nopCommerce vs Magento (Adobe Commerce): How to Choose the Right Ecommerce Platform?

Having a hard time choosing between Magento and nopCommerce? No worries, we’ve got you covered. 

Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento) is one of the leaders in the ecommerce world. It provides a feature-rich, customizable solution and comes in both free and paid editions. Magento is extremely popular globally powering about 1,000,000 websites, including such giants as Nike, Ford, and Nestle.

nopCommerce is no slacker either. This free open-source ecommerce platform boasts customizability and security and has won the trust of such big retailers as Volvo, The North Face, and Reebok.

Yet, no two ecommerce platforms are the same. Having operated in the ecommerce development market since 2009, Elogic has worked with a variety of ecommerce platforms and has helped 200+ retailers invest in the right ecommerce solution for their business needs and requirements. 

In this article, you’ll see the pros and cons of nopCommerce vs Magento, clear up your doubts with a handy comparison table by the end of this article, and recognize yourself in an ideal merchant profile for each ecommerce platform.

Adobe Commerce (Magento) vs nopCommerce Basic Overview

No time to read? Check out main characteristics of nopCommerce vs Magento in a side-by-side comparison table.

Magento vs nopCommerce Review in Details

Being open-source platforms, both Adobe Commerce and nopCommerce have their similarities and differences. Read on to see the capabilities of each platform in more detail.

Pricing

We’ll start our review with one of the greatest concerns for any merchant: the platform pricing.

Technically, the cost of entry for both nopCommerce and Magento Open Source is free. However, you’ll need to consider the costs of web development unless you fancy programming yourself. For nopCommerce, average developer rates range from $18 to $80, as seen on Upwork. A Magento developer rate varies from $15/hour in India to $200+ in the US considering a developer’s level of seniority and prior experience. 

The “free” nopCommerce still has its price though. When calculating nopCommerce pricing, you’ll still need to consider such additional expenses as:

• Hosting: $3 to $10 for shared hosting, and up to $100 for dedicated servers.
• SSL certificates: $60/year on average. 
• Custom themes: $100-$400.
• Third-party apps & add-ons: up to $300 per extension.
• Premium support services: $499 for three months or $999 for a one-year period.
• nopCommerce copyright removal key: $250-$1000.

You might bear the same expenses when opting for Magento Open Source.

However, if you go for Adobe Commerce and Commerce Cloud, hosting, tech support, and many advanced features come included in the license fees. Don’t let the figures like $22,000+/year for Adobe Commerce and $40,000+/year for Adobe Commerce Cloud baffle you though. The total cost of ownership (TCO) for a seemingly free nopCommerce and high-maintenance Magento may eventually be the same.

Features 

nopCommerce comes with a rather robust set of features for small and mid-sized businesses (SMEs). Some of the most important ones include:

• Mobile commerce: use responsive themes and mobile-specific functionality.
• Multi-store and multi-vendor capabilities: run more than one store from a single nopCommerce installation and establish marketplaces.
• Omnichannel commerce: sell across multiple channels and overseas (multilingual and multicurrency support included).
• Products: create as many product attributes as needed, compare products side by side, set different pricing for different customer groups, offer downloadable, rental products, and product bundles.
• SEO and marketing features: take advantage of SEO-friendly URLs, sitemap, breadcrumbs and implement reward points system, discounts and coupons, gift cards for your customers.
• nopCommerce B2B: simplify B2B shopping with recurring payments and invoices, automatic order updates, bulk import and export of product data, and others.
• 50+ payment gateways and multiple shipping methods.
• One-page checkout.
• Reports and analytics.

For more advanced functionalities, you can install third-party extensions or plug-ins to be found on the official marketplace or community-created websites like NopTemplates or nop4you.

Adobe Commerce expands this feature list with more sophisticated functionalities that will fit not only SMEs but also large enterprises. Here’s how Magento is different from nopCommerce:

• Marketing and conversion tools: ecommerce personalization, product recommendations, live search – use these and more tools to ramp up your marketing game and boost sales.
• Site management: manage all your brands, B2B & B2C stores, and sales channels from a single platform.
• Inventory and product management: ensure real-time product inventory availability and visibility.
• Product and catalog browsing
• Analytics and reporting: use AI-powered Business Intelligence and data visualizations to get actionable insights into your store performance and sales.
• Mobile commerce: Magento PWA Studio allows you to build an app and boost conversions on every device.
• Integrated B2B functionality: besides customer-specific catalogs and pricing, Magento offers personalized experiences and self-service customer portals for easy account management and ordering
• Products: create simple, configurable, virtual, grouped, bundle, and downloadable products with custom attributes and unlimited SKUs. 
• One-step checkout, payment, and shipping.

Check out the full list of Adobe Commerce features here. 

Even though nopCommerce features pose serious competition to those of Magento, Adobe Commerce wins this category in terms of enterprise-level functionalities. 

Sure, nopCommerce will be sufficient for small or a mid-sized business merchants who don’t need any AI-driven analytics and full-page caching, among others. However, ecommerce personalization and unlimited scalability of Adobe Commerce and Commerce Cloud will certainly catch the eye of serious enterprise-level companies.

Read more: What is Adobe Commerce Cloud? – Features And Benefits 

Security

nopCommerce is considered a secure platform. The platform’s main highlight is that it’s based on Microsoft’s ASP.NET Core framework, which brings an extra level of security. The platform also supports GDPR and meets the requirements of the European Union Laws. It’s also PCI-compliant, supports Honeypot to prevent spam, and comes with a strong customer password policy.

Now, ever since Magento 1 end-of-life and Magento 2 rebranding, Adobe Commerce has substantially strengthened its security. The Adobe Product Security Incident Response Team regularly tests core application code for security vulnerabilities and releases security patches every 10-15 days. Although Magento Open Source is not PCI-compliant, Adobe Commerce addresses this issue with a Secure Payment Bridge. The team has also reinforced the hashing algorithms (SHA-256) used in password management so as to prevent sensitive data leaks as well as adopted security measures against XSS attacks.

Performance & Scalability

Ecommerce platform performance and scalability are the most important indicators for ambitious merchants. Because if the platform limits your business growth, you would think twice before investing in it, right?

nopCommerce performs great for small stores that don’t do much traffic, although a lot depends on your nopCommerce hosting provider. The best hosting for nopCommerce is provided by Everleap, Hostinger, Cloudways, and SiteGround, all of which offer different servers and varying ecommerce hosting costs.

Technically, there’s no limit on the number of SKUs you can upload. However, the vendor’s team itself acknowledges some nopCommerce performance issues if a large number of products is uploaded. A bit of customization can solve this issue, but we still recommend nopCommerce for SMEs.

Adobe Commerce (Magento), on the other hand, is widely praised for its scalability potential. A self-hosted Magento Open Source allows adding up to 250,000 SKUs, the number that grows only bigger on a Adobe Commerce cloud edition. 

Read more: 7 Best Magento Hosting Providers in 2023

In terms of performance, a Magento store can handle 2,500+ orders per hour and boasts instant response times of under 500 milliseconds for catalog and add-to-cart pages. So if you’re planning to expand in the short run, Magento will work best for you.

Ease of Use

We hate to disappoint you right away, but neither nopCommerce nor Magento will be easy to set up. Both platforms require a decent knowledge of programming. Such is the nature of open-source systems.

To install nopCommerce, you’ll need to configure the hosting environment and download the nopCommerce source code. Microsoft Visual Studio is required to compile and deploy the code. You can also use Microsoft Azure, which automates the entire installation process, but you’ll still need to have developer-level skills to build a nopCommerce store. At a bare minimum, you should be familiar with .NET, MS SQL, HTML, and CSS.

A reward to the meticulous setup process is an intuitive Admin panel. It has everything a merchant might need to handle orders and customers: product descriptions, sales & stats, basic configuration, etc. A fully-fledged demo store with a front-end view and Admin area can be found here.

With Magento, the store setup works in a similar way. After configuring the hosting environment, you’ll need to download the source code via Composer and deploy it using the command line. The difference lies only in the use of technologies: you’ll need to be proficient in PHP to build a Magento store. Unless you want to sacrifice a dream store to your lacking developer skills, you can always hire a Magento developer and rest easy about your website setup.

Meanwhile, the Magento Admin dashboard opens a world of configurations to the merchant. You can not only add products and view basic customer data but also set up multiple storefronts, add SEO metadata, etc.

User Support

Both nopCommerce and Magento offer extensive documentation for developers and users. Both have online fora with a vast number of users to answer your questions or fix your problem.

The difference between the two platforms lies in paid professional support. nopCommerce offers premium support services at a rate of $499 for three months or $999 for a year. With Magento, the helpdesk ticket feature is free, but you’d have to upgrade to Adobe Commerce or Commerce Cloud to benefit from 24/7 tech support. Still, you can get ongoing Magento support from a professional development agency anytime.

The Verdict: Who’s the Ideal Merchant for Magento vs nopCommerce

Both Magento and nopCommerce are high-fliers in ecommerce. But while choosing between the two platforms, keep in mind your scalability ambitions and the amount of traffic.

nopCommerce is the best framework for small or medium-sized companies. It may not sustain a large product catalog or huge volumes of traffic. But its feature-rich and secure interface will give a merchant solid grounds to start and grow the business — at least to the level of selling internationally. 

Meanwhile, Magento will be suitable for mid-sized companies and large enterprises. If you’re looking to expand without slowing down; if you expect high traffic spikes especially during high sales season; if you’re selling B2B — Magento should be your top choice. 

Looking for more alternatives to nopCommerce? Check out our series of Magento vs [choose your ecommerce platform] comparisons!

• Magento vs Shopify 
• Magento 2 vs Shopify Plus
• Magento vs BigCommerce
• Drupal Commerce vs Magento 2
• Magento vs WooCommerce
• Magento vs OpenCart
• Magento vs PrestaShop