PrestaShop vs Magento: What to choose for an online store?

Today technology and the internet are rapidly evolving. Traditional trading is moving online, which makes it more reachable for buyers and much more profitable for merchants. To build a successful online store, you need a functional website with a beautiful design, a reliable payment system and a variety of tools.

You don’t need to have strong technical or programming skills to start your online business. There are many different e-commerce platforms on the market that help you to create and grow your online store from scratch. Regardless of which shopping cart you choose, it must be of high quality, functionally developed in order to provide convenience to your customers and increase your sales accordingly. In this article, we compare and contrast 2 powerful website builders, PrestaShop and Magento, to help you make the right choice.

User-friendliness

PrestaShop and Magento are open source e-commerce platforms that can be customized in many ways. However, since Magento is more complex than PrestaShop, you will need technical knowledge to build a robust e-commerce website. It is considered one of the most adaptable platforms with limitless potential for tech-savvy people.

Whereas, PrestaShop is quite a beginner-friendly platform. A user-friendly and intuitive admin panel makes it easy to work with the website and manage it seamlessly. In comparison to a Magento site, a PrestaShop site is much simpler to set up. It is the perfect solution for both beginners and experts.

Speed and performance

For a successful online store, the speed and performance of the site is very important, as the traffic and profit of your site depends on them. Customers will not want to stay on a website that takes too long to load, so they will leave, which will result in low profits.

Magento is known to have performance problems from time to time. Users and developers frequently complain that the Magento backend slows down, resulting in a sluggish website. While for PrestaShop, performance and speed are not that important. The platform provides a better and hassle-free experience for online store owners and their customers as it has no issues with heavy CMS like Magento.

Design and templates

PrestaShop offers many options to help you manage your online store with ease. This open-source software has access to everything from plugins to checkout tools. For the design of your store, you can choose among thousands of web templates that are already mobile responsive.

On the official Magento Marketplace you can find modern themes with well-organized categories. If you haven't found a suitable template for your website, you can check out an even larger selection at Theme Forest, Template Monster. Furthermore, if you have the necessary technical knowledge, you can create your own Magento theme.

Security

Security is the main priority of every e-commerce store. It is crucial that customers trust you and your website enough to leave their personal and payment information on it without worrying about its safety.

PrestaShop and Magento both offer excellent security features that keep your data completely protected. As open-source systems, the platforms are constantly improved and maintained, ensuring that no unwanted attacks affect the user experience.

Plugins and extensions

The PrestaShop Addons Marketplace offers plenty of free and paid add-ons and plugins you can use for your online store. Here you can find modules, responsive themes and many services that will surely meet your needs. Magento provides its users with a lot of plugins and extensions which you can discover on the Magento Marketplace.

SEO

Once you have created a website, it is important to promote it and make it recognizable. Billions of people search for something on the Internet every day. In order to attract a lot of customers to your online store, you need to have effective search engine optimization. Luckily, both e-commerce platforms have simple and responsive interfaces.

Magento allows you to manage URLs, create images and handle links, making it easy to use SEO so that your website can be easily indexed by search engines. The platform has a wide range of SEO options. Among them are meta tags for products and home pages, image optimization, canonical tags for categories and products, editing robot.txt files, etc.

However, PrestaShop also has enough SEO features to offer you. Choosing PrestaShop gives you many benefits such as automatic URL rewriting, CMS pages for quality content, dedicated content section for products, a premium SEO module, etc.

Pricing

Another reason many merchants are moving online is the high rental prices of a physical store. A huge advantage of online stores is that they allow you to start your business at a lower cost compared to traditional stores. When choosing a shopping cart, make sure that it will be affordable to you.

Like PrestaShop, Magento is open-source and free to use. But there are some requirements for PrestaShop. However, the platform is free to download and use, you’ll have to pay for web hosting. If you want to launch a fully functional PrestaShop store, be prepared to purchase several paid modules and a responsive template.

In comparison to PrestaShop, Magento is a more costly choice. It offers 2 options: Magento CE (Community Edition) and Magento EE (Enterprise Edition). The first one is available free to download and use which is a great choice for small and medium businesses, while Magento Enterprise Edition has a paid cost. If you have a large online business and wish to expand it further, feel free to choose the second option.

Support

The goal of any business is to make more money and increase their sales, and satisfied customers can help them in that. Taking care of customers, providing them with the necessary information and assistance are the key factors that will help you to succeed and grow. PrestaShop and Magento offer different support services to its customers.

Magento CE users don’t have access to official support services. However, there is a huge developer community available for customers' questions that is ready to provide them with professional support. Magento Enterprise Edition users can count on technical support service provided by Magento.

PrestaShop provides a great support service that can be hardly compared to other e-commerce platforms. However, one thing that may be concerning is that you are offered paid assistance. ​​PrestaShop consultants will assist you in choosing the right support plan to suit your needs.

Who is it for?

When deciding which of these 2 e-commerce platforms will be suitable, take into account your budget and size of your online business.

Small and medium-sized online stores can prefer PrestaShop as their shopping carts as it offers a more user-friendly interface and can be easily understood by beginners. Magento will be a good choice for a large business that needs a modern online store with full control and extensive customization options.

In conclusion

In this article, we've covered all the important details to help you decide which of these 2 platforms you can build an online store that meets your requirements. Keep in mind that for Magento you have to be technically prepared and experienced enough. Meanwhile beginners can use PrestaShop without any fuss. Basically, we can say that both PrestaShop and Magento have all the important qualities that will help you build a strong and functional online store.