Welcome to the post series where we are going to perform detailed comparison of the most popular eCommerce solutions currently available on the market, thuswise, helping you to find out which one meets your requirements perfectly.
We’d like to start off this research by comparing two leading platforms in this area; so, ladies and gentlemen, Prestashop vs Magento are onstage! Actually, if this competition took place on a boxing ring, these fighters may have never met each other as they belong to completely different weight categories, although they certainly have obvious similarities. Both systems are open source and have free editions, both provide flexibility and implementation of plenty custom features for any tricky business requirement. Both of them number about 250.000 customers. But their differences become more evident once we take a closer look at them:
| Magento | Prestashop | |
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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 store. | Easy for beginners to set up if the hosting company supports one-click installation. But to install by hand, you must have technical knowledge. |
| 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. | PrestaShop doesn’t offer an official support, just community forum. Support is quite restricted, available only in English and French. PrestaShop Community has 30.000 members. |
| Customization capabilities | Encourages extensive customization to meet specific business goals. Because of great variety of features Magento is more complex. | Installation and handling of the modules is simpler than in Magento. |
| Design | There are 1500+ free/paid and fully customizable Magento themes. Magento CE, 1.9 and later versions handle responsiveness “automatically”. | 1000+ paid themes PrestaShop is a responsive system by default just from version 1.6. |
| Flexibility | Magento is perfect choice for product editing and capable of handling large database smartly. | Prestashop allows developer to customize eCommerce store easily according to his opinions and customer’s need through the admin panel. |
| Extensions | More than 15.000 Magento plugins and extensions. | About 3.000 Prestashop modules. Most of full functional modules are quite expensive. |
| One step checkout | Can be implemented with numerous available extensions. | You need to install one of checkout modules. |
| Search Engine Optimization (SEO) | Magento SEO is more powerful not only than Presta, but even than others popular eCommerce platforms. | PerstaShop provides easy update of meta tags and URLs, that works quite good to optimize web store. |
| Popular Customers | Christian Louboutin, Vizio, Rosetta Stone, Easton, Nike, Olympus, Gant, Ford Accessories, Sisley Paris, Eastwood, TractorTool, Webprint, Mothercare, Burger King | Timefy, Eleven Paris, Gretel Home |
Ultimately, simply comparing what Magento and Prestashop offer may be not enough to understand which platform will be the best option for your business. eCommerce software comparison is just a first little step in choosing the platform. The next step includes estimating your individual business inquiries and opportunities.
Magento is more appropriate for large business and agencies with ambitious plans growing day by day or existing successful online stores. It may be quite expensive even if you choose free Community Edition as you will have to take care of expenses for hosting service, frontend and backend (Admin panel) customizations. But with no doubts it all pays off in case you have existing customer database and an elaborated sales strategy. Magento easily operates multi-store system, stores up to 500,000 items in the catalog and 2,000 categories, handles 4M page requests, 200K page views and 50K orders PER HOUR! Magento is famous for already having a great deal of functions available by default but managing Magento environment is quite a challenge. The good news is that it’s an easy task for professional Magento developers who can take care of the system they know so well.
Stay tuned on our next eCommerce shopping cart comparison articles. There’s a lot more to come!
