Magento vs WooCommerce vs Shopify vs Opencart: Best Ecommerce Platforms 2022

The debate for which ecommerce platform is the best is always going on among entrepreneurs and proficient developers.
eCommerce business is yet to blossom completely. However, the ecommerce industry juggernauts like Magento, WooCommerce, Shopify, Opencart, BigCommerce, and various others are leaving no stone unturned to expand their market share and make an indelible express in the e-commerce realm.

However, still, the hot question is unanswered “What are the best ecommerce platforms of 2021?” The only way to answer this daunting question is thorough review and analysis of every prominent e-commerce platform functionality, security, performance, number of users, customers’ reviews and ratings, and various other crucial aspects.

Before we begin the best e-commerce platforms 2021 comparison, we would like you to have a glance at the market share of top-notch e-commerce giants.

Comparison Table of e-commerce platforms: Magento vs. WooCommerce vs. Shopify vs. Opencart

This table will cover various aspects such as ease of use, customization, pricing, support, and scalability to show the comparison between the four e-commerce platforms.

Magento vs WooCommerce vs Shopify vs Opencart: Which E-commerce Platform is the Best?

#Magento

Currently, Magento is one of the most popular as well as one of the most sought-after ecommerce platforms among merchants across the world. Magento offers 2 editions according to the business needs of merchants: the Magento open-source edition and the Magento commerce edition.

Not many individuals know that through the Magento platform, merchants from across the world have sold goods and services worth 155 billion dollars which is a staggering figure. When it comes to offering performance, security, and stability in one single place, the Magento ecommerce platform has the trust of millions.

The best part about the Magento platform is it releases new versions on a timely basis to upgrade the platform functionalities and fix loopholes in security. Let’s state the comparison attributes for Magento vs WooCommerce vs Shopify vs WooCommerce vs BigCommerce.

1. Platform Functionalities

• Merchant can integrate different channels, and sell both to businesses and consumers from a single platform.
• It allows merchants to integrate ERP, progressive web application studio, inventory management, shipping, order management, customer service, business intelligence, and the list goes on.
• The Magento platform is open and customizable. You can deploy cloud, scale-up the platform’s performance, integrate APIs, and scale up the platform’s performance.

2. SEO

On average, the Magento platform boasts an SEO score between 90 to 95 which is brilliant from the SEO point of view. After Shopify and WooCommerce platforms, Magento SEO score is the second-highest one. The key reason which Magento platform SEO score is ridiculously high is, it is extremely SEO optimized in advance.

Moreover, Magento offers a myriad of SEO settings like meta tags optimization, image optimization, edit robots.txt file, canonical tags for products, etc.

3. User-Friendliness

Earlier versions of Magento like Magento 1.X and 2.2.X were not as user-friendly as Shopify is. However, the pristine version of the Magento platform that is Magento 2.4 is way more user-friendly and easy to comprehend. Magento is seamless to use for those individuals who have significant technical knowledge. If you want to get conversant with the Magento platform, unlike Shopify, you need to devote a good chunk of your time.

4. Pricing and Additional Costs

If we talk about the pricing of the Magento platform, there are two options for merchants. As we know there are two editions of Magento: community edition and Enterprise edition. The community edition or better say open-source edition of Magento is free to download and use. However, the attributes in the open-source editions are quite fettered. This edition is an ideal choice for small-scale businesses.

Another edition is the enterprise edition which is an exemplary option for large-sized businesses. The pricing of the community edition depends upon the size of your business. Apart from the platform costing, there are hosting charges and plugin charges that you will integrate later to amplify your e-commerce platform performance. Overall, the cost of running an e-commerce platform on the Magento instance is budget-friendly.

5. Customer Service and Support

The degree of customer support varies from Magento’s open-source edition to the Magento commerce edition.

As the Magento community edition is free to download and use, its customer support is quite fettered and low. Magento community edition users don’t get full-fledged official support. However, they can find relevant information on the developer’s forum.

But, if you are using enterprise addition, you will receive par excellent customer support and services from Magento technical support.

Pro Tip: If you are using Magento open-source edition, you should have a competent developer to take care of your platform’s security and maintenance because no external support will give by Magento for the community edition.

6. Security and Performance

The latest Magento 2.4 version has commendable security and efficacious performance rendering ability. In the new Magento 2.4 version, a significant number of security changes and up-gradation have been made to make the security unassailable and impeccable.

Magento 2.4 New Security Features

• Improvement in password encryption
• Enhancement in cross-site scripting
• Improvement in library support
• Checkout Recaptcha

The newly released Magento 2.4 version boasts top of the line performance. A gargantuan number of enhancements have been made to ensure deriving maximum efficiency and stability from the platform.

Magento 2.4 Performance Features

• Better retention of shipping and billing data
• Improved address system
• Excellent Page Load optimization

In a nutshell, you don’t have to worry a bit about the security and performance aspects if you are choosing the latest instance of Magento for running your e-commerce store.

7. User Ratings and Reviews

As you can see in the picture, customers have given incredible ratings to Magento products on renowned platforms like Merchant Maverick and Apptha. The ratings and reviews clearly describe the utmost customer satisfaction. Hence, we can say that Magento products are worth-considering for running small and large scale e-commerce businesses.

8. Themes and Designs

Magento marketplace offers a colossal selection of riveting, highly responsive, and user-friendly themes that are way too exemplary to put on your website. All the themes listed in the Magento marketplace are customizable, affordable, and highly responsive. Apart from the Magento marketplace, there are other sources like ThemeForest from where you can purchase the coveted Magento theme at a reasonable price.

9. Pros and Cons

Pros

• Free to download (open source)
• Impeccable Security
• Millions of active users which ensure credibility
• Highly robust, stable, and customizable platform
• Highly Scalable

Cons

• Needed strong technical knowledge to operate the platform
• Limited customer support in the community edition
• Steep learning curve

#WooCommerce

Presumably, WooCommerce is the most utilized and most efficient ecommerce platform in the world. Not many individuals know that WooCommerce is neither a complete content management system nor a complete framework. In actuality, it is a plugin powered and developed by WordPress and free to use. WooCommerce is a very convenient, affordable, and low-key option for those merchants who don’t want to spend a fortune in developing a full-fledged e-commerce platform. One of the key reasons why WooCommerce is massively popular among merchants across the world is its utter simplicity. Any layman can build a website on WooCommerce from scratch and develop an alluring ecommerce store. According to the 2018 survey conducted by a leading consulting agency, WooCommerce covers 30% of the overall ecommerce market share which is a staggering number.

1. Platform Functionalities

• WooCommerce has more than 1000 free plugins and 300 extensions that are sufficient enough to run a successful ecommerce business on WooCommerce without much of a hitch.
• When it comes to cost and pricing, WooCommerce is absolutely free. However, you have to pay for hosting and an SSL certificate which is a bit exorbitant.
• WooCommerce allows you to do listing management, order management, reporting and analytics, shipping courier integration, marketplace integration, and the list goes on.
• Other striking features of WooCommerce are coupon system, tax control, delivery settings, payment gateway, and more than 350 extensions and templates.

2. SEO

After the Shopify platform, WooCommerce has the highest SEO score. Thanks to the wide range of plugins and customizations, WooCommerce is SEO-friendly to a great extent.

As WooCommerce is completely built on the WordPress platform, it offers immeasurable SEO potential. The SEO score of WooCommerce is monstrous 97%.

3. User-Friendliness

When it comes to user-friendliness, WooCommerce is second to none. It boasts a par-excellent level of user-friendliness as it is a plugin, not a complete framework. The real challenge in the WooCommerce platform is configuring its store settings and that is quite a strenuous task.

If we talk about the ease of use, WooCommerce is way easier to use than Magento and Shopify platforms. WooCommerce has quite a seamless and powerful interface that renders users visually breathtaking user-experience.

4. Pricing & Additional Costs

From the above comprehensive cost-structure of WooCommerce platform hosting, you can find out which plan of WooCommerce hosting is exemplary for you. But, is that it? NO! You totally forget about the WooCommerce plugin and SSL certificate charges. For those who don’t know, the official price of the WooCommerce extension is 29$.

5. Customer Service and Support

Like the Magento community edition, there is quite limited support for the WooCommerce ecommerce platform. All merchants and developers get access to the source code, and from there, they can strive issues and raise a concern to WooCommerce support.

Don’t worry, WooCommerce also allows merchants to “submit a support ticket” to get WooCommerce official support for critical issues.

6. Security and Performance

No merchant would like to compromise a bit when it comes to the security of their ecommerce platform.WooCommerce platform offers commendable security features to protect merchants’ data and other crucial information. However, sometimes, you can witness severe vulnerabilities and human errors which can be easily rectified if given proper during the initial stage of problems.

7. Themes and Designs

WooCommerce definitely has upper hands over Magento and Shopify when it comes to responsive and captivating themes and designs. By using merely, a plugin, you can set your coveted themes on the WooCommerce shop in no time. Moreover, you can also utilize any WordPress theme with the right plugin.

WooCommerce offers a colossal selection of themes and beautiful templates that are easy to implement in your store. If you don’t want to purchase a theme, not an issue. You can also utilize the WooCommerce own default theme named Storefront which is quite efficient and eyeballs grabbing like any other theme.

8. User Ratings & Reviews

It is quite clear from the images that a great chunk of the users has given excellent reviews to WooCommerce and its services. Highly recommended!

9. Pros and Cons

Pros

• Easy to install
• Easy to customize
• A great number of plugins to configure the store accordingly
• Compatible with most of the versions of WordPress
• Plugins for advanced security

Cons

• Some prominent extensions are not free in WooCommerce
• The website owner has to take care of store maintenance or else needs to pay the developer for that.
• Difficult to fulfill ecommerce conversion funnel
• You have to update WordPress as well along with plugins

#Shopify

Shopify is one of the leading ecommerce companies in the world. By many, Shopify is acknowledged as the best platform for running the ecommerce business and retail point-of-sale system. Currently, Shopify ecommerce platform services are utilized by more than 1,000,000 business owners worldwide and the numbers are rising at a staggering rate. Shopify renders you full control over all your website coding (HTML and CSS). Moreover, Shopify is heavily preferred by business owners because of its unique and efficacious functionalities. One of the striking features of Shopify is it has recently integrated with Amazon which allows merchants to sell products on Amazon through Shopify Admin Panel.

1. Platform Functionalities

• Shopify auto-calculate shipping prices for each customer
• You can integrate Shopify with social media platform like Facebook to set up an entire shop on your Facebook page
• If you are sick and tired of inventory management, no need to stress out. Shopify allows you to do drop-shipping and run your online store without taking the load of managing the entire inventory.
• To help you get the most out of your online store, Shopify promotes selected expert patterns in marketing, design, programming, so that you can rope in the right expert according to your conscience and amp up your Shopify store performance.

2. SEO

When we talk about the best SE0 score of prominent ecommerce platforms, Shopify is second to none. Shopify has an outstanding SEO score of 98-100 that is way above all the prevailing ecommerce platforms.

Moreover, the Shopify platform encloses all the SEO features like the inclusion of Title tags, meta tags, ALT tags, Page URLs optimization, image optimization, and the list go on.

3. User-Friendliness

By leaps and bounds, Shopify is the most user-friendly ecommerce platform among all. Shopify has the most seamless user-experience, drag and drop options, easy to edit theme that allows merchants to create par-excellent user-experience for their customers.

Shopify has an engulfing and easy to navigate admin panel for merchants. For the users, the shopping experience is as good as any goliath ecommerce platform.

4. Shopify Pricing and Cost

Shopify offers 14 days of free trial for merchants to get conversant with the Shopify platform before using it in a full-fledged manner. The best thing about the free trial period is you don’t have to feed any payment information to utilize the free version.

The basic plan of Shopify ecommerce begins with 29$ and it goes up to 299$ for the advance version. Considering the attributes in Shopify’s different pricing plans, the amount is worth investing in setting up a Shopify ecommerce store.

5. Customer Service and Support

Here is another pointer in which Shopify has a massive upper hand among all its competitors. Shopify provides 24/7 support to its customers, and they can connect with the Shopify support team via phone, email, chat, or social media channels.

In addition to that, Shopify renders valuable advice to its merchants on a timely basis regarding the platform maintenance and guidelines to ensure your ecommerce store remains free from glitches.

6. Security and Performance

Shopify is as safe as any top-notch ecommerce platform. Not only that, according to the recent research conducted by a leading consulting agency, Shopify is considered to be the most secure ecommerce platform by most of the merchants.

At various prominent platforms, most of the merchants have given no less than 5 stars to Shopify security and performance.

7. Themes and Designs

Shopify has a fabled theme store from where you can purchase a highly responsive, SEO-friendly, and enriching user-experience theme for your store out of 100 ‘s of themes. Shopify offers approximately 10 free website templates. The price of paid themes in the Shopify theme store starts at $140.

8. User Ratings and Reviews

In the above-mentioned image, you can clearly see the average ratings and reviews given by customers to Shopify ecommerce services. This clearly states that customers are more than happy when using the Shopify ecommerce platform for running their online business. In a nutshell, Shopify is a highly recommended platform for running an ecommerce business without much of a hitch.

9. Pros and Cons

Pros

• Shopify provides in-built hosting services.
• Most SEO-friendly E-commerce platform.
• Shopify offers 14 days trial services. No other platform offers that.
• Themes and plugins can augment your store functionalities.
• 24/7 support from Shopify Community.

Cons

• Quite exorbitant as compared to other ecommerce platforms.
• Hosting service is also costly in Shopify.
• Shopify has the highest as compared to other platforms.
• Themes and plugins are limited in number.
• Most of the themes and plugins are quite hefty in price.

Also Read: Magento Commerce vs Shopify Plus Comparison: Which is Better for eCommerce Business

#Opencart

If you want to run a small-scale or mid-size business, none of the platforms can cater to your online business needs as much as Opencart. It is a free and open-source ecommerce platform built on a PHP framework that gives merchants an added advantage. Opencart offers the highest number of customization options as compared to other ecommerce platforms to scale up your business. The basic installation of the Opencart store doesn’t involve any add-ons. However, to amplify your business growth, you need to purchase the paid version of Opencart that encloses numerous add-ons and attributes. Not many merchants know that Opencart 2.0 allows merchants to access the admin panel through admin. Approximately, 1 million websites are using Opencart ecommerce functionalities to run their online business in a full-fledged manner.

1. Platform Functionalities

• Opencart offers more than 8 shipping methods to merchants
• There are more than 20 payment gateways you can integrate with your Opencart ecommerce platform. This is the highest number of payment gateways integration offered by any ecommerce platform.
• The SEO optimization level of Opencart is quite moderate. However, you can take Opencart SEO optimization notches higher by adding the right theme and plugins.
• You can add an unlimited number of products in an Opencart ecommerce store.

2. SEO

Though the SEO score of Opencart is significantly low as compared to other ecommerce platforms, the SEO score of the Opencart SEO score can be optimized by making pivotal adjustments in the title, meta description, keywords, and alt tags in images.

You need a moderate level of technical knowledge to perform SEO optimization in an Opencart ecommerce store.

3. User-Friendliness

When it comes to user-friendliness, Opencart ranks way higher than most of the ecommerce platforms. The interface and user-experience of the Opencart platform are highly engulfing and responsive. The user-friendliness is more than the Magento platform but a bit less than the WooCommerce platform.

Even if you don’t have a smidgen of knowledge of coding, you can still make significant changes in Opencart to configure your store as per your preferences.

4. Opencart Pricing and Cost

Though it is clearly mentioned on the home page of the Opencart website that it is a free and open-source platform, it doesn’t mean every functionality is free to use.

To run the store in a full-fledged manner, you need to spend a significant chunk of money on buying the hosting domain name, hosting, SSL certificate, plugins, and responsive themes.

5. Customer Service and Support

Image Credit – Opencart

To stand apart from the competitors, Opencart renders top of the line and two types of support: community support and dedicated support. If you are using the free and open-source platform, you can get the support for free. However, when using the advanced version, you have to pay for dedicated support to rectify your technical issues. Opencart doesn’t offer24/7 support to its customers.

6. Security and Performance

For merchants, the security of their ecommerce store is the foremost concern. A single glitch in the overall security can debilitate the website performance in no time. Overall, the security of the Opencart platform is quite satisfactory. However, the major concern arises when you use the Opencart extensions. Most of the Opencart extensions are developed by third-party CMS and have not been much scrutinized by the Opencart technical team. It ultimately puts the question make on Opencart extensions credibility.

The performance of the Opencart ecommerce platform is quite similar to other ecommerce giants.

7. Themes & Templates

Opencart offers a towering number of themes and templates as per your business domain. From clothes and apparel to food and beverages, home accessories, tech, and gadgets, you can find a huge number of professional themes at a nominal price on the Opencart theme store.

Both free and paid themes are available that are highly responsive, riveting in appearance, and SEO friendly. You should have a basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, and Javascript to run the store and implement the themes and extensions properly. In addition to that, you can find an astonishing selection of themes and extensions for Opencart on third-party sources.

8. User Ratings and Reviews

9.Pros and Cons

Pros

• Community support is formidable though not available 24/7.
• A great number of themes, plugins, and extensions.
• Admin panel is easy to navigate for merchants
• High efficiency and free to download.

Cons

• Use of CSS and Javascripts can perplex non-programmer merchants.
• Functionalities are moderate.
• Less Credibility of third-party paid plugins.
• Encounter of too many errors while updating.

Based on the above stated meticulous analysis, you can easily figure out which platform is exemplary to run your ecommerce business. So, what are you waiting for? Give your business stellar growth by choosing the best ecommerce platform for 2021.

If you already have an online store and you are struggling to scale then you can learn about ecommerce replatforming as well.

Conclusion

In the end we must say the four platforms Magento vs Shopify vs OpenCart vs WooCommerce have lots of similarity and dissimilar function and features making them best in different areas. Moreover, the selection of the platform for your business can be done on the basis of the requirements of your project. Thus, do not rush; test the platform if possible, and then make a carefully planned and weighed decision. 

In case you are having any issues selecting one from these, we at Emizentech, as an e-commerce website development company, have qualified developers and consultants who can help you in choosing one. We also provide multiple integration and store setup services you can have a look at or can get the information by contacting us today.