BigCommerce vs Magento: Who Wins the Fight?

BigCommerce vs Magento is a competition between two leaders of the ecommerce market. Why leaders? 

According to SimilarTech, BigCommerce powers 37,278 online stores including Toyota, Tyler’s, and Clarks. Magento has a much bigger market share with 133,425 websites and big brands such as Bauhaus and Burger King on their client list. In 2018, the total value of merchandise sold on websites handled by Magento amounted to $155 billion. This doesn’t mean you need to choose Magento and call it done. 

We hope this article will help you understand the difference between the two platforms so you could make the right decision which platform to go with.

Disclaimer: Elogic is a certified Magento development company. And while we are a bit biased when it comes to comparing ecommerce platforms, we don’t want you to make the wrong choice. There are many businesses online who will only benefit from getting their store up and running on the BigCommerce platform. And there are companies that will find Magento the right warrior to bet their gold coin on (want to see examples of such companies? Check out our projects).

If you don’t like long-reads, here are some quick facts to help you compare BigCommerce with Magento at a glance.

What’s the difference between BigCommerce and Magento?

BigCommerce overview

• SaaS platform
• Perfect for quick launch and fast growth
• The price starts at as little as $29,95 per month

“BigCommerce is an ecommerce platform for fast-growth businesses. It lets you launch a store in hours, not weeks.”

Magento overview

• Offers both free (Magento Open Source) and paid (Magento Commerce and Commerce Cloud) versions. (Read how they differ here)
• If you decide to go with a free open source Magento, you will need ample coding knowledge to be able to install it. Otherwise, you can hire a Magento developer to do it for you
• Perfect for mid-sized business, and enterprise-level companies.

“Magento is the ecommerce platform trusted by the world’s leading brands. It lets you grow without limits.”

Now, we’re going to compare BigCommerce vs Magento based on several key factors, including:

• Ease of use
• Features
• Hosting
• Theme Selection
• SEO
• Payment solutions
• Extensions and Apps
• Scalability
• Security
• Price

Before we continue, why not see how Magento compares to Shopify and WooCommerce?

Magento vs BigCommerce Comparison

Our Magento 2 vs BigCommerce comparison guide highlights their main differences. Below is a detailed explanation of the factors needed to think over before building the store.

By the end of the article, you’ll find out which ecommerce solution is more suitable for your business. Let’s dig in!

Ease of use

Setting up a BigCommerce website is much easier than Magento. The BigCommerce dashboard demands only minimal coding knowledge and has an intuitive dashboard that makes it simple for store owners to get their site up and running. 

With Bigcommerce, you get access to step-by-step instructions, useful tutorials, and tooltips that simplify the website development process. In the paid plan, BigCommerce provides excellent customer service. Additionally, the ecommerce solution comes with a website builder that enables merchants to build and operate the website without web technical knowledge.

How easy is Magento to use? Building an ecommerce store on Magento requires the technical expertise of the platform, thus you’ll need to hire a certified Magento development company that has an experienced team of developers with profound knowledge in HTML, CSS, PHP, Java, and JavaScript programming languages. 

Magento is written on PHP, so you can customize the store the way you need and has access to unlimited selling capacity. On the other hand, BigCommerce also allows you to customize your ecommerce website store but with many restrictions and this customization can cost a pretty penny.

Features

Both Magento and BigCommerce come with advanced out-of-box features and can be easily integrated with multiple extensions and third-party systems.

Magento is by far the most robust in terms of features. General Magento 2  features list:

• Marketing, Promotions, and Conversion Tool
• Site Management
• Search Engine Optimization
• Catalog Management
• Product Browsing
• Catalog Browsing
• Checkout, Payment, and Shipping
• Order Management
• Customer Accounts
• Customer Service
• International Support
• Analytics and Reporting
• Mobile Commerce

The mentioned features above are basic. Check out the full Magento 2 Enterprise features list. 

BigCommerce also provides amazing out-of-box features to quickly set-up and effectively run your ecommerce website. General BigCommerce features list:

• Website Builder
• Payment and Inventory Management 
• SEO and Analytics Optimization
• Product catalog
• Marketing tools
• Social Media Marketing
• Products and Merchandising
• Product Options and Bundling
• Mobile-optimized store
• Multi-Currency Support
• Configurable Fields
• In-Store Search
• Google AMP on product and category pages
• Selling on eBay and on Instagram, and more

Hosting

BigCommerce platform is a hosted solution that runs on Google Cloud platform, so you shouldn’t worry about finding the right hosting provider or about downtime as BigCommerce has an average uptime of more than 99.99%. With BigCommerce web hosting, you get faster page load times and spend less time maintaining your website.

Magento can be hosted on-site, in the cloud, or through a third-party. With Magento Commerce Cloud, your store is fully hosted and run by Magento, while in Magento Open Source you need to purchase your domain and hosting. Cloud edition is built on Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) model. 

Read also: How much does web hosting cost?

Theme Selection

The theme of your store creates the basis of what your customers will see when they visit your website. Both Magento and BigCommerce provide free templates that are SEO friendly and responsive on mobile devices.

BigCommerce provides 7 free themes and 50 paid themes. Prices for themes range from $145 and $245. All of these themes are responsive and easy to customize. 

Magento provides 17 free and paid themes, 10 of which are mobile-optimized.  Prices for themes range from $29 – $499. However, there are multiple templates available on unofficial websites such as ThemeForest and Template Monster.

With Magento and BigCommerce, you can also create custom themes from scratch. 

SEO

Search engine optimization is vital for any ecommerce store. Recent research claims that 75% of users only check the first page of Google results. If your company doesn’t show up on the first page on the search engine, there is a high probability that your potential customers won’t find your brand. 

To develop your online business, you need to optimize your store for search engines. Fortunately, both BigCommerce and Magento come with powerful SEO tools. Both platforms give you an opportunity to perform significant tasks such as optimizing your pictures, customizing page meta tags, altering search links.

BigCommerce has many SEO features such as robots.txt file and Google sitemap to perform professional SEO configurations for your pages and headlines. With BigCommerce, store owners also get access to a program called SocialShop that enables you to post promotions on Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. 

Magento is known for its SEO friendly options. Being a self-hosted platform, Magento Open Source offers a lot more flexibility and control regarding SEO for maximum output. Magento 2 has introduced many improvements to SEO such as Auto-Generation and Schema.org features. Auto-Generation is aimed to set templates for product metadata and Schema.org could help to boost the search engine rankings of your ecommerce store. 

Extensions and Apps

Once you’ve launched your ecommerce store, you may find that some features are missing. Advanced navigation, cart abandonment, payment gateways as a few examples. Both ecommerce solutions have a marketplace where you can find specific extensions or apps that gives store owners the opportunity to customize their store tailored to their business requirements.

On the Magento marketplace, there are over 5,000 extensions that integrate easily with the Magento backend. The BigCommerce app marketplace is smaller in comparison to Magento’s marketplace. 

Magento extensions involve a traditional installation process, so you will require to maintain and upgrade those extensions from time to time. With BigCommerce, you need to install extensions directly to your store that results in an easier installation process. 

Payment options

A payment gateway is a service that enables ecommerce websites to accept debit or credit cards within the existing software. Magento and BigCommerce provide a fine selection of payment gateways, giving your customers the possibility to opt for the most relevant one. 

BigCommerce has a wider range of payment gateways and supports over 40 options, including PayPal, Stripe, Amazon Pay, Authorize.net, and more. With BigCommerce payment gateways, you don’t have any transaction fees on all price plans. However, BigCommerce doesn’t support such payments as Swedbank, SEB, etc that are commonly used in many countries.

Magento offers a lower number of payment gateways, but it can be implemented through a variety of third-party apps. After integrating apps for payment processors, you’ll have access to the major gateways like Square, Stripe, PayPal, Stripe, and more. 

 Security

Cybersecurity should be a top priority for your ecommerce business. All ecommerce platforms should be PCI compliant, so you can keep your customers’ payment data secure. You cannot risk the customer’s personal info and card details, especially with the number of hacking attacks happening every day.

BigCommerce security is level 1 certified PCI and ISO/IEC 27001 certified compliant making sure that financial transactions are encrypted. BigCommerce provides free and paid SSL Certificates. All stores built on BigCommerce are protected by multiple layers of security to prevent unauthorized access.

Is Magento secure? Magento offers one of the most powerful security solutions for online stores. Magento is also PCI compliant and supports such advanced technologies as Zend Framework, Composer, PHP 7, Symfony, and the integration of SSL Certificate. Moreover, Magento frequently updates security to make sure that the system is protected from malware, and store performance is optimized. 

Scalability

Store owners that are considering expanding their business in the future cannot neglect scalability. You should be prepared to manage a high volume of sales with the same effectiveness that helped make your business successful when you had a smaller store. 

Your platform should also be able to scale upward your enterprise resource planning (ERP), project information management (PIM), fulfillment, warehouse, and customer relationship management in order to meet your demand.

Bigcommerce offers unlimited storage space and bandwidth. With BigCommerce, if your sales limits surpass or if you decide to scale up, your pricing plan will be changed to a higher one.

Magento is one of the most scalable platforms available on the market making it’s one of the best solutions for large enterprises. With Magento 2 scalability, you can smoothly scale up when your ecommerce business expands or when your catalog of products grows. 

Unlike BigCommerce, Magento operates considerably more orders per hour on the same hardware and handles peak order volume easily delivering near-instant service response times for catalog browsing. Moreover, Magento features inventory management and ERP integrations which make scaling much smoother.

Price

Value for money is crucial if you intend to get the best ecommerce solution.

Here’s a snapshot of the BigCommerce pricing scheme:

The license for BigCommerce starts at  $29.95 per month and an extra transaction fee of 1.5%. Once you need to grow your business, you can choose the $79.95 monthly plan or an even $199.95 per month. Merchants that sell more than $125,000 USD annually are automatically moved to the pro plan. 

Magento Open Source (Community) Edition is free of charge. The license cost for Magento Commerce Edition (Enterprise) starts from $22,000 annually. The license cost for Magento Cloud Edition starts from $40,000. The pricing system for Magento cost is based on a tiered model, linked to GMV (gross merchandise value). 

Overall, the cost of operating a store on Magento platform can be significantly less expensive than on BigCommerce if you calculate the license and transaction fees.

BigCommerce vs Magento 2 Comparison Table

The table below shows a Magento 2 vs Bigcommerce features comparison. 

Which Ecommerce Platform to Choose?

When selecting between Magento 2 vs Bigcommerce, you should make a decision based on your business requirements, features, design, budget, expected growth. 

Bigcommerce ecommerce platform provides store owners with the possibility to build a store and sell products online fast. This ecommerce solution designed for small to medium-sized businesses. If you’re a small business, without an in-house IT team and you intend to sell a few hundred products, then BigCommerce is a good choice for your ecommerce business.

BigCommerce ideal merchant:

If you are looking for an enterprise solution with the ability to sell thousands of products, advanced customization, and the option to scale as the business expands, Magento is the best solution for your business.

Magento ideal merchant:

Which type of merchant looks like you?