An attempt to find the best eCommerce shopping cart may be considered identically subjective and tricky as trying to decide who is the most beautiful woman in the world. eCommerce solutions comparison shows that each of existing platforms has its own advantages and strong points suitable for some clients but totally improper for others. Once you decide to take advantage of creating your own online store or to migrate from the eCommerce platform that hasn’t quite met your initial expectations, you should keep in mind a lot of various aspects that may influence your final decision. So, this time OpenCart or Magento? Which one will work for you? eCommerce software comparison will definitely clarify which choice is wiser but first, answer some of these questions:
- Define the size of the store for which the shopping cart is needed.
- Do you plan to run multiple stores or just a single one?
- Have you estimated your budget?
- How much do you generally rely on system support?
- Is SEO important?
- Do you need a hosted eCommerce solution?
- How unique is your business? Do you need special customization?
- Integrations with which systems are the most important for you?
| Magento | OpenCart | |
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| Features List |
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| Supported Integrations |
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| Price |
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| Business Size | Large Enterprises | Medium Business | Small Business | Medium Business |
| Installation & Ease of Use | Easy for developers and tech-savvy merchants. It takes about 10 minutes to install a base version of Magento or a few hours to run a whole store. | OpenCart is simple to setup and deploy. Its obvious advantage is that it is extremely easy to begin theming even for non-technicals. |
| Community & Customer support | Magento developers community is one of the biggest developers community in the world. It’s easy to find answers for any questions. Magento supports multiple languages and currencies. Despite Magento official support received only for expensive Enterprise Edition stores, you will not be left alone if you choose free Community Edition. A lot of enthusiastic web developers can help you to solve any issue. Magento Community has 130.000 members. | Commercial support provided by partners. Free community support via community forums. |
| Customization capabilities | Encourages extensive customization to meet specific business goals. Because of great variety of features Magento is more complex. | OpenCart is not very easy to customize. |
| Design | There are 1500+ free/paid and fully customizable Magento themes. Magento CE, 1.9 and later versions handle responsiveness “automatically”. | There are 1000+ free/paid and fully customizable themes. Decent templates but restricted static and product pages. |
| Flexibility | Magento is perfect choice for product editing and capable of handling large database smartly. | Highly flexible. |
| Extensions | More than 15.000 Magento plugins and extensions. | The community offers about 12.800 extensions but its search function leaves much to be desired. |
| One step checkout | Can be implemented with numerous available extensions. | Can be realized with add-ons. |
| Search Engine Optimization (SEO) | Magento SEO is more powerful not only than Presta, but even than others popular eCommerce platforms. | OpenCart provide regular search engine enhancement capabilities, except search engine friendly URLs that are default on Magento store. |
| Popular Customers | Christian Louboutin, Vizio, Rosetta Stone, Easton, Nike, Olympus, Gant, Ford Accessories, Sisley Paris, Eastwood, TractorTool, Webprint, Mothercare, Burger King | - |
OpenCart is a lightweight system, so it needs much less resources than Magento. However, this is also the reason why it has restrictions in number of handling products and bandwidth of your store not promising a very high performance. OpenCart can serve limited amount of users while Magento can easily handle up to 4M page requests and 50K orders PER HOUR!
In general, OpenCart looks like a great solution for startups and small companies that are going for independent web store development. The tremendous advantage of this platform is its clarity and user-friendliness, which is suitable for less experienced users. The Admin panel of Opencart is clear and convenient.
The wide amount of panels in Magento back-end can easily confuse any basic user, but when used by Magento professionals, it is like a piano that they use to create an unlimited amount of symphonies, all unique and fun.
Ok then, now let’s talk money! Being a smart choice for small companies in terms of functionality, OpenCart is also a very affordable solution as it requires minimum investments and its development costs about $10/hr. Bearing in mind all these benefits OpenCart offers small business a relatively quick start.
But if your company has ambitious plans to grow into a bigger business, you should pay more attention to scalability opportunities offered by a chosen eCommerce platform. When comparing Magento and OpenCart in this case, Magento obviously has the upper-hand. Magento has already earned the trust of leading brands in the world. It has a power of handling massive amount of data and traffic that is one of the most important requirements for big enterprises.
If you’re not sure which eCommerce platform is right for you, it’s always a good idea to speak with developers or apply for business and technical consulting.
