Building an online store can be challenging. It requires hard work, commitment, and resourcefulness. You need to spend time and effort setting up your account, managing inventory, filling out product pages, uploading quality images, checking price points, and finding out the right tools to help you accelerate your business and acquire good profit. When managed properly, an online store can bring you a high return on investment, so you should work hard in building it the right way.

When it comes to which platform to use for your online store, there are a handful of options to choose from.

In this post, we will discuss WooCommerce vs Magento to help you identify which is the better e-platform for your business.

WooCommerce vs Magento: An Overview

WooCommerce and Magento are two of the most popular e-commerce platforms available on the market. If you are considering either one of them, this guide will help you find answers to your questions.

WooCommerce is an open-source e-commerce plugin built specifically to be integrated to WordPress websites. Designed with full e-commerce features, WooCommerce lets you easily build an online store, manage inventiry, accept payments, and more. It runs on top of WordPress, which means you also get to enjoy the features of WordPress, such as thousands of themes to choose from and access to hundreds of plugins that will help you grow your e-commerce business.

Magento, on the other hand, is also an open source e-commerce platform, but offers a larger scale of e-commerce solutions for B2C and B2B market. Being part of the Adobe Experience Cloud, it offers an integrated and automated approach to online selling, marketing, content management, and email distribution. While it offers enterprise power and unlimited scalability, most of its solutions are priced on the higher end side.

Both platforms are open-source software, meaning features can be added using extensions and they can utilize different templates for design. However, they both have advantages and disadvantages, and that is what we will discuss below.

Cost and Pricing

Cost is one of the top factors that many business owners take into consideration before building their online shop. Therefore, let’s take a look at how much you will be spending if you choose either WooCommerce or Magento for your e-commerce store.

Since WooCommerce is a free plugin on WordPress, anyone can download and install it on their website without any cost. While WooCommerce itself is free, your website as you build it will require payment, including registering a domain name, acquiring an SSL certificate, and getting a WordPress hosting account. There are also thousands of free WordPress themes you can use, but if you wish to use a paid one, you will also need to add it to your total expense.

To give you a better visualization, the costs associated in building a WordPress website (which enables you to use WooCommerce) include a domain name which you can buy for $15, SSL certificate for $70, and hosting for $100. This sample computation is already good for 1 year of operation.

Magento, on the other hand, is a full-featured e-commerce solution. It comes in 2 editions — the community edition which you can download and install on any hosting provider, but only includes basic features and the Magento Commerce that comes in monthly plans, giving businesses an option as to which plan is ideal to the size of their store. The Paid plans of Magento are quite expensive as they offer high-performance cloud hosting, professional support, and impressive e-commerce features. Depending on the plan you choose, the cost of running an online store using Magento can reach up to $250 per month.

If you are a running a start-up business or you’re a newbie in the e-commerce industry, the more cost-friendly option is obviously WooCommerce. As soon as you grow your online business and you’re acquiring thousands of dollars of profit, you can perhaps think about upgrading to the Magento platform.

Ease of Use

WordPress, in general, is very easy to install, use, and navigate through. This is the reason why it is the most preferred website building platform for many individuals, businesses, and developers all over the world. And since WooCommerce is part of the WordPress system, this gives you an idea of how easy to utilize WooCommerce as a plugin.

The installation is very simple. You can do it on your own, or may hosting providers will automatically install it for you when you purchase a WordPress hosting plan. WooCommerce comes with a setup wizard that is easy to understand and will walk you through the basic setup you need to know, including adding new pages, setting up payments, managing inventories, choosing the currency, and setting your preferred shipping and tax options.

On the other hand, Magento is a powerful e-commerce specific platform, it comes with a lot of built-in features that work out of the box. Its advanced setup process may require time to learn and can be complicated for new users. Common user feedback about the platform is that it’s not easy to install. Additionally, the installer language is quite developer-centric which is not very friendly to non-technical users.

After installation, you may also need some time to familiarize yourself with the entire system. Things like customizing themes and installing extensions are not straightforward, so you may need to read online references or watch video tutorials in order to perform them. Magento is an extremely powerful platform and comes packed with impressive features, but it’s a bit of a challenge to get used to it.

Magento is an extremely powerful platform and comes packed with impressive features, but it’s a bit of a challenge to get used to it.

What is a Better E-Commerce Platform?

There are more factors that you can look at to comprehensively review WooCommerce vs Magento in terms of which is the better e-commerce platform. However, keeping in mind the basic insights we discussed above, it is obvious that WooCommerce is more ideal for start up businesses and beginners in the e-commerce space.