Likelihood to Recommend Ultimately, if a company is looking for a solid industry-known E-Commerce system, Magento Commerce does exactly what it's intended to do. The headaches start when your company wants to start getting granular in customizations of the platform to meet specific business needs (which every company eventually has). This becomes a major issue down the road when trying to upgrade said customizations as the core software updates.
Read full review If you’re bringing anything into Salesforce you should just invest now into Mule, you will get your money’s worth and find a myriad of uses to build APIs between many other systems. Once you build a component you can easily reuse it as a building block to attach to another source/destination. This makes it easy to ramp up quickly and spread usage of Mule throughout your enterprise. A good value for medium to large companies, but probably cheaper to outsource your job to a consulting firm if you are smaller.
Read full review Pros Magento Commerce Cloud allows us to develop our own custom solutions for problems that we need solved. Magento Commerce Cloud can also be integrated with many of the third part vendors that we use. This has made many implementations go very smoothly and tends to be much quicker than developing our own custom solution. There are many features available right out of the box. Many of them we have not implemented yet, but it is great to have them available to us when we are ready. Read full review It is best suited for Rest API development. Mule ESB uses RAML as an API descriptor which is less complex and easy to understand. RAML is an open standard majorly supported by Mulesoft. Once RAML is developed, it is very easy (a few clicks)to create flows corresponding to the resources defined in the RAML. One can also include JSON schema validation in RAML, and with the use of APIkit router, Mule ESB makes the request validation very easy (it's automatic basically.) Mule ESB comes with a large spectrum of community and enterprise connectors. We have connectors for all the major platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce, SAP, etc. This enables Mule ESB to integrate with the other systems in a faster and more robust way. Mule ESB has many components to fulfill the requirements of each integration (for example batch processing, parallel processing, choice, etc.) Mule API gateway is one of the best tools (modules) of Mulesoft's offering. It supports API governance and management very well. One can easily enforce policies on their APIs with API gateway. It enables some of the must-have features in an API solution (i.e. throttling, oAuth, access levels, etc.) Implementing a CI/CD (DevOps) environment for Mule ESB is a very easy task. Mule majorly uses MAVEN as its build tool, which in turn makes it best suitable for CI/CD approach. Mule also provides MAVEN plugins for auto deployments to the servers. Mule also has a best Unit testing module which is MUnit. MUnit can be used for both Unit and Functional testing, and it is easy to write and generates coverage reports in various formats. Read full review Cons The platform is difficult to tune and can be slow. Even with expensive best in class hardware the platform performance can be an issue. Even with caching poor coding can lead to unacceptable performance and user experiences. The total cost of ownership for the platform can be quite high as a great deal of technical expertise is required to modify, develop, troubleshoot and maintain the platform. The costs of initial development are only a down payment on what a Magento store will cost. For mid size companies with substantial web revenues this can be overcome for smaller businesses the total cost of ownership may be prohibitive. Security of the platform can be an issue. Magento is often targeted by hackers and much of the security is the responsibility of the store owner. Read full review Make sure to not over-engineer shared components. It can complicate development Create a roadmap for where you are going - if not, you may miss components I suggest getting support, otherwise it could be a difficult learning curve Read full review Likelihood to Renew Magento is well-supported by a big development team at eBay, which not only addresses bug reports very quickly, but also is constantly working on improvements to the platform. The wealth of Magento third party modules ensures that the platform will be up to date with future changes to Payment or ERP systems. Security is always a concern and with the Zend framework as a foundation, Magento has had very few security-related patches since I have started to work with it
Read full review Usability Magento offers lots of templates and themes to customize the look and feel of the store, and even optimize it for mobile phones. The have an extensive library of forms and templates.
Read full review Support Rating The technical service was impeccable. They were on point and were very knowledgeable.
Read full review Online Training Great value for an flexible, open source platform.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Magento scales much better than any of the other software when it comes to very large e-commerce websites. But all the other options are more user-friendly for smaller sites as there is a bit of a learning curve in learning to manage Magento. Customization is better along with
WooCommerce and
OpenCart as self-hosted solutions vs.
BigCommerce and
Shopify which are hosted. Magento should be the first choice for large, extensive e-commerce solutions,but for smaller stores, I would recommend the others first.
Read full review It doesn't have API . We have to go for another API manager. But in Mule, it has both API manager and ESB
Read full review Return on Investment Magento definitely lets us get a return on our investment. Because we have developers who can customize Magento to our needs, we have been able to create a beautiful and effective website, run promotions, and serve up customized product display pages that are effective and beautifully branded. Magento has also caused a lot of time to be invested in doing something that seems simple, but without a lot of knowledge, end up taking far more time than could otherwise be better-spent. We have had to outsource some of our development work due to Magento being developer-focused rather than marketer/merchandiser-focused. I've used other website management software that is comparable to Magento's capabilities but is far easier to use, that even someone like me (with basic HTML/CSS skills) can customize the front-end without requiring a back-end developer to intervene. Read full review Overall a great tool for complex integrations Read full review ScreenShots