The Battle of Ecommerce Platforms, Part 2: Magento vs WooCommerce

Whether it's open-source or commercial, by the time an ecommerce framework has matured into an attractive solution, the market forces that made it a worthwhile prospect are likely to have shifted a little—or even beyond recognition.

For this reason, most of the market-leading PHP-based ecommerce systems have had to adapt to later trends that weren't necessarily anticipated when those systems were conceived. These influences still show, to an extent, in their current architectures.

Magento, for instance, emerged from the golden age of eBay and the early ascendance of Amazon as an online shopping portal. If you strip away the later modules and accoutrements that update it to the current age of content-driven sales funnels, it's still basically a DIY kit for a straightforward 2007-style web shop, outputting relatively inflexible product and category tables by default.

With tight integration into an established content management system, Drupal Commerce seems to have the edge on Magento. After all, it's a later product that issues from the early gold rush of CMS-driven content marketing, from the late 2000s on.

Nonetheless, since it centers on a developer-focused CMS that offers relatively little out-of-the-box functionality, Drupal Commerce arguably also has one foot in the past. It harkens back to the era before user-friendly CMSs such as WordPress and Joomla made custom CMS builds based on the likes of Drupal and Laravel a 'luxury' solution rather than a default position.

Magento, first conceived and released by US company Varien between 2007-8, achieved early recognition as a powerful standalone ecommerce solution as well as a third-party inventory and shopping cart for existing sites. It was purchased by online retail goliath eBay in 2011 and later by graphics giant Adobe, who have since folded Magento into its proprietary cloud-based ecommerce infrastructure.

Due to the platform’s intimate association with eBay, PayPal gateway integration is strongly featured in Magento. In 2018, Magento introduced Magento Payments, an integrated solution that incorporates PayPal, Braintree Checkout, Payments, and Signifyd fraud protection into Magento Commerce environments—an initiative intended to help conversion and fight shopping cart abandonment.

PayPal, Braintree, and Authorize.Net are supported by default, but there is also provision for enabling custom payment providers.

WooCommerce emerged out of the WordPress themes supplier WooThemes. WooCommerce is actually a fork, proposed in 2011, of existing open-source ecommerce solution JigoShop. The core developers hired to realize the project had previously worked on ecommerce approaches based around Magento and WordPress.

In keeping with its origins, WooCommerce offers the free and customizable Storefront theme, which has its own subculture of free and commercial extensions and child themes.

In 2015, WooCommerce was acquired by San Francisco-based Automattic, one of the principal contributors to the WordPress open-source repository, as well as the proprietor of Wordpress.com and Gravatar.

WooCommerce lists native integration and extensions for 75 payment gateways, including Stripe, Square, PayPal, Amazon Pay, PayFast, Authorize.net, First Data, eWay and Sage Pay. Custom gateways are supported via plugin development.

Since Magento is intended as a starting point for code-specific custom ecommerce frameworks, it offers only basic support around issues with core code, managed via support tickets. Any issues beyond the abilities of your project's own development team are deferred to certified specialists.

In addition to the ticketing system and FAQs on the support domain, Magento has a thriving Stack Exchange presence, and, at the time of writing, 37,513 questions posed on Stack Overflow.

Subscribers to more expensive cloud-hosted Magento domains receive additional 24/7 support resources. However, enquiries around build-specific issues are likely to lead to developer fees.

The average cost of employing a Magento developer is $79,371 per annum, according to Glass Door. Anecdotal evidence suggests a range of possible hourly rates as disparate as $35-200, although much lower rates can be found in gig work forums, particularly when outsourcing to India and other economies that contrast sharply with the west. One might try out other platforms like Magento if the developer and other related costs prove to be too expensive.

Due to the open-source nature of the core product, WooCommerce offers only a limited tier of text-based support, initially deferring enquiries to the online help documentation. It is possible to chat live with a technical support representative about generalized enquiries or problems relating to core code or relationships between native modules and extensions. Third-party theme and extension vendors or any core commercial add-ons will usually provide further layers of support for their own products.

At Stack Overflow, there are currently 20,664 questions specifically dedicated to WooCommerce. However, the additional 159,394 questions around WordPress are likely to have a bearing on many WooCommerce issues.

The ubiquity of WordPress around the internet has made this CMS a popular specialization for developers. Many rival talent pools are catering to captive, non-migrated legacy builds that have too much technical debt to easily switch to WordPress—a factor which, in addition to greater scarcity, tends to raise prices.

Glassdoor currently estimates the average WordPress developer salary at $61,083 per annum—nearly $20K lower than a Magento developer. However, unlike equivalent Magento candidates, not all WordPress coders are ecommerce developers; this skillset can fetch an additional premium.

CodeMentor estimates the average hourly rate for a WordPress developer at $61-80. As with Magento, casual international gig marts tend to offer lower rates.

Magento is available in a free edition entitled Magento Open Source, or MOS (formerly known as Magento Community Edition). However, MOS has more viability as an upstream repository feeding the brand's commercialized versions than as a practical prospect for a license-free ecommerce implementation.

A customized Magento build is demanding in terms of development resources, requiring advanced PHP skills. Launching a functional and scalable Magento sales portal will require a skilled team, the expense of which is likely to claw back any savings that might be achieved by using only the 'base' version of the project.

Magento Commerce offers a host of more professional development resources, including:

These and other related benefits offer genuine value in an ecommerce proposition, and represent a notable challenge to replicate or imitate in the free version. To compare, a default WooCommerce installation features very little of this functionality, which will have to be enabled via plugins or additional services.

The highest level of commitment to Magento is found in the Adobe Commerce Cloud subscription, formerly known as Magento Commerce Cloud and Enterprise Cloud Edition. This adds New Relic Application Performance Monitoring, a native implementation of the Fastly Content Delivery Network (with DDOS protection), the Fastly Web Application Firewall, and secure cloud hosting on Adobe's network.

Pricing is bespoke, with custom quotes available. Anecdotal evidence suggests that $2,000 per month is the entry level for Magento Commerce—a minimum that's said to rise steeply with cloud-hosted tiers.

A fully cloud-based implementation, including outsourcing or in-house development, extension licensing, support, and sundry other expenses could run anywhere from $30,000 to $150,000 per year, depending on needed functionality and specs.

Self-hosting a Magento site entails a decently specified server. More than 25GB of SSD storage is recommended for sites with more than 4,000 items in inventory. The requisite 2GB server RAM is unlikely to yield the best performance or to scale well as demand and content grows. Though CDN deployment can help with responsiveness, many higher-volume sellers might be advised to seek out re-sellers that specialize in Magento-optimized hosting packages.

WooCommerce is a completely free WordPress plugin. Although development costs, extension licensing, hosting and several other factors can easily propel it into a similar band of costs to Magento, there is no official 'professional' tier available, outside of third-party support subscriptions.

It is not possible or fair to compare the out-of-the-box functionality that WooCommerce offers to a default Magento build, since the two frameworks do not operate in quite the same way. Magento is a dedicated solution that integrates multiple useful ecommerce features, and WooCommerce is a basic ecommerce framework that can be made equally (or more) functional via additional plugins.

The advantage of Magento's 'baked-in' functionality is that an update to any individual component will only be released after extensive testing for compatibility with other core components. In the case of WooCommerce (as with any WordPress build), stringing together a feature set via disparate plugins and extensions is more likely to cause compatibility issues from time to time when updates are applied.

Nonetheless, this is tempered by the fact that most Magento installs also make use of non-core third-party plugins or code additions that are subject to the same issues, and that both platforms will in any case require ongoing development resources.

The server requirements for a self-hosted WooCommerce install are additional to those of a basic WordPress setup. These are very basic on paper, with WooCommerce only dictating that the WordPress memory limit be no lower than 128MB. In practice, even a standard site of moderate complexity and traffic is likely to need a better-specced dedicated hosting. Adding considerable inventory loads under WooCommerce will require stress-testing to understand optimal minimum capacity specifications for your server.

WordPress provides recommendations for some of the many sites that offer WooCommerce-optimized hosting:

The more expensive of these hosts offer similarly robust enterprise-level features to Adobe's Magento cloud deals, and similar levels of long-term expenditure.

Debating the merits of frameworks predicated on content/ecommerce integrations might be analogous to pondering whether VHS or Betamax is better in the age of video streaming. Both Magento and WooCommerce are in the process of separating the hard-coded bond between inventory delivery and content streams, and both share a vision of a 'decoupled' future where API-driven sales listing systems become truly platform-agnostic.

We've already seen how the leading ecommerce systems have had to rethink their original missions to some extent in the light of later market developments. Right now it seems that headless is the trend to keep up with.

Therefore, one critical consideration in future-proofing an expensive enterprise ecommerce development is ensuring that you're optimistic about the tools currently provided for headless ecommerce and the framework's roadmap in this respect.

Adobe's considerable resources promise great flexibility and functionality via the PWA Studio and Magento's plans for headless integration of ecommerce content. On the other hand, the adoption of rentier models (SaaS) and the top-tier pricing policies that Adobe has pursued over the last ten years means that this functionality will likely come with a consistently rising cost that the end user cannot control.

WordPress and WooCommerce have made a bold and convincing early entry into API-driven headless ecommerce streaming. If WooCommerce cannot throw quite as much money directly at this challenge as Adobe, it can summon up a far wider and deeper pool of first-class global development talent—much of it well-funded by large corporate concerns that now have an implacable stake in WordPress-based systems.

This early lead, combined with an overwhelming market share for WordPress and an able suite of management tools, currently makes a WordPress/WooCommerce implementation a favorable long-term prospect.