Overview
What is Magento Open Source?
Magento Open Source is an ecommerce content management solution originally developed by Varien Inc and presently supported by Adobe. The Open Source product is for developers and merchants that is available as a free download, and supported with free upgrades…
Magento is a good foundation for your e-commerce platform!
Review of Magento by Agency Owner
Going Big? Go Magento!
If speed is at your core, try Magento Open Source!
Magento 1 & 2 - Free, great features, but very complex
A Decent Program for E-commerce/Subscription-based Start Ups
Our website runs Magento Open Source and is doing very well.
Great open source ecommerce platform
Too expensive and too cumbersome to use.
Magento Open Source Vs Other Website Management Tools
Use Magento Open Source If You Are A Medium-Sized Business Who Wants A Simple And Affordable Website
Magento Matured.
Magento is a Heavy Hitter; Make Sure You Can Carry It
Is Magento the Best eCommerce Platform? Opace Say Yes
Awards
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Popular Features
- Product management (28)9.595%
- Checkout user experience (28)9.090%
- Product catalog & listings (28)8.585%
- Mobile storefront (28)4.040%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Pricing
What is Magento Open Source?
Magento Open Source is an ecommerce content management solution originally developed by Varien Inc and presently supported by Adobe. The Open Source product is for developers and merchants that is available as a free download, and supported with free upgrades from the Magento Community.
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Alternatives Pricing
What is Adobe Business Catalyst (Discontinued)?
Adobe Business Catalyst was a cloud-hosted system for building and managing web content and online stores with a built-in CRM framework in addition to sales, service, and marketing features including eCommerce and Email Marketing tools. It has been end of life (EOL) since 2020.
What is PrestaShop?
PrestaShop is a free, open source e-commerce solution available under the Open Software License and officially launched in August 2007. The software is written in PHP and based on the Smarty template engine and is currently used by 165,000 shops worldwide. The PrestaShop group was founded in Paris,…
Features
Online Storefront
Features for creating an online storefront with a browse-able product catalog.
- 8.5Product catalog & listings(28) Ratings
Products are easy to browse; listings include descriptions, photos, 360-degree views, and/or videos.
- 9.5Product management(28) Ratings
Product catalog can be easily updated.
- 8Bulk product upload(26) Ratings
Admins can upload products in bulk using spreadsheets.
- 6.5Branding(26) Ratings
Storefront is part of a unified customer experience of the brand across channels (social media, physical store, website, etc.)
- 4Mobile storefront(28) Ratings
Customers can easily shop on mobile devices; storefront is responsive or mobile optimized.
- 9.5Product variations(26) Ratings
Products with variations or configurable options are easy to list and easy to browse.
- 8Website integration(24) Ratings
Integrates with an existing company website or blog.
- 6.5Visual customization(27) Ratings
Users can customize the look & feel of the storefront; storefront is visually attractive.
- 8.5CMS(26) Ratings
Beyond product catalog, includes basic content creation and management features such as blogging capabilities.
Online Shopping Cart
Features that facilitate the collection of items so that customers can purchase them as a group.
- 7Abandoned cart recovery(23) Ratings
Saves contents of abandoned carts and allows customers to purchase on a future visit; may send a reminder email to the customer and/or a report to the merchant to help convert abandoned carts into sales.
- 9Checkout user experience(28) Ratings
Easy for customers to view shopping cart and checkout; maintains a consistent, trusted look & feel.
Online Payment System
Features related to processing online payment for eCommerce purchases.
- 6.5eCommerce security(26) Ratings
Security measures are in place to prevent a breach of sensitive payment information.
eCommerce Marketing
Features related to marketing for eCommerce websites
- 5.5Promotions & discounts(28) Ratings
Includes tools for offering and redeeming coupons, promotional codes, and time-based discounts.
- 2.1Personalized recommendations(22) Ratings
Display or recommend certain products depending on the customer’s identity or shopping/browsing history.
- 5SEO(25) Ratings
The platform & templates help users create the right website infrastructure (pagination, page headers, titles, meta tags, url structure, etc.) to increase the site’s visibility in search engine results.
eCommerce Business Management
Features related to business management and administration of eCommerce operations
- 9.5Multi-site management(25) Ratings
Administrators can manage multiple storefronts or websites under one umbrella.
- 9.5Order processing(27) Ratings
Includes tools or integrations for order processing.
- 9.5Inventory management(25) Ratings
Includes tools or integrations for managing inventory.
- 8.5Shipping(24) Ratings
Includes tools or integrations for order fulfillment of physical products.
- 8.5Custom functionality(26) Ratings
Users are able to customize the functionality of their eCommerce operation with custom code or add-ons.
Product Details
- About
- Integrations
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Magento Open Source?
Magento Open Source Video
Magento Open Source Integrations
Magento Open Source Technical Details
Operating Systems | Unspecified |
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Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(128)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-24 of 24)An eCommerce beast to tame
- Modularity
- Great Community
- Updates
- Very step learning curve
- If not using it headless, the frontend uses old technologies
- The first setup can be problematic
Magento is a good foundation for your e-commerce platform!
- Free framework in widely used language (PHP) based on common database (MySQL)
- Has lots of developer support
- Has frequent security patches.
- Not the most performant when you want to scale up
- Does not have single page app support out of the box
- Does not have native mobile app support (yet)
Review of Magento by Agency Owner
- It is very good when it comes to search engine optimization as it makes a good use of keywords and tags to improve the SEO score. It increases the chances of ranking up of the eCommerce store in the search engine rankings.
- It makes the store in a very optimized way and despite being a very advanced system it is still very lightweight when it comes to website speed. The pages have a comparatively low loading time and a good speed.
- It provides a lot more advance reporting features which are very helpful for businesses to do their planning.
- It requires coding experience, so a non-tech guy cannot use it without special training.
- It requires a considerably large server for the smooth functioning.
- It requires a good amount of effort to do the initial setup which makes it a low priority option when it comes to stores that require fast development in a short time.
Going Big? Go Magento!
- Many out-of-the-box features
- Easily find plugins, especially with famous third-party services
- Built on well structured architecture
- It can be hard for developers to learn and use
- As there are many features in it, it can become "bloated" sometimes if not managed well.
- Non-technical savvy users might need some training to understand how it works, especially the admin side.
Magento is least suited for small projects, meaning e-commerce sites that are very simple and don't require that many features. Online stores that just have the basic buy and checkout features. It's also not suitable if you're not ready to hire expert developers to handle any issues or changes to the system that you need.
If speed is at your core, try Magento Open Source!
- Speed
- Scalability
- Open source
- No monthly cost
- You don't have to share any revenue for the sales that you make.
- Being simpler to change as developers can get costly.
- Having more built in SEO options.
- Does require specialized hosting to make it really fast.
- Installing updates could be easier.
- Setting up a staging site should be built into the backend although it's easy to set up from a hosting panel.
- Significant flexibility
- Information online for troubleshooting
- Cost-effective (free)
- Complexity can be prohibitive
- Can require accessing skill sets outside of company
- Magento 1 - retired - no flash support for uploading, editing pics
Companies that require extensive editing of parameters should expect an outlay of employee time, and perhaps outside programmers. Though the platform is free, it may require significant outlay of money to make it work appropriately.
- It's a decent system for a start-up company.
- A lot of extensions can work with it: billing, order management, customer communication, and payment processors to name a few.
- Highly customizable and reusable.
- For a normal user, there is a learning curve.
- Code clean up can sometimes be a headache.
- It's sometimes sluggish.
the products are created automatically through our ERP system. So we have custom Magento code to import our products on the frontend.
Our website is availlable in 7 languages.
- out of the box webshop
- api to allow for product inserts via code
- lots of plugins
- the content management is on pare with eg. WordPress
- plugins are not always of a good quality.
- major upgrades are not always plug and play.
Too expensive and too cumbersome to use.
- Fully customizeable
- Allows for creation of additional versions of the website for different client groups
- Too slow
- Very cumbersome to manage products
Magento Open Source Vs Other Website Management Tools
- Magento Open Source front end is easy to use. It is a fast way to get a website up and going.
- Magento Open Source has been around for a while, so it is easy to find themes for purchase.
- Although Magento Open Source can be customized, the themes are made using layers upon layers of folders to hold files. It takes a long time to learn the structure of the theme and it takes time to get anything customized on the backend to affect the website.
- Magento Open Source is also one of the slower loading website management tools. I've used many others, such as Shopify, 3D Cart, and BigCommerce. Magento Open Source feels like older software and getting specific functionality is easier on platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce, which both use apps.
Magento Matured.
- As a shopping cart platform, version 2 has matured fully. The built-in feature set is immense.
- Extensions -- there are extensions for virtually every need and vision
- Intuitive backend -- it's very easy to work with and find things-- again, in version 2. Order management is a breeze, and the level of customer data access that's built-in is huge.
- A clean modern front end -- from standard/simple templates to the more expensive paid templates, Magento websites are clean, clear, and they work very well.
- Cache management -- I think this should work better OOBE. Lots of manual flushing of caches, and tricky setup for automation.
- It's very expensive to develop on the platform -- it's time-consuming for me, and expensive when hiring outside people.
- Some things that are baked in, like shipping rates (USPS), can be improved to grab internet rates.
- Need more US-based extension developers and ways to work with them when code needs to be rewritten...
Magento is a Heavy Hitter; Make Sure You Can Carry It
- Flexibility of code - almost any part of the system can be customized
- Extensions - high availability of free and paid pre-built extensions
- Documentation - for the latest iteration (2.x)
- Multi-language/Internationalization
- Multi-store websites
- Updates - historically patches and updates, due to the frequent high customization, can be difficult
- User Experience of Management - managing the store is not as intuitive as some other systems
- Frontend Development and templating - while very flexible and modular, they are much more complex than many other systems
Magento Open Source is ideal for large e-commerce shops
- Scalability is excellent, Magento Open Source can handle hundreds, thousands, ten thousands of products.
- Inventory management is excellent.
- Excellent set of core features and extensions to expand and extend it are exhaustive.
- The community behind Magento is top-notch.
- Magento can be difficult to learn for a non-technical person, and requires an experienced developer to set it up properly.
- To really get the most of out Magento, you must run it on on a dedicated server with extensive server customizations.
- Not really geared for small shops - I don't recommend it for little e-commerce websites.
Apparently Open Source means lower publishing standards. Be prepare to hire a software developer.
- Magento 2 CE has a very robust document workflow which mirrors most mid-large ERP systems. There's a "papertrail" which mimics your business processes, and each part of the process is exposed to the API which makes for some great integration potential.
- Magento 2 CE is also great for tracking customer history, saves a record for each and allows you to understand customer interests better.
- Magento 2 CE is highly expandable, with a full marketplace of free and premium modules that should accomplish some pretty niche sales or service goals.
- Magento 2 community is full of known and new bugs with long-pending pull requests and the community is on the hook for changes. Submit an very obvious issue to the github repo, and you will likely be met with a "this is open source and you use at your own risk." I counter this poor attitude with the fact that open source community has standards, and we do not label a "release" until those standards are met. Otherwise it's just a alpha, beta or numbered build. We don't release obviously bad software until it's fully working.
- Magento is expensive to maintain. You will need a well-paid php developer with apache and hosting knowledge, or you will have to hire an external firm. Either option will turn your website into an additional $100k/yr cost center, so you'd better be ready to ramp up sales. Every feature update or bugfix in the past year has uncovered more bugs, which my devs fix, but at the cost of timelines and billed hours way outside of my budget and target dates.
Magento - the developer's choice in e-commerce platforms
- Magento is fully extendable so that you can accomplish any special needs for a client without having to build a custom site.
- Magento is powerful and fast on the proper web server. It can handle a huge number of products and customers successfully.
- Magento has a very flexible catalog structure so that you can sell most any type of product or product combination.
- Magento is easy to integrate with other systems.
- Magento is great for non-technical people to be able to update content, as it's also a full CMS system.
- Magento is well known for its bugs in early releases of each version. Luckily, there is a great community always providing temporary fixes and patches.
- Magento should allow you to add user-defined fields for customers. It allows you do do this for products, but for customers, you must be able to program in order to create user-defined fields.
- Magento should have built-in support for dimensional shipping methods. I think in general the shipping integrations are weak. Most people need to purchase add-ons to get really accurate shipping rates.
Scalable but expensive to customize
- Magento scales very well. That means if you keep adding more products, there's no significant performance decline. This sounds like a very technical and unuseful thing but actually it's very important and depends heavily on the type of eCommerce solution you are providing. In our case, we were supposed to have many products (+15,000) so we never have many scale issues with it.
- Exporting information works reasonably well. It is relatively fast and has decent built-in capabilities.
- Attributes are well built considering other eCommerce options. It's very flexible and you can modify many things, including brands, easily.
- Multistore (differente languages/places) seems to work fine but we didn't use it. I'm just referring to what I've read
- The community around Magento is very poor compared to other software. We migrated to WooCommerce and definitely there's more support there. More plugins, extensions, developers, etc., and at a reasonable price. This is one of the key points why we migrated. Magento is very expensive and slow to develop here. For WooCommerce there are plugins for everything, from popular analytics software to loyalty. This is a HUGE point to consider.
- Debugging is painful. Some times you get an error that shut downs your entire store, and why did it happen? No clue. There's no documentation, there are 20,000+ files and at least for us, the framework on which it is built is not that user-friendly. This is expensive and there are not that many options compared to other software.
- Changing the design or making changes is also very hard, because of the framework, the many files, and how complex Magento is.
Beware that the road will be painful: expensive developers (and not that many), little support or documentation, and hard to change the design to suit what you want to do. If you want to start a small store without many problems and don't have much budget, just go with WooCommerce. It's easy, fast and works pretty well for basic stuff (we had to invest some in scaling it, but now it works great.)
Our site would not exist without Magento Open Source
- Magento Open Source allows us to manage thousands of products in an easy to view and edit manner. We can make bulk changes to hundreds of products when necessary in just a few minutes.
- Magento Open Source is incredibly flexible from a developers perspective. We have been able to develop many custom solutions that Magento Open Source didn't offer out of the box without any difficulty.
- Magento Open Source allows us to pull reports very quickly. The product grid screen (Manage Products) allows you to customize the data columns you see which allows you to pull a report of just the data you want. We use this multiple times per day to see data on our catalog.
- Magento Open Source makes it very easy to set URL redirects when we change product pages or category structure. This is incredibly useful in our daily use of Magento.
- Like I mentioned previously, Magento Open Source allows us to develop custom solutions for areas where it did not offer a feature out of the box. While the ease of development is good, had these features been available out of the box, it would have been even better.
- We occasionally find that some third party vendors do not work well with Magento Open Source. We have had to come up with work-arounds or abandon certain vendors all together because of our use of Magento Open Source.
- This isn't really a drawback of Magento Open Source itself, but finding developers that are familiar with Magento can be difficult.
- When you are first getting familiar with Magento Open Source, navigating the menus can be very intimidating. There are seemingly hundreds of pages and tabs in Magento and until you are familiar with it, you can very easily get lost.
The best platform for large-scale e-commerce but maybe not the best for hobbyist or startups.
Magento has allowed us to build sophisticated and feature-rich stores for clients who are looking to sell their product online. It is easy to set up, easy to maintain and reasonably easy to navigate.
- Magento makes it easy to build out sophisticated pricing options as our clients usually have a complicated pricing structure.
- For the most part, setting up Magento is easy and straightforward. It's a lot easier than the old days of custom coding.
- The newly designed UI is so much easier to use. With the old design, we found it difficult to navigate and so did our clients. The newly designed UI is a huge improvement.
- I am not a big fan of the extensions directory and all of the paid upgrades. There are some basic features that I feel should be included but you have to pay for. By comparison, WooCommerce is better in that regard.
Powerful ecommerce solution
- Compared to other solutions, Magento has far more control over exact nuances of e-commerce such as discounting, customer segmentation, and multi-site control.
- Magento as a whole is reliable and can be made very fast thanks to built-in fullpage caching on Magento 2.
- Magento is scalable and can handle huge traffic, or it can be built for a small site.
- Small bugs and issues affecting performance could be handled more quickly, but the rate of bug fixes and improvements is much better now than it used to be!
- The built-in image lightbox uses an extension that is no longer supported. This could be improved.
- Extensions from "certified developers" are often buggy or extremely unreliable. A better certification process for third-party extensions could save a lot of time and stress for users.
Magento is a robust but complex e-commerce solution
- Comes with APIs built-in
- Lots of extensibility and customizability
- Can handle a very large product catalog
- Magento is complicated to use and has a high learning curve from a management user point of view.
- We found it difficult to upgrade when newer releases came out.
- The front-end templating system seems needlessly obtuse and is difficult to develop. Smaller front-end elements are individual files and layouts are controlled through XML files.
- As stated before, it's open source and it's free.
- Magento CE is scalable as you continue to grow your online business.
- It is high performance, and highly scalable.
- A key benefit to being open source is that there's a large community and plenty of developer support.
- If you have a large number of products, performance will degrade continually. 10-20 products is no problem but 20,000 or more and there's a noticeable slowdown.
- Your site will not load quickly with community edition.
- It's difficult to roll back changes if you make a modification by mistake. Backup/restore options are not great with CE.
- Out of the box product display allows for you to quickly get your products shown to the consumers
- Customizable product options allow for a wide variety of selection of products
- Customizable payment and shipping options allow for many different use-case scenarios for the consumer.
- It is still using a lot of xml for it's configuration which can make things complicated.
- Updating has gotten better, but very specific requirements make it difficult at times.
- Very specific requirements for installing also make it difficult.
- It is a great solution for mid to large sized E-Commerce companies who want to quickly get their product to market
- It's cost effective as there are a number of extensions available extending the capabilities of the system.
- The websites created using Magento CE are responsive and ready to set up. Just upload a few products and modify some colors and you're good to go.
- One feature of Magento CE that I feel needs improvement is with the structure of the system. Many of the important SEO factors like minifying the CSS files don't work without causing some issues on the site. It does take someone skilled to get a site working properly. It's not built for the novice in mind.
Magento CE Solves SMB E-commerce Needs
- Flexibility to add or enhance functionality as needed.
- Great assortment of inexpensive add-ons and designs, although care should be taken to insure compatibility and use.
- Low cost of entry relative to other robust systems.
- Despite its popularity, successful implementation requires not only an in-depth experience with Magento, but true knowledge of how e-commerce works. It is a complex platform with poor, Magento-provided documentation.
- Many — you could almost say "most" — of the add-ons created for Magento are not of great quality. There are plenty that are, but you have to be very careful.
- Designers may feel overwhelmed by the complex template structure.