Skip to main content
TrustRadius
Magento Open Source

Magento Open Source

Overview

What is Magento Open Source?

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…

Read more
Recent Reviews
Read all reviews

Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 20 features
  • Product management (28)
    9.5
    95%
  • Checkout user experience (28)
    8.9
    89%
  • Product catalog & listings (28)
    8.5
    85%
  • Mobile storefront (28)
    4.1
    41%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

View all pros & cons
Return to navigation

Pricing

View all pricing
N/A
Unavailable

What is Magento Open Source?

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.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Would you like us to let the vendor know that you want pricing?

7 people also want pricing

Alternatives Pricing

What is Adobe Business Catalyst (Discontinued)?

Adobe Business Catalyst was a cloud-hosted system for building and managing web content and online stores with a built-in CRM framework in addition to sales, service, and marketing features including eCommerce and Email Marketing tools. It has been end of life (EOL) since 2020.

N/A
Unavailable
What is PrestaShop?

PrestaShop is a free, open source e-commerce solution available under the Open Software License and officially launched in August 2007. The software is written in PHP and based on the Smarty template engine and is currently used by 165,000 shops worldwide. The PrestaShop group was founded in Paris,…

Return to navigation

Features

Online Storefront

Features for creating an online storefront with a browse-able product catalog.

7.7
Avg 7.7

Online Shopping Cart

Features that facilitate the collection of items so that customers can purchase them as a group.

8
Avg 7.6

Online Payment System

Features related to processing online payment for eCommerce purchases.

6.6
Avg 8.3

eCommerce Marketing

Features related to marketing for eCommerce websites

4.3
Avg 7.5

eCommerce Business Management

Features related to business management and administration of eCommerce operations

9.1
Avg 7.8
Return to navigation

Product Details

What is Magento Open Source?

Magento is an open-source ecommerce content management solution originally developed by Varien Inc and presently supported by Adobe. The Magento Open Source version (formerly known as Community Edition) is for developers and tech-savvy merchants that is available as a free download, and is supported with free upgrades from the Magento Community. Because it is free and open-source, users will enjoy the ability to alter the code. This version still presents a fully capable eCommerce presence with multiple, mobile-accessible sites, SEO optimization, targeted promotions, the ability to alter themes and and change the layout, taxes and shipping management, and more.

Magento Open Source Video

What is Magento?

Magento Open Source Integrations

Magento Open Source Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

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.

Reviewers rate Product management and Product variations and Multi-site management highest, with a score of 9.5.

The most common users of Magento Open Source are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
Return to navigation

Comparisons

View all alternatives
Return to navigation

Reviews and Ratings

(127)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 29)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
In our company, as system integrators, we often encounters customer with a Magento eCommerce. The best part of this software solution is that, since it's completely modular and we usually do not develop the entire website, we can still however work on our projects (usually integrations with third party systems or data import/export) by working on specific modules we can then deliver to our customers.
  • Modularity
  • Great Community
  • Updates
  • Very step learning curve
  • If not using it headless, the frontend uses old technologies
  • The first setup can be problematic
Magento is perfect for large scale eCommerces with various degree of complexity, like multicountry invocing/taxes, different currencies, a big catalogue with a lot of configurable products. Due to it's high customization capabilitis, it's also perfect if you have any specific need which is not covered by more "simple" eCommerce solutions.
Russell Preston | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Magento provides an excellent framework for managing customers, products, categories, cart, orders and has a plethora of extensions to allow you to do almost anything you could think of - but without being beholden to a platform such as Shopify.
  • Free framework in widely used language (PHP) based on common database (MySQL)
  • Has lots of developer support
  • Has frequent security patches.
  • Not the most performant when you want to scale up
  • Does not have single page app support out of the box
  • Does not have native mobile app support (yet)
Perfect for a small to mid size company but be very careful not to customize over the core files (although you WILL need to)... just remember that upgrading and staying current IS going to be a pain so try to keep on top of it.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using Magento to build an e-commerce platform for our clients. It's used by the developers to develop and deploy the e-commerce system. It addresses the problem of security and scalability while setting up a live e-commerce store. Magento is one of the best platforms to build e-commerce solutions as it provides us a lot of freedom in designing the store and also enables us with a lot of integrations.
  • 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.
  • It requires coding experience, so a non-tech guy cannot use it without special training.
  • It requires a considerably large server for the smooth functioning.
  • It requires a good amount of effort to do the initial setup which makes it a low priority option when it comes to stores that require fast development in a short time.
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.
Shahed Nasser | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Magento Open Source to develop e-commerce online stores for our clients in different areas and sectors. As Magento has many features out of the box, it makes creating an online store that has the basic, common features easy. We also use Magento for e-commerce stores that require some custom development, as Magento's architecture makes it easier.
  • Many out-of-the-box features
  • Easily find plugins, especially with famous third-party services
  • Built on well structured architecture
  • It can be hard for developers to learn and use
  • As there are many features in it, it can become "bloated" sometimes if not managed well.
  • Non-technical savvy users might need some training to understand how it works, especially the admin side.
Magento is best suited for big projects, meaning e-commerce sites that can handle a lot of traffic, that need a lot of features, that need custom features without breaking the system, and that need durable systems.

Magento is least suited for small projects, meaning e-commerce sites that are very simple and don't require that many features. Online stores that just have the basic buy and checkout features. It's also not suitable if you're not ready to hire expert developers to handle any issues or changes to the system that you need.
Ramon Khan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Magento open source was being used for the management of our e-commerce site. When you have thousands of products and need a platform that can handle changes quickly as well as perform quickly, then Magento is one of the best choices. I used Magento to run a store that had thousands of SKUs and we were very happy with the way that we were able to make mass changes and the speed of the platform. It is also a great platform solution for custom changes as it's open-source and there are plenty of developers that work on it. It is great at solving the issue of managing tons of products efficiently and being able to implement custom solutions for your store if needed.
  • Speed
  • Scalability
  • Open source
  • No monthly cost
  • You don't have to share any revenue for the sales that you make.
  • Being simpler to change as developers can get costly.
  • Having more built in SEO options.
  • Does require specialized hosting to make it really fast.
  • Installing updates could be easier.
  • Setting up a staging site should be built into the backend although it's easy to set up from a hosting panel.
If you have a lot of products then Magento is the way to go, but it would probably be too complicated if you wanted just a few products in a store. Overall, Magento is one of the few platforms that can handle many products and mass changes while still maintaining speed. The other pro of using Magento over other platforms is that there is no monthly cost or commissions that they charge for making sales, which I think is a huge improvement over other popular platforms, and is worth a look. Another popular platform that charges monthly fees and a percentage of sales can get expensive very quickly. Plus Magento is open source so you can make pretty much any customization that you can think of.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Vitasalus, Inc. uses Magento 1.9.0.1 for the frontend sites of vitasalus.net and nu-gen.net. I've also done extensive work on a migration of the sites to Magento 2,3.2, not live yet, pending further adjustments, corrections and extensions necessary to the new platform. I've handled the html--formatting to responsive design.<br>The best thing about Open Source is that it's free. Also that it is very inclusive and powerful. But it does come with a cost: a very high degree of study, and, in my case, trial and error. I've often sometimes thought that this is the reason Magento experts can charge such exorbitant fees--the complexity can be beyond the reach of the overwhelming majority of companies' webmasters. (Even wonder if that's done on purpose, to create an upper tier of programmers...) <br>
  • Significant flexibility
  • Information online for troubleshooting
  • Cost-effective (free)
  • Complexity can be prohibitive
  • Can require accessing skill sets outside of company
  • Magento 1 - retired - no flash support for uploading, editing pics
Best suited for a company which does not require parameters that require editing beyond Magento's default settings. No digging into its bowels necessary.
Companies that require extensive editing of parameters should expect an outlay of employee time, and perhaps outside programmers. Though the platform is free, it may require significant outlay of money to make it work appropriately.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Magento is our backbone. Our front-end website pulls product and catalog data from this tool. Our customer service team relies on this as a pseudo-CRM as all our customer data live on this platform. Our tool is also designed to work with our 3PL's backend service for seamless warehouse, inventory, and order management.
  • It's a decent system for a start-up company.
  • A lot of extensions can work with it: billing, order management, customer communication, and payment processors to name a few.
  • Highly customizable and reusable.
  • For a normal user, there is a learning curve.
  • Code clean up can sometimes be a headache.
  • It's sometimes sluggish.
It is a solid system for front-end and back-end e-commerce website management. It can handle cataloging, inventory, and product management really well. It has a robust engine for uploading product/hero images, SKUs, categories, and subscriptions. It also works well with free extensions so you can build a working e-commerce site in no time.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Magento Open Source in our public facing website. our website consists of 4 parts : window shopping of used trucks, window shopping of aggregates, B2B webshop for truck parts and a static part which desbribes our company and our fixed services.
the products are created automatically through our ERP system. So we have custom Magento code to import our products on the frontend.
Our website is availlable in 7 languages.
  • out of the box webshop
  • api to allow for product inserts via code
  • lots of plugins
  • the content management is on pare with eg. WordPress
  • plugins are not always of a good quality.
  • major upgrades are not always plug and play.
Everything is possible with Magento and i feel it is a better match for a big webshop than other tools (like WordPress). But you need some technical skills in order to start and especially to maintain it. It is not really a walk in the park to start off. But once done, it really does it thing and it hasn't failed us yet.
Jay Moore | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Magento Open Source powers our ecommerce site, shop.betaclub.org. It is the sole ecommerce platform at our organization. It allows us to sell merchandise items related to the National Beta Club. We can offer custom items through the platform. We can also do promotions, such as free shipping. The platform is very flexible and we have found lots of community support
  • Solid e-commerce platform
  • Fully customizable
  • Large add-ons marketplace
  • Tons of integration options
  • Customizable only for the very experienced
  • Will most likely need to hire experienced developers to install addons and maintain
You can certainly get a quality ecommerce platform up and running quickly. Custom theme development and addons may cost you extra. Some addons/themes can be easy to install others will require more expertise.
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Magneto Open Source is used as a platform for ecommerce business. It is used by the marketing, web, and inventory management departments. It helps us sell our products online and provides analytical insights to our sales. It allows for a lot of customizations for a growing business. Once we started selling to wholesale clients, we created a second version of the website for the purpose of having different products and prices for them.
  • Fully customizeable
  • Allows for creation of additional versions of the website for different client groups
  • Too slow
  • Very cumbersome to manage products
Magneto Open Source is probably better for companies with big budgets and needs for a lot of customizations. It is a platform that requires you to have a web team for constant support. I experienced a lot of glitches. I would not recommend Magneto Open Source for a small business.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Bass-Mollett uses Magento Open Source to host our current website. The website addresses the online needs of our customers by providing them with an alternate method to make purchases. Our customer care team can retrieve orders through Magento Open Source and get them entered, and the process started for these orders.
  • Magento Open Source front end is easy to use. It is a fast way to get a website up and going.
  • Magento Open Source has been around for a while, so it is easy to find themes for purchase.
  • Although Magento Open Source can be customized, the themes are made using layers upon layers of folders to hold files. It takes a long time to learn the structure of the theme and it takes time to get anything customized on the backend to affect the website.
  • Magento Open Source is also one of the slower loading website management tools. I've used many others, such as Shopify, 3D Cart, and BigCommerce. Magento Open Source feels like older software and getting specific functionality is easier on platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce, which both use apps.
I would recommend BigCommerce and Shopify before recommending Magento Open Source because they are much easier to customize, and the support is better. Magento Open Source is a useful tool if a company needs a cheap website solution, and they are just starting out. Of course, the paid option of Magento Open Source provides users with a lot more options, but to get the options we needed, we needed the higher plan, and it was cheaper for us to go with BigCommerce.
.Kim Murphy | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use the open-source version of Magento for many of our web design clients who want a fast and affordable eCommerce platform with some flexibility is its customization potential. The open-source code allows us to customize the features and functionality of the shopping cart so they work in specific ways the client may require. Online purchasing is made simple and affordable from the client's point of view.
  • 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.
  • Magento is not easy for a layman who is not tech-savvy to manage the website.
  • Magento is one of the only modern shopping carts in which one must manually clear the cache and "reindex".
  • Magneto has a lot of technical glitches - more than most of the other shopping carts we work with. Most are minor.
Magento Open Source is well suited for small or medium-sized businesses who don't have a lot of money or time to start their online store. If our web design client can select a specific pre-made template beforehand, and they do not want a ton of complex or extremely specific functionalities, then we suggest Magento Open Source to the client. If the client is a large retailer wanting very specific features, then OpenCart or complete custom code might be a better choice.
March 12, 2019

Magento Matured.

Vin Campbell | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are currently in the process of migrating our main retail website over to the Magento 2 platform -- this would be the open source or community version. The primary business problem this addressed was the requirement to integrate with our current point of sale solution, NCR Counterpoint. As stated, we are currently using this platform for our retail website only, but we have plans to roll this out to our wholesale division as well in the near future.
  • As a shopping cart platform, version 2 has matured fully. The built-in feature set is immense.
  • Extensions -- there are extensions for virtually every need and vision
  • Intuitive backend -- it's very easy to work with and find things-- again, in version 2. Order management is a breeze, and the level of customer data access that's built-in is huge.
  • A clean modern front end -- from standard/simple templates to the more expensive paid templates, Magento websites are clean, clear, and they work very well.
  • Cache management -- I think this should work better OOBE. Lots of manual flushing of caches, and tricky setup for automation.
  • It's very expensive to develop on the platform -- it's time-consuming for me, and expensive when hiring outside people.
  • Some things that are baked in, like shipping rates (USPS), can be improved to grab internet rates.
  • Need more US-based extension developers and ways to work with them when code needs to be rewritten...
In sync with our needs -- if you want to tightly integrate a website with NCR Counterpoint, Magento is likely your best choice. You have a very deep level of control over the integration. If you do a high volume of online sales, this platform is for you, as there is plenty of room for growth and you can start out on the Community platform as you rise towards Amazon and Walmart levels of sales. =) This platform is not for small businesses, and I would not recommend this to developers who don't have some heavy experience with backend coding. This platform is costly to run from a dev perspective, and also from a hosting perspective. Ongoing management, don't forget about that!
Chris Putnam | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We help manage, update, maintain and customize websites built with Magento Open Source (Community Edition) - among many other CMSs and frameworks - for our clients. Magento enables building highly customizable e-commerce websites, with a solid core set of features and a large variety of extensions available to extend it further, and a framework that allows further extension by an expert programmer.
  • Flexibility of code - almost any part of the system can be customized
  • Extensions - high availability of free and paid pre-built extensions
  • Documentation - for the latest iteration (2.x)
  • Multi-language/Internationalization
  • Multi-store websites
  • Updates - historically patches and updates, due to the frequent high customization, can be difficult
  • User Experience of Management - managing the store is not as intuitive as some other systems
  • Frontend Development and templating - while very flexible and modular, they are much more complex than many other systems
If you need to sell your products in multiple languages and/or via multiple websites (e.g. targeting different demographics), then Magento may be a good fit. If a high amount of customization is needed, Magento could be a good fit. You will need an experienced programmer in this case, and expect to have ongoing costs in hosting, maintenance and updates.
David Bryan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Our agency Opace use Magento day-in-day-out for e-commerce clients, we also specialize in other open source platforms, including WordPress, WooCommerce and Joomla. However for e-commerce, especially larger stores with large inventories and/or an international presence, Magento is always our platform of choice and we find that customers are usually very happy with the solution. The one limitation, where a combination like WordPress and WooCommerce outperforms Magento, is ease-of-use and flexibility. Magento isn't the most straight forward of platforms to use or maintain, not without some level of technical knowledge. That said, Magento is very powerful and migrations to Magento 2 are becoming more straight forward. For more information on a study we've conducted and a comparison to other e-commerce platforms available, you can view our infographic here.

  • Multiple storefronts - the ability to power multiple Magento stores from a single install/database.
  • Extensibility - the ability to grow your e-commerce store using the vast selection of available extensions.
  • 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.
Definitely well suited to larger e-commerce stores, in particular where multiple store-fronts are needed. Not so well suited to smaller online shops.
Brian Halstrom | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our company uses the Magento eCommerce platform to sell retail bowling equipment to thousands of customers around the world. Magento is flexible to configure to our needs as we've implemented many different extensions from payment gateways, search engine optimization, upgraded search features, and more. What's nice is that we've been able to launch multiple stores using the same install and database. I would recommend this platform for companies that have a lot of products and need the flexibility to add a lot of categories and product attributes.
  • Ability to create unlimited attributes and attribute sets to describe products
  • Ability to launch multiple stores with one install
  • Tons of extensions available to integrate and optimize an eCommerce store
  • Resource intensive, recommended that you host this on a dedicated server
  • Updating site layout is not intuitive, developers may be needed at an additional expense
  • Extensions can be costly, and typically developers are needed to install
For eCommerce stores with a lot of products and numerous categories are needed, I think Magento would be the ideal choice. For stores looking to see a few products, I think Magento would be overkill as there are different eCommerce solutions available that can be launched in less time.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Magento Open Source is my top selection for large/complex e-commerce websites. There is really no better open-source e-commerce solution that can scale for large shops or accommodate specialty customizations. I use Magento for my clients that need a platform that can scale with thousands of products or complex product configurations.
  • Scalability is excellent, Magento Open Source can handle hundreds, thousands, ten thousands of products.
  • Inventory management is excellent.
  • Excellent set of core features and extensions to expand and extend it are exhaustive.
  • The community behind Magento is top-notch.
  • Magento can be difficult to learn for a non-technical person, and requires an experienced developer to set it up properly.
  • To really get the most of out Magento, you must run it on on a dedicated server with extensive server customizations.
  • Not really geared for small shops - I don't recommend it for little e-commerce websites.
I highly recommend Magento Open Source for large e-commerce websites, or e-commerce websites that require extensive customizations. It is always my first choice for clients that need a complex e-commerce system that can scale well. I do not recommend it for smaller e-commerce websites or simple basic shops and would encourage using a simpler system.
Brendon Brown | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Magento CE is our current eCommerce platform in a business which also has a B2B and Retail units. We conducted the upgrade from WooCommerce after experience of outages and problems which were limiting growth. Currently online customers use this platform for direct ordering, our marketing team does some design work, and customer service accesses the platform to find order-related information. We planned the development to allow for growth into a B2B ordering platform and potentially more.
  • Magento 2 CE has a very robust document workflow which mirrors most mid-large ERP systems. There's a "papertrail" which mimics your business processes, and each part of the process is exposed to the API which makes for some great integration potential.
  • Magento 2 CE is also great for tracking customer history, saves a record for each and allows you to understand customer interests better.
  • Magento 2 CE is highly expandable, with a full marketplace of free and premium modules that should accomplish some pretty niche sales or service goals.
  • Magento 2 community is full of known and new bugs with long-pending pull requests and the community is on the hook for changes. Submit an very obvious issue to the github repo, and you will likely be met with a "this is open source and you use at your own risk." I counter this poor attitude with the fact that open source community has standards, and we do not label a "release" until those standards are met. Otherwise it's just a alpha, beta or numbered build. We don't release obviously bad software until it's fully working.
  • Magento is expensive to maintain. You will need a well-paid php developer with apache and hosting knowledge, or you will have to hire an external firm. Either option will turn your website into an additional $100k/yr cost center, so you'd better be ready to ramp up sales. Every feature update or bugfix in the past year has uncovered more bugs, which my devs fix, but at the cost of timelines and billed hours way outside of my budget and target dates.
If you have a lively dev department and are selling $5m+/year, then this may be an option for you. But then you should probably be using Magento Enterprise anyway. I am convinced that Magento allows and follows the Open Source version not to provide any meaningful support but to glean new ideas to attract Enterprise customers.
Lynn Thames | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are a software company that builds e-commerce sites for companies. We mostly use Magento because it is very flexible and powerful and we are able to integrate it with any other 3rd party system as needed. Our sites are built for both B2B and B2C (direct sales) companies.
  • Magento is fully extendable so that you can accomplish any special needs for a client without having to build a custom site.
  • Magento is powerful and fast on the proper web server. It can handle a huge number of products and customers successfully.
  • Magento has a very flexible catalog structure so that you can sell most any type of product or product combination.
  • Magento is easy to integrate with other systems.
  • Magento is great for non-technical people to be able to update content, as it's also a full CMS system.
  • Magento is well known for its bugs in early releases of each version. Luckily, there is a great community always providing temporary fixes and patches.
  • Magento should allow you to add user-defined fields for customers. It allows you do do this for products, but for customers, you must be able to program in order to create user-defined fields.
  • Magento should have built-in support for dimensional shipping methods. I think in general the shipping integrations are weak. Most people need to purchase add-ons to get really accurate shipping rates.
It is well suited to a company that is willing to invest in proper development, web server capacity, and ongoing maintenance. It's not a good solution for a DIY'er unless they are very technical. But if you need any type of custom integration and are willing to invest in your solution, it will definitely give you a good ROI.
Santiago Valdés | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We used Magento as an eCommerce solution for our company. We sell lots of different products, so scalability was an issue and we were recommended to use Magento. We didn't use it as fulfillment, only for processing orders and everything else was done outside of it. We published products from an API outside the store too.
  • Magento scales very well. That means if you keep adding more products, there's no significant performance decline. This sounds like a very technical and unuseful thing but actually it's very important and depends heavily on the type of eCommerce solution you are providing. In our case, we were supposed to have many products (+15,000) so we never have many scale issues with it.
  • Exporting information works reasonably well. It is relatively fast and has decent built-in capabilities.
  • Attributes are well built considering other eCommerce options. It's very flexible and you can modify many things, including brands, easily.
  • Multistore (differente languages/places) seems to work fine but we didn't use it. I'm just referring to what I've read
  • The community around Magento is very poor compared to other software. We migrated to WooCommerce and definitely there's more support there. More plugins, extensions, developers, etc., and at a reasonable price. This is one of the key points why we migrated. Magento is very expensive and slow to develop here. For WooCommerce there are plugins for everything, from popular analytics software to loyalty. This is a HUGE point to consider.
  • Debugging is painful. Some times you get an error that shut downs your entire store, and why did it happen? No clue. There's no documentation, there are 20,000+ files and at least for us, the framework on which it is built is not that user-friendly. This is expensive and there are not that many options compared to other software.
  • Changing the design or making changes is also very hard, because of the framework, the many files, and how complex Magento is.
Magento is good for stores that have high volumes of traffic and lots of products (20,000+). Also stores that are in many countries or need to have different stores but with the same stock.

Beware that the road will be painful: expensive developers (and not that many), little support or documentation, and hard to change the design to suit what you want to do. If you want to start a small store without many problems and don't have much budget, just go with WooCommerce. It's easy, fast and works pretty well for basic stuff (we had to invest some in scaling it, but now it works great.)
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We currently use Magento Open Source to manage our ecommerce website. We have been using it for years and have had great success. Our website development team uses Magento Open Source. This includes our e-ops team, UX team and back-end developers. It allows us to manage all the products, shipping rates, taxes, multiple stores across multiple countries, SEO, categories, redirects, etc. It really takes care of most needs we have for our site.
  • Magento Open Source allows us to manage thousands of products in an easy to view and edit manner. We can make bulk changes to hundreds of products when necessary in just a few minutes.
  • Magento Open Source is incredibly flexible from a developers perspective. We have been able to develop many custom solutions that Magento Open Source didn't offer out of the box without any difficulty.
  • Magento Open Source allows us to pull reports very quickly. The product grid screen (Manage Products) allows you to customize the data columns you see which allows you to pull a report of just the data you want. We use this multiple times per day to see data on our catalog.
  • Magento Open Source makes it very easy to set URL redirects when we change product pages or category structure. This is incredibly useful in our daily use of Magento.
  • Like I mentioned previously, Magento Open Source allows us to develop custom solutions for areas where it did not offer a feature out of the box. While the ease of development is good, had these features been available out of the box, it would have been even better.
  • We occasionally find that some third party vendors do not work well with Magento Open Source. We have had to come up with work-arounds or abandon certain vendors all together because of our use of Magento Open Source.
  • This isn't really a drawback of Magento Open Source itself, but finding developers that are familiar with Magento can be difficult.
  • When you are first getting familiar with Magento Open Source, navigating the menus can be very intimidating. There are seemingly hundreds of pages and tabs in Magento and until you are familiar with it, you can very easily get lost.
Magneto is very well suited for larger e-commerce businesses. Our catalog of thousands of products across multiple stores and storeviews is very easy to manage with Magento Open Source. I can imagine that for a smaller start up company, Magento Open Source would be overkill. If you are looking for a platform with a lot of built in extensions and customizations, Magento Open Source is probably not best for you. Expect to do some custom development if you are going to go with Magento Open Source.
Max J. Jennings | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are a digital marketing company specializing in web design and SEO. Our company has been building Magento websites for years for our clients. For both large and small scale clients, Magento has been implemented to serve as an e-commerce platform has overall has been very successful. Since we primarily deal with small to medium-sized businesses who have no in-office IT department, we often find ourselves supporting the websites as well.

Magento has allowed us to build sophisticated and feature-rich stores for clients who are looking to sell their product online. It is easy to set up, easy to maintain and reasonably easy to navigate.
  • Magento makes it easy to build out sophisticated pricing options as our clients usually have a complicated pricing structure.
  • For the most part, setting up Magento is easy and straightforward. It's a lot easier than the old days of custom coding.
  • The newly designed UI is so much easier to use. With the old design, we found it difficult to navigate and so did our clients. The newly designed UI is a huge improvement.
  • I am not a big fan of the extensions directory and all of the paid upgrades. There are some basic features that I feel should be included but you have to pay for. By comparison, WooCommerce is better in that regard.
My organization has been using Magento for many years now, and it is by far one of the best e-commerce platforms that we have used. That's not to say that it doesn't have its drawbacks, but it is the best use for any large-scale or enterprise e-commerce solutions. For the most part, I would say that we recommend Magento to our clients when they are looking to build a website that anticipates more than 3000 orders a month. Anything less than that we are going to recommend a platform like WooCommerce or Shopify.

Right off the bat one of the immediate drawbacks is that the extension library seems limited when compared to other platforms like WooCommerce. On top of that most, the extensions that you do one include some form of charge. Whereas other platforms seem to offer free solutions Magento always seems to come with some level of payment.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Magento Community Edition as our solution for e-commerce retailing.
  • Compared to other solutions, Magento has far more control over exact nuances of e-commerce such as discounting, customer segmentation, and multi-site control.
  • Magento as a whole is reliable and can be made very fast thanks to built-in fullpage caching on Magento 2.
  • Magento is scalable and can handle huge traffic, or it can be built for a small site.
  • Small bugs and issues affecting performance could be handled more quickly, but the rate of bug fixes and improvements is much better now than it used to be!
  • The built-in image lightbox uses an extension that is no longer supported. This could be improved.
  • Extensions from "certified developers" are often buggy or extremely unreliable. A better certification process for third-party extensions could save a lot of time and stress for users.
Magento is well-suited for any full-fledged retail store. I would recommend a simpler solution for anyone seeking an e-commerce presence for just a few products (Shopify, etc).
Matt Railey | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have implemented Magento CE as the e-commerce management solution for clients.
  • Comes with APIs built-in
  • Lots of extensibility and customizability
  • Can handle a very large product catalog
  • Magento is complicated to use and has a high learning curve from a management user point of view.
  • We found it difficult to upgrade when newer releases came out.
  • The front-end templating system seems needlessly obtuse and is difficult to develop. Smaller front-end elements are individual files and layouts are controlled through XML files.
It is definitely not a product for a small team looking for minimal hands-on development time. However, if you do have time/budget for a team of developers to develop and maintain a Magento storefront, then it gives you a lot of flexibility and customizability in terms of customer user experience.
Joe Dingley | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Magento as our eCommerce platform across our 4 sites. It is mostly used by the eCommerce team directly, however, we have trained brick and mortar employees to use simple functions custom made specifically for them to help with order fulfillment.
  • Easy WYSIWYG editor
  • Compatible with hundreds of platforms
  • Pre-built extensions
  • Security patching causes long term development downtime
  • Not the quickest platform
Great for eCommerce retailers, allows room for massive growth without need to switch platforms. Not appropriate for tiny catalogue, a lot to learn if managing only few products. Simpler solutions would be advisable.
Return to navigation