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Are you thinking about developing your eCommerce online store? If you’ve been researching the topic, you’ve probably seen ‘WooCommerce’ and ‘Prestashop’ thrown around a lot. They are the two most prominent e-commerce platforms, and at one point, most people interested in developing their eCommerce platform will ask, “which is the better solution?”
The battle has been raging for many years, opinions differ, and the fans of both solutions have no shortage of arguments to praise their favorite. Which is better: Prestashop or WooCommerce? In this article, we’ll conclusively explore this question.
Also, read about: How to Develop a Business Model
Financial Aspects of the Decision
A site costs money, no matter what anyone says. If you start with acquiring a domain name and hosting, even if you go for the cheapest option, it is still a cost that should not be neglected, and this is not to mention all the time you’ll invest into creating and building the e-commerce platform. Starting from 50-80 dollars a year, this can increase significantly depending on your project, what you want to display, and your e-commerce platform’s services.
With all that being said, which one, WooCommerce or Prestashop, is cheaper to develop and maintain an e-commerce platform with? Well, the answer to that question will depend on a variety of factors:
- Which one are you more familiar with? If you are experienced with one of the platforms, you’ll find it easier to develop your e-commerce platform with the most standard tools.
- What’s the size of your project? Although Prestashop is excellent for small projects, it faces some slight hitches when you try to scale it up. So, if you have a larger project, it will be less costly to use WooCommerce.
- How are you planning on developing your eCommerce platform? Are you going to code it yourself, or will you rely on professional developers? If the latter, you should go with WooCommerce. WooCommerce is much larger and has a much bigger community. You can find an excellent WooCommerce developer in Sydney, London, or another modern city. With Prestashop, on the other hand, you might not be so lucky.
Ultimately, making sure you have your financial calculations in order before starting your e-commerce project is imperative. Although there’s no easy answer here, overall, WooCommerce comes out on top. In the long run, you’re likely to spend less operating and maintaining an e-commerce platform if it’s been made by using WooCommerce.
Technical Aspects of the Decision
Finances aren’t the only thing that matters. What about the technical aspects of the decision? Both of these are ultimately web development platforms, and you have to compare their technical merits if you genuinely want to know if you’re making the right decision; here, we’ll compare them on a few critical criteria:
- Learning curve: both platforms are relatively easy to start with, and you don’t need extensive coding knowledge to use either of them. WooCommerce is built on top of WordPress, a hugely popular CMS. Many people already have experience working with WordPress, and for those people, learning WooCommerce would be far more accessible.
- Scalability: scalability is a vital consideration if you want to create a successful e-commerce platform that can grow. The reality is that neither platform is highly scalable, and you can never create something the size of Amazon with them. But, for small, medium, and even large projects under a specific size, both of them scale exceptionally well, and you won’t go wrong choosing either if this is your priority.
- Flexibility: e-commerce platforms come in many designs, shapes, and sizes. You have single-page e-commerce platforms; you have multi-page eCommerce platforms. There are mobile-first e-commerce platforms, and you have desktop-only e-commerce platforms. Thankfully, here, both platforms again tie. They are both incredibly flexible, and the community of both tools has created some fantastic stuff using them.
- Features: Prestashop and WooCommerce have relatively barebones features, but this is one of their charms: it makes them flexible. There are thousands of plugins you can customize your experience in both. These plugins include shipment plugins, specific widgets, etc. Here, however, WooCommerce edges out. Because there’s a much larger and more active community using WooCommerce, you can find far more plugins for the platform. You can genuinely make your WooCommerce installation your own by installing various plugins that can completely transform its function.
The above overview of the most important and relevant aspects of a technical comparison between the two tools. As you see, WooCommerce has somewhat of an advantage here too, and it isn’tisn’trely unearned.
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