Magento (Adobe Commerce)
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Magento and WooCommerce are two popular e-commerce platforms that enable launching and management of web stores, each with its own strong and weak points. While there is no definite answer to which is better, WooCommerce or Magento, you should comprehensively observe both solutions to choose one that will serve your business goals best. We offer you a chance to delve into an e-commerce platform's peculiarities with our thorough comparison guide. Let's get to it!
WooCommerce is an e-commerce plugin for WordPress that is suitable for businesses of all sizes. Despite not being a designated e-commerce platform, WooCommerce flawlessly integrates with WordPress and offers flexibility, customization, and a user-friendly interface to build your web store. It is also the most popular e-commerce platform in the world, with a 38.74% market share in 2023.
Magento (Adobe Commerce) is a designated e-commerce platform that fits large and medium-sized businesses. With over 200,000 web stores running on Magento, the platform boasts the most extensive feature sets in the domain and is suitable for companies with long-term vision. Magento is famous for its scalability, customization, and smooth third-party integrations.
In the comparison of Magento vs WordPress WooCommerce, it is worth noting that both platforms are open-source and have free subscriptions available.
Before diving into a thorough comparison, let's refresh the background knowledge of both platforms, pointing our attention towards their geographical popularity, average order value, common categories, and famous web stores for Magento vs WooCommerce.
Top-5 countries using Magento are the US, UK, Netherlands, Germany and Italy. The US takes the leading role with over 40,000 Magento stores. Taking a global glance, this e-commerce solution is popular in North America and Europe, with South America being second and Australia taking third place.
WooCommerce is popular in the US, UK, Germany, India and Italy. The US alone boast more than 2.4 million WooCommerce websites. As we can see, North America and Europe are the regions where this e-commerce solution is the most popular, followed by Australia, South America, and Asia.
There is a strong correlation between Magento's vs. WordPress WooCommerce's world presence and popularity. Both solutions are widespread in the same countries and regions. In addition, WooCommerce is also trendy in India.
How much do customers spend on Magento and WooCommerce? Despite the absence of significant studies on this matter, Little data research shows that Magento stores have an average order value estimated at $141, while WooCommerce AOV is estimated at only $96 in 2022.
Nevertheless, the numbers can vary due to the limited number of web stores in the study — 339 Magento stores and 238 WooCommerce shops.
Magento is quite trendy for home and garden (9.5%), apparel (6.8%), and business and industrial (5.2%) categories, making them top of the most widespread Magento web stores worldwide.
According to Statista, WooCommerce is a popular platform for online stores, with over four million stores using it worldwide. In June 2023, the most popular category for WooCommerce stores was home and garden, with over 241,500 stores. Apparel was the second-most popular category, with 239,000 stores; food and beverage came in third place with 169,000 stores.
Magento vs WooCommerce: what are the most appealing features of two popular e-commerce platforms? Now, we will bring the facts to the table.
Magento boasts a theming and layout system, easy integration with third-party solutions via APIs, and intuitive admin interfaces. The other outstanding features include:
WooCommerce is recognized for its wide range of payment processors, the unlimited number of products supported, and the availability of numerous free and premium themes. Additionally, the platform is famous for:
As you can see, both platforms have advantages and particular features that help them to stand out from the crowd. Moving forward, we will analyze Magento and WooCommerce on a solid comparison base. Below you can find points for evaluation and comparison — let’s find out which is better!
Every store owner wants their shop to stand out from the crowd and attract visitors. Both WooCommerce and Magento offer front-end customization. Let's discover the options.
WooCommerce allows you to change the theme via Editor Tub (Advanced > Editor) or create your store with the help of the page builder feature. WooCommerce enables customization, changing footers and headers, setting up page templates, and adding pages.
Comparing Magento 2 vs WooCommerce, the latter has fewer built-in design options, balanced with thousands of pre-made themes, plugins, and add-ons to create the UI that the customers will fall in love with. Being a WordPress plugin, WooCommerce can use its 20,000+ free and premium themes.
Magento 2 theme installation requires technical knowledge. First, you need to declare your theme into the Magento folder and only then enable it through the path Content > Design > Theme. After choosing a theme, it can be customized to meet the store's owner's needs.
Premium extensions may be more expensive yet provide more capabilities due to their complexity. The platform offers only five themes but leaves a lot of space for design customization. The Hyva theme has recently become more popular among US Magento users for its quality and performance. Remember that Magento store development and customization take longer than other e-commerce platforms.
Concerning design and themes, WooCommerce is a more straightforward solution for beginners, as it does not require technical knowledge and offers many themes. At the same time, Magento allows you to create the web store's design from scratch and use various tools to tailor the selected theme. You can create a store with a unique look and feel, effectively improve your brand representation, and attract customers, offering eye-catching design and shopping inspiration.
Extensions enhance the functionality and appearance of the web stores. Both Magento and WooCommerce are known for their abundance of add-ons and plugins.
WooCommerce plugins, both third-party and WooCommerce-originated, enable you to respond to your expectations for marketing, logistics, and technology. Each retailer will find something appealing and helpful from the wide range of solutions, paid or free. Closely tied with WordPress, WooCommerce offers over 800 free plugins and extensions from WordPress, which are easily integrated — customize your store in terms of payments, subscription, product type, etc.
Like WooCommerce, Magento offers free and paid third-party extensions to boost your store's look and functionality. Today, Magento has over 4000 extensions for site optimization, sales, payment and security, accounting and finance, etc. Some extensions may catch your eye in our Magento extensions store, with plenty of modules, plugins, and personalization extensions available.
Adobe is in step with technologies and has already implemented artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) into the Magento platform. The improvements enable retailers to introduce different customer experiences through personalization. It is expected that modern technologies will be able to deliver AI-based chatbots in customer support and introduce pricing personalization via ML.
Magento also cares about interactive shopping experiences for the customer and introduced virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR), enabling product visualization in a 3D environment.
The other critical innovations include headless commerce, connecting various store frontends with the backend through APIs, and delivering omnichannel commerce possibilities. Magento provides integrations with Facebook and Instagram, offering in-store pickup and delivery options.
Similar to Magento, AI-based WooCommerce plugins optimize pages and product descriptions, making them user-friendly and improving SEO. They also introduce natural language processing and data mining. Machine learning can collect and analyze past experiences and learn to solve future problems, for example, by creating smart product recommendations and engaging content.
WooCommerce also narrows the gap between the real and virtual world, allowing you to introduce 3D models and try before you buy experience through an AR technology plugin.
Additionally, the platform allows custom UI use through headless technology and multichannel selling opportunities through integrations with Google, Amazon, eBay, and Walmart.
Overall, both Magento and WooCommerce strive to implement modern technologies to improve user experience for customers and business owners.
Expanding its reputation as a simple and easy-to-use solution, WooCommerce offers an easy product management interface. Essential tools of the platform allow users to edit products' prices, descriptions, and images. For further customer experience and product management improvement, over 100 store management extensions are available.2
Magento offers more tools and features from the beginning, such as product reviews, wish lists, smart pricing, personalization, and group items. New Magento version offers a more intuitive user interface, many product management options, and easy integration with other sales channels like Amazon and Allegro.
While WooCommerce has the advantage of simple design and user-friendliness, Magento offers more tools and features for product management out of the box. However, it may be a little more complex to operate and navigate.
Marketing strategies are essential to attract new customers and increase sales. What sales features does each platform offer, WooCommerce vs Magento?
Despite Magento Open Source having no advanced marketing tools without third-party integrations, it still boasts such built-in features as customized product recommendations, coupons and promotional offers creation, customer segmentation, customer loyalty programs, wishlist creation and sharing. For e-mail marketing, you should also rely on third-party marketing platforms. Nevertheless, Magento has paid and free extensions for social media marketing. For example, the Instagram Feed extension allows sharing images and videos from Instagram accounts, while Share Buttons enable sharing your store’s content through social media.
The most handy marketing tools include upselling and cross-selling, coupon management and monitoring, catalog promotional pricing, bundled products, sharing and wishlists, persistent shopping carts, and smart pricing.
Magento Analytics is a data analysis tool offered by Magento to collect, analyze, and visualize web store data, like sales trends, customer behavior, and product effectiveness. The platform allows access to Google Analytics without using an extension.
WooCommerce has no built-in social media marketing features, but they are available through third-party plugins, such as connecting your store to Instagram. Additionally, the platform includes WooCommerce Analytics for tracking your website metrics and creating reports, analyzing key performance indicators, and identifying areas for improvement. It helps to learn about customers' needs and preferences, allows the use of customized and pre-built reports, applies filters, and sets up automated alarms when key metrics reach a certain edge.
Overall, each platform is suited for marketing campaigns and reporting, including data analytics tools and offering additional features in the extensions store.
SEO helps to make an e-commerce store recognizable, promote your brand, and attract more customers. Is Magento better than WooCommerce for SEO? Let's figure this out.
Built on WordPress CMS, WooCommerce was meant to have extensive SEO features and functionality for content marketing content campaigns. The platform has a useful shortcode feature that enables adding additional elements to blogs and landing pages. Aside from basic functionality, the platform's extensions can gain a substantial advantage for marketing and SEO.
Magento offers advanced SEO settings, such as optimized meta tags, SEO-friendly URLs, customizable robots.txt files, Google sitemaps support, etc. The platform perfectly integrates with Google Analytics and Google Search Console, making it possible to gather and analyze valuable data and control the web store's performance.
WooCommerce's default shipping options encompass flat rates, free shipping, and local pickup. You can use FedEx, DHL, UPS, and USPS, popular US carriers. Regardless of limited out-of-box shipping methods, the platform's plugins enable third-party integrations and introduce additional table and real-time carrier rates into the store. There are 78 WooCommerce shipping, delivery, and fulfillment extensions to meet each business need.2
Basic Magento shipping methods include table rates, flat rates, free shipping, and in-store delivery, with the default carriers being UPS, USPS, FedEx, or DHL. Magento also allows integrations with third-party shipping methods and carriers. The platform diversifies shipping methods for customers, offering the most convenient options, rates, rules, and shipping process customization. Magento offers 512 extensions in the shipping and fulfillment section, making both local and global shipping easy.
Magento offers more built-in shipping options than WooCommerce, yet each platform can expand shipping options through extensions and plugins.
WooCommerce has integrations with Stripe, PayPal Pro, Square, Authorize.net, Amazon Pay, Apple Pay, and Alibaba. Most have a standard transaction fee of 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction, except for Square, which has a more affordable tariff of 2.65% + $0.30 per transaction.
Magento has payment gateway integrations with PayPal, Braintree, Authorize.Net, AmazonPay, Stripe and more. As for transaction fees, they are usually 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction for the abovementioned payment gateways. As well as for WooCommerce, Square is also a convenient payment gateway for Magento and can be added to make fast and secure payments.
Both Magento and WooCommerce have a wide array of payment gateways with standard transaction fees. It is up to you, which online payment systems to add to your web store.
Scalability is essential when choosing between WooCommerce and Magento 2, as each business strives to expand and increase profits, and there should be no limitations from the e-commerce platform.
WooCommerce enables scalability, but it may be challenging for users with no coding experience. There is no limit to the number of products a business can handle online, but it may require more installations to keep pace with business expansion. The more customized the store is, the more effort it will take to scale it.
Magento offers native tools for scaling businesses of all sizes. The platform easily handles high-traffic loads and can handle a lot of SKUs. It allows simply raising or reducing server resources depending on the e-commerce store traffic. Created with scalability in mind, Magento has multichannel options and handles extensive product catalogs and high traffic. Remember that as your business expands, the cost of the solution may also rise.
Magento 2 language packs enable the support of multiple languages for Magento. The platform supports over 20 currency units and provides information about registration, purchasing, local tax rates, shipping, regulatory compliance, and more. This allows customers from over 200 countries to shop with no hassle. Magento allows setting up localized store versions, making international customers' journeys smooth and delightful.
WooCommerce needs additional plugins to support multiple languages, as there are no built-in options for store localization by default. The drawback is that all internalization and localization extensions are paid $49 annually. The good news is that they all are comparatively easy to install and configure, making the WooCommerce store friendly to international shoppers.
Security is one of the prominent concerns when choosing the right e-commerce platform. Security breaches damage customers' trust and lead to exposure of credit cards and other personal information and business deterioration, causing losses and damaging the brand. In 2023, the losses from online payment fraud are estimated at $48 billion, and the trend continues to grow. Do Magento and WooCommerce provide the necessary level of data safety?
Magento offers security plugins and security patches. It also provides security updates for older supported versions, relentlessly looking for vulnerabilities. Magento requires fewer plugins than WooCommerce, but when it comes to the security patches, they are challenging to apply, often leading to many web stores needing to catch up. There are over 600 security extensions for Adobe Commerce.
WooCommerce also provides solid security measures, regularly updating its plugins and themes and applying safe login procedures. You can use a free version of the security plugin or purchase one, and be sure you will receive notifications about recent security updates. The significant advantage of WooCommerce compared to Magento is its automated update process, which does not require any technical skills.
Overall, there is no winner between WooCommerce vs Magento, as both solutions offer a sustainable level of data protection by releasing security patches and updating in-built security features. Both platforms allow SSL certificates, enable PCI-DSS compliance, and two-factor authentication for all logins.
Nevertheless, the platforms are open-source, so store owners must continuously take active measures to keep their web store safe. Magento and WooCommerce security also depends on reliable hosting providers and safe versions of themes and plugins.
Server specifications are often the business owner's responsibility and headache, but when it comes to seamless user experience, hosting server choice comes to the spotlight. Let's find out the technical details of Magento and WooCommerce.
A 1 GB server can handle a WooCommerce store for basic functionality with minimal traffic. However, even with a small user base, unexpected traffic spikes can quickly overwhelm it, leading to crashes and a frustrating user experience. The e-commerce platform has an average server response time of 779ms and an average availability rate of 99,52%, which is considered sufficient for the web store.
Magento requires a bit of muscle to run smoothly. If you're starting, a 4 GB server should be sufficient. However, if you expect more than 100 concurrent users, you must upgrade your storage space to ensure optimal performance. According to the research, the platform is relatively stable, with an average server response time of 824ms. Magento has an average availability rate of 99,71%. Additionally, the Magento store may run slow when hosted on shared servers.
The website speed may vary depending on the add-ons and extensions applied, image optimization, and your hosting plan. Magento or WooCommerce — both e-commerce solutions can be faster or slower than indicated in any study.
Ease of use is one of the crucial factors for beginners in choosing an e-commerce platform. Regarding the user-friendliness of WooCommerce vs Magento, there is a considerable contrast between the platforms.
WooCommerce is more easy to operate for users with no programming experience. Knowing WordPress will be a great advantage when launching the store on WooCommerce. Still, even without it, there is no big deal in using it with automatic installation and a convenient interface. The platform offers help at almost every step of setting up the store.
Magento may be a challenging platform to launch a store and requires either development professionals to do the job or plenty of hours of determined learning for a new user. You'll need some technical knowledge and coding skills to work with Magento. After installation, the platform offers a straightforward dashboard and intelligent navigation system.
Each e-commerce platform requires knowledge for the successful management of the web store. To what extent does Magento 2 vs. WooCommerce need admin learning, and how complex is store management?
WooCommerce needs more initial configuration, as you need to install WordPress first and only then add WooCommerce. Dealing with integrations and plugins may also be complicated since not all are compatible.
Magento 2 has an improved admin panel with a better design and layout, providing a better user experience. It may be challenging to administrate at first, but the complexity and variety of store management options come from the built-in features and functionality.
If business owners need support handling their e-commerce shop on Magento or WooCommerce, there should always be a way to resolve the difficulties. Let's see how practical the customer support for each platform is.
WooCommerce offers three options to reach out for support: a help desk, a FAQ page, and extensive documentation. The help desk can be in live chat or e-mails. At the same time, documentation provides a comprehensive overview of the platform, step-by-step guides, and illustrated instructions to address any concern. Moreover, the platform has an impressive community due to the support from the WordPress side.
Magento provides call center support, extensive developer documentation and user guides, FAQ section. Direct support is available only for the Adobe Commerce package, which might be costly enough for small businesses. Luckily, there is a vast Magento community with over 300,000 members, where you can find the answer to almost every question — the Magento Forum.
When choosing the right e-commerce platform, the price can become one of the vital factors. In our comparison of WooCommerce vs Magento, let's evaluate the affordability of each solution.
Although Woocomece is free, some costs are still associated with running a web store. The final cost depends on how many additional features you want to add, as add-ons, extensions, and plugins for a platform are both paid and free. Nevertheless, some mandatory costs include hosting, domain, security, shipping and payments, and themes, and can be over $600 per year. Optional costs for enhancing customer experience and marketing can also vary, reaching $550 without costs allocated to hiring developers.
Magento open source is a free platform requiring hosting payments (starting from $10). Additionally, you can download paid extensions ($50-$500), themes ($0-$200), and purchase domains ($10-$500) to improve your store's look and functionality.
Magento Adobe Commerce is a paid premium solution with advanced tools and additional features. It includes Adobe Commerce (starting at $22,000) and Adobe Commerce Cloud (cloud-based edition, beginning at $40,000). The price depends on your business's annual gross turnover and can vary from $22,000 to $190,000 (or more).
Overall, estimating the costs for Magento 2 vs WooCommerce, consider that Magento requires more resources if you choose premium options. At the same time, WooCommerce is a more affordable plan for beginners.
Despite being enriched with an extensive list of tools and extensions, both Magento and Woocommerce have its distinctive shortcomings and limitations. There are some features that WooCommerce needs to improve in comparison to Magento. They are:
Remember that some of the above mentioned features can be added to the WooCommerce web store by extensions, and only some of these features are available for Magento Open Source users.
On the other hand, Magento is missing the following:
All in all, the limitations of both platforms do not make them generally better or worse. Either Magento or WooCommerce — the final choice depends on the result of a thorough analysis of your business goals and needs.
Many words have been said, and now it is time to move to some real-life examples of WooCommerce and Magento stores.
US hardware and tools giant Harbor Freight reigned supreme as the most visited Magento store in 2023, attracting a staggering 31.1 million monthly visitors. Fashion retailer Sinsay trailed closely behind, boasting 25.9 million monthly visits and securing the second spot on the Magento leaderboard.
Belleze is a US-based affordable furniture and decor accessories retailer. With its custom and innovative design, the store makes the customers feel comfortable and provides a seamless user experience for desktop and mobile devices.
For WooCommerce, Craftsy was one of the popular e-commerce sites, offering crafting hobbies supplies and courses, Xero shoe footwear retailer, Green Mountain Grills, a pellet-based grills manufacturer and seller, and many others.
Amundsen Sports is a sports clothing retailer known for its family history and quality goods. The store's appealing design gives the customers winter sports inspiration and an enthusiastic vibe.
Magento is a resource-demanding e-commerce platform that best suits medium and large enterprises. It enables seamless scalability, advanced product management capabilities, and multichannel sales. Despite the steep learning curve — Magento requires at least basic programming knowledge or hiring Magento developers to launch a store – the platform delivers seamless customer experience through high and stable performance, vast customization opportunities, and AI/ML use.
WooCommerce is an excellent choice for beginners in the e-commerce industry, especially those familiar with WordPress CMS. The free platform is easy to install and navigate. It provides excellent customer support and a user-friendly product management interface. Regardless of the complex scalability process and no built-in support for languages other than English, the platform offers lots of extensions for additional functionality and has a large community of supporters.
Here is a detailed overview of the WooCommerce vs Magento features and functionality:
What is better: WooCommerce or Magento? There is no definite answer to this question, as each platform can boast prominent features, tools, and options available, as well as some shortcomings that might be critical while choosing the right e-commerce platform.
If you need a consultation on launching your e-commerce store, don't hesitate to contact NEKLO. Our experienced professionals will evaluate your case and find the best solution. We are glad to give you a helping hand with Magento and e-commerce software development.
US-based and operating globally, NEKLO spearheads digital transformation initiatives for businesses worldwide. We deliver software solutions complying with your market and legislation.
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