OpenCart vs Magento – Comprehensive
Comparison of the Two Leading Ecommerce
Platforms

Loading time is crucial for any website, especially an eCommerce website to retain customers. Customers these days are very impatient and a slow website will cause you to lose out on your existing as well as potential customers. When comparing Magento 2 vs OpenCart, Magento 2 leads the competition. The time taken by an OpenCart website to load is 831 milliseconds which is 1.6 times higher than Google’s recommendation for SEO. Even the product pages take 910 milliseconds to load which is bad. Therefore, loading time is one of the crucial factors that OpenCart needs to work on. Magento’s online product page load time is 665 milliseconds, which is more than the recommended loading time set by Google (500 milliseconds). However, this speed is acceptable to some extent for retaining clients until the end of the sales funnel. Magento undeniably beats the OpenCart platform with its impressive response time.

When it comes to Magento vs OpenCart comparison, the ease of use is another major factor that can help you select the right eCommerce platform for your online store. OpenCart is ideal for beginners as it provides an intuitive user interface and simple installation process. However, the user still needs to have basic technical knowledge of web development. Magento, on the other hand, is a robust and heavily-laden platform. It is not recommended for beginners as it requires strong technical knowledge and the installation process is also very complicated. Magento also has a steep learning curve and hence, amateurs can take time to learn how to play with the system. Magento is an ideal option for large, high-sales enterprises. Moreover, if you’re confident with your technical knowledge and expertise, you may opt for Magento. Highly customizable design, flexibility, and innumerable plugins are what make Magento an ideal one for you.

OpenCart provides only 500 free and paid themes and the paid ones cost from $60 to $70). All of these themes are attractive, slick, and sales-driving. They come with various layouts, flexible customizations, and amazing features. Some of the stunning OpenCart themes include Materialize Template, Journal, etc. OpenCart also allows you to preview a theme to see how your website will look before you pay for the theme. Once you purchase and install the theme, you can easily and efficiently customize or edit the theme using OpenCart’s Theme Editor. Meanwhile, Magento offers only 2 free default themes namely Luma, a demonstration theme, and Blank which is the base for custom theme creation. Both of these themes look dull and boring. If you want your website to look good and professional, you may go to Magento Marketplace which offers 17 themes costing from $0 to $500. Just like OpenCart, Magento themes also allow you to preview themes to see how your website will look like with the theme before you pay for it. Even though Magento does not offer many themes, it offers endless opportunities to customize and design your store from scratch until you get the desired look of your website, thanks to Magento’s open-source traits. Thus, OpenCart is a clear winner in this round as it offers plenty of themes at affordable prices.

OpenCart offers limited SEO features. However, the platform enables you to make certain modifications like editing the meta tags as well as adding 301 referrals and rel canonical. You can add meta descriptions and keywords and create SEO-friendly URLs. There are also additional SEO plugins available in OpenCart. With OpenCart, you can still rank your page higher, however, it isn’t a good option for high-end SEO purposes. Magento offers endless possibilities for making your website SEO-friendly. You can simply download SEO extensions and optimize titles, URLs, meta tags, and images. Moreover, redirects and canonical tags are also accessible easily. To improve your SEO, you can also add blogs and target many new keywords using blog posts. When comparing OpenCart vs Magento 2, OpenCart lags behind in the competition. If you’re looking for high-end SEO solutions, then Magento has got you covered.

You can get almost everything in Magento Marketplace. Since Magento was exclusively intended for large-scale eCommerce enterprises, it offers a vast collection of extensions that integrate seamlessly with Magento backend. With more than 5000 extensions available in the Marketplace, Magento enables you to add more features and functionalities to your online store without writing a single line of code. Magento Marketplace has extensions that are checked for coding standards, plagiarism, compatibility, and security. Contrarily, OpenCart offers over 13,000 extensions. You can find a huge range of functionalities, plugins, themes, and modules at the OpenCart Extension Store.

With open-source platforms, there is no live chat, phone support, or email for dedicated customer service. You can ask for help on Magento Help Center, however, your concerns will be addressed by salespersons who are well-trained to help you sign up for Magento Commerce. Magento is supported by a large, active community of 300,000 members including developers who share their experience, and technical knowledge. You can freely drop your queries and ask for help, however, the accuracy ratio is not always high as every member of the community has the right to answer your questions or solve your problems. Additionally, you can also find comprehensive step-by-step guides on Magento’s official website regarding easy-to-understand installation, the configuration of themes, extensions, etc. OpenCart provides 2 types of support to its users. The Community Forum allows contributors and developers across the globe to share their knowledge and experience in operating an online business. To get dedicated and satisfactory support, OpenCart users can avail of support service by paying a monthly fee of $99.

Magento constantly releases Magento security patches to ensure that your Magento store is secure always and your customers feel safe when shopping from your online store. You can regularly update with new security patches to improve site performance. You can also check your website’s security state using third-party tools like Mage Scan and Mage Report. You also have access to self-help resources provided by Magento security guidelines. Additionally, Magento also provides Content Security Policy (CSP) for open-source Magento. CSP offers an organized collection of guidelines that can restrict the content of browsers so that only whitelisted services are visible. This way the browser decides which web tools need to be blocked and which ones can be trusted. On the contrary, since OpenCart is not liable for your website’s security, you must ensure your server’s level of security. Being an open-source platform, it is more susceptible to cyber-attacks. As the internal code and framework of OpenCart are available to the public, hackers can identify and exploit the security vulnerabilities more easily. OpenCart is also not regular in releasing security patches. Besides, you also need to be careful with third-party extensions as they might contain some security vulnerabilities and may harm your website if your website is not secure. Therefore, when comparing Magento 2 vs Opencart in terms of website security, Magento leads the competition.

In the debate of OpenCart vs Magento 2, Opencart beats Magento down with the number of payment options available. OpenCart allows you to integrate multiple payment gateways into it including Authorize.Net, PayPal, SagePay, 2Checkout, WorldPay, etc. Apart from these, additional payment options can be downloaded from the OpenCart Extension Dictionary. By default, all OpenCart payment methods are PA-DSS compliant which means they do not save any card details. Magento offers PayPal, Braintree by default and additional payment options can be later according to your preferences through Magento Connect. You can also experiment with features like one-click payments, guest checkouts, etc. While OpenCart offers several payment methods, adding more payment gateways costs additional expenses.