Magento
Magento vs WooCommerce: when do you choose which?
Short answer
WooCommerce and Magento are both open source online shop software that you host yourself. WooCommerce is an extension of WordPress: light, easy to manage and suited to ranges up to a few thousand products. Magento is built as an online shop platform and can handle large catalogues, customer-specific prices and several shops, at higher costs for hosting and maintenance. Most shops rightly start in WooCommerce.
What do they have in common?
More than you would think. Both are open source and cost no licence. You host both yourself, so you decide where your shop and your customer data are. And with both the code is yours: another agency can take it over.
That sets them apart from rented platforms. Between the two, the difference is what they were made for.
What were they made for?
WooCommerce is an extension that turns a WordPress site into a shop. Its strength is simplicity and the huge range of themes and extensions. Its weakness is that WordPress is, at its base, a system for pages and posts.
Magento was designed as an online shop from the first line. Products with dozens of attributes, price rules, several warehouses and several shops are in the core. Its weakness is weight: it asks more of the server and of whoever maintains it.
Side by side
| Subject | WooCommerce | Magento |
|---|---|---|
| Basis | WordPress with an extension | Its own online shop platform |
| Range | Up to a few thousand products | Thousands to hundreds of thousands |
| Prices per customer or group | With extensions | Standard |
| Several shops | One installation per shop | One installation, several shops |
| Hosting | Light | Heavy: cache, search engine, queue |
| Updates | Frequent, small | Less frequent, larger |
| Learning the back office | An hour | Half a day |
| Finding developers | Easy | More specialised |
The signs you are outgrowing WooCommerce
- The back office gets slow when you save a product.
- Filters on the category page take seconds.
- You have more than thirty extensions, some of which rebuild things that are standard elsewhere.
- Business customers ask for their own prices and to order on account.
- A second country or a second brand is coming.
One sign is no reason to switch. Three at once are.
The signs that Magento is too much
- The shop has a few hundred products and will stay that way.
- Nobody uses the features Magento is known for.
- The maintenance costs more than the shop earns in margin.
- Every small change needs a developer.
That happens too. We have no interest in the biggest platform; we host and maintain both.
What does the choice mean for hosting?
WooCommerce runs on an ordinary, well-configured server with a cache. Magento needs a set of components working together: a page cache, a search engine, an in-memory store and a queue for background work. That is not a drawback, it is the reason Magento keeps large catalogues fast. Someone just has to set it up and maintain it.
How do you decide?
Start with the range and the customer, not the platform. How many products, how many variants, who buys and at what price. The choice usually follows from that.
If you are unsure, start in WooCommerce. The way up is known and doable. The way back from a platform that is too big costs more.