Drupal vs. nopCommerce

If you want to set up a basic Not For Profit (NFP) Membership system and content base, Word Press is easier than Drupal. However, if you have specific needs that require a fair bit of customisation then Drupal is the best CRM available. If the webmaster is confident with PHP and SQL, Drupal allows a lot of creativity.

Incentivized

nopCommerce is an ideal solution for businesses that want to tailor the customer journey for discovering and purchasing products. The nopCommerce solution is designed to adapt to you, not the other way around. The platform works best when you partner with a solution provider like ourselves. It also works well if you have a team of in-house .NET developers. A one-person shop will likely find less value in a platform like this if they're looking to spin up a small ecommerce site with just a few button clicks.

• Drag and drop functionality is easy to use
• Easy to switch between straight text and HTML content
• Ability to easily have multiple environments so that pages can be built in b/c-stage before they are approved and published
• Solid user experience where it's clear how to navigate the platform

Incentivized

• As I came from Microsoft .Net technical experience with more than 15 years in IT industry, the nopCommerce .Net based open sourced framework is the best eCommerce framework in terms of architectural perspective - such as incorporating with Entity Framework code first approach, Domain Driven Architecture, using ASP.Net MVC, Unit Testing, ...etc.
• When my client asked for an eCommerce portal, the whole team was struggling from designing a database to identifying the requirements. nopCommerce has everything we need. All the industrial standard eCommerce features are included. It saves hours of database design, application design and also the client's requirements are easily fit into nopCommerce's features.
• The cost of nopCommerce- the last time we paid was a $200 one time cost for using the production site. It was ridiculously cost effective. As it is opened source, the whole community is supporting and constantly making this framework better and better.
• I set up a web site within a week using nopCommerce to sell my own products online. It was so easy to use, deploy, and set up.

Incentivized

• This is not an easy CMS to work with if you don't have a good understanding of website development. It isn't "plug-and-play" like Wordpress or Shopify.
• Over time, doing major updates to the system can be taxing, especially if you aren't well-versed enough in doing system updates in line with your "child" theme and code.
• The CMS can become somewhat cumbersome with server resources if not carefully optimized while you build and customize it to your liking.

Incentivized

• More community templates would be great.
• Some of the pricing can be a bit tricky, especially configured items... there is a likelihood of mispriced items with the current structure

Incentivized

The time and money invested into this platform were too great to discontinue it at this point. I'm sure it will be in use for a while. We have also spent time training many employees how to use it. All of these things add up to quite an investment in the product. Lastly, it basically fulfills what we need our intranet site to do.

As a team, we found Drupal to be highly customizable and flexible, allowing our development team to go to great lengths to develop desired functionalities. It can be used as a solution for all types of web projects. It comes with a robust admin interface that provides greater flexibility once the user gets acquainted with the system.

Incentivized

Drupal itself does not tend to have bugs that cause sporadic outages. When deployed on a well-configured LAMP stack, deployment and maintenance problems are minimal, and in general no exotic tuning or configuration is required. For highest uptime, putting a caching proxy like Varnish in front of Drupal (or a CDN that supports dynamic applications).

Drupal page loads can be slow, as a great many database calls may be required to generate a page. It is highly recommended to use caching systems, both built-in and external to lessen such database loads and improve performance. I haven't had any problems with behind-the-scenes integrations with external systems.

Incentivized

As noted earlier, the support of the community can be rather variable, with some modules attracting more attraction and action in their issue queues, but overall, the development community for Drupal is second to none. It probably the single greatest aspect of being involved in this open-source project.

Incentivized

I have asked numerous questions and the team treats my random questions as if they are critical to the continued success of their product. They really take each users' questions to heart and strive to solve them. I cannot commend them enough on how fast they respond to questions as well as the follow-through given to things thay may or may not even be a part of their platform.

Incentivized

I was part of the team that conducted the training. Our training was fine, but we could have been better informed on Drupal before we started providing it. If we did not have answers to tough questions, we had more technical staff we could consult with. We did provide hands-on practice time for the learners, which I would always recommend. That is where the best learning occurred.

The on-line training was not as ideal as the face-to-face training. It was done remotely and only allowed for the trainers to present information to the learners and demonstrate the platform online. There was not a good way to allow for the learners to practice, ask questions and have them answered all in the same session.

Plan ahead as much you can. You really need to know how to build what you want with the modules available to you, or that you might need to code yourself, in order to make the best use of Drupal. I recommend you analyze the most technically difficult workflows and other aspects of your implementation, and try building some test versions of those first. Get feedback from stakeholders early and often, because you can easily find yourself in a situation where your implementation does 90% of what you want, but, due to something you didn't plan for, foresee, or know about, there's no feasible way to get past the last 10%

Incentivized

Go for a plugin based development if you would like to extend nopCommerce. This approach will make it easier for you to upgrade the software.

Drupal can be more complex to learn, but it offers a much wider range of applications. Drupal’s front and backend can be customized from design to functionality to allow for a wide range of uses. If someone wants to create something more complex than a simple site or blog, Drupal can be an amazing asset to have at hand.

Incentivized

NopCommerce offers you more flexibility where it comes to customization and scaling your application. The customization and extension is easy as well as the theme and plugin structure adds a large value to the overall system. The API's introduced by nopCommerce makes it more efficient when it comes to integrations and developing a mobile application on top of your eCommerce platform. The customer owns 100% of the source code without any extra fee.

Drupal is well known to be scalable, although it requires solid knowledge of MySQL best practices, caching mechanisms, and other server-level best practices. I have never personally dealt with an especially large site, so I can speak well to the issues associated with Drupal scaling.

Incentivized

• Given the endless possibilities that Drupal can have, we tend to have great support going on when we get a website launched
• It has become much much faster and easier for us to launch a new project due to reusability
• Configuration management in Drupal helps greatly with CI/CD, saves us costs

• It has been our sole platform for developing online stores for the last 9 years and our business have been growing year to year.
• The disadvantage of nopCommerce is that it is not as well known as other competitors, which makes it more difficult to sell.