Searching for the most appropriate platform for your E-commerce requires a detailed market research and comparison of the top offers. Magento vs PrestaShop is the commonly met request as far as these two are worthy competitors. Since these two have a lot in common, we’ll take a look at their similarities first.
Magento and PrestaShop are open-source programs, so that a user can customize any of them in many ways. Basically, they aim to provide any shop owner with dozen of attractive features, easier site management, SEO advantages, accurate analytics, and more. Finally, we can say that both platforms were released to boost E-commerce sales. So, is it better to choose Magento or PrestaShop and in what cases?
Installation Process
PrestaShop is known to be a bit easier and faster to install than Magento. No special skills are needed to run Presta on your own. Actually, you can figure out how to work with Magento as well, but this platform requires higher technical knowledge, especially when talking about improving the Magento site. Most probably, you will have to turn to the expert team. In general, Presta might save a little bit more of your time and costs.
On the whole, any of these two can be quickly installed without any problems with the help of one-click installers like Softaculous or SimpleScripts. But further management will require more time and most probably money, especially in case with Magento. The admin area is less complicated in Presta.
Speed
Unfortunately, Magento is not working as fast as its closer competitors. That is where this platform loses. In addition, Magento needs much higher end infrastructure.
However, you can always speed up your Magento site by, for instance, caching. You don’t necessarily need any advanced technical skills – just try enabling flat categories/products or compilation, merging CSS and JS Files, and picking the most appropriate hosting. When making a choice between Magento vs PrestaShop in terms of speed, mind that PrestaShop works faster than Magento.
Shopping Carts
Magento is an unquestionable leader in terms of online store cart. It guarantees better SEO benefits than the rest of the shopping carts on the market. Targeted promotion and merchandising are included. Customers enjoy the variety of payment methods and shipping/delivery options. Most of the large businesses prefer Magento shopping cart.
Features
Magento is famous for its wide choice of features. Magento is also rather flexible. For instance, any admin is able to change the design, site’s content, and the way it operates at any time. But PrestaShop does not require that much investments to get more features. As for Magento, it does not possess built-in security, full-page caching and gifting options.
The range of PrestaShop plugins and extensions impresses: about 25,000 of them! Magento provides only 1,500 plugins and extensions, but they are all great. But it is still hard to say whether Magento or PrestaShop offers better and more effective features.
System Requirements
If you choose Presta, note that it requires less system requirements than Magento. You will need only PHP 5.2, MySQL 5 and a Linux, UNIX or Windows operation system when speaking about Presta. However, Magento’s system requirements are not that much higher.
Compatibility
Magento is compatible with every single site, while there are some exceptions for PrestaShop. However, Presta lacks mobile optimization: it is not ideally compatible with mobile applications.
Think of your customers and how you plan to reach them. In case your customer base consists of many mobile users, then Magento would fit you better than PrestaShop.
Customization
In this aspect, Presta has some more advantages. Presta can offer more themes to enjoy than Magento. PrestaShop has a free basic set, but additional templates, themes and modules have to be purchase to make it look better. Magento, in its turn, is the excellent solution for those who wish to obtain a full control over the store customization.
Technical Support and Consulting
Users appreciate Magento for its professional, all-time available support. Presta cannot boast that high level of support. Large developers community is also a plus.
The reason might be that Magento is the world’s top popular E-commerce solution. As it is reported, Magento currently powers about 25% of the existing Alexa Top 1M E-commerce sites.
Both solutions possess a tremendous amount of versions, but as for the basic, Presta offers eight official versions.
Size of Business
Are you hesitating whether to choose Magento or PrestaShop based on your shop’s size and goals? Whole Magento fits medium and large online businesses, Presta is recommended for small and medium sized stores. You can expect more from Magento as it can maintain a larger amount of traffic. But if you plan launching a small online business (or already have one), pick PrestaShop or Magento Community Edition to fasten the process.
SEO
Magento is much more powerful in terms of SEO when compared to PrestaShop. It means that your site gets more chances to be easily found by the customers. Frankly, you can even use it as a catalog-management tool.
Fees
PrestaShop is a completely free application which can be downloaded and used immediately without spending a cent. Installing this one on the web hosting account makes it possible to benefit from your online presence. The prices for PrestaShop additional sets of themes are also cheaper. In addition, PrestaShop offers a plenty of built-in attributes of its primary software for free.
Magento, has two editions as for today: Magento Community Edition absolutely free of charge and Magento Enterprise Edition for professionals. The second one is rather powerful; it was created for large enterprises, so it makes no wonder the initial price is $15,550 and more per year (the license is included).
Target Audience
Thanks to differences in its editions, Magento may cover the needs of the developers and online store owners who wish to grow further, as well as assist huge enterprises that strive for exclusive technical support and outstanding performance. At the same time, PrestaShop lacks some features to satisfy the needs of those who look for the gold support. It works better for the small-scale enterprises.
To sum up, start-ups should start over with PrestaShop or Magento Community. But all those serious huge corporations are better to run Magento Enterprise in order to impress their clients and partners more. Besides, it is crucial to be mobile-friendly in term s of rapid growth of mobile devices popularity. Despite these differences, it is complicated to pick only one winner in Magento vs PrestaShop debate. Both shopping carts are extremely efficient, flexible, reliable, and scalable.
If you have any questions about anything I’ve mentioned in this blog post or anything else related to Magento, please feel free to drop me a message via this form.
Thank you Yemchuk!!