Magento vs WooCommerce

Each accounting for roughly 30 percent of all ecommerce websites, Magento and WooCommerce are both incredibly popular. For anyone looking to build and maintain an online shop, these platforms are often the top two contenders. But how exactly do they compare?

What is Magento?

Magento is a dedicated ecommerce platform written in PHP. It was bought by Adobe in 2018, which is why it’s also often referred to as Adobe Commerce.

There are two main versions of Magento – Magento Open Source, which is free to use, and Magento Commerce (also called Magento Enterprise), which comes with high monthly costs. However, you’ll still have to factor in extra costs even with the free version, as you’ll still need to pay for web hosting, domain names, SSL certificates, and more to get your website up and running. Alternatively, you can choose a Magento hosting plan (like the one offered with Fasthosts), which means you’ll get the above features included for free, plus super simple Magento installation.

Magento is flexible, high-performance, scalable, and packed with plenty of excellent features, free extensions and API integrations, but using it involves a bit of a learning curve. Overall, Magento hosting isn’t really designed for beginners, but if you’re tech-savvy or work with a Magento developer, you’ll be able to harness the advanced features of this platform to host a professional, sophisticated ecommerce website (or multiple websites). 

What is WooCommerce?

Magento software is designed solely for ecommerce, with extensive features for creating and managing online stores. WooCommerce, on the other hand, is a slightly different beast.

Rather than standalone software, WooCommerce is a free, open-source plugin for WordPress that provides advanced ecommerce functionality on top of a standard WordPress install. It’s free to download and relatively easy to set up, and just like WordPress and Magento, it offers a wide array of customisation options via themes and add-ons.

While there isn’t a paid tier for WooCommerce like there is for Magento, you can choose to pay for premium themes and plugins that take your ecommerce website to the next level. Plus, you’ll also have to pay for web hosting, domain registration, SSL certificates, and so on – unless you choose a WooCommerce hosting package, which will add on these features for free and come with WooCommerce pre-installed.

Magento vs WooCommerce: Which is better for you?

Apart from the initial differences in pricing and purpose, what actually sets these two ecommerce platforms apart? If you’re just starting out as an online entrepreneur, or looking for a better platform for your growing ecommerce business, which one of these highly popular platforms would be best for you? Let’s compare the two according to the most important factors you’ll need to consider to make your choice, including usability, functionality, cost and more.

1. Usability

In general, building and maintaining a Magento site is far more complex and time-consuming than the WooCommerce alternative. Setting up Magento and learning its basics isn’t too difficult in the grand scheme of things, but mastering its more advanced features is another thing altogether. If you’re not intimately familiar with the software, you’ll need the services of a Magento developer. And if you want to make full use of the powerful Magento platform, the basics just won’t cut it.

In theory, a WooCommerce shop can be up and running in a day. And while its long-term development and management will require a decent chunk of time and energy, WooCommerce is much more welcoming to novice users, just like the WordPress CMS it’s built on.

This is especially true if you’re already familiar with WordPress, e.g. if you have an existing WordPress site. And because WooCommerce integrates so seamlessly with WordPress, it’s ideal if you plan on using a blog for marketing purposes alongside your WooCommerce shop.

Of course, there’s nothing to stop you getting started with WooCommerce, then switching to Magento at a later date. This also makes sense if you don’t have the required experience with Magento, or the hosting and development resources right now.

Still, if you anticipate a need to rapidly scale up your online shop in the future, getting to grips with Magento up front could save a lot of bother later on.

2. Functionality

Like WordPress in general, WooCommerce is supported by thousands of free and paid extensions. These enable a wide array of specialised features, including integration with payment providers, delivery services, and other marketplaces like Amazon.

Magento also offers a massive range of expanded functionality in the form of extensions, and just like WooCommerce, a large community of developers to create and maintain them. But unlike WooCommerce, Magento also comes with a comprehensive suite of powerful ecommerce features out of the box.

One of Magento’s key advantages vs WooCommerce is its advanced product filtering features, allowing customers to narrow down search results more efficiently based on product attributes. Magento also offers enhanced functionality in terms of cross-selling, upselling, product comparisons, discount codes and more.

Another key feature of Magento is its ability to manage multiple shops simultaneously. This out-of-the-box functionality isn’t possible with WooCommerce, and while a multi-store WooCommerce plugin is available, it comes with a hefty price tag. Multi-store support allows you to open stores for different countries, using different currencies and languages – all on the same install.

Both Magento and WooCommerce offer the ability to add unlimited products. But while WooCommerce is perfect for many small to medium stores, the Magento feature set makes it inherently more scalable, all the way up to enterprise level.

Ultimately, this is why major global players like Nike or Samsung rely on Magento for their online shops – it offers a level of advanced functionality you just won’t find on any other ecommerce platform. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, considering how Magento was always designed purely for ecommerce, essentially placing it in a higher weight class than WooCommerce.

With all that said, Magento’s enhanced functionality doesn’t automatically make it the superior choice. Many shops will find all the features they need with WooCommerce – it’s a simple case of asking yourself what level of functionality you actually require. Magento offers more scalability, flexibility and customisation – but all this comes with increased complexity for the user.

3. Cost

While Magento does come in both open-source and paid editions, it’s only fair to compare the free version with WooCommerce, which likewise is available to download for nothing.

But as mentioned, to get the most from both Magento and WooCommerce, you really need to combine them with some of the myriad themes, plugins and extensions available from their respective communities. And while many of these are free, some of the most powerful add-ons are paid. This means that an online shop with specialised features will usually incur extra costs, no matter which you choose.

But the real question is, what do these extra costs add up to? On Magento, unless you take the time and effort to master the intricacies of the software yourself, you’ll probably need to hire a developer to implement extensions for you – even the free ones. The straightforward nature of WooCommerce, by contrast, makes the DIY approach more viable.

Still, for some of the more advanced WooCommerce functionality, you may well have to call on outside help. But whether you manage your WooCommerce site personally or employ someone to do it for you, the end cost is usually lower overall compared to Magento.

Magento devs are generally harder to come by than their WordPress/WooCommerce counterparts, so they often command higher fees – putting a premium on the development of your Magento site.

Another cost to consider is hosting. As explained below, Magento will typically place greater demands on servers, so it’s reasonable to expect to pay more for Magento hosting.

So overall, WooCommerce is usually the cheaper option. But just like with usability, these gains in cost are at the expense of functionality and complexity – something to always bear in mind when planning your long-term ecommerce strategy.

4. SEO

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is an extremely important factor to consider when choosing an ecommerce platform. After all, an optimised website will appear higher up in search results when users search for relevant terms, leading to more clicks and (hopefully) more conversions.

Using any reputable ecommerce platform shouldn’t negatively impact your SEO, but different platforms will offer different SEO features. For example, as WooCommerce is built on the WordPress CMS, it has plenty of blogging features to help your content marketing campaigns, and you can use plugins like Yoast or All-in-One SEO to ensure your content is optimised. On the other hand, Magento doesn’t have these blogging features because it’s a strictly ecommerce platform, so you would need an extension to add a blogging functionality to your site.

Page load speed is another factor to pay attention to when looking at SEO. Not only are slow-loading websites annoying for customers, but they’re also penalised by Google. Page speed is an important ranking factor, so you need to choose an ecommerce platform that promises excellent speed and performance. 

While any reputable platform should offer good performance, those looking for the best speeds possible may prefer Magento, as this platform can offer advanced features and performance compared to WooCommerce. However, this doesn’t mean that you can’t have a high-performance website running on WooCommerce, and there are also many other factors at play rather than just your choice of ecommerce platform. 

For example, the number of plugins/extensions you’ve installed, whether you’ve optimised your images, whether you’ve implemented caching, and a whole host of other factors can affect page speed, performance and rankings, so simply choosing a platform based on the idea that one is better for SEO misses the big picture. 

5. Security

Protecting your business’ data and customers’ data is paramount if you want to run a successful online store. Customers will only trust their payment details with reputable, secure websites, so if you have a history of data breaches or outages, you could end up losing a huge amount of business.

As popular and established ecommerce platforms, both Magento and WooCommerce offer plenty of security features to keep your website safe. In particular, Magento offers dedicated security patches to fix bugs and stay ahead of emerging cybersecurity threats, so this platform is a great choice if security is one of your top concerns.

However, since Magento and WooCommerce are both open-source platforms, a lot of the responsibility for protecting your website falls to you, unless you opt for a managed hosting plan. You or your developer will be responsible for managing firewalls, installing updates, using strong passwords or multi-factor authentication, creating website backups, monitoring security threats, and installing security plugins/extensions if desired, which means much of your site’s security is reliant on you rather than the ecommerce platform you choose.

If you decide to install multiple plugins, whether they’re for security or other functionalities, make sure you only choose plugins from trusted sources. This is because plugins can potentially add security vulnerabilities to your website, especially if they’re not regularly updated by their developers.

The more plugins you install, the greater the chances are that one of them could add security vulnerabilities to your website. And since Magento generally needs fewer extensions compared to WooCommerce, as its basic version boasts more features to start with, this can mean that Magento is a more secure solution for some customers. 

Overall, WooCommerce is secure and robust enough for most small-to-medium-sized businesses, but if you need an enterprise-level solution and don’t mind paying extra for developer support, Magento may be better for you.

6. Support

Speaking of support, the level of extra help you need can influence your choice of ecommerce platform. While both platforms are extremely popular and therefore have large online communities of users to help each other with common queries, Magento and WooCommerce offer different amounts of official support.

The free versions of both platforms offer general guides and FAQs on their websites, but tailored support for individual users isn’t available. With WooCommerce, individual support is only available with paid extensions, and similarly, Magento only offers dedicated support via email or phone for Magento Commerce customers. However, for more complex issues on this platform, you would need to hire a Magento developer to work on your website, which can get expensive.

It’s important to consider that WooCommerce is designed to be beginner-friendly, whereas Magento is more advanced and trickier to navigate even with the basic version. Therefore, if you don’t have tech experience or want to install more advanced features for your website, you’ll likely need the support of a Magento developer. On the other hand, with WooCommerce, it’s generally very easy to install plugins and manage your website without a developer.

7. Performance

Magento and WordPress hosting requirements are key considerations in your choice of ecommerce platform.

For larger, more complex ecommerce websites with high visitor numbers, Magento can offer increased levels of performance. But you’ll need the server power – preferably a dedicated server or a high-performance cloud platform with plenty of RAM.

WooCommerce, like WordPress, is sometimes run on shared hosting. While smaller, lower-traffic WooCommerce sites can get away with the performance of a shared platform, more intensive ecommerce applications will naturally demand dedicated resources.

So whether you choose the advanced features and scalability of Magento, or instead opt for the highly flexible, user-friendly and affordable WooCommerce solution, a capable web hosting platform is always recommended.

At Fasthosts, our Dedicated Servers are ideal for Magento Hosting, with the power you need to fuel this advanced platform. We also offer WooCommerce Hosting, which sets you up with a fresh WordPress install including WooCommerce with the click of a button – so you can get started with its flexibility straight away.