What to keep in mind before taking the decision?
Before proceeding to explain which of the platforms is best, I would like to give you some background on the few basic things that have to be kept in mind. The first one is to figure out the size of your business and how you plan to expand it in the future. The next thing is to analyze the market that you're selling in. Both these things are important so that you have a clear idea as to what features you expect from the platform and whether it will meet your requirement specifications or not. Other 3 things that must be your deciding factors include -
a) Cost Effective Development & Deployment b) Website Management c) Industry Leading Platform
WordPress V/S Magento- A brief background
Though WordPress is popular worldwide as a blogging platform, its counterpart Woocommerce can be used as a largest content publishing framework for content creation. Indeed content is the king in the internet era and will rule the web in future too. So, it's quite clear why WordPress makes up for a good choice when it comes to creating an ecommerce website. Also, WordPress is an open-source platform right from the start and till date.
Magento, on the other hand, emerged solely as an ecommerce platform in the first place. Though it also started off as an open-source platform with the Magento Community edition, later Magento launched two more solutions - Magento Enterprise and Magento Go that became hugely popular amongst the online merchants.
WordPress V/S Magento- Amazing Statistics
As per the usage statistics compiled by Built with- a popular website that tracks technology usage of sites across the globe, there are nearly 3, 99,233 live websites using Woo-commerce till date. However, Magento platform is currently used by around 2, 21,623 ecommerce websites worldwide.
WordPress V/S Magento- Major differences?
Since both the platforms are equally popular, here I have listed down the major differences based on some important comparison criteria like cost, core-features, flexibility, robustness and architecture.
1. You can run multiple stores using a single dashboard in Magento. This is indeed the most powerful feature as to why Magento is preferred over Woocommerce by business owners who have clear plans to expand their online stores in future. Since Magento possesses a native ability to run many stores simultaneously through one sophisticated back-end, no one can question the inherent flexibility of this platform.
2. As compared to WordPress, Magento has a much steeper learning curve that actually takes more time to understand the whole architecture and manage products and prices before launching the online store. Time is the investment one has to pay due to the complexity of this platform.
3. The advanced Magento ecommerce platform gives you the ability to organize and filter products through attributes and stores. So, if you're running a store that has thousands of products with hundreds of variations, this platform will easily be able to handle everything with ease while giving your customers the most flexible way of shopping
4. If we talk about hosting requirements, the architectural complexity of the Magento platform requires much more space as compared to WordPress and even more server power also.
5. Server Loads are a problem with Magento. Even the simplest Magento ecommerce websites eat a lot of space (several GBs of disk space) and lead to server loads due to complex transactions. Hence it is always advisable to seek a lot of information and invest considerable time while choosing a hosting provider for your website. Since, Magento demands a high-performance server you need to choose an expensive hosting platform to run your store successfully. If you choose a budget hosting provider, the installations of Magento are typically very slow and often people run out of the threshold when it comes to waiting.
6. Magento, being solely an ecommerce platform is not a content publishing framework. So, if you want to associate a blog with your Magento website and manage the content efficiently, you have to install some plugins and carve out a clear strategy for your business. However, with WordPress you have the power to leverage the platform to create a content-rich website with minimum efforts. This is because WordPress is an easy-to-use CMS that offers an inherent ability to create and publish blogs.
7. As compared to WordPress, Magento extensions are usually very expensive. Often, the prices as high as thousands of dollars are spent on customizing the site.
8. It is often very challenging to customize Magento due to its highly complex architecture.
9. WordPress has a drag and drop user-interface that is universally popular and makes it stand out among its competitor Magento. The interface is pretty easy that anyone can start tweaking their website without much hassle. This is not the case with Magento.
10. With countless number of plugins available on the WordPress directory, you can practically do almost everything you want to do in your website. And that too within a decent budget as most of these plugins are low-priced and won't burn a hole in your pocket. So, if you want something other than the basic ecommerce functions in your website, installing additional plugins and custom development will be much easier and cheaper than it is for Magento.
Which one you should choose - WordPress or Magento?
If you're still confused, look at your business model and then decide which one will best suit your needs. Online merchants who plan to run a small business with a tight budget, Woocommerce would be a good choice as it will allow one to sell a wide range of products. However, for those who own a medium-sized business better go with Magento if they don't have serious budget constraints. Merchants who want to run multiple stores and want to control everything within a single admin interface should consider Magento as the only choice.
