PrestaShop vs Magento which is better for e-commerce

The most widespread shopping platform. There is no need to say anything more. You all know this shopping cart. It’s Magento! 

One of the most user-friendly and easy to operate shopping carts. It’s PrestaShop! So, let’s get ready to rumble!!!

Who is where

It is an open source and free to download shopping cart. Magento community is extremely big and includes around 375 000 of people. More than 100 000 of Internet shops are based on Magento. The platform is available in 60 languages and this number continues to grow! Incredibly, but it seems that at the moment Magento is one of the best options and it definitely wins the first round.

Don’t forget that PrestaShop is also an open source platform. And it is available in more than 40 languages. At the moment more than 50 000 of Web stores are using this platform. This number is constantly growing from year to year with amazing speed. And what is even more important all users agree that PrestaShop has far more user-friendly and flexible interface. If we take into consideration that PrestaShop is almost six years younger than Magento you will understand that it is incredible result.

Which are best part of them

• Both platforms have a wide selection of product management tools that include: product, order history and customers management systems.
• Both carts support a great number of payment gateways that include: PayPal, Google Checkout, Authorized.Net and other.
• A variety of available PrestaShop modules makes it very simple in development and administration. However, some of these modules are quite expensive.
• PrestaShop is very simple in installation, but the number of basic features is considerably less when compare it to Magento.
• PrestaShop software is much smaller in MBs and it has lower system requirements. However, Magento offers better out-of-the-box feature set.
• Magento is more useful for big scale Internet stores while PrestaShop will better suit small and middle sized companies.
• Magento offers better SEO features. However, PrestaShop has emphasized its search capabilities since its launch.
• Magento definitely has bigger user community. While PrestaShop provides customers with an official support. Users also share their experience and advices on the PrestaShop Forum.
• Magento store needs a very good hosting environment. It means that you will have to pay extra money for a good server.

Verdict

PrestaShop and Magento showed that they have both advantages and disadvantages. Presta shopping cart is much easier in installation and operating. It will perfectly handle with your Internet store if it is small or middle sized. However, the number of product items is almost unlimited. Which means that if you have enough skills and experience you can also manage a big Web store based on this platform. PrestaShop can become a good solution for a beginner to start-up his business. Nevertheless, experienced user will also find PrestaShop shopping cart very useful. At the same time Magento can be a very good solution for a big Internet store with a very wide range of items. New updates that are available for Magento can help you make your business successful.

Users decision

Both platforms are standing on their feet with their heads proudly raised. It is up to you to decide which of them is better for your business requirements.

Some more technical comparison

There seems to be growing anger with magento as the community is slowly and painfully discovering that varien, the company behind it isn't so much interested in championing a reliable open source product, than to create a community that would require extensive commercial support.

In the 2 days that I've been researching magento, the amount of negative feedbacks that I've heard and the code quality is more than enough to steer me away. After having a look through the source, I believe the intended basic architectural principles were decent, but the execution is wrong. Many PHP programmers see OOP and call it good software. I'm reasonably well versed with the Zend Framework and am generally reluctant to refer to any code as bloat, but in this case I have few other choice of word. Magento seems to uses some Zend libraries, but the relationship doesn't warrant good quality code. Don't take my word for it, here's some evidence. I decided to follow a request to see what happens during a call to one of the action controllers, so I tried to trace calls made within the Mage_Adminhtml_Customer_GroupController::indexAction method, starting with a call to $this->loadLayout(). Pretty self explanatory right, we're loading a layout. Lets see where it takes us. The following illustrates a single thread in that one call, where each line represents a call to a new method from the preceding method:

    Mage_Adminhtml_Customer_GroupController::indexAction
        Mage_Adminhtml_Controller_Action::loadLayout
            Mage_Core_Controller_Varien_Action::loadLayout
                Mage_Core_Controller_Varien_Action::addActionLayoutHandles
                    Mage_Core_Controller_Varien_Action::getLayout
                        Mage::getSingleton                               
                            Mage::getModel
                                Mage::getConfig
                                    Mage::registry

I repeat, we're following a single thread from within one call to $this->loadLayout(). In real time each call to a method would likely initiate multiple threads as they fork and each action would likely have multiple method calls. Is anyone still surprised as to why magento would be so slow? Just because it's OOP, doesn't necessarily mean this is good. This code looks like something meant to be compiled (therefore reduced), but PHP is (for the most part) a "just-in-time" technology, you should refrain from doing this sort of things.