Magento vs Woocommerce , what’s the best e-commerce solution for your business?
When it comes to starting an online store, there are many things to take into consideration. One of the most important parts of the puzzle is which platform to use to power your e-commerce site.
Magento
This is an e-commerce platform that has been around for ages. Perhaps the criticism I am about to unleash on it could be attributed to that.
Although used by a large majority of big e-commerce websites, Magento is a platform I would advice most companies against. There are many reasons for this, but difficulty to customize would be my number one.
The platform is like a giant complex dinosaur that just won’t quit. Yes, it has plenty of features and then some, but the user interface is not friendly at all. It is a classic example of a product designed by engineers and developers who do not really understand what makes a user interface great.
Another big issue many stores face is the terribly slow performance that arise on Magento. There’s many different things to fix the problem, but the fact that you have to specifically fix the issue is a big no-no for me already.
Out of the box, Magento is a slow and sluggish platform and until you spend hours or days messing with caching extensions and settings, you probably won’t be happy with its performance.
WooCommerce
Comparing WooCommerce to Magento is difficult because WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin so it depends very much on WordPress. You cannot use WooCommerce without WordPress.
WooCommerce is great because it offers ultimate customizability. Anything you can do with WordPress, you can do with WooCommerce. Only WordPress developers will understand what I mean, but using actions, hooks, and filters to make enhancements or changes to functionality is pretty sweet and efficient.
As with anything WordPress, the resources available are endless. You have access to millions of themes and plugins to do exactly what you want. And in the rare scenario where you need something custom, there are many quality developers waiting to work.
Because WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin, you also get all the goodies that come with WordPress. That means blogging on your e-commerce store comes standard and is all very neatly organized. Compare that with Magento where you have to install a blogging extension just to even start blogging.
The Winner
For me, this is a no-brainer. In 95 percent of cases, I think WooCommerce is a better and safer choice than Magento. Unless you have millions of dollars in your development and maintenance budget, you shouldn’t really touch Magento.
If you use Magento, you will need custom development sooner or later and there’s no way getting around that. In fact, you will probably need a developer on call 24/7 for whenever you want to do any minor change to your store.
