Both Magento and osCommerce allow store owners to maintain their online stores with minimal effort. Magento and osCommerce are open source e-commerce shopping cart applications and both are packed with all the features needed to create a successful web store. We have composed this article to help you understand the advantages and disadvantages of each platform. So take a look at the comparison of these two eCommerce apps to see which one is better for your online stores, because it’s important to know when selecting your shopping cart what features you need.
osCommerce is a free, open source online store management software that is powered by the very well established and responsive osCommerce community technology. To run any osCommerce website, the web server must support the powerful PHP web scripting language and the fast MySQL database. osCommerce offers a wide range of features that allow online stores to be set up quite quickly and easily.
Magento is a highly efficient open source eCommerce platform. It offers you a wide set of powerful tools to create and manage an online store. Magento runs on Apache/MySQL/PHP platform and to create an online store with it, you need reliable web hosting services. Magento shopping cart support is provided free of charge by an active open source community, professional subscription support from Varien, the company behind Magento, is paid. The wide variety of rich features is one of the main benefits of Magento. Magento comes with enterprise-grade features and build quality. It puts you in control of all facets of your store, from merchandising to promotions, and creativity has no limits with Magento, allowing us to create stunningly beautiful eCommerce themes for Magento that will enhance your brand visibility, adding confidence to your e-commerce and improving sales with SEO effort put into developing them.
Advantages and disadvantages of Magento over osCommerce:
• Magento needs dedicated servers from private hosting providers to run fast stores, while a shared web hosting account will suffice for osCommerce.
• Magento has many additional modules within the rest of the important new capabilities. Magento’s feature set includes not only all the features of osCommerce, but also many of the add-on modules. For example, it includes coupons, order editing, SEO URLs and meta tags, abandoned cart reports, product comparisons, editable order emails, in-shopping cart shipping estimator without login, and much more.
• Magento shopping cart is designed to be easy to update.
• Magento runs a fairly slow, layered, and overly complicated coding style, and thousands of files take a long time to learn and customize.
• Magento offers a well-organized backend along with a cleaner site structure. Its backend is well organized and most items of interest are fully covered. Speaking of osCommerce, some people admit that its code is a real mess and the back-end is really pitiful.
• Magento is a new solution that is regularly improved. Web developers and store owners are eagerly awaiting new Magento releases. OsCommerce is quite old and does not surprise its owners with new updates.
• In general, osCommerce is known to be easy to install but a real hassle to set up and customize. The Magento project has revolutionized eCommerce with its flexibility and power. It takes the best things about osCommerce, like being open source, easy to modify, and having a strong community, but then takes it to the next level of sophistication. Magento developers practiced all the advantages of last time to shape the web application incorporating richer user interface and better ergonomics.
Also see the list of following features for Magento and osCommerce:
• Unlimited products
Magento: Yes
osCommerce: Yes
• Edit products
Magento: Yes
osCommerce: Yes
• Admin can edit products in order
Magento: Yes
osCommerce: No
• Product attributes
Magento: Yes
osCommerce: Yes
• Multiple product images
Magento: Yes
osCommerce: No
• Vouchers
Magento: Yes
osCommerce: No
• Edit clients
Magento: Yes
osCommerce: Yes
• Different prices for customer groups
Magento: Yes
osCommerce: No
• SSL support
Magento: Yes
osCommerce: Yes
• Spreadsheet database upload
Magento: Yes
osCommerce: No
• System of graphic templates
Magento: Yes
osCommerce: No
• SEO tools for meta tags and URLs
Magento: Yes
osCommerce: No
• Live shipping quotes
Magento: Yes
osCommerce: Yes
• Google Checkout pre-installed
Magento: Yes
osCommerce: No
• Content Management System for Informative Pages
Magento: Yes
osCommerce: No
• PayPal
Magento: Yes
osCommerce: Yes, but no IPN
• PayPal Pro
Magento: Yes
osCommerce: No
• SEO tools for meta tags and URLs
Magento: Yes
osCommerce: No
• Multilingual support
Magento: Yes
osCommerce: Yes
• Multi-currency support
Magento: Yes
osCommerce: Yes
• Compatibility with several stores
Magento: Yes
osCommerce: No