Choosing the best e-commerce platform is as subjective and challenging as finding the most beautiful woman in the world. However, comparing e-commerce solutions shows that each of the existing platforms has its advantages and strengths, which suit some customers but are entirely unsuitable for others.
All e-commerce platforms can be divided into two main categories based on code and data access:
– Open source solutions
– Hosted solutions.
To host or not to host? – This is a perennial question, as it is a choice between the intricacies of freedom and simplicity constraints. If you prefer an Open Source platform, you are not obliged to host it. Instead, you can delegate hosting responsibilities to the company that developed the platform, i.e., Enterprise versions of Open Source products offering complete freedom of customization and hosting the store. Hosted solutions such as Shopify (see also Shopify Headless Storefront) or Bigcommerce offer a more limited range of customization options. Still, as most hosted out-of-the-box solutions have fairly standardized features, a hosted e-commerce platform may be the best choice for you.
For these of you that aren’t looking for an easy way, we’ve compared the six best open source ecommerce platforms:
– nopCommerce
– Magento
– WooCommerce
– WooCommerce
– PrestaShop
– Shop items
nopCommerce is the most popular open-source solution for e-commerce shopping carts based on Microsoft technologies. With its functionality, security, and stability, nopCommerce matches expensive enterprise solutions and is suitable for any size and type of business but is still completely free.
nopCommerce offers powerful out-of-the-box features for effective B2C and B2B sales: multi-store and multi-vendor, a range of tools for professional marketing and sales growth, popular payment methods, high performance and scalability, advanced SEO optimization, integrations with dozens of third-party services on the nopCommerce Marketplace and many others.
The nopCommerce architecture follows well-known software patterns and best security practices. In addition, the source code is fully customizable. The flexible and manageable architecture makes it easy to develop custom features and follow any business need. nopCommerce uses the latest Microsoft technologies and offers high performance and comprehensive features.
Today there are more than 60,000 live stores, including major brands such as Volvo, Lexus, Turkish Airlines, Harman, Herbalife, etc.
Friendly members of the nopCommerce community will always help you with advice and share their experiences with you. Clear and detailed documentation for developers and users without technical skills will quickly help you get started with nopCommerce. You can also get highly qualified support from the nopCommerce team with a guaranteed response within 24 hours.
| Magento
Magento is a well-known player at the enterprise level, and it’s a good fit for large retailers with a high volume of sales.
This platform has already gained recognition from the world’s biggest brands. This is because it can handle vast amounts of data and traffic, which is considered one of the essential requirements for large businesses. However, this success is entirely predictable, and stores built on Magento can easily handle up to 4M page requests and 50K orders PER TIME! Such high performance is a proven advantage over other platforms, and Magento maintains its position as one of the most robust e-commerce platforms.
Moreover, it has a very high level of security, and if any issues or vulnerabilities arise, the security team reacts immediately and launches security patches. Thanks to these regular updates, it can protect Magento stores against malware attacks.
Magento is fully customizable and scalable, which may seem like a strange advantage over other open-source platforms that claim to be flexible, but remember that they all have some limitations, while Magento is fully customizable. However, this freedom of customization is the other side of the coin, as the cost of customization can be pretty high. Professional Magento software development at $60-120 per hour is relatively expensive compared to growth on other platforms, which can be 2-3 times cheaper. However, such investments in the Magento platform will pay for themselves in increased sales, time, and money saved due to the lack of redundant functionality and automated processes. Magento is available in two versions Open Source and Commerce, and if you want to know more about the differences, here is a very comprehensive Magento Commerce overview.
Alternatively, you can check out the Magento alternatives.
| OpenCart
OpenCart is a lightweight system and requires fewer resources than Magento. Still, it can also serve a limited number of users and has some limitations in the number of products it handles, and the bandwidth of your store doesn’t promise very high performance.
All in all, OpenCart seems to be a good solution for startups and small businesses that are heading into independent ecommerce development. A considerable advantage of this platform is its clarity and ease of use, and that it is also suitable for less experienced users. In addition, it can save you a lot of money, as it costs around $10 per hour to develop. Its other clear advantage for beginners is that its management is straightforward and intuitive, thanks to a handy Admin panel.
| WooCommerce
WooCommerce is the most widely used tool in the e-commerce category worldwide. Its community includes many professional developers who can release many different options and customizations for your online store. Both are equally flexible with a wide range of ready-made solutions, so if you didn’t find the feature you wanted installing by default, likely, someone has already developed such an extension, which is available on the system’s Marketplace. And this colossal community can quickly help you solve your problem. With WooCommerce, you can upload and manage an endless number of products, maintain a blog, perform SEO and marketing activities.
WooCommerce is the leading eCommerce platform across the web because its large audience consists of WordPress users and small businesses familiar with this CMS. All you need to do is install the shopping cart add-on, run and customize it to your needs, and you’re ready to create products. Manage orders, coupons, reports, inventory, linked products, shipping, settings, add-ons, add tags, and categories for all your products effortlessly.
Woocommerce security depends mainly on the hosting company.
If you’re brand-new to the ecommerce industry or target a marketing group in general, or have a sparse product range, it may make sense to try WooCommerce.
| PrestaShop
Prestashop has about 250,000 customers, 30,000 communities, and 850,000 forum members. Unfortunately, even though Prestashop is distributed in over 200 countries and translated into 65 languages, the Prestashop community forum is only available in English and French.
Hiring a PrestaShop developer costs less than hiring a Magento developer, but you will have to pay extra for some of the more expensive modules for this platform.
PrestaShop is relatively easy to install if your hosting company supports one-click installation, but you need some technical knowledge for manual installation.
| Shopware
Shopware has been used to create about 11,306 online shops. At first glance, this may seem like unfair competition with other platforms such as Magento or WooCommerce, but what if we stopped comparing platforms globally and tailored this study to a specific country? If we take a closer look, it becomes clear that this competition is local in the German e-commerce market, with 13,463 active Magento shops and 7,848 active Shopware shops in Germany. These figures are impressive, especially considering that many new Shopware adopters have migrated from the Magento platform. Shopware’s primary focus is on the German market, where it has a 3.76% share.
Shopware is developing its community, and its events are pretty similar to those organized by Magento. Unfortunately, the Shopware community is mainly German-speaking, so it isn’t easy to find information and user reviews on this solution, especially in English.
This platform always sounds like a mysterious e-commerce platform, and you may have heard its name before, but it has always been difficult to describe its main features. Keep in thought that for larger projects, you will need to use paid versions. Therefore, if you plan to create a multi-store system, be prepared to pay a license fee to add considerably to the initial cost. Furthermore, despite the flexibility and extensive design possibilities of Shopware, its use is geographically limited to German-speaking countries.
The average hourly rate for a Shopware developer is about $35-70.
Today, it has over 60,000 shops in operation, including major brands such as Volvo, Lexus, Turkish Airlines, Harman, Herbalife, etc.
The friendly members of the NopCommerce community are always ready to give advice and share their experiences. In addition, clear and detailed documentation for both developers and non-technical users will help you get started with nopCommerce quickly. If you are looking for a developer to build your e-commerce app there are many software development companies and app development companies that can help you in building customize ecommerce app.
