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8 Great Magento Alternatives You Should Consider For a Robust Ecommerce Store in 2024

Updated on May 28, 2022

15 Min Read
Magento-Alternatives

While Magento is a powerful ecommerce platform that offers a great variety of features, it’s probably not for everyone. It has more of an appeal to people with technical mastery over the platform. There are plenty of factors to consider when choosing an ecommerce platform, including pricing, its CMS, the ease of use, interface, and the required skills and knowledge.

This list of 8 best Magento alternatives contains all the necessary information you need to make an informed decision about which Magento alternative you should choose to build a sophisticated and functional ecommerce store.

Best Magento Alternatives: 8 Suitable Competitors

We will be covering the following alternatives to Magento in detail throughout this article. All of these are popular Magento competitors in the market and come with distinct features to facilitate the setup of different kinds and sizes of ecommerce stores.

Let’s start with discussing our most recommended ecommerce solution, which is WooCommerce, and you would soon know the reason it stands as our #1 choice among all the Magento alternatives we have listed.

1. WooCommerce

woocommerce platform

Overview

WooCommerce is a popular name in the ecommerce industry, primarily because it is an easy-to-use, customizable, and open-source ecommerce platform for businesses of all sizes.

A WordPress plugin, WooCommerce offers users an open-source CMS, as well as extendable functionality thanks to the numerous plugins and extensions in their arsenal.

It is worth noting that WooCommerce is a self-hosted platform, and so is WordPress.org, a CMS on which you build your WooCommerce ecommerce store.

With Cloudways, you can launch your WooCommerce store in minutes through the WooCommerce Starter Bundle.

WooCommerce Starter Bundle

The WooCommerce Starter Bundle is designed to relieve your time and budget constraints while setting up your ecommerce store.

It lets you gain access to a number of pre-installed and configured ecommerce tools, plugins, and themes in just one click.

What’s more is that Cloudways follows a pay-as-you-go pricing model, so it takes into account your needs and budget at all times while offering you maximal convenience.

This starter bundle allows you a 1-click integration with all popular WooCommerce plugins like:

  • Checkout Field Editor
  • Kadence Email Designer
  • Coupon Shortcodes
  • Cart Abandonment Recovery
  • Google Analytics Integration
  • Paypal Checkout Gateway
  • Shipping and Tax
  • Stripe Gateway

In short, you wouldn’t need to worry about which plugins are best for your store. There’s no hassle, just ease, convenience, and functionality.

WooCommerce Starter Bundle By Cloudways

Get your ecommerce store up and running in one click with our bundle, which includes top-notch pre-installed extensions and plugins to offer a no-hassle, smooth experience.

Features

With WooCommerce, you can start selling anything you want online. Here are some of its standout features:

  • You can ensure flexible and secure payments for all your customers through integrations with popular payment gateways like Google Pay, Apple Pay, Paypal.
  • WooCommerce saves your time with automated tax and live shipping rate calculations, and options to print USPS and DHL labels at home to save on shipping.
  • You can sell both physical and digital goods with endless product variations, and update and fulfill orders on the go with the mobile app for both Android and iOS.
  • Extend the functionality of your store with the WooCommerce marketplace for store enhancements, marketing extensions, multichannel sales extensions, and point of sale systems.
  • The platform offers extensive documentation, a public support forum, a dedicated support team, and the option to hire a developer for extra customization
  • There are plenty of marketing tools and features to boost sales by integrating with Google Shopping and  Facebook, or via emails with Mailchimp. WooCommerce also lets you track and report your marketing efforts as well as your store’s performance online with Google Analytics.
  • WooCommerce is multilingual, and lets you display prices in multiple currencies  – your store can be translated in upto 24 languages, including Danish, Ukrainian, and Persian.
  • WordPress integration lets you scale from 1 to 100,000+ orders per day. You can also add Bestsellers, Top-Rated, New Products, and more to any page or post on your site.

Interface

WooCommerce’s interface is very similar to WordPress. After all, it is a powerful plugin that is built on the CMS. Users who are familiar with WordPress will find it easy to adjust to it. The analytics tool makes it easy to access data and statistics to evaluate the store’s performance online.

WooCommerce interface

Source: WooCommerce

Pricing

Starts From: Free

WooCommerce and WordPress are both free; however, you would have to pay for some of the extensions and plugins. Besides that, you only need to pay your hosting provider depending on what kind of hosting you choose. You must ask all the relevant questions before signing up with a hosting provider to make a fully informed decision.

Why Choose WooCommerce over Magento?

Both WooCommerce and Magento are really robust platforms for setting up an ecommerce store. Woocommerce is much easier to set up for small and mid-sized businesses, however, especially with the Cloudways WooCommerce Starter Bundle. Hence, it is a great Magento alternative if you want to set up an equally robust ecommerce store with maximum ease and functionality.

Pros

  • Flexible and scalable
  • Free to use (you just have to pay for hosting, plugins, and add-ons)
  • Easy to use and understand
  • Basically allows you to create any type and size of website you want
  • Can easily integrate stores and marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, and Walmart to allow for multichannel sales

Cons

  • It’s WordPress specific
  • You will have to buy advanced level plugins for a large-scale online store

2. OpenCart

opencart

Overview

OpenCart is a free, easy-to-use, open-source and self-hosted ecommerce solution that is ideal for small and mid-sized businesses.

Because it is open-source, OpenCart allows access to its source code so you can both modify and customize your ecommerce store as you like, much like Magento Ecommerce and WooCommerce.

Features

OpenCart is a great alternative to Magento, as it comes with a quite promising list of features:

  • User management: separate privileges and access given to users to allow for a smooth workflow, and multi-store management with one admin interface
  • Options to add product variables (size, color, length, height, etc.)
  • Offer discounts and coupons, and use reward points to build customer loyalty
  • Multilingual and multi-currency support enables international sales

Interface

OpenCart’s interface is straightforward and minimalistic. If you have used an ecommerce platform before, it will be easy for you to navigate around this one. However, if you are new to ecommerce, then you should take out some time to learn your way around it.

opencart interfaceSource: MultiMerch Marketplace

Pricing

Starts From: Free

Why choose Opencart over Magento?

Magento is definitely more robust, so it is more suitable for developers, but OpenCart will offers a more intuitive interface that lets you set up your store on your own.

OpenCart is a better option if you want to start with a small or medium sized store. It has a simpler coding structure and installation process. Moreover, you can have dedicated customer support by paying a monthly fee of $99. Since you are looking for Magento alternatives, Opencart can be a great choice for you.

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Pros

  • Light and fast platform
  • Supports almost all the popular payment gateways like Paypal and Authorize.net
  • Reward points increase customer lifetime value
  • OpenCart’s marketplace of themes and plugins

Cons

  • Different installations sometimes don’t work in harmony
  • Difficult to import inventory list
  • Slow checkout experience

3. BigCommerce

BigCommerce

Overview

BigCommerce is an open and flexible SaaS ecommerce platform. It is a web-based application hosted, supported, and maintained by BigCommerce itself as the hosting service provider.

Since it is not open source like Magento, you access the source code. BigCommerce is ideal for setting up a large ecommerce store as it comes with a myriad of features, which we will be discussing below.

Features

BigCommerce is a powerful ecommerce platform because of the following features:

  • Theme customization for an attractive store
  • Checkout customization and automatic tax calculation to simplify purchases
  • WordPress integration provides a CMS for content management
  • You can integrate with top marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay and Google Shopping to help you increase multichannel sales
  • Supports multi-language and multi-currency
  • Scalable product catalog

Interface

BigCommerce has a smooth interface and allows for easy navigation. But this platform uses tech terms that may be hard to grasp for people who are not tech savvy. However, with some learning, it is possible to develop an understanding of all the terms and fully utilize all the features the platform has to offer.

BigCommerce Interface

Pricing

Start From: $29.95/month for a standard ecommerce store

Why choose BigCommerce over Magento?

You should choose BigCommerce to build your ecommerce store if you are not a developer and don’t have knowledge regarding source codes. The installation process is also really easy and simple compared to Magento.

Moreover, with the release of ‘BigCommerce Next,’ you can also avail the built-in blog feature for if you want to add a blog to your online store.

Pros

  • 24/7 technical support
  • An ecosystem of apps to extend functionality
  • Allows custom pricing for different customer segments and their corresponding site experience

Cons

  • Shipping options can’t be expanded to include customer order tracking information
  • Shipping alerts are not editable to include tracking number
  • Limited free template designs for store owners who can’t afford to purchase unique designs

4. Shopify

Shopify

Overview

An ecommerce-only website builder, Shopify has all the tools you need to run a successful online store, including an app marketplace. It is a hosted ecommerce solution with free and premium themes and template options.

Here is a short guide to help you compare both Shopify and WooCommerce so you can choose the best Magento alternative for your ecommerce store..

When it comes to payment gateways, you can choose Shopify Payments and Shopify Pay to give your customers the convenience they seek when making a payment. Both are PCI-compliant and ensure safe payments for your customers. Shopify also allows you to sell on online channels like Amazon and Instagram.

Features

Shopify provides some pretty interesting features, such as:

  • Option to sell unlimited products
  • Unlimited bandwidth and online storage to support a large product catalog
  • Gift cards and discount codes to build customer loyalty
  • Point of sale functionality, and a built-in automatic tax calculator at check-out
  • Multiple online sales channels to increase sales
  • Fraud prevention to provide customers with a safe shopping experience

Interface

Shopify’s interface is also as simple as WooCommerce and WordPress.

Shopify interface

Pricing

Starts From: $29/month for a basic ecommerce store

Why choose Shopify over Magento?

While Magento is the most preferred choice of mid-market and enterprise level ecommerce businesses, Shopify is a SaaS and hosted ecommerce solution suited for small to medium-sized ecommerce stores.

Shopify’s easy drag-and-drop interface might be the better choice for you if you are not a retailer with several thousand SKUs.

Pros

  • An array of professional ecommerce-specific templates
  • Best for POS applications (for example you can use Shopify built-in POS or, POS for Shopify)
  • Multilingual
  • Can easily integrate stores and marketplaces like Amazon and eBay

Cons

  • Since it’s 100% focused on ecommerce, it gives you only a few basic

features to add a blog to your store

  • Less room for customization as compared to WooCommerce’s ocean of plugins

5. Salesforce Commerce Cloud

Salesforce Commerce Cloud

Overview

Salesforce’s fully-hosted agile ecommerce platform is built on one of the most popular customer relationship management (CRM) systems in the world.

In fact, when you connect Salesforce Commerce Cloud 360 with Slack, your ecommerce store drives the best results for both you and your store customers.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud will also provide your ecommerce store customers greater freedom and control by allowing them to browse products through sorting, filtering, image zooming, and more as part of its merchandising tools package.

This website builder is ideal for enterprises who want a simple and manageable web-based user interface and want to provide customers with a personalized shopping experience by utilizing visitor/shopper’s data in the best possible manner.

Features

Salesforce Commerce Cloud comes with some great features like:

  • Multi-site management enables you to sell on multiple sites
  • It offers marketing and merchandising tools for campaigns management, real-time reports and dashboards, and for customer segmentation and segment specific pricing. There’s also targeted promotion management.
  • Pre-built integrations and extensions extend the store’s functionality
  • It offers native targeting and A/B testing
  • Comprehensive development platform – easy to set up an ecommerce store for people who are not entirely, but near tech-savvy
  • Customer catalog entitlements helps enterprises define the items their customers can buy – for example, as an ecommerce store owner, you can restrict your customers to buy from a particular category if you have a limited upcoming sale on that category, or you have run out of products, or perhaps you want to secure pre-orders before you launch a product.

Interface

Salesforce Commerce Cloud comes with a drag-and-drop interface. You can easily build pages using its powerful features and components that make customization possible with just a few clicks.

Salesforce Commerce B2C interfaceSource: Salesforce

Salesforce commerce B2B interfaceSource: Salesforce

Pricing

Prices start from: $4 price per order for B2B ecommerce store, with 1% gross merchandise value for a basic B2C ecommerce store.

Why choose SalesForce Commerce Cloud over Magento

You should choose Salesforce Commerce Cloud as a Magento alternative if you want a greater level of personalization and machine learning through consumer insights.

It lets you access complex product data and avail strong native merchandising features for your enterprise. While Magento offers value in these areas as well, Salesforce Commerce Cloud is known for its functionality in terms of merchandising and personalization. This is why it is one of the best Magento alternatives in the market.

Pros

  • Comprehensive development platform so it’s easy to set up an ecommerce store for people who are not entirely tech savvy
  • Responsive mobile design

Cons

  • Some initial training and time may be required to understand the platform

6. PrestaShop

PrestaShop

Overview:

PrestaShop is a freemium, open source and self-hosted ecommerce platform. The software can be installed on any server of your choice, and is written in the PHP programming language with support for the MySQL database management system. Like WooCommerce, this platform has also been listed among the best PHP open source ecommerce platforms.

Using Prestashop, you can drive your business by attracting visitors to your ecommerce store and selling globally through a professional-looking online store. You can easily translate your store into multiple languages and accept payments in multiple currencies.

Features

PrestaShop allows you to utilize the following features to set up a profitable ecommerce store.

  • Allows customers to upload files for customizable products
  • Lets you set a purchase limit for a particular products
  • Allows you to choose which message to display for products out-of-stock
  • Easy product navigation – lets you create categories and sub-categories
  • Order management and inventory tracking for every product
  • Supports multiple languages and currencies
  • Lets you set up a one-page checkout
  • Product promotion features to increase sales

Interface

PrestaShop has a user-friendly interface, and comes with a wide variety of pre-made themes. If you want to start a small to mid-sized ecommerce store, you will have a smooth experience in creating one using PrestaShop.

PrestaShop InterfaceSource: Prestapro.ru

Pricing

Price Starts From: Free, you will just have to pay your hosting provider.

Why choose Prestashop over Magento

You can choose PrestaShop as an alternative to Magento if you aren’t familiar with codes. Moreover, PrestaShop is easier to install than Magento, simpler to customize, and also free for those who are on a low budget. It is a strong Magento competitor when it comes to ease of use.

PrestaShop has nearly 3200 professional-looking themes, works excellently for small to medium-sized online stores, and also includes gifting options (with gift wrapping), as well as PCI compliance to protect cardholders’ data.

PrestaShop is not ideal for large stores or enterprises, so we would not recommend it to you if you want to set up a large store. However, overall, it is one of the best Magento alternatives in the market.

Pros

  • Free
  • Lets customers add gift-wrapping
  • Multiple languages
  • Multi-currency

Cons

  • Images can sometimes be too compressed and lose quality
  • Little online documentation
  • Not ideal for businesses with large range of products

7. Volusion

Volusion

Overview

Volusion is a comprehensive website builder that lets you create unique stores without coding. It is a hosted solution and a bit pricey as compared to its alternatives but does offer powerful features like inventory management, unlimited product options, and more.

Volusion offers a 14 day trial without credit card, and lets you connect with apps like Stripe, Amazon, Shipstation, Paypal and FedEx for added functionality. You can also market your products using its CRM, built-in SEO management, and newsletters.

Features

You can benefit from the following features if you opt to build your ecommerce store on Volusion:

  • Responsive themes and rich content editor for an attractive store
  • Custom domain
  • Product category pages and search functionality
  • CSS editor lets you access backend codes for added customization
  • PCI-certified checkout process
  • Inventory management and vendor codes
  • Multichannel sales ensure more visibility and revenue
  • You can send newsletters to promote new products and offers

Interface

Volusion’s back-end is extremely user-friendly for beginners, especially those who don’t come from a technical background. It mostly focuses on small businesses, and also offers step-by-step web creation tutorials to facilitate you once you enter the dashboard after signing up. You can easily select a theme, add a product, and set a logo.

Volusion InterfaceSource: Logic Inbound

Pricing

Prices Start From: $79/month if you want a professional ecommerce store

Why choose Volusion over Magento

You should choose Volusion as a Magento alternative if you are new to setting up an ecommerce store and do not know how to code. Volusion is simpler to learn and work with, and the learning curve is not as steep as with Magento.

Volusion is a hosted solution, so if you don’t want a self-hosted platform, Volusion could be your alternative to Magento.

Pros

  • Beginner-friendly
  • Drag and drop design
  • No transaction fees
  • Good customer support

Cons

  • No CMS so you can’t add a blog to your ecommerce store
  • Expensive
  • SSL certificate is not included
  • Pricing fluctuates with traffic

8. Drupal

Drupal

Overview

Drupal Commerce offers an open source ecommerce platform that you can choose to host on a server of your choice. The platform has a set of modules instead of plugins and extensions that offers ecommerce features to support basic functions like order, product details, cart item, and payment options.

Modules like Commerce Stock and Commerce Inventory make inventory management easy for ecommerce store owners, while Commerce Shipping comes in handy when shipping and billing addresses are separate from each other.

Features

Drupal helps ecommerce store owners by offering the following features:

  • Flexible store options like CKU and DC2 help display product variations in the best manner
  • Automatic tax calculation to save time
  • User-friendly shopping cart and configurable checkout to facilitate customers
  • Order management for timely deliveries
  • Choice of payment gateways to simplify the payment process for customers
  • Coupons and promotions for attracting customers

Interface

With Drupal, you can create, edit, and publish a website through a graphical user interface (GUI). Instead of plugins and extensions, it comes with a set of built-in modules that extend functionality. Since it is an open-source CMS, you can also access the source code and modify it on the back-end to make your ecommerce store more functional.

Drupal interfaceSource: Drupal Commerce

Pricing

Prices Start From: Free to download Drupal Commerce software, but you will have to pay your hosting provider. It needs developers so if you want professional support, you can opt for the Commerce Guy plans, which start at $3,000 at the time of setup, and continue at $580/month.

Why choose Drupal over Magento?

Both Drupal and Magento are robust, self-hosted ecommerce platforms. However Drupal has an edge over Magento in terms of SEO functionality. While Magento only has built-in SEO friendly tools, Drupal has a plethora of modules that enable high SEO functionality. Ecommerce SEO is important for your product pages to rank on Google, so make sure you read up on it.

In terms of ease of use, Drupal requires only a basic level of coding, while Magento requires advanced coding skills. Moreover, the fact that Drupal is a CMS, allows it to create complex content relationships, while with Magento you only get a basic content management system.

In addition, with dynamic product catalog management, and addition and removal of products, Drupal is a great Magento alternative for complex online stores.

Pros

  • Good for creating large complex websites
  • Supported by a dedicated community
  • Strong security features

Cons

  • More complex than other CMS platforms
  • Learning curve is steep so requires more time and effort
  • Some performance issues – wrong combination of modules can crash your Drupal core

WooCommerce Starter Bundle By Cloudways

Get your ecommerce store up and running in one click with our bundle, which includes top-notch pre-installed extensions and plugins to offer a no-hassle, smooth experience.

Why Should One Consider Looking for a Magento Alternative?

Magento is a robust, open-source and self-hosted ecommerce platform that’s great for growing business. Then why should you look for Magento alternatives in the first place?

Well, because of two main factors:

  • The need to hire a developer: Magento requires advanced coding skills, so you’ll either need to be a developer, or hire a Magento developer to set up your ecommerce store.
  • Not ideal for novice ecommerce store owners: Because Magento is a full-bodied ecommerce platform with powerful, yet complex features, it is not ideal for people who are new to setting up an ecommerce store. The versatility that it offers can be fully enjoyed by those looking to set up a large online store, not a small one.

Wrapping Up!

You should now be able to select from the 8 alternatives to Magento that we have discussed in the article. Make sure to factor in your needs, whether it’s a good CMS, a self-hosted platform, a no-code solution or budget and user-friendliness.

To recap, the eight best Magento alternatives are:

  1. WooCommerce
  2. OpenCart
  3. BigCommerce
  4. Shopify
  5. SalesForce Commerce Cloud
  6. PrestaShop
  7. Volusion
  8. Drupal

Select the platform that best meets your needs, and get ready to launch your ecommerce store now with your chosen alternative to Magento!

In case you want to read more helpful articles from our alternative series:

Q1. Is Magento Still Relevant?

Of course! Magento is an immensely popular ecommerce platform with full-bodied features. That said, it is not suitable for all kinds of ecommerce stores. It is ideal for large online stores, and those store owners that have a budget to hire a Magento-certified developer or partner. It’s because it is difficult to maintain server operations on it without a managed Magento hosting provider like Cloudways.

Q2. What is the easiest ecommerce platform to use?

Here is a list of the easiest ecommerce platforms:

  • WooCommerce
  • OpenCart
  • BigCommerce
  • Shopify
  • SalesForce Commerce Cloud
  • Prestashop
  • Volusion
  • Drupal
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Umair Qureshi

Umair Qureshi is a Digital Marketer at Cloudways. He loves to read and share his digital marketing experience with Ecommerce & Startups community. In his spare time, he enjoys watching and playing cricket. You can email him at [email protected] or connect him on linkedin: https://pk.linkedin.com/in/umair-qureshi-seo

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