Magento vs Joomla – What’s the Difference? (Pros and Cons). Technologies are enabling many sectors to switch from traditional business to digital or e-commerce. No matter how small or big an organization is, they all would like to be able to sell their goods online, however, making an e-commerce store or web application is a complicated and time consuming process that requires expertise in code. Due to this issue, many platforms have been developed that make it easy to build websites, content management systems, and e-commerce stores. Joomla and Magento are two platforms that provide different features for building websites and online stores.
What is Magento?
Magento is an eCommerce platform that enables its users to sell their products and services online. This open source platform was developed using PHP. The platform was founded in 2008 by Roy Rubin. Later Adobe purchased the platform for $1.68 billion in 2018. MySQL server and MariaDB are the main databases that are used to store information in Magento development.
Key Features of Magento
- Reports and analytics: This application integrates Google Analytics and offers a variety of reports, such as sales reports, tax reports, abandoned shopping cart reports, low stock reports and more.
- Browsing catalogues: Using layered navigation, users can narrow down search results by categories and products.
- Payment and Shipping: It has the capability to handle multi-address shipping for a single order, single page checkout, guest checkout and saved shopping carts.
- Conversion and marketing tools: The software offers features such as up sells, related products, cross sells, multi tier pricing and custom landing pages for each category.
- Browse products: It provides stock availability information, displays multiple images and offers upselling based on different price tiers.
- Search engine optimization (SEO): Users can generate sitemaps automatically and add meta information to content pages, category pages and product pages.
- Admin panel: Through the admin panel, you can manage multiple stores and import/export customer and catalogue information in bulk.
Pros of Magento
- Applications can be developed for various devices, including Android, iPad, etc.
- Because it is SEO friendly, websites can be easily optimized for better ranking on SERPs.
- The loading speed of the site is very good.
- Plugins from third parties can easily be integrated.
- It has advanced reporting and analytics tools to help you track your performance.
- Offers a wide variety of marketing tools, including gift cards and coupons, that integrate seamlessly with the system.
- Simple Catalog Management and it manages catalogues intuitively.
- The installation process is quick and easy.
- Easily customize your website with more than 10 native themes and 3,800 extensions.
Cons of Magento
- Configuration and setup is more difficult than with Joomla.
- Large amounts of space are required for hosting, which slows down the speed of the website.
- A variety of themes, templates and extensions are available for a premium price, even though the service is open source.
- Magento extensions are very costly.
- To get it up and running, you’ll need some coding skills.
Next in the article Magento vs Joomla – What’s the Difference? (Pros and Cons) is to introduce Joomla server.
What is Joomla?
The Joomla platform is a content management system that helps in building interactive websites and web applications. This platform was developed by Open Source Matters Incorporation. It was first released in 2005. The application was written in PHP using the OOPS programming model. It uses MySQL and PostgreSQL databases for its data storage.
Key Features of Joomla
- Managed CMS: It provides users with convenient core and extension updates, user registration and easy installation of web extensions.
- Editing and publishing content: It provides a WYSIWYG editor to customize frontend themes and templates.
- Design: The website uses Bootstrap for creating responsive design and JLayouts for displaying HTML that is generated from data arrays and objects.
- Support globally: The application has built in help features, extensive documentation, and a forum for community support.
- Multilingual support: More than 70 languages are supported.
- Search engine optimization: It includes an SEO package that optimizes the site content out of the box.
- User Management Access Control List (ACL): This feature allows users to keep track of their site visitors and categorize them accordingly.
Pros of Joomla
- Easy installation with one click.
- With so many ready to use themes, there is no need to start from scratch.
- With its advanced marketing tools, you can reach more customers.
- Using tracking tools, you will be able to evaluate the performance of the application.
- This platform is currently being used to build over 2 million websites.
- To prevent unauthorized access, it is equipped with enhanced security features.
- Features built in SEO capabilities.
- Provides a convenient way to manage products and content in one place.
- Offers both free and premium extensions with support of more than 5,000 extensions.
- Offers a wide range of payment gateway options including a number of popular platforms like Google Checkout and PayPal.
Cons of Joomla
- Joomla its realy difficult to add categories.
- It takes a long time to load compared to other platforms.
- There are no charges for basic features, but there are hosting fees.
- Users who wish to customize must be familiar with web design and development.
- Installing and configuring user friendly URLs is a little more challenging than with other platforms.
Follow Magento vs Joomla – What’s the Difference? to learn differences between there shopping e stores.
Magento vs Joomla: Feature Comparison
SEO Optimization
Magento
Even though it is an all in one eCommerce solution, it has a reasonably good search engine optimization rating. But you still need to step up your SEO game if you want to differentiate yourself from your competition, increase sales volume, grow revenue, boost conversions, and get more traffic.
Keeping this in mind, Magento doesn’t automatically generate headers or title tags. This must be done manually. You should also optimize the URLs of product pages manually. It is necessary not to include the category in the URLs.
Most of these SEO tweaks need to be done by yourself manually, but you shouldn’t be afraid of that. This makes it possible to automatically optimize your store for search engines because it supports SEO features and plugins like Yoast.
Joomla
It supports a variety of plugins designed to optimize your website for search engines, but it falls far short of what Magento offers. You’ll need to make most of the adjustments manually.
However, the integration of plugins makes this easier. By using them, you can manage meta tags, find out where no follow tags are needed, perform keyword density checks on your pages and get insight into how your website performs in search engine results.
Performance and Ease of Use
Magento
The first thing you’ll notice is that if you’re a newbie with no prior web coding experience, this platform is going to be difficult for you to master. Yes, it comes with a one click installer to get it up and running, but that’s just the beginning.
If you are familiar with coding, you will like the simplicity of the self hosting setup because you don’t have to devote much time to it. The navigation menu consists of everything on the interface and it is easy to use. Besides reports, promotions, sales, products, and customers, there is a lot to discuss here. Also, remember that this system requires FTP server since it relies on a local installation. However, this doesn’t necessarily present a problem to developers.
Joomla
It’s better to use this particular CMS unless you have or plan to hire someone with development experience. The interface is more “beginner-friendly,” but getting the backend up and running will require some coding skills.
Nevertheless, the learning curve is not as steep as you might expect. In addition, there are a number of online tutorials available for you to use.
The front end of the application is quite user friendly for non developers. Even managing your products is possible without switching tabs. In that regard, it is a clear winner.
Scalability
Magento
Magento is a leading eCommerce platform ideal for online companies with a large number of products and several categorizations, as well as a high volume of customers and, most importantly, a desire to grow and scale quickly. Magento’s product inventory management system is capable of holding countless products concurrently and can handle up to 50,000 visits per hour, providing businesses of all sizes with the capabilities they need for their growth and efficiency.
Joomla
Joomla tools can certainly handle a huge amount of content since it is a content focus system. Additionally, Joomla can also capture a large number of users, so it is quite scalable if the store owners pay attention to their server hardware, web hosting, plugins and other critical elements.
Magento and Joomla General Comparison
- Popularity: Magento is more popular than Joomla in Web Industries.
- Established: Magento is established on 2008, while Joomla is established on 2005.
- Growth: Magento growth is higher than Joomla.
- Online visibility in Magento and Joomla are both great in that sector.
- Open source: Magento and Joomla both are Open Source .
- Cost: Joomla is much more expensive than Magento.
- Ese of use: Magento is somehow difficult and Joomla is simple and plain for set up and install.
- Customization: Front end in Magento is more difficult to customize than in Joomla.
- Shopping performance: Magento is better than Joomla.
Magento vs Joomla — Which is the Better Platform?
After comparing these two technologies comprehensively, it’s clear that both of them offers good options for your online store. How much backend involvement you are willing to give up is all down to you.
In comparison to Joomla, Magento offers more functionality and performance. It is, however, a little complex and requires a lot of experience in development. Therefore, it is not suitable for beginners.
On the other hand, Joomla, at least for the front end, is somewhat user friendly for newcomers. However, users will also need some experience with coding to use the backend.
Magento vs Joomla - What's the Difference? Conclusion
You can go with Magento if your business budget is flexible or if you can hire a developer if necessary. However, if you cannot afford such an expense, Joomla would be the perfect solution.
From reading this article Magento vs Joomla – What’s the Difference? should now have a better understanding of what a CMS is and what the major CMS platforms are and where to build your website. You’ll also have a more knowledge about the similarities and differences between Magento and Joomla and which ones are best to use for you.
