Which is better Magento or OpenCart?
Magento and Opencart are well-known open-source ecommerce platforms in the market today. And if you are thinking of starting an online store, It’s tricky to choose between these two platforms.
It is important to know what will work better for your business and what fits best for your business needs because the success of an e-commerce business is highly dependent on the platform behind it.
Magento or Opencart? Today, we will be comparing the top trending eCommerce platforms based on various factors. Which one will appear to be the best choice for you? Read on to know the difference between Magento and OpenCart and to find the best ecommerce solution.
What is Magento?
Magento is a powerful e-commerce platform released in 2008, which is now known as Adobe Commerce. It provides businesses worldwide with everything they need to sell online. It comes with many advanced features and customization options. Magento offers solutions for small to medium to enterprise businesses. Magento represents around 8% of all eCommerce platforms available on the market, with more than 178,714 live websites.
Magento has three editions:
- Magento Open Source, (previously Magento Community Edition)
- Magento Commerce (previously Magento Enterprise Edition)
- Magento Commerce Cloud Edition
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Highly Scalable & Flexible | High Ownership Cost |
| Unlimited Customization | Require Technical Knowledge |
| Omnichannel | Better hosting environment required |
| Better Security | Slower Development |
| Larger Community | Complexity |
You May Also Want to Read This: Benefits of Using Magento
What is OpenCart?
OpenCart is a free shopping cart platform that provides small business owners with everything they need to set up their own e-commerce site. Opencart is an eCommerce platform developed by Open Source Matters Inc. It was released on September 22, 2008, under MIT License. It’s easy to install, customize, integrate, and update. If OpenCart is well known for its high level of simplicity and user-friendliness,
The name “opencart” is derived from the fact that it is free, open-source software. Opencart provides everything you need to establish an online store and start selling products online immediately. If you want to build an eCommerce website at minimum cost, then OpenCart is a great choice.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Free to Download | Slow and lengthy checkouts compared to other platforms |
| Easy Integrations | A bit outdated platform |
| Amazing Designs and Templates | Doesn’t offer many templates |
| Recurring Payments | Has fewer plugins than other self-hosted platforms |
| Multi-Store Functionality | Difficult to import your inventory list. |
Both platforms have their pros and cons, but we’re here to help you make the best decision based on your individual situation. Before going through the detailed comparison of the 2 platforms, let’s have a look at some similarities between both Magento and OpenCart:
- Magento and OpenCart, are both open-source platforms and free!
- Developed and based on the PHP programming language.
- Both are superb eCommerce platforms with powerful features and tons of add-ons and extensions.
Without further ado, let’s jump into details with all the key comparison components between OpenCart vs Magento via this blog. We have listed highlighted features from two popular ecommerce platforms, Magento 2 vs Opencart, and will leave you to review, consider and give your final decision to shopping for the platform that is suitable for your business.
Magento Vs Opencart Comparison:
Pricing Structure/Cost
The first major difference is the pricing structure.
While both the platforms Opencart and Magento are free. Magento comes with 2 versions: Free (Magento Open Source) and Paid (Magento Commerce) both. Any additional features, hosting, domain, extension, and customization will add extra cost to your investment.
Magento requires you to separately buy a domain name that works well for growing and developing businesses. It is much cheaper for hosting with OpenCart as it has low hosting fees compared to the Magento platform.
Performance
Both these platforms offer excellent performance. Performance is considered one of the important factors as it affects the user experience. The longer the page loads, the higher the bounce rate will be.
Magento is way better in terms of performance because they have improved their user experience and speed the page load time. Magento is much faster than Opencart. If performance is a concern, then you might want to stick with Magento.
Compared to Magento, OpenCart often lacks speed even on strong hosting solutions. A slow website will cause you higher bounce rates, fewer conversions, and also lose your customers. Therefore, website performance and page loading are definitely the factors that OpenCart needs to improve.
As per Quanta, the loading time of Opencart is 936 milliseconds, while for Magento it is 568 milliseconds. With a much more impressive response time, Magento undoubtedly beats OpenCart down.
Support
Magento offers good technical support compared to Opencart.
In the case of Magento, you get 24/7 technical support via phone, email, and live chat. Magento has also developed a huge community of developers and offers excellent customer service as well.
OpenCart has a dedicated support system for all its users, with an extra fee. Also, you can only contact its developer team regarding issues in their forums. Opencart comes with extensive documentation and user forums. You’ll get quick responses and 24/7 technical support.
User-friendly platform
The businesses rely on the user-friendly interface and the ease-to-use dashboard of the admin panel for easy navigation and management without wasting much of their time.
OpenCart is an easier-to-use and user-friendly platform compared to Magento. OpenCart is simple enough for beginners to manage without any problems. With the dashboard, the admin can easily navigate to other modules like sales, extensions, reports, catalog, help, system, etc. OpenCart is easy to install, with a much simpler and user-friendly interface, and easy to set up.
On the other hand, Magento is robust, a bit complex, and also needs good technical knowledge to work with. To handle your site, you might need the help of the dedicated magento developer. The installation process of Magento is a bit lengthy and complex, but you can follow the steps on how to install Magento. But the lucid user interface of Magento with excellent navigation features and site structure makes the customers crave spending more time on the website. Magento comes with advanced features and functionality that offer a lot of customization if required, and also comes with a steep learning curve.
Security
Magento has strict and rich security, as for them the customer’s data and privacy are more important. Thus, they offer regular security patch updates to improve the website performance. And in order to leverage the latest security features, it is recommended to upgrade Magento 2 store to the latest version.
Since being a simple and light platform, OpenCart is also less vulnerable to hackers’ attacks and security breaches.
Payment Methods
Opencart offers many payment gateways compare to Magento. You can choose from 36 payment methods or download among hundreds more available via the marketplace of Opencart.
On the other hand, Magento offers two default payment gateway integration i.e. Paypal & Braintree.
SEO
Both platforms offer great search engine optimization tools.
Compare to Magento, Opencart has limited SEO customization and also does not have an extension that supports individual URLs.
On the other hand, Magneto has powerful SEO options. One can customize every page of a website with relevant titles, descriptions, keywords, and meta titles.
So, when it comes to SEO, Magento is way better compared to Opencart.
So, Which is better Magento or OpenCart?
Both the ecommerce platforms are great, but depending on your business needs, one may be better and suits better than the other. Comparing both the eCommerce platforms will help you choose the best one for your business. We believe that you will have the most informed decision after reading this article.
To sum up all the comparisons, Magento is more complex and requires a higher level of technical proficiency, but it’s a powerful, more secure platform, easily customizable, and functions more extensively than Opencart.
That concludes our Magento vs Opencart battle royale. Both these platforms provide excellent functionality, and hence they are equally suitable for e-commerce sites. If you have any queries regarding this article, feel free to comment or, get in touch. Our experts will love to answer your queries.
