The two platforms acquire a large market share and are a go-to option for most merchants. BigCommerce and Magento will help you get on your feet in e-commerce and offer comprehensive out-of-the-box amenities to encourage an interactive commerce experience. But they have a few additional aspects that make retailers substitute one platform with another.
This blog will walk you through the different aspects of stylishster the two platforms regarding their price, security, design flexibility, and user-friendly interface so you can find a worthy partner to bet your gold coin on.
About BigCommerce
BigCommerce is a software-as-a-service platform for burgeoning businesses. Conventionally focused on server message block protocol with <50 million USD in gross revenue, BigCommerce’s market share is 0.4% with 49,907 online e-commerce.
BigCommerce technology stack depends on multiple plugins, MySQL database, and a PHP-based platform. The platform works on a subscription model, with the monthly charges starting at 29.95 USD.
Advantages
- Economical for small-scale businesses
- Easy user interface
- Comprises several features.
Disadvantage
- Additional BigCommerce extensions and add-ons can cause unnecessary expenses.
- Limited customisations
- Limited free themes options
About Magento
Announced a leader by the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for tishare Digital Commerce, Adobe Commerce or Magento is an open-source e-commerce channel for enterprise and midsize-level
B2B and B2C companies with more than 50 billion USD in gross revenue.
The vendor offers paid Adobe Commerce and free Magento Open Source solutions. It’s always been one of the most personalised solutions in the market, and Magento’s acquisition by Adobe enhanced the platform consolidation capabilities even further.
Advantages
- A variety of customisation options
- Comprises several features
- Scalability
Disadvantages
- Development is complicated
- Customization consumes time
- Expensive
Comparison of BigCommerce and Magento
Now that you’ve made it to a precise BigCommerce and Magento comparison, find a list of aspects to consider before building your store on any of the two platforms.
1. Pricing
Value for money is vital to get an excellent e-commerce solution.
BigCommerce pricing has four levels starting from 29.95 USD a month. The tricky part about them is the subscription plan allocation based on your yearly income.
Once you scale and achieve specific annual sales thresholds, you become eligible for the advanced subscription plans.
You can still avail of a 15-day trial period. But watch out for some associated expenses while building a BigCommerce store, such as the partner support fees, add-ons, paid themes, SSL certificates, and domain.
While Magento Open Source offers free e-commerce solutions, the vendor charges license fees for advanced solutions. Adobe Commerce Edition will cost you more than twenty-thousand dollars every year. In addition, Adobe Commerce Cloud will cost you more than forty thousand dollars annually. The latter two e-commerce solutions unlock advanced features so that you might spend less on Magento modules and add-ons.
2. Features
Bigcommerce and Magento offer uncommonly advanced features that are enhanced with third-party systems and modules.
Because BigCommerce does not allow extensive customisation, the vendor offers a sturdy set of features to create a website for and run your e-commerce site successfully.
Popular BigCommerce platform features list:
- Website Builder
- Inventory and Payment management
- Analytics optimisation and SEO
- Product Catalog
- Marketing tools
- Social Media Marketing
- Merchandising and Products
- Bundling and Product options
- Mobile-optimized store
- Multi-currency support
- Personalised fields
- In-store search
- Google AMP on category and product pages
- Cross-channel commerce and Social media integration
Adobe Commerce is no clock-watcher. On top of configuration options, Magento boasts a wide array of uncommon features, including-
- Conversion, promotions, and Marketing tool
- Site management
- Search Engine Optimization
- Catalogue management
- Product Browsing
- Catalogue Browsing
- Shipping, payment, and checkout
- Order management
- Client accounts
- Client service
- International support
- Reporting and Analytics
- Mobile commerce
3. SEO
Unless your business ranks up on the first page of search engine results, consider yourself out of the e-commerce business. Fortunately, you have robust SEO tools in Magento and BigCommerce to rank high on Google and other search engines.
BigCommerce has all the required tools to make your e-commerce platform Google-friendly. You can customise URLs, edit meta descriptions and page titles, and add alt text to images. You can even create a Google sitemap and BigCommerce robots.txt file to make the web crawlers index your page faster.
With BigCommerce, retailers can also access a feature called SocialShop that helps them post advertisements directly on Twitter, Pinterest, and Facebook.
Adobe Commerce’s (Magento) e-commerce platform boasts of its SEO-friendliness, particularly in terms of technical SEO.
Besides robots.txt file, metadata, and several other Magento SEO configurations also offered by BigCommerce, a retailer can access Magento source code and optimise it for multiple search engines.
Additional settings of Schema.org and Auto-Generation also help to set themes for product metadata and enhance the SEO rankings of your e-commerce website faster.
4. Security
The biggest loophole of e-commerce is security issues. So your chosen platform should at least comply with Payment Card Industry security standards. This way, you can protect your customers’ confidential data in the face of cyberattacks happening every day.
BigCommerce security is ISO/IEC27001 and level 1 certified PCI certified, ensuring that every financial transaction is encrypted. BigCommerce also provides paid and free SSL accreditation in its pricing plans. BigCommerce safeguards the e-commerce stores built on its platform by using several security layers to avoid unauthorised access.
Does Magento offer security to customers? Adobe Commerce provides customers with robust security solutions. It complies with PCI security standards and supports cutting-edge technologies such as Symphony, PHP 7, Composer, and the consolidation of SSL certificates. A retailer can consolidate Magento security add-ons to protect their e-commerce platform from cyberattacks. The platform frequently launches security patches to safeguard the framework from cyberattacks.
5. Ease of Use
Here we begin with the biggest trump card of BigCommerce: the e-commerce store-building process is much more convenient than that of Magento. It does not require any prior programming knowledge; you only have to adhere to the instructions on your screen and drag & drop the components of your upcoming e-commerce website.
More advanced BigCommerce pricing plans provide fantastic customer service to help you out. Admin dashboard is divided between the backend (inventory) and frontend (storefront), so you can configure these two components separately.
To build an e-commerce platform on Adobe Commerce, you must have profound knowledge of JavaScript, Java, PHP, CSS, and HTML programming languages and technical expertise in the platform. That’s the price to pay for advanced customisation features.
At first glance, the Magento Admin dashboard can appear to be non-user-friendly. But as you know all such areas of customising your storefront as order analytics, product page view, and SEO settings, website management becomes quite forthright.
6. Payment alternatives
A payment gateway is a feature in an eCommerce website builder that allows e-commerce websites to accept payments through credit or debit cards within the existing software. BigCommerce and Magento offer a first-class selection of payment gateways, allowing your customers the facility to select the most relevant one.
BigCommerce supports almost forty payment gateway options, including Authorize.net, Amazon Pay., Stripe, and more. With BigCommerce payment gateways, you need not bear the expenses of transactional charges for any of its pricing plans.
However, BigCommerce doesn’t support such payment methods as SEB, Swedbank, etc., usually used in local markets.
Adobe Commerce supports only three payment gateways out of the box: Authorize.net, Braintree, and PayPal. Additional Magento payment methods can be unified through API, including Amazon Payments, Stripe, Square, etc.
The API-based framework of Magento resolves the problems BigCommerce can’t: local payment methods to fulfil the consumer requirements in a specific market.
Which Is Better: Magento or BigCommerce?
There’s no clear winner in the competition between BigCommerce and Magento. These are both top-notch solutions targeting two distinct types of retailers. Your platform selection should depend on your tech background, business growth, budget, and requirements.
Select BigCommerce if:
- You operate the business on a tight budget and need a development team to handle your e-commerce administration and infrastructure.
- Your search for a convenient framework and a fast go-live solution.
- You manage sales through several marketing channels, including social media, and want an upper hand through the BigCommerce marketing features.
Select Magento (Adobe Commerce) if:
- You emphasise customisation and aspire to provide customers with unique functionality and web design.
- You are keen on conducting experiments and have adequate technical and financial resources to build your e-commerce store.
- You offer thousands of products in your catalogue and aspire to engage in headless or Omni channel commerce.
- You are the owner of a B2B e-commerce platform and aspire to build a B2C-like shopping experience for customers.
You can also consider Fynd Platform as an eCommerce solution for your website if you are looking for something cheaper and something that offers more features than these two platforms.
Conclusion
Depending on your business goals and requirements, BigCommerce and Magento may reach the same total cost of ownership in the long run.
Even though BigCommerce offers economical pricing plans, you might spend a lump sum on BigCommerce custom features, themes, and add-ons. On the contrary, you need not spend extra bucks on custom features with Magento.
