Kick starting your eсommerce business can be challenging without the right facilities and infrastructures. At this present time, getting started on your ecommerce business is quite straightforward as there are several ecommerce platforms to choose from.
Magento is one of the best ecommerce building platforms. The store building platform is popular and it boasts over 260,000 online store users around the world.
However, being an open-source ecommerce platform, Magento offers complete customizability and hassle-free scalability but it is quite complex due to its coding requirements.
Hence, Magento might not be the best option for small businesses and beginners.
Here is a compilation of the best Magento alternatives for your business.
Let’s dive in!
Mangento is regarded as the most popular open-source ecommerce platform. Its extreme popularity is because it offers users both website building, SaaS (Software as a Service), and open-source platform options.
However, it requires huge development costs coupled with poor website performance and complex customizations.
There are other competent online store building platforms which are embedded with easy to use features and customizations.
Business owners have been considering the following factors when choosing their Magento alternatives.
Another important factor to consider when searching for the best Magento alternative for your business is the features it provides.
Your preferred website builder should offer plugins and extensions that can help you discover your website’s capabilities and widen its functionality for greater value.
There are lots of extensions and plugins available on the Magento system for you to customize your website. These assets are very useful but due to the large volume of extensions and plugins available they tend to slow down your website system.
So, it’s better to avoid such situations by choosing a Magento alternative that is easy to maintain.
Although open-source platforms like Magento offer excellent customizability at surprisingly low costs, you’ll end up spending more on website designs and improvements.
However, closed-source (proprietary) platforms might seem expensive at first. It is actually pocket-friendly in the long-run.
Magento’s customizations and features require coding know-how. If you know how to code or can hire website developers to help set up your site you’re good to go.
There are other options that offer easy to use customizations and you might not need to hire professional website builders to set your site up for you.
When building your website, the very first step is deciding where to host it. If you’re a big brand and have a sophisticated infrastructure you can consider self-hosting your website.
Conversely, most businesses don’t have heavy infrastructures making it unwise to self-host their websites. They can leverage SaaS platforms like Magento for their website hosting.
If you’ve decided to move on from Magento, it’s important to do a proper check to determine the best alternative for your business.
If what your b2b startup requires is a platform that enables you to design your ecommerce website from scratch and provides an excellent management of product sales and inventory, then Shopify is the perfect fit for your business.
Shopify is regarded as the most popular ecommerce platform and this is mainly because it provides incredible scalability.
Wix, just like WooCommerce, is an eсommerce website builder. Wix is very easy to use as it is simply a drag-and-drop online store builder.
Wix is ideal for small businesses seeking to create websites in diverse niches. Wix also helps to incorporate essential eсommerce features into already existing wordpress sites.
If you need a platform that can help build your ecommerce website and boost your sales, then look no further. Volusion is a dedicated online business building platform that focuses on generating sales for businesses.
What makes Volusion even better is the fact that it is easy to use. It has lots of custom teams you can select to intricately design your website, keeping visitors engaged.
This is the perfect platform for stores looking to take their business to new heights. BigCommerce has a reputation for being a platform with lots of exceptional built-in-tools and data reporting features.
Bigcommerce comes with an extensive set of how-tos and guidelines for easy web page set up.
Squarespace is one of the best Magento alternatives for building fancy ecommerce websites. It is perfect for people without any programming or design knowledge looking to create attractive websites.
Squarespace has lots of great-looking and ready-to-use templates. It also helps in ensuring page titles, URLs, and description titles are all SEO-optimized.
The best open-source Magento alternative that helps businesses build their website is Virto Commerce. Being open-source, it provides agile features that enable stores to satisfy their customers.
Virto Commerce allows users to launch their site via Microsoft Cloud and also helps them scale up their site with its multichannel solutions.
3dcart is a widely used Magento alternative perfect for setting up a hosted online store. It is highly customizable and gives users huge flexibility to set up eCommerce websites.
3dcart enables smaller brands to use great reporting tools with exciting built-in features such as gift certificates, live chat plugins and bundling options.
WooCommerce is a unique Magento alternative. It is completely different from other alternatives as it is basically a wordpress plugin.
WooCommerce is prominent for its ability to convert a wordpress website into a super functioning online store.
Shopify is a dedicated eсommerce platform for businesses and it supports up to 1,000,000 merchants around the world.
Shopify is incredibly scalable and comes with lots of built-in tools, excellent features, and intricately designed templates.
It has a superb customer support base that guides users through the rigorous process of online store creation.
It offers pocket-friendly plans which are packed with hosting, domain, and security features needed to develop a high-end online store.
Shopify offers varieties of payment plans. The services offered provide different provisions. There’s also a free trail that lasts up to 90 days.
Shopify offers a lot of advanced tools and it is ideal for companies selling online looking to scale up their business. With Shopify’s intuitive design tools, businesses can upgrade their websites, and also add integrations and plugins from third parties.
Volusion has been around since the late 90s. It is a hosted shopping cart service supporting over 180,000 businesses worldwide.
As a dedicated ecommerce platform, Volusion focuses on providing online store owners with website building, SEO, selling, hosting, and marketing tools.
Volusion offers great expandability options with plug-ins and extensions coupled with a variety of design templates and customizable themes to build an attractive online store.
It offers great customer support and gives clients the best experience with its customer order management options. It provides secure checkouts with SSL certifications, customer accounts, tax rates calculator, and SEO tools.
Volusion offers one of the cheapest payment plans. It provides three standard pricing plans, a prime custom pricing plan, and a 14-day free trial.
Volusion is perfect for businesses seeking website builders that provide beautiful templates and wonderful user experience. It comes with easy to set up customer accounts and provides users with advanced features to upgrade and scale their businesses.
Known for its extraordinary and advanced features, Bigcommerce is one of the most popular ecommerce platforms. It is a hosted shopping cart platform that has generated over $25 Billion in sales for businesses worldwide.
Bigcommerce is a closed-source solution that offers a high security and hassle-free setup coupled with advanced SEO tools and multi-channel integrations.
It offers a variety of customizable templates which gives online stores an appealing look. Bigcommerce is perfect for brands looking to take their business to new heights as it provides multiple site integrations with third parties, a super responsive web hosting, excellent checkout system, and Google shopping integrations.
Bigcommerce pricing plans are very similar to Shopify’s plans. It provides three different plans for businesses and an enterprise plan for larger brands. The platform provides a 15-day free trial.
Bigcommerce is an ideal choice for businesses seeking to scale up and skyrocket their sales. It comes with marketing and SEO tools which helps in promoting goods and services. It also supports multi-channel integrations and requires no transaction fees.
Virto Commerce is a dedicated ecommerce platform which provides open-source solutions that enable quick website setup.
It adopts the .NET 4.6 framework and uses excellent web technologies like Liquid and AngularJS, making it a perfect choice for small online store owners, medium store brands, and enterprise level businesses.
Virto Commerce enables users to launch their sites on Microsoft cloud and provides multi-channel integrations for brands to maximize their marketing. It makes websites appealing with the customizable themes and extensions it provides.
The company is well known for its creative problem-solving approaches, flexible pricing models, e-commerce integrations and interchanges as well as great partner selection and website delivery.
You can estimate your pricing plan via the link.
Virto Commerce is most suited for medium and large B2B businesses with complex business scenarios.
WordPress is one of the largest website builders. When paired with WooCommerce, it becomes one of the major Magento alternatives in the field of eCommerce.
If you know how to code, you can turn your shop into a powerful selling platform that can be hosted anywhere. You can as well hire wordpress web developers to set up your store.
If you are a fan of installing a lot of plugins to improve your wordpress websites’ work, this platform is made just for you. The plugins extend your options regarding functionality and make the process of tax reporting smoother and at the same time increase conversion rates through unique design features.
WooCommerce is simply an open-source Wordpress plugin solution for website development. Hence, it is free and doesn’t have any standard pricing plan. However, Wordpress requires a hosting plan which ranges from $35 - $50 annually.
If you’re seeking a platform for selling through your wordpress site or blog, WooCommerce is the ideal eсommerce solution for you. It has a variety of payment processing options and is technically free to use.
Squarespace is a multiple tool in the eсommerce field and an important alternative to Magento. It is an excellent online store building platform and is perfect for magazine subscription websites and restaurant booking systems.
Squarespace is highly recommended for store owners who know nothing about programming or design but still want to have a fancy website. It is easy to set up and manage, but compared to other platforms it lacks some essential features that Shopify or BigCommerce possess.
Squarespace has an appealing product presentation page and an equally attractive home page.
With Squarespace, get into SEO by receiving custom page titles, URLs, description titles, and redirects in addition to blogging capabilities that allow you to host your podcast, just like using WordPress.
Squarespace provides four different pricing plans for clients of different levels. The plans come with a free custom domain and include a 14-day free trial.
Do you own a magazine subscription website, a restaurant booking system, or an online selling blog, and you want an eCommerce platform which can help you market your products and services? Squarespace is the perfect online store building platform for your business. It provides an array of services which helps boost your sales and scale up your business.
Just like WordPress, Wix is an incredible website builder that is free and easy to use. Now, Wix has become one of the most widely used eсommerce platforms, becoming a great alternative to Magento in the field.
It is especially useful for small businesses and for those who want to create websites in niches such as design, photography, restaurant business and music due to the abundance of specific tools it provides to boost websites.
Wix poses itself as the most innovative website builder amongst the existing competitors. Easily accessible dashboards and drag & drop tools allow users to quickly send invoices, accept orders, and enable clients to place bookings.
It makes websites attractive and appealing as web developers get to choose from the multiple themes and templates it offers. Wix has recently introduced Artificial Design Intelligence that creates websites based on the user’s preferences.
Wix offers three standard pricing plans and an enterprise plan for larger businesses. All plans come with a free 1 year custom domain, website booster, unlimited bandwidth, and a visitors analytics app.
Wix eсommerce platform is the perfect choice for new startups as it provides a simple set up and offers lots of guidance. Wix is the platform that can help you host an already existing website and enable some essential e-commerce features into it. It is cheap and versatile.
3dcart, besides other Magento competitors, is being widely used, and is ideal for new store owners. It can be a perfect solution, especially if you plan to set up a hosted e-commerce shop.
The platform is highly customizable, giving you the needed flexibility to set up your online store. 3dcart designs are Google certified making it a great choice for tanking websites on search engine result pages (SERPs).
3dcart has been in the field since 1997 and has proven its reliability. Since then, they are up to date with the latest cutting-edge technologies and design trends, always updating their templates and themes.
If you compare Magento and 3dcart, you'll find out that the platform provides excellent reporting tools with amazing built-in features such as, bundling options, live chat plugins, and gift certificates.
3dcart is an appealing Magento alternative in the sense that it doesn’t include any transaction fees, allows you to upload unlimited products and has unlimited bandwidth.
3dcart offers five different pricing plans. All plans come with a 15-day free trial, a fast and secure web hosting, unlimited orders and products, and no transaction fees.
3dcart is best for businesses just starting out and looking to boost their sales. It is the perfect ecommerce platform for ranking websites and scaling up businesses. The platform is easy to use and has lots of built-in features to make online stores appealing.
We’ve explained in detail how Magento alternatives fare against other competitors and how every single one of them can add value to businesses of diverse levels.
Now, here’s a comparison table that shows the differences between these eсommerce platforms.
Price
|
Standout feature
|
Apps and extensions
|
Ease of use
|
|
---|---|---|---|---|
Shopify |
$$ - $$$$ |
Multi-channel sales |
2800 + apps |
4 / 5 |
Wix |
$$ - $$$ |
Product videos |
250 apps ( 50 + ecommerce specific) |
4 / 5 |
BigCommerce |
$$ - $$$$ |
Getting feedback before your store it's live |
600 + apps |
4 / 5 |
WooCommerce |
0 - $$$ |
Flexibility and customization options |
280 + ofiicial extension |
3 / 5 |
Volusion |
$$ - $$$$ |
Dedicated account manager for 24/7 personal suport |
20 + apps |
5 / 5 |
Virto Commerce |
$$$ |
Open source, mutli-channel, composable, cloud-native, headless |
500 + apps |
3 / 5 |
Magento is one of the most widely known and used eсommerce platforms worldwide. It has lots of built-in features and tools which can be used to create responsive online stores. Mangento however is best for those who have knowledge on programming or can afford to hire Magento developers.
Conversely, if you can’t afford the developmental costs offered on the Magento website there are other eсommerce platforms to consider depending on your business needs.
If you’re just starting out you might consider 3dcart, Squarespace, or Wix to get started. And if you’re only looking to scale up your business, Virto Commerce, Shopify, BigCommerce, and others might be the perfect choice for your business.