Magento Vs. Prestashop - Which Shopping Cart Is Better?

Currently, Magento and Prestashop are the two most popular open source shopping carts. Launched in 2008 Magento powers over one third of online stores. Released one year earlier Prestashop is the platform of choice for 150,000+ online stores and its popularity seems to be growing.

If we compared these two shopping carts feature by feature, they would seem very similar one to another. However, there are subtle, but important differences, which set these two shopping carts apart.

Number of free features – Magento

Magento offers an impressive array of features out of the box. CMS, Multi Store and customer groups are among 350 features offered by Magento for free. Some of them, such as product comparisons, wish lists and RSS feed, are offered only by Magento and are not included in the Prestashop selection of 310 free features. In result, Magento stores tend to have a better user interface than any other open source stores. Also, if you plan to create an online store based on Prestashop, be prepared to pay for additional plugins, which were not provided with the free version of the product.

Search modules – Prestashop

The biggest advantage of Prestashop are its advanced and fast search modules. When it comes to searching for a product, Magento tends to be significantly slower than Prestashop and as we all know, in the world of e-commerce every second matters.

SEO features and community support - Magento

Since Magento is the most popular open source shopping cart, it is no surprise that the community of Magento fans and users is also significantly bigger than the group of designers, who use Prestashop. The support of a large community of experts in shopping cart development becomes a top issue, if you ever run into problems you can’t solve by yourself. There are hundreds of tutorials and forums dedicated to Magento, so finding the correct answer is often just a question of time. Another benefit of Magento and one of its biggest advantages is SEO ready design. Every part of Magento store can be customized to meet the demands of search engine optimization. And the best thing about it is that you do not need to hire Magento enterprise backend developer every time you want to make some SEO changes, online retailers can easily do it by themselves.

Ease of use and price - Prestashop

Overall, Magento might turn out to be a little too complex and complicated for someone with no background in website development. Installing and using Prestashop will pose much less problems for online retailers, who are not tech-savvy. When we consider the Magento store development cost, Prestashop also seem to be a better choice, as long as you do not need any advanced settings. Prestashop is easier to maintain without the help of a professional developer and if you do not plan to install many additional extensions, Prestashop will turn out to be less expensive than Magento. Overall, Magento is an excellent choice for large enterprises, big online retailers and professional developers, in whose hands this shopping cart will reveal its full potential. Prestashop is much better suited to the needs of small retailers and beginners, who want to learn how to use an open source shopping cart.

Marta Gromadzka is a writer and editor with a wide variety of experience, including writing for websites internationally and editing books on many different subjects and in a variety of formats.