Magento or OpenCart- Which Suits Your E-commerce Project?
- Saivion Technologies
- Mar 30, 2017
- 3 min read
The e-commerce platforms available to businesses have a wide range making it perplexing to find the best-suited one for a particular project. But the best thing is competition is always good for customers. With all the stiff competition in the industry, we can see new development in the story almost every week. That's why e-commerce platforms keep on improving regularly and today we have numerous platforms to select from. Magento and OpenCart are two of the most popular platforms for e-commerce stores. Both these platforms have magnificent features that make content management of online stores very easy. That's the reason several online stores across the world are powered by them. But making a decision regarding which one of the two is better for your project is a very difficult thing to do. Let's discuss both the platforms in detail to know more about them.
Common Features of Magento & OpenCart
Being developed for the same purpose, both the platforms have many similarities. First of all, both are open source. It means you can use them without paying anything for the technology. Also, both the e-commerce solutions are PHP based. When it comes to language support and currencies, both of them have multiple options. Both have huge communities leading to a plenty of extensions offering various functionalities. Moreover, you can manage stores of any scale with any of the platforms.
Differences Between Magento & OpenCart
User-friendliness
This supposes to be the biggest difference between the two. OpenCart is very easy to manage but Magento lacks this kind of simplicity. Simply put, you can't handle Magento unless you have a certain amount of programming knowledge. The technical expertise that Magento needs forces e-commerce store owners to hire development professionals. Though the solution is so powerful that it can leave the shoppers stunned with a high level of user experience but to reach that level you will certainly need a professional developer.
On the other hand, OpenCart is very easy to manage. Setting up an e-commerce store is a matter of hours with OpenCart. But the convenience it offers comes at a cost, it has around 80% of functionalities that Magento offers. That's the reason big e-commerce stores prefer Magento over OpenCart even when the latter is so convenient to use.
Popularity & Community Support
As per an estimation, Magento occupies about 20% of the overall e-commerce market with around 3 times more e-stores than OpenCart. Have a look at the image below to know what level of popularity both the platforms enjoy. The blue line is for Magento while the red one is for OpenCart.
And as far as support is concerned, both the e-commerce solutions have huge communities offering all sorts of help to merchants. But when drawn a comparison, the volume of programs for Magento is considerably larger than that of OpenCart. The reason for this difference is the immense need of technical assistance that Magento requires as an e-commerce solution.
Hosting Packages & Extension Prices
True that both Magento and OpenCart are open source but they can definitely affect the cost of other things like hosting plans, extension prices, and template costs. In this case, Magento will cost you more and the cost difference would be considerable. Being way heavier that OpenCart, Magento requires a good hosting plan. Besides, templates and extension license for Magento are also very expensive.
But OpenCart supposes to be a very lightweight platform making hosting plan requirements for it quite low. And themes are available at almost half the price of Magento templates. All these things make OpenCart considerable cheaper than Magento as an e-commerce solution.
With all the above information in mind, you can easily figure out which platform you need for your e-commerce venture. If you want to go with Magento, you can take help of e-commerce development professionals but if you find OpenCart worth, you can give it a try yourself.
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