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.
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X-Cart
Score 7.8 out of 10
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X-Cart is an eCommerce and shopping cart platform built through PHP code.
$199
per month
Pricing
Magento Open Source
X-Cart
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Platform
Starting at $199
per month
Auto
Starting at $299
per month
Marketplace
Starting at $399
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Magento Open Source
X-Cart
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Pricing for Magento will vary greatly depending on outsourcing support and maintenance services.
Magento is the heaviest by far, in a few senses of the word. It has the steepest learning curve both for administrators and programmers, but it also has the highest potential to run a high traffic, high volume ecommerce store. Other products will get you up and running faster …
Magento Open Source is an excellent choice for businesses that need a highly customizable and scalable solution and (most of all) have the technical resources to support it. It's ideal for mid-to-large-sized businesses with complex product catalogs that require complete ownership and control, particularly those with complexities such as multi-country/multi-currency stores.
X-cart uses Smarty Templates in a PHP environment which means there are many developers who could probably pick it up relatively quickly to provide new features. The smarty template engine is very robust and well documented, and the cost of x-cart is very low which makes it easy for anyone to get started with their e-commerce business. It is a really great e-commerce software and suitable for every business. I actually cannot find any serious objection to what it does. They regularly update it, add new features, fix flaws, offer support. The software itself offers many integrations for shipping and payments, everything you need for sales. Although it covers many things, there will always be something missing, because many things happen in between customer visit and final delivery. Therefore, if you plan to expand your business, also plan to expand your X-Cart - but do not worry, it won't be hard.
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.
For everyone. From small to huge business you get everything out of box. Just setup company details, payment and shipping methods and you are ready to go.
Upgradable. There are many plugins one can integrate with X-Cart. Over time, many of them became part of the software, and you are one click away to enable them.
Well organized code. It uses Smarty template engine, which I find great, specially for debugging (famous Webmaster mode).
Creating new plugins the way X-Cart wants is maybe not complicated, but hard to implement because there are no hooks. One has to manually change each file. This is similar to patching the core and therefore one has to know basics of web development.
Even if you get everything styled correctly with base skin, there is a bunch of unused styles you have to cope with. Start skin should be much cleaner. You may find thousands excess lines of code.
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.
Magento has a relly step learning curve. This means that you need to find experienced developers who can lead junior ones, otherwise the overall development process can be a disaster. However, once you are comfortable in developing on the platform, the customization capability are basically limitless and you can adapt the platform to any use case you can imagine. Also, there are many alredy developed marketplace modules that can solve, out of the box, many problems you may face.
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.
Better Total Cost of Ownership than bespoke e-commerce solutions due to being open source and the wide range of free/commercial extensions available to extend the platform.
Often more extensive to set up and maintain than other open source alternatives, such as WooCommerce.
Flexibility in presentation as well as functionality
Full open source software allows for unlimited possibilities with the store function, though some developers who create modules do encode their modules which have errors in their code which therefore can't be fixed
A fully functional professional level application at a fraction of the cost of similar applications such as magento.
