Magneto Vs WooCommerce: Which One To Pick For Your Online Store

WooCommerce

TechsPlace | In this era where people prefer shopping online, eCommerce has become a thriving field. A great number of businesses are moving online to reach a wide audience and maximize their sales. This clearly means that tools required to set up and operate an eCommerce store are in high demand. And, with quite a large number of tools, store owners are often spoil for choice. The self-hosted solution is the most viable option if you want to leverage all the benefits of an online store. The self-hosted solution brings the complete control of appearance and visibility of your web-based shop in your hand. Talking about the self-hosted solution, Magneto and WooCommerce are nonpareil platforms available out there.

Magneto vs WooCommerce – the comparison of two platforms require considering multiple aspects depending upon your business model. When it comes to features, Magneto and WooCommerce both come with a pack of punch. Hence, there is no ultimate solution between Magneto and WooCommerce, but you can pick one of the two depending upon your unique needs.

Here is a list of aspects that we will bring to light in this blog for pitching the comparison between Magneto and WooCommerce:

  1. Cost
  2. Usability
  3. Customization
  4. Features
  5. SEO

Let’s begin.

  1. Cost:

WooCommerce is available free of cost, though the free version of the plugin offers only basic operation. You need to make use of extensions, which generally comes with an annual cost of $5 to $500. For an instance, the free-of-cost available version of WooCommerce offers payments via PayPal and bank transfers only. However, if you want to use a full range of payment options, then you need to go for paid options.

Coming to Magneto, this eCommerce platform is free initially and has a wide range of features in a standard package. However, as your business elevate, you would require adding extensions for the customization of the store and this results in elevating the cost of the platform.

  1. Usability:

If you already have a WordPress-based website, then it is logical to pick WooCommerce to create an online store within it.  WordPress is an easy-to-use platform and WooCommerce being one of its plugins, follows the lead.

In contrast to this, Magneto cannot be considered novice-friendly. Magneto being robust, demands for at least intermediate knowledge to get started with. Although, there is extensive documentation available through which you can learn about the functionality of the platform.

In a nutshell, the beginner-friendly nature of WooCommerce makes it win the battle when it comes to usability.

  1. Customization:

When it comes to customization, WooCommerce again manages to beat Magneto. Adding own extensions becomes an intricate and time-consuming task in Magneto. Hence, one is required to take assistance from experts to get the tasks done.

On the other hand, customization are not a hard nut to crack in WooCommerce. WooCommerce possesses quite a large number of extensions with dedicated updates that make it easy to do changes in the site. Also, it is easy to find WordPress developer as compared to Magneto experts.

  1. Features:

WooCommerce is intuitive to use, easy-to-setup and well-developed plugin that is perfect for small and medium scale organizations. Clean and sleek design of WooCommerce, make it simple to add eCommerce functionality to your site. With WooCommerce, it becomes a cinch to manage and run your store. You can comfortably learn to manage your store within a couple of hours, even if you don’t have any technical background.

Moving to Magneto, it is a go-to option for larger eCommerce retailers as it can handle unlimited products and can work with multiple languages, different currencies, and payment options. Magneto also allows you to run multiple storefronts with a single dashboard, thereby enabling you to manage multiple websites. The only drawback to Magneto is that you need to hire an expert to set up and customize your store.

  1. SEO:

When it comes to search engine strategies, you need to be on the top of the game. Both the platforms, offer you excellent opportunities for the optimization of the store over search engine. With Magneto, you will get search-engine friendly URLs, well-structured pages and a lot more options to improve the visibility of your site.

Similarly, with WooCommerce you find myriad of plugins for search engine optimization. The Yoast Plugin, for an instance, offers a number of features like readability calculation, keyword optimization, breadcrumb design etc.

In a nutshell, picking the right platform from one of the two eCommerce giants is entirely depended upon your requirements. Dedicated eCommerce capability and quite a large number of inbuilt features make Magneto enterprise level solution. On the contrary, WooCommerce is the best option for small to medium businesses owing to ease-of-use, cost-effectiveness, and flexibility.