iSpring Market vs. Magento Open Source

iSpring Market is suited for small organizations with limited staff and limited IT resources. Allowing users to self-register is a huge time-saver for small organizations. SEO, Google Tag Manager and SSO are included and easy to set up. For the most part, the documentation is good and the help desk provides timely customer service. iSpring Market is not the best tool for larger and more sophisticated organization. It's extremely difficult to get global reporting data, it doesn't import data from other systems, and it only exports a limited amount of data for use in other applications such as business intelligence software.

It's well suited for large eCommerce stores as it requires much effort to set up and the development cost for setting it up is high. It's less appropriate to use Magento where you are looking for quick development and launch of the store. Also, it is required to have a developer or sometimes the entire tech team to manage an e-commerce store, so you may need to hire a few PHP developers.

Incentivized

• It is easy to use.
• It works with Stripe.
• The UI is clean and intuitive for customers.

• Magento is perfect if our web design client likes a specific pre-made template and wants a fast solution.
• Magento allows us to customize its open-source code to create additional features and functionality.
• Magento saves small businesses time and money if they only need a simple solution.

Incentivized

• There are few global reporting features. I can get specific information on a user or a course, but there is no easy way to find users who made an account and didn't enroll in a course. You have to look at every user, or download spreadsheets and search.
• There are very few hooks available to Zapier to transfer data to other services.
• You can't transfer data into the iSpring Market using Zapier, so we can't use our member management system to populate courses.

• Not the simplest of solutions to use or maintain from an end-user perspective
• Other platforms are better with regards to SEO in our experience
• Fairly sluggish and slow compared to other platforms without the correct server specification and performance optimization work.

It's the dominant force in the SMB open source market. With the continued support of eBay/PayPal, Magento will continue to evolve and should be a market leader for some time.

We picked iSpring Market because of cost, maintenance, and easy of use.

In looking at a different platform to migrate to from Magento 1, we looked primarily at Big Commerce, Shopify and Shopify Plus. Our host was very negative about Magento 2, but we determined after a couple years it was due to the fact it had even more complexity (and very different) than Magento 1. Shopify Plus was attractive, but the cost factor for two sites led us back to Magento 2.

Incentivized

• We have saved thousands of dollars a year in licensing fees compared with other products we used.
• We have eliminated the need for contractors, to build content for iSpring Market, saving tens of thousands of dollars, because we can publish directly into the system using iSpring Suite.
• We get 80% fewer help desk requests for enrollment and payment compared to the last two products we used.

• Delays in development leads to missed timelines and opportunity loss.
• High cost of development and maintenance may currently outweigh the growth.
• Better handling of customer and order information makes for better customer service.
• Excellent API has been a boon for integration with our ERP

Incentivized