NOPCOMMERCE VS MAGENTO - WHICH IS THE BEST E-COMMERCE PLATFORM FOR ENTERPRISES?

NopCommerce is free and open-source e-Commerce solution based on the ASP.NET platform. The first version of NopCommerce was released in 2008. The latest version of Nopcommerce 4.40 was released in 2021 based on .NET Core 5.

Because of the absence of the shopping cart, there were limitations placed on business processes and flow. Hence, it was important to be addressed which NopCommerce managed to do that.

MAGENTO:

Similar to Nopcommerce, Magento is also another open-source platform for e-Commerce development. It offers a flexible shopping cart along with the management of appearance, content, and the functions of the store. With Magento, you also gain access to marketing, SEO, and tools to manage the product catalog.

There are certain aspects based on which, both the platforms differ from each other. Let us compare both of them to see which one should enterprises prefer.

Both the platforms have a lot of common things. Magento offers Community Edition and Enterprise edition. The Community Edition is similar to the functionalities offered by NopCommerce, and both of them are open source.

Following are the factors based on which we have drawn a comparison between both the solutions:

1. PRICE:

NopCommerce is an open-source platform that can be used without any extra charges. Magento has two versions as we saw previously: a free open-source community edition and a paid Magento Enterprise edition.

When it comes to paid versions of Magento products, there are two main versions, Magento 1 and Magento 2. The price range for both of them greatly varies. Magento 1 works on a per-server model whereas Magento 2 follows a revenue model.

Free solutions like nopcommerce and Magento community Edition don’t have any subscription amount. However, some expenditures like hosting and extensions are not available for free. Even if you purchase additional plugins to extend the functionality it still costs less than the Enterprise edition.

2. FEATURES:

Both NopCommerce and Magento come with a lot of features. But this and similar to each other in basic functionalities like management of product and catalog, SEO, and readymade analytics. They also come with multi-store and multi-vendor functionalities along with very good payment and externally available shipping integrations.

Magento Enterprise edition has customer loyalty tools like reward points, gift cards, and in-store credit amount. This works to improve engagement with the buyer, stimulate repeat visits and offer rewards to the customers.

Magento 2 has other marketing tools like flexible rates, coupons, promotions, upsell, and cross-sells.

Nopcommerce provides similar Magento enterprise marketing options but most of the features come for free. It is difficult to draw a comparison of these versions as far as the features are concerned. This is because they cannot be compared without using both platforms for the development of a real project. To compare both of them you have to dig deeper into merchant processes and selling functionalities.

You cannot draw a conclusion only based on the side-by-side feature comparison. Extra features of Magento Enterprise are generally used less. But nopcommerce development services use a couple of functionalities that are easily customizable with certain extensions. It would cost very less and the performance is not compromised.

3. CUSTOMIZATION:

As we saw in the previous section both the platforms come with readymade features and functionalities. If a business lacks certain functionalities, you can extend the functionality by customizations that are available on both platforms. Since they are open-source platforms, they can be customized to address specific requirements of the business.

Nopcommerce Development and Magento offer using API for interaction with databases, third-party tools, Google merchant, product feeds, and more. In addition to this, you can extend the functionality using plugins and integrations available from the market places. Both the platforms come with huge marketplaces. Some extensions are free while others are payable. Apart from plugins, you can also install themes for your e-Commerce Store.

Nopcommerce and Magento are tools that advanced users can use who possess some technical knowledge and require professional developers to implement customization.

4. CODING AND SECURITY:

One of the basic differences between Nopcommerce and Magento is language. NopCommerce has been developed using ASP.NET Magento works on PHP.

When we talk about ASP.NET it means that Microsoft powers the product. As with Magento, it is driven by the community.

Windows ASP.NET and MS SQL Server when combined provide a very productive environment. Also, the ASP.NET core is very fast. The higher productivity implies that you require a few resources and cheap hosting services.

Nopcommerce comes with an extendable architecture that enables the developers to override certain functions from plugins without fiddling with their core. Moreover, it is easy and fast to implement customization which provides quick ROI.

Magento is known to release security patches with every version upgrade and sometimes between two version upgrades too. But Nopcommerce provides more security. The security patches with merging two are only through for enterprise edition.

Magento Community Edition does not have regular security updates and the patches come only when they are commercially viable.

Nopcommerce had only one security patch since its launch which relates to an external component. This implies that it does not require constant upgrades to the newest nopcommerce version. It is also safe to work with the versions that were released years ago.

On the other hand, Magento has no security updates and will make your Store prone to security breaches, errors, and malicious cyber attacks.

Magento is not fully PCI compliant which means that credit cards cannot be processed security and payment gateways would be prone to attacks. You can address this issue by using an additional extension. But Magento Enterprise comes with Magento secure payment bridge which helps merchants fulfill the PCI compliance.

Nopcommerce is PCI compliant out of the box.

5. SUPPORT:

NopCommerce and Magento community Edition both provide product documentation that lays out basic knowledge and understanding of the products. They have forums where community members assist other members. Communities for both platforms have more than 2 lakh users. But, nopcommerce e-commerce is more active with 190,000 plus forum posts over 73000 for Magento.

Forum support does not guarantee that they will be able to answer the questions quickly. But you can excess paid support in that case. The premium support services for nopcommerce are at $299 for 3 months or $799 for the entire year.

For Magento Community Edition there are no support forums. But Enterprise edition offers 24/7 professional technical support available through a ticket system or by phone. Account manager with Magento also guides your business towards helpful resources to make the most of Magento.

From an overview, both the platforms look similar to each other. Both of them provide a rich feature set and opportunities to scale your business. Magento is long on the e-commerce market and is widely used at this moment. This explains a greater number of extensions and a wide network of partners along with certified developers. But on the other hand, nopcommerce is a quickly growing solution with an active community.

Therefore choosing between both the platforms comes to individual selection. To make sure you make the right choice, you need to analyze your business requirements and see which platform would meet those requirements. In addition to this, you should also analyze the cost of development and maintenance with each platform.