Opencart vs Prestashop vs Magento
The new open-source free shopping cart software based on PHP/MySQL is as follows: Opencart, Prestashop， Magento。They have already exceeded osCommerce, Zencart, CRE Loaded.If you just want to build a media-sized shopping cart, choosing them is a very good choice. However, these three kinds of shopping cart software have their own advantage and disadvantage. Which to choose? Let’s make a contrast. You can choose according to your requirement. Of course, you can also tell IECSP the detailed requirement, we assist you to determine which shopping cart software to choose.
Function contrast:
| Features | Prestashop | Magento | Opencart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Source | 100% | 100% | 100% |
| Pricing | Free | Free | Free |
| Templatable | Smarty | Smarty | PHP |
| Multi-Language | |||
| Multi-Currency | |||
| Product Reviews | |||
| Product Ratings | |||
| Downloadable | |||
| Related Products | |||
| Product Features | |||
| Newsletters | |||
| Discount Coupon | |||
| SEO URLs | |||
| Backup & Restore | |||
| Printable Invoices | |||
| Sales Reports | |||
| Free Shipping | |||
| Wholesale | |||
| News & Events | |||
| Wish List | |||
| Testimonlals | |||
| Track order | |||
| F.A.Q | |||
| Gift Certificate | |||
| Recently Viewed | |||
| Points | |||
| Bulk Category Add | |||
| Bulk Product Add | |||
| Product Comparison | |||
| Statistics | |||
| Affiliate | |||
| Memberships | |||
| One-page Checkout | |||
| Order Barcode | |||
| Merchandise return (RMAs) | |||
| RSS Feed | |||
| TAG | |||
| Send to friend | |||
| Access Restrictions | |||
| Live Chat Software |
Conclusion: Magento win, Prestashop and Opencart lose.
Code contrast:
Opencart’ code is not only a very excellent but also a high efficient framework, which adopt MVC schema development, and have a clear logic structure, easy to study and modify. Of course, the precondition is that you have to possess a powerful PHP developing ability. Opencart don’t use the Smarty template engine, which is a reason IECSP admire it. This project can not only increase the efficiency, but also decrease the code workload of the programmer.
Based on PHP5, Prestashop adopt smarty template engine. The first MVC schema is not excellent. It will be tough, if you touch the code of prestashop first. The linage of code is much more, for it adopt smarty, increase the workload of extending development.
Magento adopt Zend framework, not smarty template engine. For the programmer who are making extending development, they not only need to master PHP, but also need to handle Zend framework. The efficiency of development will be increased, if you can handle Zend framework. However, adopting Zend framework will definitely decrease the disposal performance of Magento, which is congenital deficiency, but Magento add the Compiler module in order to increase performance, at least 30%.
Conclusion: Opencart win, Prestashop and Magento lose.
Speed contrast:
We deploy the three shopping cart softwares on the same host, and turn on the cache function, Magento turn on Compiler module, the homepage display 20 products. We make the first and second visit to every shopping cart software, then record the visit speed. Through many time testing and average value contrast, we find that the speed of Opencart is the best. The speed of Prestashop and Magento is a little worse. What IECSP need to show is that our test is based on our own host environment, our own simple method, not the general objective evaluation. The possibility of error exist. If you test, the result maybe different from ours.
Conclusion: Opencart win, Prestashop and Magento lose.
Community and support contrast:
Magento developed by a company from US, Prestashop by a group of students from French, Opencart by a programmer from British.
Now, magento Community have 130,000 members, Prestashop have 30000 members, Opencart have only 4000 members.
Conclusion: Matento win, Prestashop follow, Opencart last.
IECSP.COM original article, give a clear indication of the artical coming from http://www.iecsp.com please, if you want to copy.53 Comments
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thanks for this review, I have been used Prestashop since 10 months ago and made some money from this great opensource ecommerce application. But we realize that these three kinds of shopping cart software have their own advantage and disadvantage. Now i’m learning the opencart template system as requested from our client.
Regards
ArdianYS
I can tell you from my experience that Prestashop is much easier to install and to use.
I know that when I tried to install Magento for the first time, I got frustrated after about 15 minutes because it seemed too hard. Usually with new software it never takes me more than 15 minutes to figure out how it works.
In fact I am just now in the middle of converting a Magento site to Prestashop for a client.
Also, many of the Prestashop features and addons you have marked with an X are available now.
I am also an English Moderator on the Prestashop forum, and I see many people that are far less tech savvy than me that manage to install and customize their own shops, and install themes, modules and modification with little or no help.
I have many useful modules for Prestashop on my store (http://www.presto-changeo.com/), like a filter module, a translation module (which I used to translate my site to 15 other languages), and an attribute wizard module that lets you customized your attributes similar to apple’s website.
I have not tested Prestashop on a really large scale (10,000 – 50,000+ products), so I can’t say if Magento works better in those conditions, but for any small / medium shops, I feel the Prestashop is by far the better option.
I have personally experienced Prestashop and Opencart. Prestashop will be very nice, but is still in its early phase and has many bugs to work out. There are several issues to be worked out for U.S. based customers such as shipping features. I have decided to use Opencart because of ease of product import and export, and easier to integrate shipping features.
While I do appreciate your effort into putting together this review, I’ve gotta say that it has some inaccurate information whithin. To be honest I did not have the patience to read it through, but I did notice your “Function contrast” comparsion. That’s actually what I was looking for.
There are some features that even though you said PrestaShop cannot do, I have used them before:
- It doesn’t have “News & Events” and F.A.Q. indeed, but it has CMS, which can be easily used for matter.
- It has for sure: Wish List, Testimonials, Track order, Gift Certificate, Recently Viewed, Points, Bulk Category Add, Bulk Product Add, Affiliate, Merchandise return (RMAs), RSS Feed, TAG, Send to friend.
I haven’t used Opencart at all and I only played a little with Magento, but I’m 100% sure that PrestaShop is a good choice for most uses. It has everything you need and then some. Quite fabulous I’d say.
I hope this helps.
Actually, sometimes after we use certain shopping cart for quite a while the business grows and the needs grow accordingly. That’s why more people switch to magento and prestashop. If you decided to make such move at least use a service like cart2cart to have no problems with data entry errors.
Prestashop is easy to use but its product attributes are limited, Magento full of bloat, making changes is a nightmare.
the architecture of opencart alone compared to magento and prestashop makes it a win for me hands down.
@ Tomer
I find it strange that people are selling modules and themes for free open source software — it rather defeats the purpose of the open source community. All the add-ons and tweaks I’ve created over the years for osCommerce were given for free to the community. If you want to profit from software you wrote, write extensions and add-ons for commercial software like Photoshop, etc.
Look what can you do with OpenCart:
http://style.st/opencart-template-leonardo
Never coming back to Magento again. Way too difficult.
i like magento
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PrestaShop has made inumerous updates and this post is wrong by now!
At the moment I feel PrestaShop is the best. Thanks to PrestaShop Team.
Iì’m not sure Opencart wins on speed. and on what I see Prestashop really supports unlimited categories and products, but…guy…try to put in opencart’s database 1000 categories…you’ll se the real shit of that product…
Sure, Prestashop wins, Magento I don’t know, but Opencart…Sucks…
I have a store running on opencart, installation and setup was very easy, tried magento, was EXTREMELY frustrating but then i came across Prestashop
there’s no turning back for me, its all i need and more, like most have highlighted, they provide most of the features that have been Xed in the diagram above.
I would recommend prestashop anyday
But… OpenCart have Feed and Statistics… :S
Ahh and have tags too lol..
Hey, somethings are missing on Magento:
Track order
F.A.Q
Gift Certificate (com connect or enterprise)
Recently Viewed
Points (com connect or enterprise)
Statistics
Affiliate (connect or enterprise)
One-page Checkout
Send to friend
Access Restrictions (connect or enterprise)
Live Chat Software (connect)
Many of the features marked with “X” are free/commercial modules already made for OpenCart. I’m using OpenCart for an year and I have to say that is a good choice for those who need a simple, yet powerful shopping cart.
Opencart hands down
Cheers!
I have worked with opencart and prestashop. Opencart is a very clean choice and works well. Personally that was the appeal to me. Before, I used Prestashop – loved it also but I liked the opencart look slightly more. I am now contemplating going back to Prestashop because of the more comprehensive support structures and there are more free modules available. With opencart virtually all modules must be bought – kind of defeats going with a free solution…
Magento is a great solution IF you have a GOOD PHP/Zend programmer on call. It’s damn near impossible to learn “from the ground up” – check any Magento forum and you’ll find plenty of people saying it’s just too damn hard. Besides, finding freelance programmers who *really* know what they’re doing with Magento is almost impossible also – it’s too new, and too complicated. There’s a much bigger pool of “generic PHP” or OsCommerce or OpenCart developers out there.
Magento is great if you need multiple storefronts, multiple discount groups/schemes, complex shipping, very-social-media-oriented selling, etc. But – the learning curve, the server load (about 30% slower on our server than OpenCart or hand-hacked PHP scripts, with the same exact data & images), and the sheer overwhelming mass of options and configurations make it prohibitive to anyone but the most serious developer.
Now, OpenCart does use some pretty outdated code, but it’s heck of a lot easier to work with. I’ve given up on Magento after spending almost a year learning it, and I’ve made more progress with OpenCart in 2 months than I did with 12 months of Magento.
If you are a newbie go for opencart its simple and clean made.
Thanks for the review
I never used the other 2 solution before. I started to use Magento (version 1.3.1) a few months before this post was created. I do agree on most of the complains about Magento. It is very difficult to understand if you don’t have Zend Framework background. There are many free extensions and forum supports available for simple modifications. I don’t suggest to use shared hosting package to run production Magento site because it is resource-intensive. However, it is more flexible, scaleable, better integration with Google search engine and larger community support than the other 2.
There are a few mistakes on the comparison above. Magento does come with Recently Viewed, One-Page-Checkout (need to turn on this Configuration page), and Send to friend function in default installation. It comes with user reviews (by product only), which is the same as Testimonlals to certain extend. Magento also comes with some charting on products, customers and orders matrix in the admin dashboard. I am not sure if it is what Statistic refers.
All-in-all, you may not want to use Magento if you must run on shared hosting and you have more than 100 products and 10 categories/subcategories.
It’s wrong presta suport rss, whislist, livechat, Gift Certificate, etc.
@Olivier There are not so much free add-ons for Prestashop imho !! At least not on the Presta -site….
Prestashop is better than magento and opencart together!!
it is not care, but i think ps is more easy to use than magento!
i like opencart , prestashop seams the slowly execution efficiency
I think open cart is better then. But every e commerge script has avantage and disavantage..
Hi,happy to know everybody for the first time! It’s good forum, I had been looking for something like this.
I don’t understand why people find Magento to difficult to install or use. After reading this article I’ve installed both Opencart and Magento. Both took approximately the same time (15 – 30 minutes). Both are pretty straight forward: copy files, change file permissions, create database, run webapp.
I did see Magento was a bit slower on my test setup using virtualbox and assigned 80% of one cpu, But this would run fine on most sharedhosting providers.
Having said this, I going for Opencart… Excellent code, good speed, like the default style.
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Nice comparison.i have used those three engines and i agree with your analysis. Opencart is much faster than magento and prestashop. Magento needs a lot of resources compared to the others but magento is more robust and stable but it’s also very slow…so slow.
opencart has wishlist built in
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I worked on several Magento sites for over 4 months and had nothing but trouble. Things would vanish and I would have to put them in over and over again. The database management was crazy. The file structure and code of this platform is not to be seen, the worst ever. I could go on and on about how pretty Magento is and what it makes you think you can do but forget it. I found opencart and tried it as a test. I had a site up and running, custom edits and all in 1 day with no errors. No bulk product load but I just used php admin to export the db, update it with products and import it. This is a dream come true. I have moved every one of my 48 sites to opencart. I cannot say enough great things about it! Magento can go to hell!!!!!
Interesting!
Your post is pretty useful for the CRE Loaded Development companies. Thanks for taking the time and effort.
Thanks for the compare, but you should consider updating this article. There are a few more features that have been added to OpenCart such as Gift Certs, Affiliates and Wish Lists to name a few.
prestashop agreat!
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Magento makes it too hard to configured so that you will buy the premium installation that costs $12,000. somebody is right you have to hire a programmer just to install it!
Hi there,
You should check again for the list items.
Prestashop wins!!!
Thanks.
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Now all have changed, prestashop is the winner (more stores, user in forum and really speed up the last version)
I think you could make a new comparison , 2009 wise it’s a great overview, but a has changed in the projects,
also i understand you objective, but i think a win/lose scenario is not really a good thermometer for e-commerce software, great article though
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