In this tech-savvy world, most businesses are shifting online to gain abundant advantages and survive in the market. Digital platforms allow these enterprises to easily market their products and brands to a much larger customer base.
Also, there are hundreds and thousands of eCommerce platforms as well as tools that can help retailers to serve different needs, budgets, and functionalities. There are a variety of options available in the market and newbies can be in a dilemma of where and how to start.
This entire blog is dedicated to different functionalities, weaknesses, and strengths of the two most popular platforms available in the market i.e. WordPress VS Magento.
WordPress – The Ace Of CMS
WordPress is a very popular open-source platform that has become one of the most popular blogging platforms and content management systems all across the globe.
The prominent reason behind the popularity of WordPress is its easy-to-use feature and amazing customization options. Here’s why WordPress is the cherry on the top CMS:
- Renders the flexibility to craft any type of blog ranging from a personal blog to a fully functional eCommerce website.
- It provides deep guidance, tutorials, and resources enabling you to get the fullest potential of WordPress.
- One can easily create a basic eCommerce functionality with the already available themes and plugins along with tons of features and styles on the website.
- Comes with an easy installation.
- Provides a huge community that is always ready to support you during the entire web development process.
You can rapidly build a website with WordPress even if you are a non-technical person or have no coding knowledge. All thanks to its rich library of plugins.
Magento – The eCommerce Powerhouse
Magento is also based on open-source technology just like WordPress. If WordPress is an ace for content creators or bloggers, Magento can be a paradise for business owners as it can be seen as an eCommerce powerhouse. IT can serve all business enterprises ranging from start-ups, small-scale businesses, to large enterprises. One can easily build and run a successful e-store with Magento.
Magento Open-source
- It’s a free version of Magento and can be downloaded completely free.
- It’s free to use, configure, or extend as per your requirements without any restrictions.
- It is meant for developers who have a strong Magento background i.e. in-depth knowledge of codes. This includes small businesses that may have in-house developers or can hire Magento developers for website development.
- Although it is free of cost, you have to pay for the hosting and additional costs to develop and maintain the website.
- If you have little or no coding skills, you need to hire developers for the entire process of building and managing a website.
Magento Commerce
- One needs to pay the license fee for Magento Commerce. It renders premium features to help large enterprises scale up.
- It comes in two versions: 1. Magento Enterprise and 2. Magento Enterprise Cloud.
- It provides more functionality along with advanced features for sales and marketing activities.
- You can simply get 24/7 support from the Magento technical team.
WordPress VS Magento – The Similarities
Both WordPress and Magento offer appealing design tools and other options, but both have an exceptional approach to building a top-class online store.
- Renders SEO-friendly and high customizable design options along with a huge support community.
- Both act as a powerful content management system, allowing enterprises to add, customize, and manage every piece of content and product in the most optimal manner.
- Both give the enterprise the option of building the website with a free or paid version.
- Both render a huge collection of extensions (Magento), plugins (WordPress), and themes to build a fully functional and personalized website.
WordPress VS Magento – The Differences
Although both the platforms have various similarities, they have some differences for good. You need to smartly select a platform to build your website and get the most out of it for your business.
WordPress
If you want a user-friendly web builder, there is no better option than WordPress. Check out these amazing stats:
- WordPress is the world’s most popular content management system powering 34% of all websites on the internet.
- WordPress powers 14.7% of the world’s top websites.
- 500+ sites are built each day using WordPress while only 60-80 per day are built on platforms like Shopify and Squarespace.
- The WordPress Plugin Directory features 55,000+ plugins.
- WordPress has a 60.8% market share in the CMS market.
WordPress simply understands its target audience and hence, a person with zero coding skills can build a beautiful and highly functional website using innovative tools. You can easily customize the website using different plugins and themes as per your preferences.
Magento
Magento websites are a little more complicated as compared to WordPress. Magento offers much more functionalities and advanced features to the client to help them boost their business.
- One must have coding experience. Without proper knowledge of Magento, you may find it challenging to use its tools in web development.
- It’s not recommended for the beginner’s level enterprises who are tight on pockets due to its complexities and coding issues.
- One needs to set up FTP and transfer the Magento Archive to their hosted system. Also, the entire installation process requires high coding skills.
- While keeping flexibility in mind, you can only use Magento to create eCommerce sites because it renders high specialization in the eCommerce capability.
Conclusion
For WordPress: It doesn’t offer advanced features of eCommerce capabilities like Magento. But, it’s a good start for those who need a simple user-friendly platform to work and sell.
For Magento: It’s a great option for creating a fully functional eCommerce website in the long run. It renders high-end features and extensions.
WordPress VS Magento – Security
WordPress
WordPress’s premium users can avail support from the Security Team whenever required. In fact, they don’t check all the themes and plugins. WordPress is developed on secured code which is regularly updated by its team. This process is entirely automated. Along with this, merchants can also schedule updates whenever there is a security patch. But, this auto-update feature is only available for paid WordPress packages.
Magento
Magento offers two versions:
- Magento Commerce: Fully-hosted website
- Magento Open-Source: Self-hosted and developed website
Magento can be easily accessed by the users as it comes with built-in security features. However, it’s not that easy for Magento Open-source users. The good news – you can select a suitable security extension out of the 750+ security apps. The quality of each app depends on the requirements and budgets ranging from $25 to $7000.
Security updates are sent to the merchants to reduce vulnerabilities and common issues. In short, Magento renders more security options than WordPress.
Conclusion
As long as users update their websites regularly to the latest versions, both WordPress and Magento are secure options.
However, it can be a little risky for WordPress users as there is an absence of built-in security features. On the other hand, Magento Commerce renders built-in security features that are great in eradicating some security hazards such as data/information leaks, unlawful transactions, malware attacks, etc.
Magento is very popular and known for its high-security features. Sadly, WordPress is recorded to have almost 90,000 attacks per minute. In one study, it was found there are 3,972 known WordPress vulnerabilities. Out of which,
- 52% are from WordPress plugins,
- 37% are due to core WordPress files
- 11% are from WordPress Themes.
WordPress VS Magento – SEO
WordPress
To build a powerful online presence for any business, WordPress enables enterprises to:
- Customize the image alt-text, meta descriptions, meta titles, headings, page titles, custom URLs, etc.
- You can simply choose from a spectrum of responsive and SEO-friendly themes.
- One can easily optimize a WordPress site with fully functional SEO plugins (both free and paid) while automating the website’s SEO processes.
- Some specialized plugins enable advanced users to deal with the website’s underlying code.
Magento
Magento renders a comprehensive eCommerce Solution and is different from a content-centric platform like WordPress. Its SEO Tools are not as optimized as WordPress’s SEO tools. Although, Magento renders its SEO tools kit that allows merchants to:
- Select user-friendly and responsive themes.
- Add and optimize metra description of all the product pages.
- Add alt-text to all the product images while optimizing the title.
- Develop an XML sitemap for clients’ websites.
- It also renders other SEO services
Conclusion
Offering a variety of basic and advanced features as well as tools to elevate a website’s SEO performance, both enable users to build a powerful online presence on different SEO experience levels.
WordPress VS Magento – Blogging
Every business website needs a blog to keep its audience engaged and updated about its products, services, and new launches. Here are some important statistics.
- 84% of companies have a content marketing strategy.
- Updating blog posts can increase traffic by 106%.
Today, blogs are very popular, and thus blogging is one of the top marketing tools to attract potential customers and retain the existing ones.
WordPress
WordPress was actually built as a blogging platform in 2003. Due to the increasing requirements of the users, it evolved and developed into a multi-approach CMS to attract a large audience.
WordPress is still one of the best blogging platforms as it offers a variety of built-in blogging features (standard to advanced).
As a content creator, WordPress allows you to:
- Easily create content for your blogs with a simple drag and drop feature. You can easily drag and drop buttons or images as per your preferences.
- It helps you to customize blogs by offering a lot of photos, layouts, and other different elements of the page.
- You can go through and select from thousands of WordPress themes and plugins available in the market to effortlessly meet your blogging requirements.
- It basically enables you to customize your blog section seamlessly and professionally.
Magento
Although Magento offers exceptional features to its users, its blogging features are not well-developed as compared to other sales and marketing tools. In short, you need a Blog extension to add a blog to your Magento store.
There are a variety of blog extensions and you can choose any – free or paid as per your preferences and business requirements.
Conclusion
WordPress is a better option if blogging, educating, and engaging the audience is your primary goal. Adding blogs and optimizing them on Magento is a bit challenging but can be definitely done through extensions and extra efforts.
WordPress VS Magento – Support
Both WordPress and Magento allow merchants to find solutions to their issues and challenges through multiple channels.
WordPress
Merchants can easily get support from WordPress’s Support Website like,
- New customers can get Video Tutorials to start with WordPress.
- One can access well-structured documentation anytime.
- It offers a business-focused email course to help build an entire business website.
- You get access to a standalone web page that simply explains how you can customize your WordPress site with different themes, drop-down menus, widgies, etc.
- You can easily connect with the support team with the help of the QuickStart Support Session. Users can simply access two complimentary 30-min sessions.
- The premium, business, and eCommerce plan users can access the Live Chat Support as well.
Magento
For Magento users, most of the professional support and help is received from the hosting providers or technical web developers and not from the platform. The main content of Magento Center offers different types of support:
- Announcement, Best Practices, and Support Tools
- Help Center Guide and Troubleshooting
- FAQs and How to
Along with this, Magento also offers its clients other sources of help like:
- Speak to Sales: 1-800-685-3624
- Users can submit a support ticket
- Magento Forums: Simply share your knowledge about the Magento’s informative tips and tricks while helping out other Magento professionals and enthusiasts.
- Technical Resources: Get access to step-to-step instructions, complete guidance, security updates, etc. on how to work with Magento.
- Developer Documentation: Simply cover each and everything you need to build and manage a successful Magento website.
- Partner Solutions: Here, you can easily find and reach out to Magento’s certified solution partners.
Magento Premium Users can access exceptional rich features along with 24/7 support services.
Conclusion
Both WordPress and Magento render high-end support to their users in the form of rich documentation and huge user communities where you can find answers to most of your difficulties.
WordPress VS Magento – The Pricing
WordPress Pricing Plans
WordPress offers five different types of pricing plans that could fit various requirements of its users. They are:
- Free plan: $0 for life – This is the best plan for getting started
- Personal: $7 for the monthly plan and $4 for the annual plan – This is best for your personal use.
- Premium: $14 for the monthly plan and $8 for the yearly plan – This can prove to be the best option for freelancers.
- Business: $33 for the monthly plan and $25 for the yearly plan – This is the best plan for small enterprises.
- eCommerce: $59 for the monthly plan and $45 for the yearly plan – This one is the best for online stores.
The below plan comparisons can give you deep insights into the pricing plan benefits and you can decide on your own based upon your requirements.
Magento Pricing Plans
The Magento Commerce version and Magento Commerce Cloud version’s pricing depends on the annual GMV (Gross Merchandise Value) and AOV (Average Order Value). For Magento Commerce users, the pricing can be around $20 and for Magento Commerce Cloud, it can go around more than $40.
For Magento Open-Source Users, the prices can go a little cheaper as it’s an open-source platform. But you need to build your website from a to z. The pricing will typically increase from web hosting, extensions, and the developers you hire for fixing any bugs or crafting codes in your website.
The image comparisons can give you deep insights into the difference between Magento Open-Source, Magento Commerce and Magento Hosted Cloud pricing plans.
Conclusion
WordPress is the king of content management systems. But pricing plays a major role in addition to its simplicity.
WordPress is the winner in terms of cost as compared to Magento. Though Magento is complicated and more expensive than WordPress, its Magento is crafted for intermediate and advanced web development.
The below image clearly shows the winner at different features:
| Feature | Winner |
| Ease Of Use | WordPress |
| eCommerce | Magento |
| Security | Both render high-end security. But Magento is the Winner. |
| SEO | Both are great to enhance your site’s SEO performance |
| Blogging | WordPress |
| Support | Both offer huge support services. |
| Pricing | WordPress is the clear winner |
| Flexibility | WordPress |
Use WordPress and Magento Together
It’s possible to get the best of both worlds. You can integrate 2 platforms to elevate your site performance. Without any doubt, Magento is the best eCommerce Solution. But i9f you need an alluring and top-class blog on your website to gain more traffic, WordPress is a perfect choice.
The Bottom Line
WordPress and Magento are secure web-building solutions and render unique features and functionalities to help businesses scale. It totally depends upon your requirements and preferences. You can simply decide what works best for your enterprise.
