Choosing a platform for their business is essential for store owners, especially in this era of technology when there are so many alternatives to consider. In this blog, we’re going to give you a brief comparison of Spree vs. Magento. We hope that this would answer the question of Spree vs. Magento: which one is suitable for you?
Introduction about Spree and Magento
Table of Contents
Before diving into the detailed comparison of Spree vs. Magento, let’s get to know these two platforms.
What is Magento?
Magento is an e-commerce platform that provides business owners with an effortless way to set up their online stores. This platform offers many features that help online merchants manage their products, sales, and other work aspects.
Magento comes in two different versions. The free version is called Magento Open Source, and the paid one is Magento Commerce or Magento EE, which was renamed as Adobe Ecommerce recently. The difference between these two is that the paid version was upgraded to come with more advanced features.
Moreover, in 2015, Magento 2 was introduced. This edition is claimed to have been updated to fit with the latest development practices and some improvements on the performance of the platform were made.
FIND OUT MORE: Magento Open Source & Enterprise comparison.
What is Spree?
Spree is also an e-commerce framework that was developed to offer business owners an easy solution to build their digital stores. This platform provides its users with many features that can be helpful for managing and operating their online business.
Spree vs. Magento comparison
After getting to know the two platforms, we can now start looking at the details of what makes each of them special in this Spree vs. Magento comparison.
Product management:
With Spree, you have a total of six tabs to add, edit, remove or view your products. You can easily add product description, quantity, availability and product category, Spree also allows you to create product prototypes to save time and effort. For example, when you create a mixer prototype, the next time you add a mixer to your inventory, you only need to assign it to the right prototype and have some basic product descriptions already filled out for you.
Magento’s product management features are even more advanced. Using Magento, you can display your products under different forms such as simple, virtual, configurable or downloadable and product attributes are limitless. For other product features such as cross-selling and upselling, Magento also lets you manage this in the admin control panel.
SEO:
Spree provides all the basic features of SEO that a website must-have. You can add your meta description, meta title and meta keywords. It also supports you with breadcrumbs-a type of navigation aid that helps users to locate where they are on a website.
With Magento, you can find all of the aforementioned SEO features available at your disposal. Furthermore, Magento has a built-in site map, which is basically a list that contains all of the URLs on your site. This site map will help search engines to better understand and index your site. Hence, your site would be more SEO-friendly.
READ MORE: improve your SEO performance in Magento with this tricks and tips.
Back-end functions:
A website’s back-end refers to the parts that users cannot see, contrary to the front-end. It’s where the work of developers takes place.
With Spree, the backend is very simple and minimal. Its admin panel is cleanly organized with fewer tabs and sub-menus. But this doesn’t mean taking away any options for its users, rather, it helps developers stay more focused. Another important aspect of backend functions is the speed at which requests are handled. In one second, Spree can process more requests than Magento.
Magento’s backend offers you a wide range of options, which is good. But sometimes, having too many options can make its admin panel look disorganized and cluttered. However, this is not a big concern because, with a professional team of developers who are used to working with Magento, they’ll know exactly what to do. In terms of handling requests, Magento is a little bit slower and can process fewer requests at the same time.
Community support:
Spree is written in Ruby on Rails which is a rather difficult development language. Hence, it’s going to take more effort to find an expert that is familiar with working in this language. However, since Spree’s framework is minimal, it’s easier for developers to navigate this platform.
Magento is written in PHP- a very common development language with a wide network of support worldwide. Thanks to its popularity, it’s also easier for a beginner to learn PHP. Therefore, you won’t have any difficulty finding help when facing problems with this platform.
THRIVING YOUR BUSINESS with Magento website development.
Payment gateways:
Spree supports over 125 payment gateways, which is a large number. With this many options, there is nothing you have to worry about when it comes to payment processors.
Magento supports around 75 solutions for payment. However, this is not necessarily a big disadvantage because the platform does have all of the common payment gateways supported such as Paypal, Amazon pay, Stripe,…
LEARN MORE: 10 best payment gateways for Magento 2.
Analytics and Reports:
Spree’s analytics and reports features are quite simple. It offers basic data such as sales statistics and also supports and with the help of extensions, you can track your KPI.
Magento comes with more choices for analytics and reports. It’s embedded with Google Analytics to provide the most accurate data for your store. Moreover, you can choose from a range of available default reports such as product reports, refund reports, sales reports, etc.
Usage:
Spree accounts for about 0.01% of the market share in the field of e-commerce. There are around 1370 websites that are using Spree. About 182 companies choose Spree as their platform. Some of them are Grover Corporation, Align Technology Inc, etc. And most enterprises that use Spree fall in the small and medium-sized category.
Known as one of the leading sites for ecommerce, Magento makes up about 12% of the e-commerce market share. Some top companies that use this platform include Ford. Nike, Coca-Cola, etc. And in this era of technology, you can definitely expect Magento and its community to expand in the future.
Pricing:
As an open-source platform, Spree is free of charge and offers a free trial for anyone interested.
As we have mentioned before in the introduction, with Magento, you can choose between the free version (Magento Open Source) and the paid version (Magento Enterprise). The fee for Magento Enterprise starts from 22000 a year and will change depending on your yearly revenue. If you have any extensions installed, those will be charged separately.
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The conclusion
After a brief comparison of Spree vs. Magento, here are some highlights about each platform that are worth considering:
Spree is built around simplicity. All of the platform’s features focus on a minimal user interface, leaving its users with only necessary features. Being totally free of charge is also one of the strong points of this platform.
As for Magento, the wide community support and the popularity of the platform make it a common choice for many businesses and one of the leading e-commerce platforms.
There is no clear winner for the match of Spree vs. Magento. It all depends on your business and your specific needs. Spree would be very helpful for anyone who is looking for a simple, low-cost solution. But the specialized features for e-commerce that Magento offers would be more suitable for enterprises with a specific purpose to expand their business online.
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