular plugins today, with many features for newbies and more advanced users. Its main purpose is to organize sales on the Internet.
On the other hand, Magento is a full-fledged, independent system, created only for internet trading. Its potential customers are mostly medium and large businesses. While WooCommerce can be quickly and easily learned by a beginner, Magento is generally not recommended for beginners. It (platform) is for tech-savvy users.
Both platforms have their own advantages and disadvantages. Let’s check out the main features of WooCommerce and Magento. Then we decide which of the two platforms is better.
Comparison of Magento and WooCommerce
Ease of use
Many sellers lack technical and programming knowledge, so they are searching for easily accessible and operating eCommerce solutions.
Magento is a strong platform with many helpful features and capabilities. Yet, it is somewhat tough for newbies to start using Magento. The platform has an advanced setup method and needs technical knowledge to create a Magento site.
However, Magento delivers comprehensive video tutorials and documentation. In order to fully utilize the potential of the platform, it is useful to outsource the deployment process to a professional Magento eCommerce development company that has the knowledge and resources to create high-quality eCommerce websites. WooCommerce is not an independent platform. It can be called a plugin that you can include in the WordPress site and convert it into an online store.
WooCommerce has an intuitive interface, so you can create an online store yourself. Anyone aware of WordPress coding, without in-depth technical knowledge, can easily start and run a WooCommerce store and run effortlessly.
What’s more, WooCommerce has a setup wizard that reveals all the necessary steps to create a store, like; creating pages, selecting a language, setting up payments, and shipping procedures. You just have to follow the guide and arrange everything up perfectly.
Specifications
The number of features that an e-commerce solution provides speaks volumes. To have a successful shopping site, you need more than basic functionality, it is very important to find a platform that offers flexibility and advanced customization. Fortunately, both WooCommerce and Magento have a wide variety of features to enable you to open a sales-boosting eCommerce store.
Magento is considered an enterprise-grade e-commerce solution and offers a great set of out-of-the-box features. The platform allows you to create a sophisticated and feature-rich store that is tailored to your specific business needs. Here are the key features of Magento 2 for an online store:
- Marketing, promotion and conversion tool
- Content Management System (CMS)
- Search engine optimization
- Directory management
- View Products
- Browse catalogue
- Calculation, payment and delivery
- Order management
- Customer accounts and service
- International support
- Analytics and reporting
- Mobility
WooCommerce provides a basic set of features that are suitable for small stores with a limited set of needs. Here are the key features of WooCommerce for an online store:
- Search engine optimization
- Cart behavior
- Product data panel
- Calculation of customs taxes
- Discount coupons and codes
- Geolocation support
- Calculations and delivery prices
- Store management
- Analytics and reporting
- Inventory Management and more
Choosing a theme
Both WooCommerce and Magento give you the ability to create a unique storefront and provide a great selection of themes. There are dozens of free and paid templates that are optimized for mobile devices. After a little tweaking, your online store should look exactly the way you want it to look.
You can search for Magento templates on the Magento marketplace or select themes from third-party providers such as ThemeForest or TemplateMonster. When it comes to storing design, we recommend that you create a custom theme from scratch if you want a unique look and feel.
WooCommerce has a slight edge over Magento in terms of the number of themes available on the market. The platform provides a wide variety of topics. Besides the native WooCommerce themes, it is possible to apply any of the WordPress themes. There are thousands of WordPress themes on the world wide web.
Extensions and plugins
No eCommerce solution is perfect, there is a limitation on the features your platform provides as core features. In this case, you can integrate extensions to extend the functionality of the platform. Both WooCommerce and Magento allow merchants to add advanced features through their extensions.
Magento offers about 6,000 free and paid extensions on the Magento marketplace that you can easily install using the Magento backend. They are created by community developers for website optimization, payments, accounting, sales, and more.
WooCommerce has a large number of free and paid plugins available on the WooCommerce marketplace that can help grow your eCommerce business. Since WooCommerce runs on top of WordPress, it gives you access to 55,000+ WordPress add-ons for store management, marketing, payments, shipping, and more.
It’s also worth mentioning that Magento provides a lot more out-of-the-box features in its enterprise plan compared to WooCommerce, so you might not need to integrate as many extensions. To have advanced features on your WooCommerce store, you need to integrate plugins.
Payment Methods
An online store will not receive any orders for products if it does not support secure payment methods. You need to analyze which payment solutions your target audience prefers and check if the e-commerce platform you choose supports these payment methods. Both Magento and WooCommerce support a wide variety of payment methods. Magento supports PayPal, Braintree, Authorize.net, COD, Bank Transfer by default. Moreover, with Magento, you can easily integrate many popular payment gateways like Stripe, 2Checkout, Square, Dwolla and others through third-party extensions.
WooCommerce supports PayPal and Stripe payment gateways by default. Merchants can also add Braintree, 2Checkout, Alipay, Amazon payments through extensions available in the market.
Search Engine Optimization
SEO can improve or destroy your online store. When it comes to Magento and Woocommerce SEO, both platforms are SEO optimized.
WooCommerce is SEO optimized out of the box. However, you have a lot of work to do to fully optimize your WooCommerce store for search engines in terms of site structure, product and category pages, tags, and more. There are many extensions you can use to enhance your SEO strategies.
Magento offers advanced SEO tools. Enhanced snippets on Magento 2 catalogue pages make it much easier for search engines to crawl your product data. With Magento, you can easily rewrite URLs, generate meta descriptions, optimize images, or integrate your store with Google Sitemap.
Just because a platform is SEO-optimized doesn’t mean you don’t need to implement SEO best practices to drive more traffic to your website.
Performance and hosting
Performance is a decisive factor that decides which platform users choose for their online stores. Customers tend to leave eCommerce stores that take too long to load and won’t come back to buy anything on your website in the future. You cannot afford to have a low-performance eCommerce website.
When comparing Magento and Woocommerce, website performance varies greatly depending on the hosting provider, the size of the files, and the number of extensions you add to your online store. Magento and WooCommerce are standalone platforms and are pretty fast by default.
In Magento 2, the average load time is now below two seconds due to full page caching technologies such as Varnish and NGINX. If your Magento store have powerful dedicated hosting, it will deliver high results. If you don’t want to worry about hosting, we recommend Magento Commerce Cloud, a cloud version powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS).
WooCommerce can never be as good as Magento in terms of performance. However, you can integrate extensions to improve the performance of your shopping site. WooCommerce might not be the best choice for large companies with a lot of products.
Woocommerce and Magento: Summing Up
Every user looking to launch an e-commerce site has different needs. When it comes to the platforms compared here, there is no one size fits all solution. This is one of the main reasons why it was difficult to compare WooCommerce and Magento.
WooCommerce is easy to start, harder to continue and notoriously difficult to set up a large store. With Magento, the opposite is true – it is very difficult to master, a huge number of powerful functions, and at the same time poor localization, but it is a very powerful and advanced platform. However, if you are motivated and confident in the development of your store, in the end, you will be satisfied with Magento.
