Adobe Commerce (Magento) Vs WooCommerce
Adobe Commerce (Formerly known as Magento) and WooCommerce.
What is Adobe Commerce?
Adobe Commerce is one of the world’s leading digital commerce solutions for merchants and brands. Magento had a rebrand in April 2021, where Adobe decided to rebrand the platform to Adobe Commerce. Although the rebrand took place in 2021, Adobe had already been running the platform for a few years prior to this, were they acquired Magento in May 2018. Magento was initially released in March 31 (2008); In June 2020, Magento 1 reached end of life, were Adobe had officially announced they will no longer support the software. Prior to this date, they had been providing quality fixes and security patches for the platform, giving merchants plenty of time to upgrade to Magento 2, which was released in November, 2015. Magento 2 was introduced in order to provide significant performance and security improvements, as well as other feature-rich enhancements.
This featured-rich, highly advanced eCommerce platform is intended for businesses that want to expand their growth and deliver an extraordinary customer buying experience. It has multiple features for providing a seamless customer experience. It has become an omni-channel solution for Business-To-Consumer (B2C) and Business-To-Business (B2B) merchants looking for an enterprise edition.
Some popular features of the platform include:
- Order and product management
- Content management made easy with Pagebuilder
- Marketing Tools
- Business intelligence dashboards
- Customer segmentation
- Unlimited customisation
- Ability to integrate many 3rd party payment solutions
- Customer loyalty tools
- Related products, Upsell and Cross-sell functionality
- B2B features and many more
What is WooCommerce?
WooCommerce was first released in 2011 as an open source eCommerce Plugin for WordPress. It’s not a stand alone platform like Magento, and relies on a WordPress installation in order to use it. The plugin however shouldn’t be disregarded; It has many vital eCommerce features for small to medium business, such as secure payments, shipping integrations and inventory/tax management. WooCommerce is a very popular platform, with over 39 million downloads. It has became known for it’s simplicity to install and customise.
Some popular features of the platform include:
- Easy to install, setup and customise
- Relatively low cost
- Fully Customisable
- International support
- Content at the core
Adobe Commerce Vs WooCommerce
When deciding between the two options, it’s important to take some of the below factors into consideration.
Pricing
When it comes to pricing, Adobe Commerce has three options:
Open Source – This doesn’t require a monthly subscription; it’s completely free to download, install and setup. The only costs involved in this will be for the domain, domain name, SSL certificate, development time and extensions (optional).
Adobe Commerce Enterprise – This includes the cost of everything mentioned above in the open source option, although a yearly license fee is also acquired. The license cost depends on which additional features are included.
Adobe Commerce Cloud – As the name suggests, this is a cloud based package, which is the more pricey option of the three. This package makes use of all Adobe Commerce Enterprise features, but also benefits from Adobe’s cloud-hosted deployment model, meaning that you won’t have to look elsewhere for hosting as this is provided.
Unless you’ve chosen to go with Adobe Commerce Cloud, due to the scaleability of Adobe Commerce, it’s recommended to purchase a good hosting package to ensure the website has sufficient resources in order to get the best performance possible.
WooCommerce on the other hand doesn’t have any options available. It’s completely free to use, although it does also come with additional paid features which are completely optional. WooCommerce is the much cheaper option out of the two options due to the simplicity of customisation, although it doesn’t have the scalability Adobe Commerce offers.
Set-up
When comparing the two platforms, Adobe Commerce is considered to be more difficult to get setup and will require experience developers. WooCommerce has become known for it’s ease of installation, setup and customisation.
Customisation / Themes
When it comes to out-the-box themes available for free, and purchased themes off-the-shelf, WooCommerce has far more options available and there are a number of companies and individuals who sell custom themes. Magento does also have some free and paid for off-the-shelf themes, although they are far limited. Both WooCommerce and Magento allow you to create custom themes completely from scratch. When it comes to additional customisation of features, Magento is much more extensible, allowing full control over what additional features can be added to the store by adding additional modules. Magento also have many 3rd party extension providers who actively develop and maintain modules. Most of these extensions do come at an additional cost, although they are designed in such a way for relatively quick installation and setup.
Additional Features
Although both WooCommerce and Magento are fully customisable, Magento has the edge over WooCommerce here. Since Magento has a number of 3rd party extension providers, they are constantly releasing new extensions and features, as well as actively maintaining existing features to ensure they are working with the latest version of Magento software.
Security
Both the options provide security updates to ensure customers can safely purchase from any stores using the platform. Magento and WooCommerce (Including WordPress) both release frequent security updates every year. However, Magento has an edge over WooCommerce here, offering more advanced security features, dedicated patches to close any vulnerabilities that arise, as well as additional optional features such as Recaptcha and Two-Factor-Authentication (2FA).
Support / Community
With both of the platforms being open source, both WooCommerce and Magento rely on community via online forums as the first point of call. The community within both of these platforms is excellent.
SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) allows you to optimise your website ranking. SEO plays an important role within the website as this will be one of the leading factors to getting customers onto your website. Both of the platforms offer similar solutions, allowing you to easily edit each web page title, description etc.
Multilingual & Currency Support
Both of the platforms offer Multiple language support and multiple currency support to allow you to sell internationally. Out the box, Magento has some great features for this already in place; For WooCommerce however, an additional plugin to work with WooCommerce to offer such services has to be installed.
Payment Gateway Options
Both Magento and WooCommerce have most of the major payment gateways available to connect to your store. If a payment gateway solution isn’t possible from the out-the-box installation, both Magento and WooCommerce offer a way to integrate this via either an additional plugin (WooCommerce), or an additional module (Magento). Both the platforms have a number of 3rd party plugins/modules available to install.
Summary
Above we have highlighted some of the key aspects which are worth considering when choosing between the two options. It’s important to first determine the main purpose and goals you want to achieve from having an online store; this can then greatly steer you down the correct path to choose. WooCommerce may be a more viable option for smaller scale business, with it’s relatively low setup and support costs and ease of installation and customisability. Adobe Commerce is a much more advanced and well rounded platform for medium to large enterprises, offering powerful features and high security.
Final verdict: Adobe Commerce being our choice between the two; As your business continues to expand, this platform offers much more scalability, extensibility and flexibility to handle the increasing number of customers.