How Magento Compares with Prestashop

 

The growth of Ecommerce in the year gone by has been nothing short of stupendous. Magento, Woocommerce and Prestashop have become household names with a large developer community adding functionality with extensions being written every day. The total revenue of B2C ecommerce sales worldwide in 2014 touched 1.505 trillion dollars in 2014 with 83% of online shoppers saying they were satisfied with their shopping experience.

Among the various ecommerce platforms used to build online stores, Magento, Woocommerce, Prestashop, and Zencart have been the most popular. Top 1 million ecommerce websites were surveyed in April 2014, the survey stated that Magento is the leading Open Source platform used to build online stores. In this article, we compare two popular and highly functional platforms Magento and Prestashop.

Magento

Magento is the most popular platform for ecommerce website development continuously for the fourth year. It is an Open Source platform that provides complete flexibility and control over the online business. It is an extremely feature rich ecommerce software that gives the developer real power over his website.

Some of the main features of Magento are

• Catalog management
• Advanced product filtering system
• Buyer account management
• Different payment methods
• One page checkout system
• 100% search engine friendly
• Control over multiple websites with multiple languages
  
  

Prestashop

 

Launched in Aug 2007, it is now one of the most popular ecommerce platforms in the world. It is also an Open Source ecommerce platform that offers lots of advance features for product management, store management, SEO, checkout and payment options.

• Product comparison
• Affiliate program
• SEO friendly URL structure
• One-page or multi-page checkout
• Payment gateway filtered by currency
• Coupons and vouchers and
• Order tracking
   

Comparison between the two

Magento requires a bit of skill and knowledge on the part of the developer to install, whereas Prestashop installation is much easier. Prestashop is also easier to customize than Magento. Magento also requires programming skills at an advanced level whereas a person with an intermediate knowledge of programming too, could begin to work on Prestashop. 

 

Magento has adopted the Zend framework of PHP and has all the capabilities of MVC architecture. Prestashop, on the other hand, has adopted smarty template based on PHP. Enterprises and store owners prefer Magento (which explains why it’s so popular), while developers and designers prefer Prestashop, owing to its ease of use.