Magento vs Prestashop is both great eCommerce solutions. Generally, Prestashop is easier to use and provides more pre-made themes. Also, it is suitable for small to medium web stores. On the other hand, Magento performs better when it offers massive-scale stores with a large number of users at a time. In this post today, Magesolution will provide you with a comprehensive and detailed comparison between PrestaShop vs Magento and advice on what eCommerce platforms are the best suited for your business.
Overview of Magento vs Prestashop
Magento
Magento is also an open-source platform with over 190,000 website users. This platform is outstanding in customizability. Moreover, it also provides a wide range of apps and extensions.
Magento Advantages
- Is exclusive for large-scale eCommerce businesses: Magento comes with robust built-in functions such as high volume selling, loyalty program management, dozens of built-in functions, and seamless payment and check-out.
- Powerful scalability: Magento offers the Enterprise version for large-scale eCommerce websites. It is outstanding for being capable of comfortably coping with up to 50,000 users per hour. In addition to that, it also has a huge community of developers and whopping collections of extensions. In short, Magento brings you a smooth and precise work of a website no matter how huge it becomes.
Magento weaknesses
- Complication: Things might get tough if you are not technically experienced as Magento installation, modification and administration require advanced technical skills.
- Be expensive: Besides basic fees like ongoing maintenance costs, updates, changes to functions, and modules. There are 2 kinds of costs that would make Magento a little pricey. At first, since it is a resource-incentive and heavy solution, Magento needs dedicated servers. Secondly, Magento requires a high level of coding expertise. Therefore, the store owners might need to hire developers, which adds to the cost of running their businesses. Hence, it might not be an issue for large-scale businesses, but for small to medium companies, this cost would be remarkable.
Prestashop
Like Magento Open Source, PrestaShop is a freely accessible eCommerce platform written in PHP. No fees or commissions are required like using Magento. Unlike Magento, Prestashop does not provide any enterprise edition. Up to now, Prestashop has been used by 300,000+ online shops across the globe and is available in 62 different languages.
PrestaShop Advantages
- User-friendly: Store owners with hardly any technical knowledge can easily solve and maintain their online store on the Prestashop platform. Indeed, Prestashop is very simple to install, and the platform also comes with a simple design and back-end interface.
- Budget-friendly: Because the store on Prestashop is not complex, the store owners can use shared-hosting web services and cloud hosting, which are fairly low-budget hosting solutions in comparison with self-hosting. Hence, generally, Prestashop needs low investment.
PrestaShop weaknesses
- Limited scalability: Prestashop is perfect for small to medium businesses. Once a store on Prestashop develops into a massive scale, it might experience lags in various aspects like page loading time or back-end performance. Consequently, Prestashop would not be the best choice for eCommerce giants.
Magento vs prestashop
1. Ease of Use
Magento is by no means a game for new members, and if anyone with no knowledge or experience of using a CMS tried their hand at it, they are going to find it really, really complex. Even installing Magento is a hard task that’ll take you a lot of time. On the other hand, PrestaShop is almost easy to install and will not require you to have expert knowledge of the platform.
Even after installation, Magento is not a simple game to play. Either you’d have to have intermediate knowledge of the product or shell money at a developer to take you through all the challenges. Hence, if that is a problem, then PrestaShop should be your go-to solution.
2. Pricing
Magento provides you with a free edition called Magento Community Edition or Magento Open Source. You can download the program code without any payment and freely customize it according to your business requirements. However, you still have to pay for web hosting.
On the other hand, an annual fee is included in the paid plans, which will increase the business’s annual revenue. With the Magento Commerce version, the cost starts from $22,000 if your revenue does not exceed $1 million. Likewise, Magento Commerce Cloud costs around $40,000 according to the relevant range of revenue.
Magento hosting:
Even if you use the Magento Open-source solution (Free), you would still have to pay for hosting which costs about $20 monthly on average. Take a look at the below table for the price of some Magento hosting service providers.
As an open-source shopping cart, Prestashop is free to set up. However, there is no hosted edition available for this platform. Therefore, the store owners can use hosting plans listed above such as SiteGround, Bluehost, or HostPapa. Also, they can get even cheaper deals from Prestashop official hosting partners 1and1 hosting and A2 hosting.
Thus, the cost of running Magento and PrestaShop is not significantly different for SMEs. When it comes to enterprise-level businesses, Magento is more costly but it brings you a lot of built-in functionalities in return.
3. Supported inventory size
Magento 2 supports the store owners to solve up to 100 000 – 200 000 products, but with proper optimization, this number extends up to 500 000 products. That makes Magento be best suitable for large stores.
PrestaShop is more proper for small and medium-sized businesses that have up to 100 000 items in the catalog. The platform enables you to add more items, but it may affect the performance of your website.
4. Plugins and extensions
Both Magento vs Prestashop is open-source and provide dozens of modules, plugins, and extensions that you can integrate into your instant to add new functions and possibilities.
With Magento marketplace, there are over 3,500 extensions available. Over a third of them falls into the Content & Customizations category, and the rest serve other purposes of Sales, Payment & Security, Shipment & Fulfillment, Site Optimization, etc. All of them have been reviewed strictly by Magento’s QA team. No matter you are looking for a free Magento Extension or a premium one, this store can fulfill your requirements
PrestaShop platform slightly exceeds Magento in module quantity. Users of this platform can access about 3700 modules from Prestashop Marketplace to enhance their store’s capacities in a few clicks.
5. Designs and Templates
PrestaShop themes are modern, professional, and stylish. You are encouraged to select from almost 5,000 free and paid Prestashop templates that will come with extra responsiveness features, themes color switcher, and front editor if you want.
With Magento, the difference comes from a diverse supply of third-party providers. As a result, Magento provides you with a whopping collection of designs to choose from. You can reach out to a huge quantity of Magento themes and easily choose a suitable theme from theme providers. Especially, you can also design your own theme once you have the necessary coding skills.
6. Security
Magento vs Prestashop is both designed to provide your store and your customer’s robust security. As is with most major CMSs, security is not much of a concern because there are all the standard security measures taken to make sure there is a minimum risk for buyers.
Magento constantly releases updated security patches to solve any vulnerabilities that arise. Therefore, it provides you with a level of security you don’t see with Prestashop. Besides, the platform also enables you to install powerful extensions to ensure the secure state of your online store
Prestashop provides a self-hosted version available for download. So, there are many people who host their website with Prestashop. If you expect a higher security level, it’s usually better to have control over the environment and access to a support team. Accordingly, we highly recommend you choose a self-hosted solution regardless of which application you pick.
7. Performance and Scalability
Having said that, Magento is outstanding for being a highly-scalable platform. It is capable of coping with up to 50,000 users/hour. Indeed, it has made both client-side, server-side, and database improvements to get the stability and scalability that large businesses need. Technically speaking, if you’re using a strong hosting solution and you’re getting a decent amount of traffic, a Magento store will usually run faster than one build by using PrestaShop. That’s not to say that PrestaShop is poorly designed, but that Magento is simply better when it comes to controlling your server’s resources.
If you’re just starting a new website, the platform you’re using isn’t likely to make a big difference. However, given that Magento is a better solution for larger projects, we’re awarding it this round of our PrestaShop vs Magento comparison.
8. Customizability
PrestaShop offers over 3,000 available plugins, and more than 4,000 themes you can choose and use. That combination provides you a high level of customizability since you can select any style you want for your store and implement lots of advanced functions. However, Magento is not a disappointment when it comes to customization ability. This platform also allows you to use both extensions (its version of modules) and themes to configure your website nearly any way you wish.
Overall, both Magento and PrestaShop provide you with outstanding customizability, so much so that it’s hard to give an edge to either platform.
9. Payment methods
By default, Prestashop provides many payment methods such as checks, cash on delivery, bank wire, and PayPal. However, users can install other payment gateways using Prestashop modules such as the PrestaShop Checkout solution. Likewise, Magento default payment methods include:
- Check/money order
- Bank Transfer
- Cash on delivery
- Purchase Order
- Zero Subtotal Checkout
In terms of third-party service providers, Magento is currently supporting Paypal, Klarna, and Amazon Pay. Users can include other payment gateways via payment extensions. Accordingly, Magento vs Prestashop is capable of providing various payment methods.
10. SEO & Marketing
Both Magento vs Prestashop bring users essential l features to optimize your website in terms of SEO such as URL modification, canonical tags, 301 redirects, and so on. Nevertheless, PrestaShop users will have to integrate modules for some SEO settings while on the Magento platform, they are originally available.
In addition to that, the Magento Commerce edition also provides other premium marketing tools like customer segmentation and targeting as discussed above, or analytics and report generators.
11. Community
Depending on Magento editions, users will experience different services of support. Magento Community users can only look for support from official documentation and communities solely. Some of the most helpful sources are Magento Help Center, Magento DevDocs, and the Anglo-Saxon ecosystem. Meanwhile, Magento Enterprise clients can reach out to the official full-fledged support via email or live support.
With PrestaShop, the support degree requires payment under support plans. For instance, the “PrestaShop Support Plan” including speedy support and expert consultancy will charge you from 249€ to 1399€ rely upon the support level.
Conclusion
All in all, as we said, both Magento and Prestashop platforms are excellent solutions and you probably will be satisfied anyway. When making a decision, you need to take into attention your goals and requirements. If you want a basic online shop of small or medium size, PrestaShop is a really great solution. If you want to grow exponentially, then Magento is the better choice. Depending on your goal, you should consider carefully to give an exact decision and if your business is in the process of scaling, don’t miss the opportunity to contact us to know more about our Magento Website Development service.
