BigCommerce vs Magento

Choosing between the hundreds of available eCommerce solutions online isn’t a simple task. Even if you have managed to narrow it down to just two options such as BigCommerce and Magento, the task of picking just one option for your business can quickly become overwhelming. That’s where our expertise comes in handy - we performed side by side comparisons of BigCommerce and Magento, so you can easily find the best option out of these two amazing eCommerce platforms.

These two platforms are powerful and can provide you with amazing online stores. However, if you pick the wrong option for your needs, you may be unable to use the tool at its full potential. That’s why it’s important to know what you’re getting yourself into before making up your mind. Keep reading to learn all there is to know about BigCommerce compared to Magento. After reading this comparison article, you should easily be able to pick the ideal eCommerce solution for your specific needs.

BigCommerce and Magento Compared

Magento is a powerful business tool for scalability and growth in mind - BigCommerce is a simple to use all-in-one eCommerce platform ideal for beginners and intermediates. Choosing between one or the other should be rather simple, but when we look at these two tools in more depth, the decision becomes even clearer. Keep reading our side by side comparison to find out which direction to take with your next eCommerce solution. We’re going to make it easier than ever for you to choose just one platform that will be great for your business for many years to come.

Technical Comparison

Before looking at the fun stuff, we wanted to compare the technical side of things. First up is the uptime score for both these platforms. BigCommerce has a solid uptime rating, but it remains way below average at 99.03%, whereas the industry average is 99.99%. When it comes to Magento, the uptime is determined by the hosting that you choose, so it could be absolutely amazing or terrible. Incident frequency isn’t all bad at BigCommerce, but there are some recent complaints against their platform that are cause for worry. On the other hand, Magento is a very stable platform with few complaints against them. Finally, site loading speed - both platforms are fast, but Magento has potential to be the fastest between the two. Just like with the uptime rating, the speed of your Magento website will be determined by the hosting that you choose. On the other hand, BigCommerce is well optimized from the start with most of their online stores loading in under 2.5 to 3 seconds. Overall, Magento has the most potential, but BigCommerce is a great option for people who want a ready-to-use eCommerce solution.

Customer Support

If you need quality assistance from various support channels, BigCommerce is probably the ideal solution for your needs. They provide you with 24/7 assistance via live chat, email and telephone. To make it even better, the assistance they provide is of high quality and their support agents are almost always friendly and helpful. You can tell that you’re speaking with actual experts and not just dealing with automated responses. With Magento, you’ll be dealing with an open-source platform, so assistance is not their strong suit. Magento offers support via email, but getting an answer can take days. Fortunately, there are tons of articles online that can be helpful and lots of people talk about Magento in forum boards, allowing you to get tons of assistance from the community of users.

Features

Features and functionality at BigCommerce are very different when compared to Magento. BigCommerce has tons of built-in tools that allow you to work on improving your SEO, fulfill orders, perform support assistance to your customers and even to perform marketing tasks such as bulk email marketing. At Magento, you get to benefit from all of this and so much more. In fact, Magento is pretty much limitless, the only downside is that Magento is incredibly complicated to use, so you won’t be able to implement any of this unless you put in a ton of effort or know a lot about coding. Otherwise you should set aside a budget to hire a professional webmaster to handle these tasks for you.

The ease of use at BigCommerce makes it highly appreciated by most merchants who simply want to get up and running within as little time as possible. However, larger businesses and enterprises of large scales will appreciate how professional Magento truly is. While it’s much more complicated to use, the amount of functions are endless and the flexibility of integrating them into your website allow you to make truly professional quality websites. If you’re a serious business owner looking for an enterprise level solution, Magento has everything you need. On the other hand, smaller businesses will be more than satisfied with the tools offered by BigCommerce.

Design

Designing your website is mostly dependent upon the availability of themes on the eCommerce platform that you choose. First let’s take a look at the availability of free themes. BigCommerce has a below average choice of free themes, whereas Magento has a large selection of free themes for you to explore. Quantity does not always equal quality, but in this case it does - Magento’s themes are generally of much higher quality when compared to the themes at BigCommerce. Now let’s take a look at the premium themes available on these two platforms. Both Magento and BigCommerce have a nice selection of premium paid themes. The same can be said for the quality of these themes - they both offer very high quality themes. The main difference is how difficult it is to integrate these themes - Magento themes are more complicated to install when compared to BigCommerce.

Prices

BigCommerce and Magento have two very different pricing structures. First let’s start off with the BigCommerce platform. They have various pricing plans that you can choose from with the higher plans allowing you to sell more products and enjoy better perks. While BigCommerce does not have any transaction fees, they do require you to upgrade your pricing plan as you begin selling more items.

Now let’s explore Magento’s pricing structure. They don’t have any pricing plans - in fact, Magento is entirely free to use. However, you will need to factor in other costs such as hosting, the cost of your domain name and you may even need to set aside a budget to hire a professional webmaster for building and maintaining your online shop. One of the positive aspects of the Magento pricing structure is that they have absolutely no form of transaction fees. Overall, Magento has the potential to be more cost-effective, but BigCommerce is much easier to understand.

The Final Verdict: BigCommerce or Magento

Hopefully by now you have a pretty good idea about which eCommerce solution to choose from. We’ve compared both platforms side by side with enough details to help make both platforms easy to understand. We’re going to review them briefly to make the decision that much easier to make.

If you’re a large enterprise with a large budget, your best bet is to opt for Magento. You would probably have no issues spending money towards hiring professional coders to setup your site and maintain it over time. Magento is built with scalability and growth in mind, making it the ideal choice for large businesses. It also provides a ton of flexibility, making it easier for you to benefit from a truly unique online store.

BigCommerce is much easier to use, but remains more powerful than basic eCommerce solutions. With BigCommerce you get intermediate-level functions while still being able to benefit from a simple to use GUI. Building an online store through BigCommerce is simple and attainable whether you’re a beginner or an advanced webmaster.

Overall, the choice should be pretty simple - if you’re a large business, opt for Magento. If you have a tight budget and don’t expect to ever grow as big as Walmart or Amazon, you might as well opt for the easier solution, BigCommerce.