Magento and BigCommerce are great platforms in the e-commerce field. Both of them are well-known for their rich features, which offer almost everything you need to run a useful online store. But when it comes to Magento vs. BigCommerce, “which is better” is the big concern of many business owners.
- Magento: Magento is an open-source e-commerce platform. It allows you to customize the design to the functionalities, as much as you want, to achieve your dream store. However, it requires strong technical knowledge and experience to develop a Magento website, so that you will need Magento development companies or Magento developers.
- BigCommerce: Unlike Magento, BigCommerce is easier to use for beginners even when they don’t have the strong technical know-how. This out-of-the-box solution allows you to create and launch a new store quickly using ready-made themes. There is very little room for customization.
Magento vs BigCommerce: Design, Function & Price Comparison
1. Website Design
“Design creates culture. Culture shapes values. Values determine the future.” – Robert L. Peters
Web design is undoubtedly one of the most important factors of the online businesses’ success. It helps draw the attention of your customers and builds your brand image, and creates differences. Fortunately, there are many options when it comes to the website design provided by two platforms.
Magento: With Magento, you will build a unique storefront from scratch or utilize a ready-made theme. Magento provides two default themes (Luma & Blank). However, you cannot show it to your customers but get resources to develop your custom one. Besides, there are many beautiful Magento themes for you to choose from.
BigCommerce: This platform provides 10 free and 100+ premium themes to start. Moreover, there are up to 100 templates from other third-party providers that you can consider.
Magento vs. BigCommerce in terms of the design: As you can see, there are more readymade themes for Magento than BigCommerce. Magento theme is very flexible and easy for developers to customize the theme as you want. For BigCommerce, although you can only make simple changes using the drag-and-drop tools, you can learn and do it yourself.
2. E-commerce Features
Magento
Magento is a feature-rich platform. It will give your store a solid foundation and help you boost your sales. Besides, it also improves your online presence with various SEO and marketing tools.
Magento’s key features:
- Catalog Management: You can manage your products and product categories effectively by importing/ exporting/ editing products in bulk. There are different product types that you can create, e.g., simple, configurable, virtual, group, bundle. For each item, you can upload multiple images, set price and quantity, add a description, etc.
- Analytics and Reporting: Magento offers various types of reporting for you to keep track of your sales (invoiced/ refunded), taxes, abandoned cart rate, best-viewed/purchased products, stock status, coupon usage, and so on.
- Payment and Shipping: By default, Magento supports some popular payment gateways, including PayPal, Authorize.net, and Braintree and three prevalent shipping carriers, namely UPS, USPS, and DHL.
- SEO and Marketing: There is a wide range of tools provided to boost your sales, for example, setting up-sell, cross-sell, related/ featured products, promotional price, multi-tier pricing, coupon codes, free shipping. Also, you can generate SEO-friendly URLs to improve your site ranking on SERPs.
You can easily install advanced extensions from third-party providers or customize core Magento features. These features can be marketplace or multi-vendor.
BigCommerce
Like Magento, BigCommerce also offers various useful commerce features to build and manage your store effectively.
BigCommerce’s key features:
- Scalable Catalog: BigCommerce allows you to manage your product catalog within the intuitive control panel or get data from an external system via Catalog API.
- Shipping: This platform offers industry-leading rates with a broad portfolio of partners that are available to satisfy all of your shipping and fulfillment needs.
- Payment: With BigCommerce, you can provide your customers with multiple choices of digital wallets such as Apple Pay, Amazon Pay, PayPal One Touch.
- Analytics and Reporting: You will be able to track various indicators related to your orders, customers, marketing, and more thanks to BigCommerce Analytics Dashboard.
- SEO: You can edit URL keys to generate SEO-friendly URLs and edit Metadata and robots.txt file.
- Coupons & Discounts: There are surprisingly more than 70 native discounts and promotions to raise your sales.
Magento vs. BigCommerce in terms of provided features: Overall, Magento and BigCommerce offer a comprehensive solution to build and grow your store. However, many experts think that Magento features embrace more sides of e-business development and go deeper into every need.
3. Price
Finance should be one of the crucial things the stores consider when developing an online website. How much does it cost to start an e-commerce project? Let’s compare the pricing of Magento vs. BigCommerce.
Magento
- Magento Open Source (previously Community): This is a free version of the platform that majorly targets small-to-medium eCommerce businesses. More than 70% of Magento stores are built on this version because it has already provided almost everything you need to start an eCommerce website. It’s worth noting that besides the cost of using the Magento platform, you need to consider the cost of hiring experienced Magento developers/ Magento agencies to build your website. In general, it will cost from $3,000-5,000 to create a basic website using the Magento Open Source platform.
- Magento Commerce (previously Enterprise): Magento Commerce provides more advanced eCommerce functions, especially B2B features, for large enterprises. Based on your annual revenue that you can choose the Gold Support package that costs around $22,000 a year, or the Platinum Support package at a higher cost.
Contact us to get a detailed estimate for your project.
BigCommerce
- BigCommerce Standard ($29.95): This version is suitable for startups with sales revenue under $50k per year. It provides only basic features and requires the highest transaction fee (2.9% + $0.30¢ per transaction).
- BigCommerce Plus ($79.95): This package fits to develop small online stores that have annual revenue of up to $150k. There are four extra features compared to the first package and a lower transaction fee (2.5% + $0.30¢ per transaction).
- BigCommerce Pro ($249.95): This plan includes all features of the two first packages plus three more features (Google review, product filtering, custom SSL) with a reasonable transaction fee (2.2% + $0.30¢ per transaction)
- BigCommerce Enterprise (Unrevealed): If you want full features and competitive transaction fees, contact the BigCommerce team to negotiate the price.
Magento vs. BigCommerce in terms of price: At first glance, Magento website development is more expensive than creating a website on BigCommerce. However, if you go deeper, to have a website with a wide range of features provided by Magento Open Source, you will have to buy BigCommerce Pro or Enterprise version. Therefore, in the short term, BigCommerce is a cheap solution, but Magento might be more beneficial in the long term.
Magento vs BigCommerce: The Right Decision Is Yours
Both Magento and BigCommerce can bring about excellent e-commerce solutions for your business. If you are seeking a quick solution to create your website with a low overhead cost, BigCommerce might be what you need.
However, if you want to build a solid foundation for your store and pursue long-term profits, Magento is no doubt a better option. With over 6 years of experience in Magento development, we will help you to build quality Magento stores at an affordable price. Send your request to our email [email protected] to get a free estimate within 24 hours.
