The market of ecommerce platforms has always been hot for a long time with the release of many “players”. Magento and nopCommerce are two ecommerce solutions preferred for a lot of reasons.
The question is: What will be right for you when starting an online store?
Here is the breakdown of the competition.
Along with Magento vs nopCommerce comparison, here are related topics you might interest in:
- Magento vs WooCommerce
- Magento vs Shopify
- Magento vs PrestaShop
- Magento vs Drupal
- Magento vs OpenCart
I – Magento vs nopCommerce: Solution Overview
Table of Contents
Magento
Magento is an open-source platform used to create ecommerce websites. It provides online merchants with a flexible shopping cart system and control over the look, content and functionality of their online store. Using Zend PHP and MySQL databases, the platform is loved for great flexibility with a wide range of customization options. What’s more? It also stays ahead of the competition with others regarding scalability.
Magento has been well known for two distinct editions. Magento Community Edition (CE) requires no money to download its program code. Once the process is completed, developers can freely edit and customize the code to meet their needs. Whereas, Magento Enterprise (EE) Edition’s pricing plan is based on the businesses’ annual gross revenue.
Great examples of businesses using Magento: Coca Cola, Ford, Range Rover, etc.
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nopCommerce
nopCommerce is an open-source solution based on Microsoft’s ASP.NET Core framework and MS SQL Server 2012 (or higher) backend database. It provides online merchants with a catalog frontend, an administration backend and allows shopping cart creation.
Like Magento Community Edition, nopCommerce demands no subscription fees. However, the platform has no premium pricing plan.
First launched in 2008, nopCommerce has now been one of the most secure and stable ecommerce platforms.
II – Magento vs nopCommerce: Competition Broken Down
Popularity
Magento vs nopCommerce: Which platform attracts more users?
According to BuiltWith’s data, nopCommerce has been used in more than 54.000 websites. The number of live sites which are using the platform is more than 17.000.
Meanwhile, statistics showed that over 212.000 live sites are being run on Magento. When it comes to counting both websites that used to use the platform, the number reaches as high as 755.000+. Especially, the platform is leading in many countries, including the US, UK. A large number of websites on Top 10K Sites or Top 100K Sites are using Magento.
As real numbers said, Magento completely has better usage coverage than its competitors.
Scalability
How much do you intend to grow your business?
Before choosing any ecommerce solution, you must answer this question. It impacts how scalable your online store should be. Great scalability allows you to be ready for the growth that will bring your website spikes of visits or extend your categories. Unready for these, your websites cannot retain a good performance with the development.
Magento should be your choice if you plan to grow your business fast and large. The platform can easily scale with your business and give you flexibility. There will be no matter to handle with 50.000 traffic per hour. The 4-layer architecture of Magento 2 can be optimized when you need better performance and scalability.
NopCommerce can also support equal scalability, but you will need the help of a dedicated team if you are not a tech-minded user.
Features & Functionalities
In Magento, the features differ between Open Source Edition (CE) and Commerce Edition (EE). Magento Open Source was designed with all critical features and is not inferior to any other ecommerce platform. Importantly, you can also make your online store much more usable by installing 3rd-party modules out there. Here are some of the features available in both Magento 2 CE and Magento 2 EE:
- Integrated checkout/payment/shipping
- Catalog management
- Marketing/promotion tools
- Conversion tracking tools
- Analytics and reporting
With Magento Commerce, your store will be facilitated with a host of exclusive features which are built-in at no additional costs. Some of these features are:
- B2B Functionality
- Flexible Pricing Tools
- Content Staging and Preview
- Customer Loyalty Tools
- Product Recommendations
- Customer Segmentation
- Business Intelligence Dashboards
GRASP Everything You Need to Know about Magento to have an overview of its features and functionalities.
nopCommerce is another feature-rich ecommerce solution that can give you handy tools from product management, a complex discount engine, multi-store, SEO features, etc. But it also has some drawbacks. For example, it does not support Marketing Automation, Conversion Tracking, Review Monitoring like Magento does. Like Magento, you can extend your store’s capabilities by installing third-party nopCommerce extensions.
B2B Features
In terms of business-to-business capabilities, Magento stands among the strongest platforms. Magento Commerce offers all must-have B2B features that cover from the first approach to the post-purchase stage. It helps streamline the customer experience, enhance site performance and yield sales.
- Company account: This allows corporate customers to share an account with multiple users who hold different roles and access permissions.
- Quick ordering process: To fasten their bulk ordering, B2B buyers can search and order all in one single order form instead of digging into product pages one by one.
- Quote functionality: Almost all B2B transactions go through a negotiation stage before you can seal a deal. Magento offers the request-for-quote feature to make online price dealing more convenient and communicative.
- Shared catalogs: Magento Commerce (the paid edition) enables merchants to create multiple catalogs and maintain shared catalogs with custom pricing for different B2B companies. You can customize multiple pricing structures and tailor them to different customers/ customer groups.
- Requisition list: This supports B2B customers in planning their interval purchases by saving products on your site to various lists in the management dashboard.
- Line of credits: Magento also facilitates the checkout with flexible payment methods. For instance, it’s easy to spot some payment options such as purchase orders, invoice me, and sophisticated authentications for various options – purchase order limits, good credit standing.
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Meanwhile, nopCommerce shows fewer dedicated features for the B2B eCommerce community with:
- Multi-vendor and dropshipping: Each vendor is provided with admin panel access to manage their products review sales reports and order details regarding their products. Vendors do not interfere with each other’s activities, and the wide range of options for setting up and managing access rights allows you to make their activities automated.
- Global multi-vendor store: With global trading features such as multi-currencies and multi-languages coming out-of-the-box, nopCommerce allows you to create an international multi-vendor store.
- Multi-store: The multi-store feature allows merchants to run many stores from a single nopCommerce installation. Every online store shares a single database: you can share catalog data between stores, and your customers can log-in to all of your stores using the same credentials.
Security
Security is one of the major considerations between Magento vs nopCommerce because weak protection is a great chance for hackers to attack your database and hurt the system.
In terms of security, nopCommerce is believed to be more secure than Magento. It is based on ASP.NET, which means it is hosted on a Microsoft server. The platform had only one security patch since it was introduced. Users don’t have to update to the newest versions regularly and there is no matter with the versions released years ago.
With Magento, your websites can reach the highest security by regularly updating security patches (which is explained in Magento 2 Security Patch for beginners. But it doesn’t mean that it is insecure to use Magento. By keeping your Magento version/security patch updated and following security best practices, everything will be fine.
Magento vs nopCommerce Pricing
nopCommerce is totally free. The costs will come from hosting and potentially extensions you might love to install. However, it’s very unlikely that the expense for these extras will exceed the total cost of using Magento Commerce Edition.
As mentioned above, Magento has a free plan – Magento Open Source. With Magento Commerce, there are 2 paid plans. The cheaper plan comes when you choose the cloud hosting option known as Magento 2 Commerce Cloud.
CHECK OUT Magento Costs to estimate the budget for your Magento website.
We all see that Magento Commerce seems costly in comparison with nopCommerce and Magento Open Source. But if you aim for a large-scale online store that allows visitors to do as many things on site as they can imagine, this choice will never disappoint you. Furthermore, the availability of advanced tools can save you a lot of time and money to find and install compatible extensions that fulfill your needs.
At this point, there is no better one. The decision depends on your finance and how feature-rich you want your online store to be.
User-friendliness
Both Magento vs nopCommerce comes with a great learning curve if you lack basic technical skills and knowledge about HTML/CSS. Both development and customization are about coding. In this case, it is recommended to have a dedicated developer or reach out to Ecommerce Agencies. Once completed, you will find no hassle with the administration of these systems.
With many years of experience in the industry, BSS Commerce can get you covered with any problems related to your Magento websites. We even create online stores using Magento.
Magento vs nopCommerce Support
Both Magento vs nopCommerce offer product documentation that will give you a basic guideline on how to master each platform. They all have forums and communities where users can access to find help or help each other. Both communities have a huge number of members.
In some cases, you wouldn’t solve your problems with help from forum posts and public documentation. With nopCommerce, you can reach out for paid support which costs £77 per month. You can also pay for 3 months (£231) or a whole year (£617). This is another disadvantage that can increase your expense when using nopCommerce.
In Magento, Open Source users can only find support from the community or forums. Some of the common sources are Magento Dev Docs, Magento Forums, Magento Stack Exchange, etc. Meanwhile, Magento Commerce offers its users a 24/7 official technical support system through a ticketing system or by phone without additional fees.
For merchants considering which is the best wholesale platform, you can’t skip the details on B2B features of Magento vs Shopify vs BigCommerce – three giants in the eCommerce world.
Fill in the form below and a comprehensive comparison chart would be delivered to your email in the blink of an eye!
III – Wrap Up
To sum up, the ” Magento vs nopCommerce” has let us see both pros and cons of each platform. They are all feature-rich and scalable platforms.
However, Magento users can find more extensions and get support from a wider community than nopCommerce users. If your business is not ready to use Magento Commerce, Magento Open Source can be another good choice that stays within your budget. In contrast, if you are affordable with Magento Commerce and have had a clear vision to expand your reach, why don’t you consider trying it?
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