Magento is a Heavy Hitter; Make Sure You Can Carry It
Overall Satisfaction with Magento Open Source
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.
Pros
- 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
Cons
- 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
- As a framework, it allows more efficient implementation of many features (depending on the feature and what you compare it to)
- The options for customization open up many possibilities
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 (and probably cheaper) and will very likely have lower ongoing maintenance needs, so choose carefully based on your budget and the features you must have.
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