June 26th, 2020
Ecommerce: BigCommerce vs. Magento
Running a successful ecommerce business has a lot of moving parts to it, but nothing can be as important as the platform you choose to run your business on. No matter how top-notch or awesome your product is, a challenging platform can keep your business from growing.
There are a ton of software options in the ecommerce space and it can be overwhelming. Today we’re just looking at two of the big players–BigCommerce and Magento. Both have the reputation of being powerful ecommerce platforms. They allow you to customize your store and integrate your website with necessary extensions. Let’s dig into some of the key differences between the two platforms.
Overview Differences
Magento is an open source platform that has been increasingly making shifts to appear more like a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform. It introduces a cloud offering to give merchants the option of having a single vendor handle both software and hosting. BigCommerce already does this. This allows merchants to achieve customization and integrations that had historically only been possible using an open source platform. BigCommerce is offering 4 months free for Magento users that are looking to migrate. Check out this article to learn more about the types of ecommerce platforms, along with their pros and cons.
For merchants already familiar with Magento that are facing the end of life of Magento V1, now is a crucial time to consider the options that are available on the market.
Not sure which one is right for you? Here is a quick breakdown comparing the two platforms with some of their key benefits.
BigCommerce
- With BigCommerce, upgrades and patches are automatic so you’re always on the latest version and have no downtime with each upgrade.
- When BigCommerce rolls out an update that enables a new feature, merchants will have access to it immediately and can control when or if they want to enable that new feature.
- BigCommerce includes hosting without any bandwidth caps or limits.
- With BigCommerce’s automatic updates, merchants don’t have to pay for ongoing maintenance costs, and can focus on innovation or growing their business.
- BigCommerce has a drag-and-drop Page Builder available on all plans, which is not something merchants would get on Magento open source.
Magento
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Keeping up with the necessary security patches and version updates is time consuming and labor intensive.
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The more customizations a merchant makes, the harder (and more costly) their Magento store becomes to maintain. This has a huge impact on installing updates, security patches, and adding extensions.
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Costs can vary greatly on Magento: Paying for infrastructure, development, hosting and maintenance with adds up.
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With Magento, the complexity of the platform makes merchants reliant on developer support.
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The learning curve from Magento 1 to Magento 2 is significant, due to Magento 2 using a different architecture and newer technologies under the hood.
“We’d been on Magento for several years, but there came a point when we realized that the platform wasn’t optimized for what we were trying to do anymore. Plus, we were never sure if the data from that system was 100% correct. We needed a hosted platform that allowed us to focus more on the marketing and selling of products rather than always being tied up with system maintenance. That’s why BigCommerce stood out as a big opportunity for us. We were expanding into B2B markets and fundamentally changing the way we do things online, and BigCommerce helped us accomplish that. It’s helped us get to where we are today.”Wayne Ainsworth, Awesome GTI
Conclusion
While I like to stay informed about software options, I have yet to see one that beats the capabilities of BigCommerce. The platform has scaled with my business that started with 30 products and has grown to over 750. Sales have increased significantly over the years and while other parts of my business have growing pains, I’ve never had to worry about my ecommerce software.