Magento vs OpenCart – Which One is Best For You? [2024]

One of the most common problems faced by store owners while starting an online store is about choosing an eCommerce platform. Magento and OpenCart are the two of the biggest eCommerce platforms used widely in the market. If you are confused in choosing the best E-commerce platform between Magento vs OpenCart, this ultimate guide is prepared just for you

The selection of CMS platforms depends on some of the factors such as the size of the store, design, SEO, and budget. Both of these platforms provide solutions for unique needs and thus, selecting the right platform is of prime concern.

Magento is a robust E-commerce platform that suits large companies that do not want to compromise when it comes to their online shop. It is a platform designed for complex stores, so if you are thinking of scaling up your business, Magento is your go-to platform as it has all the features that are better suited to large online businesses.

OpenCart is an open-source eCommerce platform that is suitable for those looking for high customization and low development costs. It is a platform with an intuitive dashboard, a solid set of features, and a friendly and active user community.

Comparing both the CMS platforms against certain factors will help you choose the best option, OpenCart or Magento, based on your business requirements.

Also read: Magento vs Shopify – The Ultimate Comparison Guide

Magento vs OpenCart Comparision:

The main difference between Magento and OpenCart is the availability of tools and functions. Both of the platforms are well-suited for larger businesses, however Magento beats OpenCart in each and every aspect when it comes to flexibility, customizability, and built-in functionality.

1. Performance
2. Cost
3. Ease of Use
4. SEO and marketing tools
5. Extensions
6. Support
7. Security
8. Payment Methods
9. Inventory Management

Magento vs OpenCart Comparison Guide of 2024:

As the first thing, let’s do a feature comparison between OpenCart vs Magento.

1. Performance

Magento wins in this area against OpenCart as the online page loading time is 665 milliseconds and that for OpenCart is 831 milliseconds which is much high in comparison to Google’s recommendation for SEO.

Customers are very impatient these days and hence, a slow website will result in losing the customer and hinder the user experience of your store.

As per the study, it has been found that slow loading time has a negative impact on the shopping experience. Around 40% of the people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.

For Magento 2 store owners, there are also options for FREE extensions like Magento 2 Defer Parsing of Javascript that helps in defer parsing of Javascript for Magento 2 to speed up the store’s page load time and improve the user experience.

2. Cost

Magento and OpenCart both are open-source platforms, having similar operating costs. They are free to download and install but will incur hosting costs associated along with it. These additional costs include the cost of a hosting plan, a domain name, a good template, extensions, and an SSL certificate. You can select the best Magento hosting providers so as to experience the best positive returns.

Magento is a resource-demanding platform as compared to OpenCart. OpenCart has lightweight architecture and thus, OpenCart will have low hosting fees in comparison to Magento. Most Magento extensions can cost around $50 to $500, whereas, for OpenCart cost ranges from $10 to $489. The pricing structure may even vary for various development agencies and the features incorporated in it.

3. Ease of Use

OpenCart is a user-friendly platform that is easy to install and set up. It is even easier for beginners to use and manage things easily. You only need to have basic technical knowledge of hosting, FTPs, & security.

Magento is a robust eCommerce platform and installing Magento is itself a difficult task. If you are not an experienced developer, you will have to hire certified Magento developer or Magento development agency to do the job for you.

On the other hand, Magento 2 is optimized for larger online stores while adapting to simpler E-commerce units and OpenCart tends to work better for small to medium-sized websites. Use OpenCart if you are a small or medium retailer looking for a self-hosted solution that won’t break the bank. 

4. SEO and Marketing Tools

Search engine optimization is one of the critical aspects of any online store. To stand apart from this competition, you need to have powerful SEO tools. Magento and OpenCart both have powerful SEO options. Thus, optimizing your store with both these platforms helps to stand out from the competition with a superior SEO score.

OpenCart allows editing meta tags, adding 301 referrals, and rel canonical. It has certain limitations such as URLs is not supported. On the other side, it offers a number of extensions on its marketplace which will help to boost the performance of your store.

Magento 2 SEO features allow the store owners to customize their store design and SEO. It is mobile responsive and has many powerful tools for optimizing the content, analyzing the traffic, and much more.

Hence, OpenCart has certain limitations that can only be overcome by Magento.

5. Extensions

OpenCart has around 13,000 extensions available with unique features and themes. Whereas, Magento is designed for large eCommerce stores and is easy to integrate with the Magento backend. There are nearly 5000+ Magento extensions that allow you to add on extended functionalities as per your needs.

You can get everything in the Magento marketplace that is checked for plagiarism, security, and compatibility. OpenCart also has a huge number of extensions in the marketplace.

6. Support

Mainly, OpenCart provides two types of support to its users. They are provided with a community forum across the world for sharing their knowledge and experience. They also provide guaranteed support with monthly fees of $99.

Most open-source platforms are not provided with customer service. There is no live chat, email, or phone support for the users of Magento. There are around 300,000 active members in the Magento Community who share their technical knowledge. You can even ask questions related to your queries.

Or you may refer to the Magento blog that consistently posts solutions, tips, and tricks to improve the performance, security, and other aspects of the store.

Magento devdocs also provides a detailed guide that can help you with the installation, themes, and modules. Thus, you can only expect to have support from the community, not from Magento or OpenCart. OpenCart is provided with a supporting package but is quite costly.

7. Security

There are high chances of attacks as OpenCart is an open-source platform. As the internal code and framework are available to the public, so it becomes easy for hackers to detect and exploit their security vulnerabilities easily. It is also necessary to take care while using 3rd party extensions and using software of dubious origin.

Though Magento is an open-source platform, it offers rich security features. Store owners constantly 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.

Hence, Magento is robust and secure enough in comparison to OpenCart. And it is recommended to upgrade Magento 2 store to the latest version in order to leverage the latest security features. The latest Magento 2.4.6 version comes with 300+ quality fixes and 8 security enhancements for better performance!

8. Payment Methods

OpenCart offers more number of default payment methods in comparison to Magento. It is possible to integrate nearly 36 payment methods with OpenCart. Other payment methods can be downloaded from OpenCart Extension Dictionary. These extensions are PA-DSS compliant and hence, do not store any card details.

Magento offers PayPal, and Braintree by default, and other payment gateways can be even added through Magento Connect. However, the Magento 2 store owners can choose from the series of Magento 2 payment gateway extensions available in the market to offer various payment options to their customers.

9. Inventory Management

Magento and OpenCart both are capable of managing a larger inventory, having a huge number of features. Online stores need an inventory for managing a large database of products and hundreds of pages that a website has to handle.

Magento edges OpenCart, as Magento has more extensions and features that allow better handling of inventory. Accurate inventory management for your Magento 2 store is a must to fulfill the orders on time and Magento tops this field.

Conclusion

Magento is more powerful in comparison to OpenCart but requires a technical expert. And if you are running a large store with a high budget, Magento would be best for you. OpenCart is mostly used for beginners, is user-friendly, and is widely used for small businesses.

That was all for Magento 2 vs. OpenCart comparison guide. Hopefully, the difference between Magento and OpenCart will help you in the selection process. You can also checkout on 10 best Headless Ecommerce Platforms.

What are your thoughts about OpenCart vs Magento 2? Do let me know in the Comments section below.

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Thank you.

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• Magento Vs. Shopify
• Magento vs PrestaShop
• Magento vs BigCommerce
• Magento vs WooCommerce