Choosing the right eCommerce platform has never been an easy task for store owners, especially for those who are newbies to online business. Choosing a hosted solution or an open-sourced one, remains a big question. Thus, in this article, LitExtension – #1 Shopping Cart Migration Expert will deliver a detailed analysis of two popular eCommerce platforms: BigCommerce vs Magento.
In recent years, Magento and BigCommerce have been becoming more and more popular. Let’s follow us to:
- Get an overlook of BigCommerce vs Magento 2
- Analyze key differences between Magento vs BigCommerce
- Find out which eCommerce solution suits your business best
BigCommerce vs Magento – Overview
BigCommerce vs Magento are the two popular eCommerce platforms and always rank in the top platforms list. According to BuiltWith statistics, while Magento accounts for 7% of live websites in the top one million sites, that figure for BigCommerce is 3%.
1. What is BigCommerce?
Among top Magento alternatives, BigCommerce is a popular hosted eCommerce platform. Currently, this platform is home to over 50,000 online stores. Some of the big brands are using BigCommerce platforms like Toyota, Sony, Spinning.com, Ben & Jerry’s, etc.
Read our article on BigCommerce review to grasp an all-inclusive insight!
2. What is Magento 2?
Magento 2 is an open-source platform that offers some outstanding advantages. At present, there are more than 160,000 store owners using the Magento platform. Many widely known companies are using the Magento platform for their websites, such as Ford, Coca-Cola, Hermes, and Nike.
Read our article on Magento 2 (Adobe Commerce) review to grasp an all-inclusive insight!
BigCommerce vs Magento – Full Features Compared
So, we have an overview of Magento vs BigCommerce, check out the infographic below to grasp the brief ideas of the 2 platforms!
Let’s dig into the details!
#1. Pricing
Pricing is an essential factor when choosing an eCommerce platform. You have to calculate the budget before deciding which plan is suitable for you. Follow us to find out the packages that BigCommerce vs Magento provides.
BigCommerce Pricing
In general, all BigCommerce packages offer essential features and functions that help you start your online business easily and effectively.
Some of the common features you can access on any pricing model include an incredible single-page checkout, unlimited products, a responsive website, free transaction fees, etc. Obviously, there are some outstanding ones that are only available in more expensive plans.
So, which BigCommerce plan is the best option for you?
- The Standard Plan is the cheapest at $39 per month. This plan has all the necessary features for you to start your online business. With this plan, online sales per year are limited, the revenue per year is only permitted up to $50,000. Therefore, it’s suitable for newbies or small businesses.
- Plus Plan – the most popular plan with $105. The BigCommerce Plus Plan has all the Standard Plan features. Other additions include customer groups and segmentation, a persistent cart, and an abandoned cart saver. The revenue per year is up to $180,000, store owners who have medium-scale businesses should come with this plan.
- The Pro Plan will cost you $399 per month and provides even more scalable features than the Plus Plan. Some of the additional features are Google customer reviews, faceted search (product filtering), and custom SSL. Pro Plan seems like for businesses scaling up or larger business. Still, if your revenue surpasses $400,000 per year, you have to pay additional fees (+$150/mo for each additional $200,000 in online sales).
- The Enterprise Plan is the most advanced plan. It has custom pricing, which depends on customers’ online sales. Not only does it cover everything included in the other plans, but it also offers some extra powers. Moreover, you will receive priority support from the experts if you have any troubles. So the Enterprise Plan should work well with companies that are moving very fast.
Magento Pricing
At present, Magento provides 3 editions, including Magento Open Source (previously known as Magento Community), Magento Commerce Edition (previously known as Magento Enterprise), and Adobe Commerce Cloud (previously Magento Commerce Cloud or Magento Enterprise Cloud Edition).
Let’s compare the cost that you have to pay for each one by taking a look at the table below!
| Revenue per year (USD) | Magento Commerce Edition (self-host) | Magento Commerce Cloud |
| 0 – <1 M | $22,000 | $40,000 |
| 1 – <5 M | $32,000 | $55,000 |
| 5 – <10 M | $49,000 | $80,000 |
| 10 – <25 M | $75,000 | $120,000 |
| 25 – <50 M | $125,000 | $190,000 |
The table shows the license fee of Magento Commerce and the cost of Magento Commerce Cloud (including license and hosting fee) per year. The higher the revenue you receive, the more you have to pay.
With Magento Open Source Edition, you don’t have to pay a license fee as in Magento Commerce and Magento Commerce Cloud. But both Magento Commerce Edition and Magento Open Source Edition require a hosting fee that ranges from $4 to $1000. With the former, you will unlock more features than the latter.
Besides that, while running your online store on Magento, you may need the help of web agencies or developers because using this platform is quite complex. On average, a quality Magento developer will cost between $65 to $150 per hour. So, that will cost you quite a lot of money if you do not have technical skills or an in-house development team to execute the changes you want.
Which Magento edition should you choose?
Magento Open Source is suitable for beginners or small online businesses. This edition will help you save a lot of money compared to the two other options and still allow you to build your online stores quickly.
Magento Commerce Edition gives users out-of-the-box features, an unlimited ability to customize, and seamless third-party integrations. It’s quite important to know that you can also get 24/7 email support. Magento EE suits B2B enterprises and stores with high traffic, large product catalogs, or high business complexity.
Magento Commerce Cloud Edition is more suitable for large companies that are looking for a solution with cutting-edge functionality, easy customization, 24/7 support, and that don’t want to worry about hosting. This version combines all Magento 2 Commerce features and adds enhanced Cloud infrastructure.
In conclusion, the pricing plans for both BigCommerce vs Magento are quite similar. They have various packages for you to choose from; these plans are made for all store owners, from beginners to the enterprise.
#2. Ease of Use
As a store owner, you always want to spend more time focusing on your customers, products, and brand, you don’t want to take much time on building, customizing, and editing a website. So, ease of use is a crucial element when it comes to choosing a platform. Let’s find out how easy it is to use BigCommerce vs Magento.
BigCommerce Ease of Use
You can easily set up your store with detailed instructions on the dashboard. There are 8 key things you need to establish before your store can go live, including store profile, currencies, payments, store settings, shipping, tax, point of sale, and accounting.
BigCommerce allows easy navigation on its interface, everything is quite smooth. However, this platform uses various tech terms, which is not easy to handle for non-technical people. If you are not a techie, you may need help from Google a lot to understand all the terminologies every time performing basic tasks such as adding a product.
Besides, there is one drawback of the BigCommerce design interface. When you’re creating your store, it’s split between two areas. One is where you add products and manage your backend, while the other is where you edit your storefront. This can be confusing to navigate.
You can create a BigCommerce account to set up a BigCommerce website.
Magento Ease of Use
Setting up a new Magento store is not simple since there are many steps to take, including downloading Magento, setting up FTP, transferring the Magento archive to your hosted system, etc.
Moreover, you have to find ways to integrate extensions and customize themes yourself. Hence, you would need help from experts or developers to finish the task. However, the Magento interface is well-designed and thought-out if comparing its latest version, Magento 2, with the previous one.
Although it also uses complicated terminology on each page like BigCommerce, Magento 2 has a highly improved admin interface compared to Magento 1, allowing non-technical users to accomplish more without having to rely on their developers. Everything is consolidated on the navigational menu such as customers, products, promotions, sales, and reports.
In summary, BigCommerce is easier to use than Magento, the setting up process is quick and easy with clear instructions. Furthermore, unlike Magento, you don’t need to know technical skills to customize your website because almost all the functions you need can be found on the BigCommerce dashboard.
Do you know that WooCommerce is also a popular open-source solution for eCommerce? If you need more options, here, we also got you a full comparison between BigCommerce vs WooCommerce.
#3. Themes & Templates
One of the most important things that merchants care about is the look of their platform. That will be the first impression shoppers have on the brands. Therefore, it is of great significance. So, follow me to find out the difference between theme and level of interface customization between BigCommerce vs Magento.
BigCommerce Themes
Currently, BigCommerce is providing 15 free themes and 100+ paid options, which cost from $150 to $399 each. All of these themes are mobile responsive and easy to customize with the help of Stencil – BigCommerce front-end development framework.
If you’re wondering which BigCommerce templates may suit your store best, worry not! We’ve compiled a list of 8 best BigCommerce templates to solve your concern.
Magento Themes
On the other hand, Magento offers 5 theme options in total, both free and paid. With Magento, you can even create your theme from scratch, but this requires you to have deep coding knowledge, or you can hire developers to do it for you.
When it comes to themes, BigCommerce offers a variety of options for you to choose from, but Magento offers much more design flexibility than BigCommerce. Magento lets you customize your themes any way you want as long as you have enough coding experience to pull it off.
#4. Apps & Extensions
BigCommerce Apps
As a hosted platform, BigCommerce provides strong built-in features that help your online store perform better. Some of the outstanding ones are:
- Abandoned cart reminders: This feature allows users to create and send out automated emails to any website visitors who went through the sales funnel and left without making a purchase.
- Analytic tools and reporting: With this feature, you can manage your site’s performance and assess campaigns.
BigCommerce also provides a wide range of apps for you to expand the functions of your store. At present, it supports over 600 BigCommerce apps belonging to different categories, such as Marketing, Analytics & Reporting, Payment & Security and Accounting, etc.
Magento Extensions
Like BigCommerce, Magento offers various and powerful built-in features such as Integrated checkout, payment, and shipping; mobile-optimized shopping; catalog management; instant purchase, and so on.
And of course, you can also buy third-party extensions on Magento Marketplace, which is now providing 3520+ extensions in all categories. You can refer to some highlight extensions of Magento here.
In a nutshell, both BigCommerce vs Magento offer many robust integrated functions and support a wide range of extensions on their marketplaces. However, Magento is the winner in terms of extension quantity.
#5. Payment Options & Fees
BigCommerce Payments
BigCommerce offers over 65 integrated payment gateways to its users. Some of the big bosses are PayPal, Stripe, Square, Apple Pay, etc. All BigCommerce plans require no transaction fees. You just need to pay credit card rates. The higher the plan you choose, the less you have to pay for credit card rates.
Take a look at the below table, which shows credit card rates on each pricing plan of BigCommerce.
| Standard | Plus | Pro | Enterprise |
| 2.59% + $0.49
per transaction |
2.35% + $0.49
per transaction |
2.05% + $0.49
per transaction |
2.05% + $0.49¢ or lower
per transaction |
Magento Payment
Contrasting to BigCommerce, with Magento, you have to use third-party payment methods. Currently, there are more than 450 Apps in the Magento Marketplace for you to choose from. Therefore, it may take you some time to select and integrate. However, some apps provide gateways that support other countries and languages, which is ideal for international businesses.
In summary, in terms of Payment Gateway, BigCommerce allows you to integrate Payment Processors quicker and easier, without transaction fees on any pricing plans. While adding payment gateways into BigCommerce can be done with just a couple of clicks from the dashboard, Magento requires apps that may cost an extra fee.
#6. SEO Features
When running an online business, optimizing SEO is essential. On both platforms, you can edit the page title and meta description, add alt text to images, and customize URLs. However, let’s go further to see the differences between BigCommerce vs Magento in terms of SEO and marketing tools.
With that being said, if you are still unsure of the SEO implications of different eCommerce platforms, you can always hire an SEO consultant who understands the implications. They will be able to help you choose the best setup.
BigCommerce SEO
BigCommerce has some built-in SEO features like:
- Unique URLs: Ensuring that every unique page has only one URL, so you don’t get punished for duplicate content.
- Micro-data: BigCommerce has integrated micro-data (rich snippets) into your product pages to enhance your search result listings with information like ratings, pricing, brand, and stock levels.
- 301 redirects and URL rewrites: When you rename a product, it will automatically generate a new URL, and the old URL will be redirected to the new URL. This helps search engines understand when you’ve made changes or moved pages on your site without manual effort.
- CDN (Content Delivery Network): This feature is always working in the background to ensure your site loads quickly for both shoppers and search engines. The fast site speed will boost the website’s search rankings.
In addition, you can go through 600 apps for BigCommerce to add SEO apps if you want. You can refer to these two trending SEO apps, such as Shogun Page Builder and FavSEO.
Magento SEO
Magento doesn’t offer as many built-in SEO features as BigCommerce, so you need to integrate SEO apps into a Magento store.
Some of the apps that help expand Magento SEO functionality are:
- SEO Toolkit, some of the top-notch features this extension offers you are:
- Generate relevant meta tags with ease;
- Help you build robust sitemaps;
- Quickly import and export product tags;
- Make your product reviews SEO-friendly;
- Show rich snippets in search results;
- Create and automate meta tag templates.
- Advanced SEO Suite, some of the highlight features of this extension are:
- Take care of SEO settings for pages, layered navigation, and categories;
- Take advanced rich snippets;
- Generate Meta-tags with templates;
- Generate advanced Sitemap for Google;
- Manage all redirects quickly and easily;
- Get an SEO analysis of every page;
- Increase your website visibility on search engines and grow your CTR.
#7. Multi-Channel Integration
Multichannel Selling tactic is a marketing strategy in which retailers can interact with potential buyers via several important social media and Marketplaces.
Both BigCommerce vs Magento offer the ability to sell products on Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, eBay, Amazon, etc by default. While these sales channels are available in the BigCommerce platform, Magento requires a multi-channel selling tool (like LitCommerce) to integrate with marketplaces.
In conclusion, BigCommerce has better-integrated marketing features than Magento, it has full marks in SEO and automatically links your store to numerous channels like Facebook, Amazon, and eBay. By contrast, with Magento, if you want to rank your website, you should buy SEO extensions on Magento MarketPlace, and Magento also requires third-party extensions for multi-channel selling.
#8. Scalability
When choosing eCommerce platforms, you need to take into account the future business scale that you are orienting to.
Magento Scalability
Magento has some incredible performance and scalability standards, as follows:
- Processes significantly more orders per hour on the same hardware;
- Offer near-instant server response times for catalog browsing;
- Deliver double-digit decreases in response times for cart and checkout pages;
- Better handle peak order volume, extra-large catalogs, and outsized customer lists;
- Supports significantly more simultaneous administrative users on the backend.
BigCommerce Scalability
BigCommerce has some outstanding features to plan for your store’s future growth:
- Open API: BigCommerce enables developers to create an entirely customized user experience for their customers with an open API.
- 100% uptime: This is a very important factor as your business grows and traffic increases. BigCommerce will ensure that your store will maintain the normal loading speed during peak periods.
- Bringing order to the back-end with an ERP: An integrated ERP allows employees in different departments( eg: accounting, logistics, and sales, etc) to rely on the same information and data source
- Product information management (PIM): it is a solution that provides a single place to collect, manage, and enrich your product information, create a product catalog, and distribute it to your sales and eCommerce channels.
In terms of business scalability, Magento seems to outweigh BigCommerce when allowing merchants to flexibly customize their storefronts.
#9. Security
It is an unfortunate fact, but the reality of the current day is that there is a never-ending line of people attempting to hack your website. Thus, website security should be taken very seriously to protect your site against security risks like business-crucial data loss or abrupt shutdown
BigCommerce Security
BigCommerce, as a fully hosted platform, will take care of security as part of your monthly subscription. Additional security measures include perimeter and server-specific firewalls, file integrity scanners, intrusion detection software, 24/7 human monitoring, and fraudulent transaction protection.
Magento Security
In contrast, due to the open-source nature, most of the Magento security will fall into your own hands. For instance, you are responsible for your own SSL certificate, configuring your site security plugins, two-factor authentication, and PCI compliance.
Moreover, Magento frequently updates security to make sure that the system is protected from malware and that store performance is optimized. However, the Magento update process needs to be conducted manually and, thus, can be challenging for non-tech-savvy users.
With that being said, BigCommerce surpasses Magento in the security department. In case something goes wrong with BigCommerce, there’s always a dedicated support team right at your fingertips.
#10. Support
Whether you are a newbie or a senior in an online business, there will be times when you need expert advice to solve website-related problems. Hence, the platform’s customer support service is an essential factor that you need to think about.
BigCommerce Support
At this time, BigCommerce supports 24/7 through phone and live chat, email, and help center for all plans. Also, when you sign up for a free trial, you get an email offering an appointment for a 10-minute call to discuss your business and how BigCommerce can help you succeed.
Especially with enterprise plans, you’ll get priority support. This includes an onboarding consultant, as well as prioritized phone calls. You can connect instantly to highly-trained support staff.
Magento Support
As for Magento, it doesn’t provide a variety of support types like BigCommerce. If using Magento Open Source, you can only find answers from other experienced users and developers on Magento Forums. When you sign up for Magento Commerce and Magento Cloud Edition, you’ll get more support through live chat and email.
BigCommerce vs Magento – FAQs
- Which is better Magento or BigCommerce?
BigCommerce comes out on top when it comes to ease of use, eCommerce features, support and security. Meanwhile, customizability and marketing tools are where Magento shows off its muscles. Hence, it’s quite impossible to pick up the clear winner between BigCommerce vs Magento. The answer, instead, totally depends on your own requirements and resources.
- Is BigCommerce good for eCommerce?
Totally yes! BigCommerce has more built-in sales features than any other solutions in the eCommerce sphere and combines these attributes with advanced SEO and fantastic multi-channel integration.
- Is Magento for free?
Being an open-source solution, Magento is free to download and install. But you will then need to pay for some extras like hosting, domain as well as some efficiency-enhancing features.
Final Words
After comparing and assessing the two platforms, BigCommerce and Magento, with all the key criteria that matter the most, we can conclude that both BigCommerce and Magento are suitable for all types of business, from small to large scale.
- If you only have a little technical knowledge, going with BigCommerce will be a better choice as it has all the essential features and decent support to help you quickly kick off an online business.
- Meanwhile, technical people can take advantage of Magento (Adobe Commerce) as among BigCommerce alternatives since it has a free edition and gives you limitless customizability. Magento lets you fully control and optimize your stores as you wish.
And, that’s the reason why BigCommerce and Magento are both on our list of best eCommerce platforms!
So, if you are dissatisfied with your current shopping cart and wish to migrate to BigCommerce or migrate to Magento, the LitExtension team is always here to help. Finally, If you have any questions regarding our migration service, feel free to contact our support team; we are always here to help you!
You can also visit LitExtension blog and join our Facebook Community to get more eCommerce tips and news. Or else, continue your reading with our Salesforce Commerce vs Magento comparison!