Magento and WooCommerce overview:

Magento and WooCommerce are two of the most popular eCommerce platforms along with other major platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce. Magento and WooCommerce are most similar in that they both have open source free versions, and are based on the PHP programming language. Choosing a suitable platform for an online store has never been an easy task for an e-commerce business owner. If you are looking for a self-hosted e-commerce platform that allows you to unleash the full potential of your online store and manage everything on the store site, WooCommerce and Magento are the great choices for you.

Both Magento and WooCommerce are open-source systems that can be developed by everyone from the community. Let go through the brief overview of the platform, and then we together put them into consideration.

Magento eCommerce:

Magento is incredibly powerful software that has both a free open source edition and an even more powerful Enterprise edition that you can either self-host or use as a cloud edition via Magento itself. Magento is by far the most powerful SMB eCommerce platform on the market and powers both small business websites and very large eCommerce websites.

The biggest difference between Magento and WooCommerce is that Magento is feature-packed with many eCommerce features that WooCommerce lacks, making it a far more powerful solution. However, due to being such a large application, it is often more costly software to maintain and develop on. The biggest weakness of Magento is that it is not a strong CMS compared to WooCommerce that is built on top of WordPress. Sometimes businesses integrate WordPress into Magento to make up for this issue.

WooCommerce:

Launched in 2011, WooCommerce is one of the most popular e-commerce platforms in the world. It is a plugin for WordPress, so everyone can quickly turn their WordPress website into an e-commerce site. WooCommerce is a great plugin for WordPress and is actually the most used eCommerce platform by sheer numbers. It is a very useful tool because it is actually a plugin to WordPress so that you can use the benefits of WordPress and the additional eCommerce capabilities of WooCommerce. WooCommerce itself is a pretty lightweight eCommerce platform so it’s great for simpler eCommerce sites that also have a large content need.

WooCommerce relies on a lot of plugins in many cases because the core WooCommerce plugin is pretty limited. This is where WooCommerce can become difficult to scale in that you may need many plugins to achieve the desired functionality and eventually maintaining all these plugins together will become quite cumbersome. Additionally, the catalog and order management capabilities of WooCommerce are fairly limited.

Above is a quick comparison between Magento and WooCommerce. WooCommerce is a more user-friendly platform, while Magento is well-known for a variety of powerful extensions. Hence, to decide which e-commerce platform is better, you always have to put the size as well as the needs of your online store into consideration. If you want to start up a small business with enough performance and easy to use, nothing can be more suitable than WooCommerce. In contrast, if you plan to scale your business up to be a global brand, Magento is the rightest choice for you. Contact Sovereign Software for Ecommerce development.