It’s not easy to pick a choice among many attractive ones. It confuses you and makes it harder for you to decide which choice will prove to be the most optimal. You may face this dilemma when choosing an ecommerce platform for your online business since you have many of them to choose from. What makes this decision even harder is that every platform promises distinguishing features and that every business has different goals and requirements.
WooCommerce and Magento 2, the two widely popular ecommerce solutions, are often the first choice of online vendors. Both of them are packed with great features and trusted by famous brands worldwide. To decide which platform is best suited for your business, you need to know the performance, pricing, user friendliness, ease of use, product management, scalability, customization capabilities, etc. of each of these platforms. Without this knowledge, you may end up making a poor choice.
Quick Read: Shopify Plus vs. Magento 2 - In Depth ComparisonIn the following lines, we are going to compare WooCommerce and Magento 2 with respect to their key features. We will leave it to you to decide which platform offers a better solution for your unique business requirements. This comparison will serve you to make an informed decision.
40% of users abandon a store if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. 47% of users expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less. Knowing this, the page load time is the primary concern of all online retailers.
When it comes to performance, it’s difficult to declare a clear winner since there are many other factors that contribute to this. For example, the functionality and size of your site, the efficiency of your hosting provider, whether or not your images are optimized, and whether you are using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) or not.
The performance of Magento 2 has been greatly improved by the introduction of Varnish and a full-page caching system. So if you can afford a dedicated Magento hosting, it gives optimal performance when compared with WooCommerce.WooCommerce is free to download and install on any server. However, you have to bear the hosting expenses that depend on the package you choose according to the size of your business. This varies from $6.99 per month to $499 per month. Many web hosts work well with WooCommerce but the recommended ones for new stores are Siteground, Bluehost, and Godaddy.
Apart from hosting expenses, you may need to use premium extensions to extend the functionality of your store. The good news is that many extensions are free and those that are premium are not very expensive.
The Magento 2 community (now called open source) edition is available for free but lacks B2B features. The license for Magento 2 enterprise (now called Commerce) edition starts at about $22,000 a year for up to $1M USD revenue per year. It’s an up-front fee. On top of this, you also have to pay for hosting services that will cost you about $1,000 per month. Moreover, Magento extensions and development is more expensive than WooCommerce.
So when it comes to pricing, Magento will hurt your pocket more than WooCommerce.The security of an online store is another important factor that every merchant must consider. Nothing is more important for a customer than the security of his private information and payment details and for a store than its trust and reputation.
Although both WooCommerce and Magento provide features and tools to provide a secure shopping experience to their customers, WooCommerce tends to be more vulnerable to security threats through themes and extensions. Although WooCommerce itself is secure, the third-party free and low-quality extensions and themes are often the sources of attacks for most hackers. According to a WordPress security infographic, more than 51% of WordPress sites were hacked due to a vulnerability in the themes and plugins they were using.
Magento, on the other hand, frequently releases dedicated security patches and updates apart from offering many built-in security features. Moreover, all the Magento marketplace extensions are approved after passing the security test. So Magento takes a slight lead when it comes to security.
WooCommerce is a clear winner here as it is more beginner-friendly and requires little or no knowledge especially if you are already a WordPress user. About 70% of users opt for WooCommerce because of its ease of use.
The WP-admin dashboard allows you to effortlessly customize your website, insert content, install plugins, and do what you want with your website. You can add an unlimited number of products, create pages, set up payments, manage orders, etc. The massive WordPress community and extensive documentation further make it easier to solve any problem.
Magento, on the other hand, is for web development professionals. It’s not the job of a newbie or even an amateur to build a store in Magento. Even Magento installation may require the services of a Magento professional.