Magento vs WordPress – What’s the Difference? (Pros and Cons). Are you planning to start an eCommerce store, but do not know which platform to choose between Magento and WordPress? Then, you are at the right place.
While both are hosting platforms and are sturdy in their own ways, they do have some differences, making them suitable for a particular blend of resources, objectives and infrastructure needs.
Moreover, while Magento offers web professionals and larger stores the most impressive features suitable in the field, WordPress site powers nearly 40 percent of the Internet. It makes WordPress a sturdy contender providing flexibility and endless plugin directory.
Read this blog to help you narrow down your options between Magento vs WordPress – What’s the Difference? and to choose the best online platform for your requirements.
What is Magento
Released in 2008, Magento has gained tremendous popularity for its sturdy stability, high customizability and robust built in features. This open source platform is powered by software giant Adobe. It is geared toward web development and encourages them to use its API heavily. It it much more difficult to learn, but then it allows web savvy users to enjoy complete freedom of e-commerce platform.
It also comes with a large marketplace of extensions that works well in expanding the eCommerce functionality of the store. Now that you have learned about Magento, let’s learn about its features.
Magento Features
- Magento comes with various eCommerce features that provide you amazing shopping experience. It enables you to sell an unlimited types or number of products to the customers. Moreover, it makes writing quality product descriptions as effortless as adding product variations, attributes, pricing, images, videos and many more.
- The page builder of page builder of Magento it provides a drag and drop interface and broader widgets, enabling you to build and configure your web pages. It is even applicable in content staging, previewing and asset management.
- With the help of this hosting platform, reviewing product recommendations based on the interest of the customers is appropriate. It even segments customers based on their locations, gender, order history and more. It comes in handy if customized content and promotions are your priority.
- Easy to install, configure and add additional plugins and themes. It supports more than 50 payment gateways
- Offers Google Analytics support and also provides you various reports such as, sales report, tax report, low stock report, search terms report, best viewed products report, product reviews report, coupon usage report and more.
- Offers a catalog management features that helps you showcasing of virtual products, editing & deletion of product reviews, complete inventory management, dynamic pricing, and also social sharing of the products.
- Offers a numerous SEO features including, SEO friendly URLs, sorting popular searches, generating Google sitemaps, compatibility with various search engines, customer sorting attributes and many more.
Pros of Magento
- Magento constitutes several features designed to grow your business. Its modular design makes handling both bigger and smaller shops possible.
- It is an easy to use web development platform for users.
- Its outstanding assortment of additional capabilities makes eCommerce plugins non essential.
- It also has premium themes that you can choose from.
- It has exceptional search engine optimization capabilities.
Cons of Magento
- The platform caters more to web developers than small business owners. It means that you have to learn about this platform before commencing the business as a solo entrepreneur.
- It is very costly, which means that only huge organizations with dedicated web design and coding teams can use the platform.
- Although it has a large user base and a vibrant forum, several users have complained that the community comprised several spams. It is not well monitored, resulting in inadequate technical assistance.
What is WordPress
WordPress is another open source hosting platform that is written in PHP. Originally developed in 2003 as a blogging platform that later immediately evolved into a top choice when it comes to creating a website. WordPress is designed not only for bloggers, it is for everyone. It has a large community with a wide range of technical people. WordPress community members providing full technical support without any charges.
One of the best features of WordPress is that it is very SEO friendly. This means that any website you build in WordPress will be more readily indexed by search engines and will rank higher. Many WordPress themes are free and come search engine optimized out of the box.
WordPress also provides a Gutenberg visual page building tool that helps you to create unique designs without having to rely on third party tools or coding.
WordPress is known for its simplicity and flexibility and you can build almost any kind of website with WordPress. Another great benefit of WordPress platform is that it is easy to scale up.
In contrast to Magento, it is not a native eCommerce platform for online companies. Instead, it has a plugin called WooCommerce, that distinguishes it as a robust and most used eCommerce solution.
By adding WooCommerce into the mix, you tend to access multiple eCommerce features to boot. Like Magento, it also enables you to sell unlimited products to your customers. You can customize the store to reflect your location by setting the language, currency and measurement units.
Using WooCommerce CSV exporter, you can export or import your product catalog. It comes in handy when you are looking of migrating your content and keeping backups of your product.
It also makes displaying customer reviews on the product pages effortless. In terms of design, it provides several WordPress themes to choose from. These themes offer a mobile friendly experience, fast loading speeds and search engine optimization.
Pros of WordPress
- Combining WordPress and WooCommerce enables you to gain access to a sturdy content management system (CMS).
- Its plugin, WooCommerce is very flexible and expandable, using several WordPress themes and plugins.
- Since the platform is supported by a highly active and flourishing community, you get several instructions, tips and techniques to follow and other users to network with on the site.
- Its backend is more straightforward than Magento’s. It makes the platform a more user friendly option for those having extensive web experience.
- There are lots of SEO plugins available in the market place to help optimize content, meta tags, keyword focus and much more!
- It is designed to be responsive and mobile friendly. All themes offered by WordPress site are responsive out of the box.
Cons of WordPress
- You have to pay for more sophisticated features, making it more expensive than its competitors.
- It does not provide instant chat technical support for free plans.
- You need to have development skills to get the most out of this eCommerce platform.
- It is attractive to potential hackers. So you will always need to assess the quality of a WordPress plugin and install with caution.
- Some themes contain a lot of unnecessary generic code. This will decrease the speed of the site and cause slow load times.
- If you don’t have any prior experience, it can be difficult to navigate through WordPress web design, development and maintenance.
Magento vs WordPress - Similarities
Both Magento and WordPress have the following points in common. Let’s learn about them in detail:
Security
Customers enter their card information on the eCommerce website. Therefore, we can estimate that Magento has tighter security than WordPress. However, they both are highly secure generally and for eCommerce purposes. And since they have been in this field for a while, they have gone through their fair share of security updates. Both provide a wider variety of plugins and extensions that helps in increasing the website’s protection.
Help And Support
Both platforms provide a community based support forum, where you will receive several posts and read support issues from other users. Also, being widely popular, the information concerning these platforms is available outside its official forums.
However, they are open source platforms and a majority of help and support comes from your hosting provider.
Magento vs WordPress - Key Differences
Ease Of Use
As an open source system, both Magento and WordPress are free to use. The package does not include any customer service, which means that you have to rely on online forums or self help material to get you through any problems you might be having with them.
Both the platforms also have substantial and active user populations. In this case, WordPress is considered the best option as it has a larger and more active community. They have a lot of self help resources that you can access on the site.
On the other hand, Magento also provides access to its solution partner. However, you need to hire professionals to help you with specific assignments.
eCommerce
Magento is the best platform for medium to large stores. In terms of eCommerce, it has more advanced features including mobile commerce, multi store management, and a sales reporting tool. Other general supported features of Magento include shopping carts, product bundles, catalog management, newsletter, etc. On the other hand with WordPress to find most of features you have to search around the appropriate plugins and themes.
Marketing and Content Management
With regards to marketing and content management, developers usually consider WordPress over Magento. Technically, it is a content management system and also started out as a primary blogging platform. However, today you can make every kind of website you want with the help of WordPress. Since its root is in blogging, it is best for content creation.
With Magento, you need a custom extension to support blogging as being an in built feature.
Theme and Design Customization
Magento consists of two design themes by default. They are Luma, which is a demonstration theme and Blank for custom theme creation. Other than that, it provides multiple templates to choose from in the Magento marketplace.
On the other hand, WordPress enables its users to access a theme library that stores 4700 plus themes. They are elegant, eye catching, feature rich and mobile responsive. It also enables you to create your own theme according to your choice.
SEO
In terms of SEO, you can completely rely on WordPress instead of Magento. Although both the platforms support SEO features like sitemaps, metadata, etc., WordPress has an inherent advantage. It contains sturdy SEO plugins like Yoast and makes the process of adding keyword rich content like blog post effortless.
Pricing
WordPress is more cost effective than Magento. It is because Magento’s eCommerce building features come at a premium price, or even if you are using an open source installation, you will have to pay a premium for its development hours.
On the contrary, WordPress is a completely free platform to download and use. Its open source nature makes users depend entirely on customizing themes and plugins. While its paid theme starts from 30 dollars, its plugins range from zero to thousand dollars.
Great job! We have learned more about Magento vs WordPress – What’s the Difference? (Pros and Cons).
Magento vs WordPress – What’s the Difference? Conclusion
Both Magento and WordPress is a feature rich eCommerce toolkits. However, they have a different target audience. Magento is considered the best option if you yourself are a web developer of consists of a team of developers to create a website. Moreover, since it is scalable, you can rely on it as the business grows.
However, if you are a solo entrepreneur, you should look for WordPress. You need to have web development knowledge for it. Once you have got your WordPress site set up, the process of building an eCommerce website becomes pretty amazing. Overall, it is best for businesses of all sizes.
