Magento vs BigCommerce – Which One is Best For You? [2024]
If you are a newbie who just started out an online business or looking to switch to other eCommerce platforms, the process has always been burdensome for the store owners. Whether you are running a small business or looking to scale up your business, it is crucial to pick the right platform for your business.
Some of the eCommerce platforms such as Magento, WooCommerce, Shopify, BigCommerce, and Opencart are the preferred choice of many! For that you can checkout on best headless Ecommerce platforms to use. Choosing the right platform depends on the number of factors based on which we have earlier made comparisons guide such as:
So, now we will make a comparison between Magento vs BigCommerce and find out which platform best fits your business requirements.
Magento is an open-source eCommerce platform based on PHP. It is equipped with many unique features, having a huge number of extensions and even customization is possible as needed. It is a platform designed for complex stores and is used by top brands like Samsung, Nike, Coca-Cola, and many more.
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BigCommerce was founded in 2009 and supports small, medium, and enterprise brands with cloud-based websites and product management services. BigCommerce is a popular eCommerce solution that provides power to more than 60,000+ merchants and has served over 150+ countries. BigCommerce is ideal for businesses looking to grow fast. It has a huge range of features including standard and scalable pricing plans for online stores of most sizes and experiences.
Thus, let us get familiar with these two popular eCommerce platforms Magento and BigCommerce.
BigCommerce vs Magento: The Comparison Guide
The main difference between Magento and BigCommerce is their usage policies. Magento is offered as Platform-as-a-service (Paas) while BigCommece is offered as Software-as-a-service. Although Magento being more expensive, its popularity is as twice as that of BigCommerce.
Let’s do a feature comparison between Magento 2 vs BigCommerce.
1. Ease of Use
Setting up a Magento store is quite hard and the steps involved are installing Magento, setting up FTP, and many more. You can integrate and customize the extensions by taking help from certified developers or Magento development agencies. It would be quite easy for developers, but quite tough and challenging for beginners.
BigCommerce is quite easy for beginners as it provides a clear dashboard for the users. The users are provided with step-by-step instructions and even facilitates the store owners to manage the store without having technical skills. This eCommerce platform has in-built features like marketing tools and payment gateways. It is provided with over 100 various add-ons that are paid and are simple to use.
Thus, summarizing, BigCommerce is easy to use than Magento.
2. Pricing
Magento is providing three editions: Magento Community, Magento Enterprise, and Magento Enterprise Cloud. There are no license fees associated with Magento Commerce and Magento Commerce Cloud. But, both Magento Enterprise Edition and Magento Commerce Edition require a hosting fee that might range from $4 to $1000. You can find the best Magento hosting providers available for better performance.
BigCommerce mainly provides various pricing plans ranging from $29 to $299. And, it even offers a 10% additional discount on paying annually. There are several packages available with varied features that help to run your online store effectively. This eCommerce platform also offers Enterprise plans that are the most advanced plan and has custom pricing. In such plans, support is provided by the experts and is best suited for complex stores that are growing fast.
However, the pricing plans for Magento vs BigCommerce are almost similar. They provide us with various packages for beginners to store owners and can select depending upon the needs.
3. Themes and Templates
Having an attractive design for your eCommerce platform is one of the important steps for your online store. These designs would help to build brand identity and may create a good impression in the minds of the customers. Both these eCommerce platforms provide free design templates and are mobile-friendly.
Magento facilitates customization and creates the design of your store exactly as you have imagined. Designing the theme in the Magento 2 store from scratch requires in-depth knowledge of coding to have a consistent look and feel of the store. You can also opt to select premium themes for your Magento 2 store from ThemeForest or TemplateMonster that can make your store beautiful and feature-rich.
BigCommerce provides free themes and many paid options. These themes require less customization and can be designed easily.
4. Extensions and Apps
Magento comes with various in-built features such as integrated checkout, payment, shipping, catalog management, and much more. They are even providing various third-party extensions and there are more than 5000+ Magento 2 extensions available.
Such feature-rich Magento extensions can be integrated easily at the Magento backend and are developed based on various factors such as to boost sales, improve customer experience, and much more.
BigCommerce is equipped with a wide range of in-built features that help the store owners to perform better. It eventually helps in reducing abandoned carts and helps in improving the site’s performance. It helps in expanding various functions of the store and even supports more than 600 apps with unique functionalities.
Out of many, the MailChimp app is the most used extension and is free to install. The main function of the module is automatic product recommendations depending on the past purchases of the customers.
5. Support
Whether you have been running an online store or newbie, there would be times where you might require the help of an expert. Thus, customer support service is an important factor that must be looked for.
If you are using Magento open-source, you might get help only from experienced users or certified developers on Magento forums. You can expect to get support through live chat and email, only once you sign-up for Magento Commerce and Magento Cloud Edition. Users can even get support from the developers from whom they purchase.
BigCommerce provides great support through live chat and phone 24/7, email, and can even contact to help center for other queries. You can even get an appointment for a 10-minute call to discuss various business strategies that may help to succeed.
6. Payment Methods
Magento offers PayPal, Braintree by default and others can be even added through Magento Connect. Other Magento 2 payment gateway extensions can be added easily to offer their customers various payment options and may cost extra charges for that.
BigCommerce offers around 65 payment gateways to its users. Some of them are PayPal, Stripe, Square, etc. There are no transaction fees associated with any BigCommerce plans. You just need to pay credit card rates, the higher the plan you select, the less you have to pay for credit cards.
Hence, the payment process is fast and quick in comparison to Magento and does not charge any transaction fees. Additionally, adding payment gateways into BigCommerce is an easy task and can be done with just by few clicks from the dashboard. There are apps required for Magento that may charge an extra fee.
7. SEO Features
Optimizing SEO is crucial for any eCommerce website and helps in building trust among the customers. Magento always stays at the top when talking about SEO capabilities and has many handy SEO settings. It is a powerful tool that is equipped with various default functionalities and even helps in optimizing their visibility on search engine rankings. Additionally, Magento 2 SEO offers options for managing promotions, communication, and content.
BigCommerce is provided with many advanced features like Microdata that are helpful in improving the appearance of the websites on search engines in an informative way either creating and using robots.txt or Google sitemap. It also facilitates the users to access a program called SocialShop that helps you to post promotions on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.
Hence, Magento is known for SEO-friendly options and is the best way to drive more traffic to your website and increase visibility.
8. Security
Security needs to be taken care of so as to protect the data against security risks like data loss and always stay at the top and keeps updating security patches constantly. Each security patch aims at fixing vulnerabilities and helps in removing potential risks keeping eCommerce websites secured.
Magento is a robust platform, it offers the most powerful security features for your online stores. Store owners frequently update Magento with security patches that help in improving the performance of your site. There are even third-party tools and Magento security extensions available to check their security level. Magento is PCI Compliant and also supports advanced technologies such as Zend Framework, Composer, and SSL Certificate.
BigCommerce is PCI level 1 certified and ISO certified ensuring that financial transactions are encrypted. They provide both paid and free SSL certificates. BigCommerce provides multiple access of security and also prevents unauthorized access.
However, Magento allows maintaining security and regularly sends updates for maintaining it.
9. Scalability
If you are thinking to expand your business in the future, you cannot ignore scalability. So, you must be prepared for managing a high volume of sales with the same effectiveness that would help in making your business a successful one.
Magento offers incredible performance and robust scalability. As Magento is self-hosted, it allows the users to make necessary changes required to improve the performance. It becomes easy to scale up when your eCommerce business expands.
BigCommerce provides unlimited storage and bandwidth. So, using BigCommerce if you decide to scale up, the pricing plan gets changed to a higher one.
Thus, using Magento scaling becomes much smoother as it is provided with great features such as inventory management and ERP integrations.
Conclusion
Magento vs Bigcommerce: Which one is the Best? Magento is more feature-rich as compared to BigCommerce, but requires a technical expert. And if you are running a large store with a high budget, Magento would be best for you. BigCommerce supports small, medium, and enterprise brands with cloud-based websites and product management services.
That was all for Magento 2 vs BigCommerce comparison guide. Hopefully, the difference between Magento and BigCommerce will help you in selecting the most appropriate eCommerce platform.
What are your thoughts about BigCommerce vs Magento 2? Do let me know in the Comments section below.
Also, share the post with store owners via social media.
Thank you.
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Shivbhadrasinh Gohil
Shivbhadrasinh is the Co-founder & Chief Marketing Officer at Meetanshi. He leads the marketing team and is the person behind the marketing & branding success of the company. Being a seasoned digital marketer, he has been consulting online businesses for growth since 2010 and has helped 100+ clients with digital marketing success.
He loves sharing tips and insights about the latest digital marketing trends aimed at helping online business owners.
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