It is raining! Yes, the eCommerce market is flooded with eCommerce apps and platforms to develop the apps. But choosing the one that bespoke your business and allows you to trade effectively should be a smart decision.
The discussion of which platform shines over the another is a never-ending and a controversial one. A group might be in favor of one platform while others, in favor of a different platform.
Choosing a wrong one can be disastrous after a long haul.
Whichever platform you chose for the Magento development company USA should be able to satisfy your initial business needs and allow you to develop out-of-the-box functionalities.
Let’s narrow down the choices and start concentrating on the discussion between the two next-generation platforms, Magento and Opencart.
They both are the go-to choices of eTailers but they individually power the eCommerce market in different ways with corresponding capabilities.
Opencart Vs Magento at a glance:
- Opencart:
It is an opensource platform based on PHP/MySQL code. It is highly known for its user-friendliness and plethora of extensions.it leverages an easy learning curve and a light-weight structure which enhances store performance.
This well-known platform hosted around 885000 websites ranging from small and midrange business from the US, Russia, Brazil, Ukraine and more.
- Magento:
Magento offers customizable features and is now owned by Adobe. It allows the merchants to fully control the site and its functionality.
The platform is renowned to give a personalized shopping experience to the users by customizing the backend management, ease of marketing, tracking orders and also adding extra features for skyrocketing the sales on your store.
This facilitates Magento to host 800570 websites and is preferred for building enterprise level eCommerce stores which hail mainly from the US, UK, Netherlands, and Germany.
Difference:
- Opencart can be tweaked by the merchants for availing the benefits, where else, Magento is complex but highly customizable.
Feature comparison can be drawn as below:
Intuitiveness:
- Opencart:
It is a preferable platform by both, amateur developer or a patron. Opencart has a user-friendly interface which can be learned by even them who are not conversant at coding.
It comes with comprehensive documentation and an easy to install process. The installation is finished in just a snap of a finger.
- Magento:
As mentioned above, it is a bit complex and may require you to hire an expert developer from the best Magento website development company for installing it. The complexity factor is neutralized by the extravagant and tweakable features.
True that even Magento provides commendable documentation but learning the step by step procedure is difficult for beginners.
Installing Magento might take few minutes of yours but whats more complicated in to get acquainted with the updates that are rolled out regularly. Some updates are imperative to install which you can not escape from.
Difference:
- Even with the steep learning curve, you can capitalize more with the Magento platform.
Customization:
- Opencart:
Making your site a brand is not much difficult using Opencart. With more than 13,000 free and premium extensions, we are sure you would find the best suitable one for the store. Fork out some more money in introducing some of the rich features for your expanding store.
Did someone just say expansion? Yes, Opencart does support multiple stores with just a single user account. Over and above this, there is no limitation for product selling on Opencart.
- Magento:
A comprehensively customizable platform is a bit difficult and costly in comparison to others. It is a treasure trove of themes and extensions that can costs you between $9.99 to $999.
It allows extensive adjustments and also facilitates more than 350 features and multiple store handling with a single account.
If you are backed with skilled coders, it is easy to set up a dynamic store with this open-source platform. Magento allows eTailers to Go Global by supporting multiple languages and international currencies.
Difference:
- Magento undoubtedly provides more eCommerce opportunities than Opencart but Opencart outdoes Magento when we talk about themes and extensions.
Store Management:
- Opencart:
eTailers need nothing more than an easy store management facility. Opencart addresses this main pain point of the merchants and allows them to track the order statistics from the admin panel.
It facilitates them to edit customer information, products and manage different other store sections.
Catalog management in the admin panel is like a cherry on the top. You can add a product description, unlimited product, and categories and take advantage of crawling through the filters of the inventory.
An interesting part about Opencart is that it allows you to sell anything, literally anything. It can be physical products, digital products, subscription, anything.
It also offers an advantage to integrate numerous payment options, filter-view your buyers, track the order status and more, but, with a limited number of actions.
- Magento:
Magento has a rich and informative admin panel. It facilitates the merchants to view average order amount, purchases, search terms and other critical store analytics.
You can also make changes from the admin dashboard. When it comes to catalog management, Magento is more advanced. You can perform unrestricted actions with numerous products and categories.
Magento inventory management is also powerful. It allows merchants with features like product filters,product tag moderation, minimum-maximum quantities setting, etc.
It supports extensive dynamic order management for adding, viewing, editing the order details. Magento also allows you to take prints of packing slips, shipping labels, and respective invoices.
Also Read: Most Important Features of Magento E-Commerce Sites
Interestingly, Magento facilitates recurring purchases and set up email notification for regular customers. The platform has multipotentiality supporting different languages and currency support for the store.
Difference:
- All the elements behind the creation of a dynamic store are incorporated within the platform. Magento turns out to be more advanced when it comes to Store management.
SEO optimization, Marketing, and Promotions:
- Opencart:
The principal attraction for gathering the traffic on the sites is to appear in the organic searches. Opencart fails to optimize the site adequately. If you want to avail the maximum SEO benefit, you have to do it all by yourself.
While managing yourself, you might have to deal with every single detail over the page including pages categories, meta-titles, description and all.
You can extend for help by taking help from plenty of extensions that are fully loaded with many SEO features.
- Magento:
Well, Magento doesn’t support automatic SEO but offers a wide range of customizable SEO features.
It allows you to customize the meta tags, canonical tags and the URLs for search engine optimization. Also, there are numerous extensions that allow you to tweak the site for making it optimized.
Also Read: Why e-Commerce Business more Profitable?
Difference:
- Magento handles SEO in a better way than Opencart.
Price:
- Opencart:
It is an open-source platform that offers free download and installation. Installing is relatively cheaper than the hosting and introducing extensions.
- Magento:
Magento is without a doubt costlier than Opencart. Above it, if you are installing excellent tools like Business Intelligence and others, it can get a bit expensive task.
Difference:
Do you still need the difference here? Isn’t it evident that Magento is pricey?
In a nutshell:
Magento leads Opencart on popularity ground. But it is important as a merchant for you to analyze which platform will make your store a more scalable one.
Magento will be a good choice for enterprise-level businesses for Magento web development company that allows them to handle complexities. Opencart, on the other hand, is suitable for small scale intuitive businesses.