Magento vs WooCommerce: The Platforms Review

Magento vs WooCommerce – the top two of the most popular eCommerce platforms. In the total market share of the eCommerce systems, WooCommerce is now leading with around 30%, while that number is 3.19% for Magento. They are packed with various features and attributes to help build a proper online store. In today’s article, we will present a Magento vs WooCommerce comparison to support readers to gain more insights into these big names. 

Magento vs WooCommerce: Overview

Magento was established in 2008 and was acquired by Adobe. Inc in 2018 for $1.68 billion. The platform is famous for its flexibility and customization. Despite offering features to help amateurs develop their own store, Magento is more suitable for intermediate to advanced users with coding and professional technical skills. Magento is highly recommended for large companies or corporations with developer teams as it requires self-hosting and setup. 

WooCommerce was founded in 2011 and is specifically designed for small to large businesses using WordPress. Since then, the platform has grown significantly to be the most popular among eCommerce platforms thanks to its simplicity to use, free base product, and customization. As of January 2020, 4% of the top HTML pages and a total of 3.9 million websites worldwide choose to use WooCommerce for their online businesses. 

Overall, Magento is more favored for big, global eCommerce stores such as Canon or Hermes while WooCommerce is more affordable while still having plenty of resources to grow and scale your business. 

Magento vs WooCommerce: On The Front End

Magento vs WooCommerce: Ease of Use

As self-hosting software, both Magento and WooCommerce require learning curves if users want to set up and move around comfortably on these platforms. 

Even with Magento Open Source (the version for beginners), the Magento store setup process can be complicated even if there are plenty of guidelines and tutorials provided. Users need to know some coding, at least PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript as there are a lot of technical terms merchants should acknowledge to maximize the platform’s potential. 

WooCommerce is an open-source plugin for WordPress. Hence, it is quite straightforward and has an easy-to-use interface. Anyone familiar with WordPress can move around and maintain their online store smoothly even without any developing knowledge. The system is customizable from users’ WordPress-Admin dashboard. 

Merchants can quickly test the site, make several changes until they are satisfied as long as they are used to the WordPress site. It makes the life of a WordPress user so much easier when it comes to creating their own eCommerce business. 

Magento vs WooCommerce: Help and Support

Neither Megento nor WooCommerce offers their own 24/7 contactable support team to help with any issues users might run into. WooCommerce does allow users to submit a form to tell the platform what kind of support they need before connecting the users to a customer service staff, which is very rare for a free plugin. 

Magento and WooCommerce all have great online resources, guides, and forums to help build and develop an eCommerce store. Because there are many websites built with Magento and WooCommerce, users are most likely to get some help from experienced developers who are happy to wade in on the forums.

Magento vs WooCommerce: On The Back End  

Magento vs WooCommerce: Product Management

WooCommerce offers a well-rounded approach to product management, with options for both physical and digital products. Setting up new items on this platform is considerably simple, especially if users are already familiar with WordPress. 

Furthermore, WooCommerce offers various advanced and hands-on additions. No matter if you want to assign categories to multiple products at once, or divide products into different variations (size, color, material, prices, etc), WooCommerce is able to help you with it.

Here are some features users can find in WooCommerce:

• Stock control level
• Unlimited product and product categories
• Selling physical products, digital products (including software and apps)
• Adjustable shipping rates and taxes

Advanced product management functions are available on Magento at a higher price, including full support for simple, configurable, grouped, or bundle product management. For comprehension purposes, Magento enables you to have category trees with multi-layer subcategories, in which we can assign goods to them in bulk by using the drag-and-drop or import function. 

It is important to keep in mind that both platforms entitle users to have unlimited products in their stores. Creating and removing products are simple within a few mouse clicks. However, in regards to product management, WooCommerce is a more favorable option because Magento server performance and speed might be slowed down if too many products are added. 

Magento vs WooCommerce: Security

As a plugin of WordPress, WooCommerce is not PCI compliant. It also doesn’t come with two-factor authentication. This platform is not favorable in the sense of built-in security methods. Nonetheless, users can add more protection to their website through extensions and apps on WooCommerce App Store. 

For a better chance of staying secure, users are highly recommended to pick a good hosting provider, add extra plugins, and also look out for any updates to either the WooCommerce plugin or WordPress. All of this information will be made available in your WordPress dashboard. 

Like WooCommerce, Magento enables users to implement advanced security measures through extensions and manual tweaks. The security level entirely depends on yourself to set it up, which gives users the flexibility to adjust it in whatever way they are capable of. Magento’s security is very robust, where you are required to be hands-on and follow PCI compliance by yourself. 

Magento does offer dedicated security patches to its users in order to stay updated with new cybersecurity trends out there. Nonetheless, the patches are not particularly easy to apply. The newbies in eCommerce might feel lost doing so on their own. As a result, it leads to a significant amount of Magento stores being outdated. 

Last but not least, Magento has its own ‘site security scanner’, which will find any problems and give users recommendations on how to fix them.   

Magento vs WooCommerce: Apps and Add-ons

Magento offers over 5,000 extensions and apps on its marketplace. Of which, 1970 of those are free. 10% of the paid choices cost around $30 per month while other apps can cost up to $2000 per month. The price varies depending on the development agency that creates them. 

Highly advanced apps are made available on Magento Marketplace, which requires coding skills to set up. However, Magento lacks basic built-in functions, such as integration with Facebook. It costs $199 to sync your online store with Facebook while it is free on WooCommerce. 

As open-source software, WooCommerce heavily relies on plugins. The platform itself doesn’t have as many plugins as Magento’s extensions. However, since WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin, users will have access to all the apps and add-ons on the WordPress library, which is up to 50,000. 

Overall, the real disparity between Magento and WooCommerce apps is in the price which Magento usually comes out to be more expensive. A typical example is when users want to sell through social media such as eBay, the fluctuation in price is significant. While WooCommerce merchants only need to spend $79 per year, Magento charges their users $499 per year. 

This is due to the fact that Magento is being built to handle a higher volume of products and orders in big companies or corporations.

Magento vs WooCommerce: Payment Processors and Transaction Fees

Magento supports payment via five methods (along with regular online card payments):

• Check/Money Order
• Cash On Delivery
• Bank Transfer
• Purchase Order
• Zero Subtotal Checkout (when an offer code takes the price to zero, but tax still needs to be calculated)

The platform comes built-in with PayPal and Authorize.net pre-installed. Users can add more payment gateways or processors as extensions, ranging from free to $100+. Apple Pay is currently not supported. Magento has over 150 payment methods and processor integrations. It asks for a bit more work to set up because users are not working with a hosted platform. You will need a set of skills where coding is included. 

Furthermore, Magento’s apps give users access to many payment options in different languages and countries. Therefore, it is easier to expand your business overseas. 

WooCommerce accepts payments via the following methods (as well as regular card payments): 

• Check Payments
• Cash On Delivery
• Direct Bank Transfer (BACS)

There are three payment gateways that are available on WooCommerce: PayPal, WooCommerce Payments, and Braintree. Other than that, WooCommerce also has up to 160 payment methods and processors on the WooCommerce App Store. 

It is highly recommended for merchants to embed payment methods directly into their online stores. In this way, users are able to process transactions conveniently without directing shoppers to third-party checkout pages. 

However, you should keep in mind that the transactions on WooCommerce payment processors might not be entirely free. The platform itself won’t charge you anything but the extensions will and the fees differ depending on each provider. 

Magento vs WooCommerce: Point-of-sale System (POS system)

Neither Magento nor WooCommerce has its own POS system, only the extensions are available on their App Store which also has many great features. 

Magento extensions for POS systems offer real-time synchronization of inventories, click-and-collect, customer orders, or buy online, pick-up in store. The price of Magento POS varies from $49 per month to $1299 per month. 

WooCommerce add-ons for POS systems are also very outstanding. They allow users to manage their products, customers, and orders entirely. Extensions on WooCommerce largely allow merchants to reward their customers with fixed or percentage-based discounts, including coupons. Moreover, cashiers can charge a fixed or percentage-based fee for cleaning service or insurance protection. 

Note attachment for important orders that require special attention is available on these apps.Users will be able to locate previous orders to repeat or query customer inquiries to see where orders were placed and who served the customers. 

ConnectPOS offers both WooCommerce POS and Magento POS systems which have basic to advanced features such as tax rates synchronization, various payment methods, and facial recognition. 

Magento vs WooCommerce: Pricing

As mentioned above, Magento and WooCommerce are open-source platforms, which means they are free to download and use. However, to have a proper store, the platforms come with a selection of extra costs, mainly coming from the apps and extensions. Some are necessary for getting your website started, others are just nice to have. 

 Magento has two plans: 

• Magento Open Source, which is completely free
• Magento Commerce is a customized plan where users need to contact Magento to know the exact price

The free plan of Magento isn’t built-in with many hands-on features. Users need to install a good amount of extensions. Therefore, the true cost of Magento varies greatly, up to several thousands of dollars per year. 

As for WooCommerce, after installing, users have to pay for a domain name, a WordPress hosting account, an SSL certificate to start a WooCommerce store. The cost for a WooCommerce website is around $110 to $1500+ depending on the size of your site and the work you choose to have.  

Magento vs WooCommerce: Discussion

In our opinion, there is no better platform here when comparing Magento and WooCommerce. Both of them have some of the most advanced and innovative features. The point here is to see which software works best for your business. 

It is quite evident and safe to say that WooCommerce is an application mainly designed for all types of businesses. It simply sells products and once your site grows bigger, it can be installed with more attributes by adding extensions to satisfy its customers. Especially for WordPress users, this is definitely the ideal platform to go for as the interface and themes are very similar. WooCommerce can save WordPress users some time to get used to the platform.  

In terms of popularity, WooCommerce is obviously the winner. The number of WooCommerce users is almost 10 times higher than that of Magento. However, Magento aims towards a different target audience: large companies and corporations. It is highly scalable, making it ideal for people with bigger plans or massive online ventures. 

Magento works brilliantly once you install it by a specialist developer. The extensions are quite impressive and high-end as well. Therefore, users should pick Magento when they have thousands of products in their catalog, have developers in-house, and have a global, enterprise-level business. In particular, merchants should be willing to pay a good amount of money for developing their online platform because Magento is not cheap at all. 

Wrapping up

After this article, we hope to give you an overview of Magento and WooCommerce to make a wise decision on which one is the best fit for your store. Please feel free to contact us with any further questions!