nopCommerce vs. OpenCart

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.

OpenCart is best suited for business owners looking to sell their products online. Building an OpenCart website requires no or minimal coding knowledge. Being a self-hosted system, it is not recommended for people who have no hosting plan or have no experience in hosting websites so it would be better to go with another platform that is hosted elsewhere.

• 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

• OpenCart is well suited in cases where our eCommerce web development clients want a very specific design with very specific shopping cart functionalities.
• OpenCart is very flexible in its native ability to work with a wide variety of payment processors and payment gateways.
• OpenCart makes it both fast and easy to setup and configure a new shopping cart website, especially if you use one of the pre-made templates.

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

• It's a very buggy platform. Although OpenCart developers release new versions time to time after fixing bugs every version of OpenCart has a different type of bug.
• It should increase the security of the platform.

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

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.

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.

Honestly, when consulting my clients, I would always recommend WooCommerce over OpenCart. Although I've had clients that had existing OpenCart websites and they were fairly happy with them, making additions/changes/customizations from a developer standpoint was not the easiest compared to other systems. For very large shops, I always recommend Magento over anything else.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Clients loves the design which is easy to integrate to; you can integrate multiple themes.
• Overall user experience is good, so number of conversions is good.

Incentivized