WooCommerce vs. Magento: Which one is the better fit for retailers?

WooCommerce and Magento are both open source eCommerce systems that everyone in the community can participate in developing. Therefore, they inherit the most advanced technical solutions at the fastest pace of improvement. Before analyzing the detailed strengths of each solution separately, let’s take a brief overview of the 2.

Some information on WooCommerce

WooCommerce was launched in 2011. Basically, WooCommerce is a plugin for WordPress that helps store owners quickly turn their WordPress site into an eCommerce site. As an open source, flexible, and extensible platform, WooCommerce makes it easier for you to perform functions in the backend and express your style with the storefront.

Magento basic facts

Magento launched its first version of Magento 1 in 2008, then released the Magento 2 that took the eCommerce world by storm in 2015. Magento 2 brought many major updates and outstanding features compared to the previous version, such as a wide range of exclusive built-in tools for:

• Monitoring performance
• Business analytics
• Conversion optimization

As one of the most powerful eCommerce solutions in the world, Magento comes with 3 editions to meet the needs of different businesses:

• Magento Open Source: Free edition that includes the essential functions for an eCommerce business
• Magento Commerce and Magento Commerce Cloud: Paid edition with premium and out-of-the-box features that help your store stay ahead in the fast-changing customer demands and complicate eCommerce operations

WooCommerce vs. Magento market share

Based on Builtwith’s distribution report in 2020, Magento and WooCommerce are dominating 38% of the worldwide eCommerce platform market. While you can take a deeper look into the statistics of WooCommerce vs. Magento to find detailed information of your specific country, we’ll provide the big picture here:

Although both WooCommerce and Magento platforms can expand offline stores online and facilitate smooth sales, each platform can’t win in every situation. We’ll evaluate WooCommerce vs. Magento on the following aspects:

• Features
• Prices
• Security
• Customer support
• Ease of use
• Speed and performance
• Plugins and extensions

WooCommerce vs. Magento — Round 1: Features comparison

1. Inventory management

Both platforms have no limit on the number of products on the website. You can add as many products to your website as you like.

WooCommerce

• Weak inventory management for large and complex catalog
• Poor database architecture for order management at high volume
• Plugin required for multi-store management and B2B features

Magento

• Strong inventory management for large and complex product catalog
• Robust order management and multi-store management
• B2B features in Magento Commerce and Magento Commerce Cloud

2. Discounts and coupon codes

With Magento, you can set promotions flexibly for customer groups and based on:

• Catalog price rule
• Shopping cart price rule
• You can even apply multiple coupon codes for one order.

WooCommerce also has this feature, but it’s very basic and does not address the needs and purposes of actual usage. Coupon codes are case-sensitive and set based on product IDs only.

3. Themes and templates

WooCommerce and Magento platforms provide you with a wide variety of templates and themes. Some simple themes are free themes. You can find and pay for more sophisticated ones in their marketplaces.

4. Multi-languages support

While Magento has built-in support for most popular languages, WooCommerce requires you to purchase WPML to run the WooCommerce site in multiple currencies and languages.

5. SEO capabilities

Magento is at the top in the field of SEO. It has good SEO capabilities by default and provides many advanced SEO extensions in case you have more complex requirements. With the SEO-friendly power of Magento, your store will easily achieve high search engine rankings and increase traffic attraction.

On the other hand, WooCommerce inherits the SEO feature of the WordPress platform, so it also has pretty good SEO capabilities in the box.

In terms of essential features to run an online business, Magento wins over WooCommerce!

WooCommerce vs. Magento — Round 2: Price comparison

WooCommerce and Magento are both free and open source systems that provide source code that makes it easy to improve and modify.

WooCommerce is a great choice for a startup business. However, after a short time, you’ll soon realize that WooCommerce has limitations and it may cost more to purchase additional WooCommerce features for your store.

With just the Magento Open Source free edition, you already have all the basic features for your store. Magento is a great choice for most growing sellers who don’t have a big budget. As their business expands, store owners may need to purchase a hosting solution for Magento ranging from $100—200 per month. But the convenience and optimization to your website speed are surely a satisfying investment in the long run. In case you choose Magento Commerce Cloud edition, this hosting fee is already included.

Magento wins the round of pricing!

WooCommerce vs. Magento — Round 3: Security comparison

In the 2021 Threat Report, Sophos indicates that more than 40,000 sites are hacked every day. Thus, website security is the most important and challenging task for any eCommerce business. Your online store contains a lot of information about payment details and customer information so optimal security should be a top priority.

You can implement some security measures with both Magento and WooCommerce, mostly through manual processes and extensions. Overall, Magento provides stronger security for online stores than WooCommerce. Magento releases Magento Patches periodically to keep your website with the most updated technology. These free security patches help you to:

• Monitor your website
• Find unauthorized access
• Scan for malware
• For more sophisticated security requirements, you can add Magento premium security extensions to protect your online store easily and better.

Magento wins the round of security!

WooCommerce vs. Magento — Round 4: Support comparison

WooCommerce and Magento are both open source platforms that attract a large number of development communities. In case of any issues, you can search for answers in the community and get support from all over the world.

WooCommerce

• Public knowledge base and community for yourself
• Support only available for paid extensions

Magento

• For Open Source edition, you can get support from the community or hire third-party developers.
• For Commerce and Commerce Cloud editions, you’ll have dedicated and direct support via tickets, email, and phone.

For store owners who want to focus on their business, you can choose a trusted Magento provider that offers all-in-one Magento eCommerce solutions, including native Magento POS, website building, support, and operation services.

Magento wins the round of support service!

WooCommerce vs. Magento — Round 5: Ease of use

Not many store owners have coding skills and deep technical knowledge. Thus, ease of use is one of the most important aspects to consider and choose an eCommerce solution. The more intuitive and convenient, the more preferable.

When you start with Magento, you may feel overwhelmed by so many new business terms and technical concepts. There are a lot of functions and features available in Magento that require professional users to do the necessary configurations. However, if you spend time to get to the bottom of them, you’ll see that everything is clearly organized and connected for further expansion in the future.

On the other hand, WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin so the installation process is much simpler than Magento. Someone who doesn’t know much about eCommerce platforms or technology can set up and run an online store using WooCommerce. WooCommerce provides a setup wizard to make the installation process effortless and comfortable. You just need to follow each step exactly to configure everything.

WooCommerce wins this round for the ease of use!

WooCommerce vs. Magento — Round 6: Speed and performance

Most website visitors will quickly leave your website or won’t even return to purchase if the loading speed is slow. That causes a significant drop in conversion rate and loss of potential revenue for your business. Therefore, performance and speed are factors when choosing a platform for your online stores.

However, no matter which platform you choose, your website performance and speed depend on various aspects, such as:

• The displaying image (optimized or not)
• The number of installed extensions and modules
• The quality of web hosting provider

Overall, there are so many factors that tie in this round. No clear winner in this round!

However, for better performance, you can learn about the most advanced PWA technology to speed up your site and boost your sales.

WooCommerce vs. Magento — Round 7: Plugins and extensions

The core of eCommerce platforms will only provide you with basic features to run an online business. Woocommerce and Magento allow third-party developers to create extensions to fill in the gaps of business expectations. They both have a large number of add-ons to enhance website appearance and functionality.

Magento offers 3,931 free and paid extensions for:

• Website optimization
• Marketing
• Payment
• Accounting and finance
• Security
• Shipping and fulfillment
• Customer support

There are many features in Magento extensions for you to speed up your business and discover new functionality in essential business categories.

WooCommerce marketplace sells over 400 extensions to customize or personalize their website according to their brand identity and business requirements. WooCommerce plugin prices are usually a lot cheaper than Magento 2. 

However, the higher cost is well worth it because Magento extensions make your Magento store more powerful than WooCommerce store.

Magento wins this round!

As a great component for WordPress, WooCommerce is the most used eCommerce platform in the market. However, the functionality of WooCommerce depends heavily on its extra plugins because the core functionality of WooCommerce is quite limited.

This creates the biggest difference between Magento and WooCommerce.

Magento is built with many eCommerce features that WooCommerce doesn’t develop, which makes Magento a much more powerful platform than WooCommerce. Sometimes to compensate for this problem, some businesses find ways to integrate WordPress into Magento.

Therefore, if you have a large catalog and require complex eCommerce integration, Magento is the more suitable choice to start with. Till now, Magento has maintained its position as the most robust SMB eCommerce platform on the market.

To make it easier for you to decide the more suitable solution for your eCommerce store, we’d like to summarize the battle between WooCommerce vs. Magento by the table below.

If you’ve decided to move your online store from WooCommerce to Magento, you’ll need a long-term technology partner to help you migrate the data, build, and maintain the new system. You can book a free consultation with Magestore to design a solution that fits your business.