Offering a convenient way to sell their products online, eCommerce has paved the way for several retailers worldwide, and the hype is well-deserved. Multiple trends are advancing the future of eCommerce too. Magento vs BigCommerce is a recent talk of the town, and both are standing face-to-face in the market.
Currently used by around 239,000 websites worldwide, Magento has made its place among the most trusted CMS brands. Whereas BigCommerce powers over 90,000 online stores.
Making the right choice can be one of the most sincere and sensitive decisions throughout your business journey, especially when you narrow down your options to two big titans of the market.
So, without wasting a minute, let’s skip to comparing Magento and BigCommerce keenly before you take any informed decision using several aspects, including security, accessibility, pricing, etc.
Magento:
Released in 2008, Magento is an open-source eCommerce platform presently acquired by Adobe. After WooCommerce and Shopify, Magento is widely popular, offering a range of features, including customizability and scalability making it appropriate for all business models. One can have enhanced security features and improved performance with its latest version, Magento 2.
Shipping and payment options, order management, and catalogue management make Magento accessible to any kind of business, providing effectiveness as a business solution. Moreover, if you are experienced in some coding procedures and have a larger inventory ready to sell mass products, Magento can own your business.
BigCommerce:
Inventory management tools, payment, and shipping integrations are some of the impressive features that BigCommerce, a Saas platform offers. Allowing easily manageable and continuously growing online stores, BigCommerce was introduced in 2009 and works on a subscription model.
Its simple user interface and easy drag-and-drop feature caught people’s attention and made it worth considering. Even less tech-savvy people also find it manageable.
If you value a straightforward setup and are required to sell on multiple social media channels, BigCommerce is right for you.
Let’s begin with a comparison right away!
Features:
With a generous range of features, Magento and BigCommerce have cut-through aspects.
Magento comes with key features to help your eCommerce store, including shipping to several locations within a single order and choosing from more than 3000 extensions, both paid and free.
What are some of the key built-in features of Magento?
- Staff accounts
- Abandoned cart recovery
- Catalogue management
- Gift card payments
- Customer logins
Apart from these, Magento is highly dependent upon extensions. Its inventory system is highly appreciated and comes with the following advantages:
- Stock management
- Revenue reports
- Multiple product variants
- Bulk product imports
Furthermore, Magento allows the integration of pre-order features, the addition of coupon codes, and the insertion of advertising banners with its app and extensions.
Coming to BigCommerce, it comes with the maximum built-in features. With a lot of built-in power, you are allowed to use more than 600 apps with BigCommerce. Let’s have a look over some of the impressive selling features of BigCommerce:
- SSL certificate – It encrypts the user’s data and allows safer payments.
- Dropshipping – It offers many dropshipping applications, like Printful and Spocket.
- Abandoned cart recovery – Recovery emails are sent to customers when they leave products in their carts.
- Multi-channel integration – BigCommerce has built-in integrations with multiple platforms, from Amazon to eBay. You can also sell across several multiple social platforms, including Facebook and Instagram.
- Analytics tool – Review sessions, sales, and campaigns.
Usability
Magento is more difficult to use when it comes to self management. Why? Because you must have coding knowledge prior. You may need some help with Magento as a beginner. Here BigCommerce is a clever winner. Yes, if you’re a beginner and not well-versed with this extravagant technology or not tech-savvy, simply going with BigCommerce will help you.
At the same time, some may struggle with its user interface and intuitiveness. Of course, you don’t have to be a tech expert to use BigCommerce, and you still need some time to learn its finer details.
Inventory or backend and storefront or front end are the two editing surfaces with BigCommerce. Bugs are continuously fixed, and there are a lot more improvements making BigCommerce more accessible to its worldwide users.
Pricing
Magento or BigCommerce comes with a subscription plan and is mixed bags. Looking at their pricing beforehand may help you to set your goals much easier.
Magento being an open-source platform, is accessible to everyone to use. Anyone can download it, and it’s highly friendly for small businesses and developers. You cannot expect millions of in-built features, and auxiliary plugins are your other options. It’s said to be free, but is this really wholly free? Hosting and paid extensions definitely need you to spend money.
Magento Pricing makes it a more expensive, advanced-designed option for a hosted Magento version. It is dedicated to serving enterprise-level businesses and allows you to maintain larger, more complex retail stores online.
There are three common pricing plans with BigCommerce.
Standard: If you own a small business, the standard plan is the accurate one for you. There is no limit to the number of products you can sell; round-the-clock support is available and comes with a coupon generator too.
With the Plus plan, you can store credit cards and avail yourself of the abandoned cart recovery feature.
Pro allows you to explore features like product search filtering, added Google customer reviews, etc. The price is higher for the Pro plan, of course, but it is suitable only for bigger ventures.
And you don’t have to dive in randomly to buy a plan! Yes, BigCommerce gives you a 15-day trial program.
Support
Magento is unbeatable when it comes to help and support. The security features are strong and the sales team is always available on calls, whereas forums are accessible for further support having every minute details.
Almost every question is answered there, and we are highly impressed with the tutorial, which is quite handy and easy to understand. At the same time, 24*7 support is absent, so you will have to rely on forums with FAQs. Sometimes, you may be stuck with a question if it’s very challenging. Who knows!
In addition, there needs to be more professional support with the open-source version.
With BigCommerce, live chat and 24*7 phone support are constantly available.
Themes and Designs
Magento has a single theme that is free out of 13 available themes . If you want to build your own theme from scratch, you’re good to go. Some sensitive coding is required! You may also need Magento developers to help you. Building a custom theme comes with a lot more conveniences. In case you are a confident coder or have someone by your side, Magento is a supercool option. Magento is flexible!
BigCommerce has more than 50 paid options, whereas 12 themes are free to use. You are able to customise and switch themes at any point and situation, providing flexibility and mobile responsiveness. The features are industry specific and a lot more accessible.
Magento vs BigCommerce: The Final Verdict
Depending upon multiple aspects, you can freely decide which one to choose, Magento or BigCommerce. With BigCommerce, any prior coding knowledge is not required, and all tools are placed in one place. It offers built-in features more in number and supports several payment options.
In contrast, Magento offers vast customisation and flexibility to design whatever you wish. Creative freedom is on the top with Magento.
But you need to be very well-versed with technology while working on the Magento platform as it is super tough to operate it as a beginner and a non-technical person.
Each option comes with pros and cons, and you have to decide to look at all certain aspects. There is no rush, take time, and come up with an option confidently. You can connect with an expert development company like Enterprise Monkey too to serve you with the best advice.