WooCommerce vs OpenCart: Which is the better alternative for developing an online store?

A long, difficult, but ultimately rewarding phase of your eCommerce journey is setting up your online store. The complexity of this step is aggravated by the fact that you must make several difficult decisions that will impact the success of your online business. 

The most important and perhaps most challenging of all of these decisions is choosing an e-commerce platform.

Two of the most widely used eCommerce platforms are WooCommerce and OpenCart. It takes time to choose between the two. Both offer a variety of features that make developing an online store easy, even for beginners. 

In this comparative piece, we will guide you through a comprehensive comparison of WooCommerce vs OpenCart and explore many features of these platforms in the context of an online store.

Let’s start!

An Overview of WooCommerce vs. OpenCart

Before I continue with the comparison, let’s have a critical overview to comprehend what WooCommerce and OpenCart are all about and how they work.

WooCommerce: what exactly is it?

The best eCommerce plugin for wordPress is WooCommerce, which converts wordPress websites into online stores.

Once installed on your website, WooCommerce is a wordpress plugin that converts it into an online store with all the basic functionalities, including order processing, reporting & analytics, and inventory management.

WooCommerce is well ahead of OpenCart in terms of popularity and user base, even though it was launched a few years after OpenCart. One of the main reasons for this is that WooCommerce is open-source, allowing anyone to develop their plugins and themes and install them on their WooCommerce store without any restrictions.

Because WooCommerce is compatible with wordPress websites, everyone who understands how to manage a wordPress website is also competent with WooCommerce.

OpenCart: what exactly is it?

Similar to WooCommerce, OpenCart is an open-source platform with robust shop management, a selection of extensions and themes, and a support system that will assist you at every stage. However, WooCommerce has enjoyed greater e-commerce success than OpenCart. One explanation could be that the store’s flexibility and usefulness are limited because it has fewer plugins and themes than WooCommerce.

OpenCart, however, is quite popular among novice store owners looking for a quick, free setup because it provides enough features to manage a small store with a few hundred products.

WooCommerce vs. OpenCart: features

Both WooCommerce and OpenCart provide a variety of functionality that covers every aspect of running an online store. Which offers better or more, though?

OpenCart

All the bases are covered with OpenCart. A powerful admin dashboard, unlimited listing options, advanced user management, payment gateways, thousands of extensions, support for multiple currencies and languages, and a tonne more are all included.

Additionally, OpenCart offers more than 13,000 extensions to enhance or add new features.

In OpenCart, everything a new or small store owner might need is available.

WooCommerce

Equally, feature-rich is WooCommerce. It offers a user-specific dashboard, shipping options, listing options, user management tools, over a hundred payment gateway options, and a library with hundreds of additional extensions.

Your pool of features dramatically widens when you add wordPress plugins and themes into the mix. There are tens of thousands of WooCommerce themes and plugins. Most will be fully compatible with both wordPress and WooCommerce.

Features – Conclusion

Both platforms include a wide range of features that are pre-built and those that you may add via extensions and plugins. Both feature a wide variety of themes to provide individuality, and both can satisfy basic and advanced stores’ needs.

However, a whole new process of expansion is made possible by the fact that WooCommerce can also make use of the tens of thousands of wordPress themes and plugins. The edge, in our opinion, goes to WooCommerce.

OpenCart vs. WooCommerce: customer support

WooCommerce help begins in the official wordPress forums, where the wordPress community can quickly address your questions. There is also extensive WooCommerce documentation that most likely resolves your query.

Open a support ticket on WooCommerce to ask for assistance in another way. You can do this by contacting the wordPress help desk. This isn’t ideal for urgent issues because it can take the operators 1-2 working days to respond to your query.

Similarly to this, online forums and documentation are available for OpenCart support. Since the OpenCart forums are frequently active, you’ll probably get prompt service. Additionally, you can hire independent developers from the OpenCart website to assist you in the process.

OpenCart developed a support plan to enhance customer support. A one-time plan or a premium plan are also options. The price for the former varies based on the type of assistance required. The latter costs $99 a month and includes five installations as well as three bug fixes.

Who Wins?

The fact that you can always get free assistance makes WooCommerce the winner, without a doubt. WordPress has a large number of forums, groups, experts, and developers who are always ready to help. Along with providing its users with the opportunity to create support tickets, WooCommerce also provides thorough documentation.

To be fair, OpenCart also provides similar choices, but it still lags far below what the wordPress community has to offer. With no assurance of continued support, OpenCart demands payment for its support system. Only a few responses can be provided each month.

To be fair, OpenCart also provides similar choices, but it still falls far behind what the wordPress community has to offer. With no assurance of continued support, OpenCart demands payment for its support system. Only a few responses can be provided each month.

OpenCart vs. WooCommerce: SEO

With WooCommerce as your e-commerce platform, you may benefit from WordPress’ considerable SEO advantage over other CMS. WordPress is composed of PHP code that is SEO-friendly, which Google and other search engines highly favor. This implies that a website or store created using wordPress has a competitive edge in SEO.

In addition, there are several WooCommerce SEO plugins that you can install on your WooCommerce store for extra features like meta details that will help you rank your site higher on the search results.

Although OpenCart doesn’t have the benefit of SEO-friendly coding, you can edit your store’s meta details. Additionally, it enables you to use URLs for your store and product pages that are search engine optimized. However, you will need to learn a lot more about coding or work with a developer who knows how to code if you want to dig deeper into OpenCart’s SEO functionalities.

Who Wins?

As a result of utilizing both WordPress’ SEO benefits and the features of SEO plugins like Yoast, WooCommerce is the definite winner in the SEO competition.

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WooCommerce vs. OpenCart: Customization

Even beginners can use WooCommerce as it is a fully customizable platform. With only a few clicks, plugins make customizing WooCommerce websites easy. As an illustration, it’s simple and quick to develop beautiful landing pages.

In comparison, OpenCart operates with a fair amount of rigidity. It is therefore not user-friendly for beginners. Scaling and customizing your online store requires professional help.

Winner: Given that WooCommerce offers a wide range of options and is simple to customize, we can recommend it in this case.

WooCommerce vs. OpenCart: Scalability

Currently, your store may be small, what about in the future? What takes place if you decide to expand or open more stores? Can WooCommerce and OpenCart support that?

OpenCart

Given that it is powered by a database, OpenCart can theoretically scale indefinitely as long as your hosting package allows it. You can include as many categories as you can manage, as well as add as many products as you like.

Another scaling capability is available in OpenCart. Multiple stores can be supported by one installation. Similar to wordPress multisite, OpenCart allows you to put up separate stores within a single instance, have them all operate independently, and manage them from a single dashboard.

WooCommerce

 It offers the same ability to add as many products, categories, and store elements as your web hosting plan permits.

WooCommerce does not, however, offer the same capacity for managing numerous stores from a single instance. WordPress multisite can be used to establish stores; however, each site would require a separate installation of WooCommerce. That would also necessitate managing each store independently. 

Scalability – Conclusion

Both platforms can support as many products as you can manage and scale to enormous sizes inside a single store. However, OpenCart has some clear benefits if you wish to expand your retail business to include several stores.

This is an easy win for OpenCart because it allows users to launch many stores from a single instance and manage them all from the same dashboard. 

WooCommerce vs. OpenCart: Advantages and Disadvantages

The following list of advantages and disadvantages for both platforms is provided because we think you’ll find it useful. This will enable you to rapidly compare each platform’s features and advantages and possibly select the one that best suits your requirements.

Advantages of OpenCart

• User friendly
• Attractive management dashboard
• Does not need a wordPress installation to function
• Huge extension and theme marketplace
• Supports several payment gateways

Disadvantages of OpenCart

• Manual database creation is required for setup.
• Modest technical skills are needed.
• Accelerated learning curve

Advantages of WooCommerce

• Easily accessible management dashboard
• Wizards for everything 
• Various themes and plugins from third parties 

Disadvantages of WooCommerce

• Needs a wordPress installation to work
• Is exposed to the same issues as wordPress

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Final Thoughts

It was always going to be competitive between OpenCart and WooCommerce.

It can be difficult to choose an e-commerce platform for your online store, but in this article, we have tried to make it easier by comparing two top platforms based on several essential aspects.

While we won’t tell you which to choose, we recommend WooCommerce. It has all the advantages of wordPress while being simpler to use and manage.

Additionally, it has some very beautiful themes and some highly powerful plugins. Both offer new store owners a considerable edge.

Did you select WooCommerce or OpenCart? And why? Comment below with your thoughts.

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