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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…

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Recent Reviews
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Awards

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Popular Features

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  • Product management (28)
    9.5
    95%
  • Checkout user experience (28)
    9.0
    90%
  • Product catalog & listings (28)
    8.5
    85%
  • Mobile storefront (28)
    4.1
    41%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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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

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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.

6.5
Avg 8.3

eCommerce Marketing

Features related to marketing for eCommerce websites

4.2
Avg 7.5

eCommerce Business Management

Features related to business management and administration of eCommerce operations

9.1
Avg 7.8
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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).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(127)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 29)
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Russell Preston | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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)
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Shahed Nasser | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Ramon Khan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
.Kim Murphy | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
March 12, 2019

Magento Matured.

Vin Campbell | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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...
Chris Putnam | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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
David Bryan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • 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.
Brian Halstrom | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Brendon Brown | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Lynn Thames | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Santiago Valdés | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Max J. Jennings | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Matt Railey | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
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