Disclaimer: In our previous CMS showdowns, many users and readers have called us biased because we sell Magento. Here’s the thing: we have no affiliation with Magento Official, and we do not sell extensions, plugins, or anything related to Magento. We sincerely love Magento as a CMS, and we only strive to guide our readers in the best direction.
————————————–
As we often repeat, choosing a CMS for your online business is not easy. We’ve gone through many showdowns, but this time we have Magento vs. PrestaShop in the arena!
Magento vs Prestashop
If you want to go through other articles in the series, here they are:
Now let’s focus on Magento vs. PrestaShop. We promise to keep the review unbiased (as always) so that you, as our reader and supporter, can make informed decisions and also help your peers with their decisions.
While both Magento and PrestaShop are great choices, they both have their strengths and weaknesses and it is important to know in-depth which CMS is better for you. Both are open-source platforms, so they are tough contenders, but let’s see who we get to pick after rounding them off in these departments:
- Features
- Performance
- Support
- Security
- Ease of Use
- Pricing
1. Features
While talking about features, there are not many platforms that top Magento. In fact, from an eagle’s point of view, Magento is the king when it comes to features. It’s a highly focused platform that aims to arm the user with all that is needed to build a powerhouse of an online store.
But it’s not to say that PrestaShop is a slacker in the features department. From hundreds of templates to an easy website builder and plenty of payment gateway solutions, PrestaShop is a great competition.
Both the platforms provide the basic functionalities of an ecommerce store. However, it’s the sheer number of features that Magento boasts of and hardly any other platform can compete with. Hence, if you’re looking for the best features and tools to empower you the most, Magento is a no-brainer. If you’re looking to build a basic online shop without much hassle, PrestaShop is a great choice.
2. Performance
Magento is known to suffer from performance issues time to time. Users and developers often complain that the Magento backend tends to slow down and often results in a slower website as well. However, we’ve addressed the issue in detail and discussed exactly why your Magento may be slow and how to make it fast.
As far as PrestaShop is concerned, performance is not its biggest concern. PrestaShop does not suffer from being a heavy-duty CMS like Magento, and hence will not slow down your website.
Although Magento is mostly misunderstood in terms of performance, but there’s no denying that PrestaShop does provide a slightly better and seamless experience to store owners and their customers.
3. Support
Being open source platforms means that you get support mostly through documentation and communities around the world. As is with both, you get a large community of users who are willing to help you out with most problems that you might face, and if that is not an option for you anytime, then official documentation for both platforms are the best resources to turn to.
Magento, however, is a CMS that is famous around the world and has a far bigger community. By the sheer size of the population that uses Magento, you are more likely to get answers compared to PrestaShop. Magento has been around since 2001 compared to PrestaShop’s inception in 2007, hence, it can be argued that Magento has amassed a huge user base with great support.
PrestaShop does not have an official support team and you’d have to rely completely on users and documentations. With Magento, if you purchase their paid plans, you get official support for every problem that you may face!
4. Security
PrestaShop and Magento are both designed to provide your store and your customers robust security. As is with most major CMSs, security is not much of a concern because there are all the standard security measures taken to ensure there is minimum risk for buyers.
However, it should be noted that despite what the platforms offer, one should spend considerable time on tightening security and ensuring that there is no vulnerability left to be exploited. And when it comes to that, Magento is a feature rich platform that allows you to install powerful plugins.
5. Ease of Use
Magento is by no means a game for beginners, and if anyone with no knowledge or experience of using a CMS tried their hand at it, they are going to find it really, really complex. Even installing Magento is a task that’ll challenge you a lot.
PrestaShop is relatively easy to install and will not require you to have expert knowledge of the platform.
Even after installation, Magento is not an easy game to play. Either you’d have to have intermediate knowledge of the product, or shell money at a developer to take you through all the difficulties. Hence, if that is a problem, then PrestaShop should be your go-to platform.
6. Pricing
Both platforms come at a price of zero, which means they should be in the good books of most customers. However, as with most things in life, free stuff is never the best. While that is not completely true for either CMS, you’d still have to incur costs in order to structure a successful business.
While you can create basic stores with the free version of both platforms, to get the best of both worlds, you’d have to cough up money to take full advantage of each. And while we are talking about shelling money out, know that Magento’s Enterprise edition is the ultimate ecommerce solution out there, and you can’t go wrong with it.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, as we said, both platforms are an excellent choice. However, which one you choose mostly depends on your needs. If you want a basic online shop of small or medium size, PrestaShop is a really great choice. If you want to grow exponentially, then Magento is the better choice. Overall, though, Magento has always been the best option for most merchants worldwide, and if you opt for Magento, you won’t have to worry about scaling your business or professional support for major issues that you might run into.