As discussed in the previous blog post comparing Magento vs Shopify. In this blog, we will discuss open source offerings like Magento, Opencart, Prestashop,woocommerce, Joomla, and cs-cart.

In this blog post, we will discuss Magento vs opencart. As both are dedicated commerce platforms, unlike Virtuemart or woocommerce.

Opencart Multi-vendor Marketplace 

Magento 2 Multi vendor marketplace

Magento Multi-vendor marketplace 

First and foremost both of the platforms are brilliant and contain all the modern commerce features including complete catalog, shipping, and payment management with a brilliant ACL system. Instead of discussing randomly, I will discuss things point by points

Both of the platforms have enormous support from the developer community. As both of the platforms are based on PHP and PHP community support is great. There are independent developers and companies are also sharing their knowledge

Even Magento has their dedicated stack overflow channel as well along with their forum. Opencart community is more active in the native opencart forum

About community support, I think both of the platforms are great and a good amount of community support exists for both the platforms.

Also, both platforms have their dedicated marketplace, almost all kinds of extensions are available there.

As explained earlier both of the platforms are great to build a dedicated commerce store. But I think Magento leads here in terms of tech adaption especially Magento 2

Magento 2 includes lots of interesting tech stacks like knockouts, Symfony2 approach, dedicated UI component, Dedicated services contracts, and dependency injection. That ok, look like a little alien for nontech merchants but does it count?

But above are tech stack how it is different and better from a previous version or any other framework is their design pattern and adaptability like dependency management.

And I think that is the true power of magento2 + forcing you on following standards e,g (MTF – Magento Testing Framework guide).

we are constantly building Modules and extensions for magento2.0 so we experience it every day with Magento2 Extensions and Modules.

Why Dependency Management is so important and why Magento2.0 is so unique?

if you will check the modern design or programming paradigm you will realize that NPM and RUBY have great influence over dependency management.

How to adapt the same in PHP – community developers have introduced composer (https://getcomposer.org/) a dependency Management tool that comes inbuilt with Magento and it is in the core of Magento.

Previously I was thinking about magento1.x.x as more like a platform instead of a framework but magento2.0 in my personal opinion is a complete platform + framework.

If you will check you will find Magento composer.json file loads tons of packages from symfony2 as well which in my perspective is great and it opens the door to adapt more and more bundles.

PHP as a language is good but I think what makes it great is the frameworks like symfony2 – please have a look at a  complete talk of Fabien Potencier

dot scale 2014 – Fabien Potencier – My Take on PHP 

and the same thing is happening at Magento 2.0 core it forces you to write test cases mainly PHP community don’t write bad test cases (i don’t think all of them but still ratio is quite large) if you are writing code on ruby or any other it forces you to write the test cases from the very beginning and magento2.o does the same.

So framework forces you the write better code.

so as I think magento2.0 has a great tech stack but that can opt-in magento1.9.x as well I am kinder happy because of brilliant design paradigms

It doesn’t mean that opencart is poor in code or not good enough. It is,  opencart is good as well but lacks some of the features which are important for nowadays as commerce are getting complex every day and if we are talking about marketplaces that’s way to complex at the same time.

Opencart in their latest releases includes composer as well and they are including a lot of changes as per their UserVoice.

So clearly in this part, Magento leads as compared to opencart.

A multi-vendor marketplace means lots of products, vendors, traffic, and buyers. And for that, your system needs to be scalable enough to handle the traffic.

The biggest confusion and many times people ask the same question “Does your marketplace offering support this amount of traffic ?” well performance or scalability does not solely depend upon the platform, it does depend upon your server architecture and your server performance / hosting as well.

As you can run opencart in any shared hosting supported by opencart tech stacks. Magento will not work at all especially Magento 2 . Magento 2 requires dedicated server support. There are pros and cons as well for both scenarios. I will explain everything in detail.

Opencart is for sure lightweight and works perfectly fine with shared hosting as well as a dedicated one. Which I highly beneficial for startups mainly in developing nations.

But if you are thinking to go with a marketplace business model, I would suggest having scalable hosting (http://cloudkul.com/ ) like amazon cloud or google cloud. Recently Amazon released a very cost-effective solution for VPS, Amazon light sail 

As discussed earlier, your marketplace speed performance does not depend on the platform there are loads of factors –

1 – Bad code e.g. calling product model within loop both in Magento and opencart. This was just an example there are 1000’s mistakes developers do so instead of putting extra hardware or using cache handlers.

I would suggest debugging the code for optimization using standard tools like black fire.

2 – Poor Server architecture – As we also offer cloud-based hosting based on AWS cloud most of the time we found that developers don’t use compatible packages like most of the people are using a LAMP stack or some of them are using Nginx instead of Apache. 

Many of them are using an outdated version of PHP and MYSQL and still many of them are not using optimization guidelines.

3 – PHP7, Opcode Support, and Full page cache – Php 7 is magic for sure and improve the performance by leaps and bound.

Here Magento especially Magento 2 takes the position. Magento 2 supports Php7 in its core with a supported full-page cache. Which lacks in opencart.

Also in Magento, almost all the popular cache handlers are supported including Memcached, Redis, varnish and Nginx, and many more. Those are supported in Opencart as well but more suitable and compatible support is there in Magento.

As per my personal opinion, you may choose any one of them for the marketplace choice both platforms are great and scalable as well.

You can easily find the difference above which I have explained. Still have any queries or questions please don’t hesitate to ask.

That’s all for Multivendor Marketplace Platform – Magento 2 Vs Opencart still have any issues feel free to add a ticket and let us know your views to make the module better contact us.