Magento vs OpenCart

Magento or OpenCart is much more suitable for you? Whether you are planning to start your eCommerce business or you already have an online store, anyway, you need to investigate all the opportunities for your business in the choosing of the right eCommerce platform. Today we are going to compare two popular platforms, Magento and Opencart, that have own advantages and disadvantages. So let’s enlighten them!

OpenCart is a free open-source eCommerce platform, that is ideal for the merchants, who just want to start own eCommerce business, for example, for start-ups. It takes not many costs for time for setting up OpenCart and to start sale your products.

Magento is also open-source eCommerce platform, that is a professional system for online retailing. It is one of the most popular eCommerce platforms, and not by chance. Magento combines a large number of extensions, freedom in customization and plenty of other features, which we will discuss in the following sections.

Various extensions are a significant part of each eCommerce store. It is the easiest way to improve your store and to make it easier in management. If we say about extensions for Magento, it is a large library of extensions to offer. You can find any extensions that you require for your store. Magento is an absolute leader among our candidates, but anyway you can see useful extensions for OpenCart. It hasn’t such a big choice, but you can find the most useful and necessary ones.

Magento and OpenCart both have SEO options. It is excellent because now SEO is a necessary part of successful online stores. Magento is SEO-friendly platform, as well as OpenCart, but anyway there are some differences in their SEO functionality.

Even Though OpenCart position itself as the SEO friendly platform, it has a limited number of functionalities. Because of this, some basic options are unavailable.

On the other hand, with Magento you can customize your SEO strategy and do everything, that can help you to get ahead in the Google Search. That is why, if you are planning to make a large SEO company and to be at the top of searches, Magento should be your choice.

If to say about ease of using and installing Magento, you need to have good technical knowledge for understanding how Magento works. It is because of plenty options and features, but anyway, it will be quite difficult to install Magento without help of skilled Magento developers.

If to say about OpenCart, it is well-known as a user-friendly platform. You can install and manage it without the help of developers or technical specialists. So, if you aren’t a technical person, it will be easier to use OpenCart.

OpenCart is an open-source platform, so you just need to download and install it. Of course, it will be additional costs, at least, for hosting.

If we say about Magento, it proposes various editions, from Community Edition, that is possible free of charge and to Magento Enterprise. The last one is great for stores of enterprise level and it proposes annual subscription fee of $20,000. But in this article, it will be more logical to compare Community Edition to OpenCart.

For the improvement process in Magento, it will be better to find professionals experienced in the development of Magento. We recommend it because Magento is quite a complex platform and not anyone can make changes correctly. For OpenCart, It might be cheaper because you needn’t developers help for each improvement, it is easier to do it yourself.

Both above platforms have a large community of developers, so in case of any issues, you can just google your question or ask it on the popular forums.

As we know, Magento is one of the most popular eCommerce platforms, it also has a large community, that is always ready to help you. We can’t say that OpenCart doesn’t have a big community. It does, so you’ll be in good hands there as well.

But if compare these two platforms, you’ll see that Magento has much bigger and robust community.

To sum up, you need, first of all, to think about your goals and financial possibilities. If you are just at the start of online business, OpenCart can be a good solution for a small online store. But if your dream is a large store with a great SEO, an enormous number of features and extensions, full customization and a large community, that can help you, Magento is a solution exactly for you!