Magento or Prestashop, which is better? [closed]

Answer 1

Like you, i am NOT a programmer but a store owner. So i hope my view point helps you, i have used both PrestaShop and Magento.

Magento i didn't like, boat ware!
Prestashop is good, pretty templates but the good modules are not free and to get an online shop with the features you need can end up costing 1000s

I also use Zen Cart, while it has the worlds ugliest standard template, if your CSS knowledge is average you can make it look pretty much like anything you want. It has more features built in than the Magento £11k pa has and all modules on the site are free and also a better community too as the forums are open source focused.

Hope it helps.

Answer 2

I fully agree with the opinion that MAGENTO is to "heavy" and consumes too much CPU and memory. If you have your own dedicated server you may try MAGENTO.

But if you can afford shared hosting only use lightweight PRESTASHOP. Much shoppers do not need complicated functionalities provided by MAGENTO and therefore don't like it. More doesn't always mean better - sometimes simpler means better.

Moreover there is large set of PRESTASHOP extensions available free and commercial ones. so every shop owner may choose what he needs and wants. Every potential market gap is filled immediately e.g. if somebody noticed there is no fast checkout option in the guest mode buying. This kind of extension appears immediately on the market.

Answer 3

Magento is more polished, but also a beast to modify, in my experience. After using Magento for a few shops, we switched to Prestashop and are much happier. It took a bit more customization up front (French-based development left some quirks in the address forms, for example), but it is much, much simpler to wrap your brain around and to develop custom modules.

Answer 4

PrestaShop is your best bet. The only problem with PrestaShop is that uses smarty template engine and rather than write clean PHP without the need of loops etc, in smarty they have made it a very great deal of effort for the average person to theme.

I will stand behind PrestaShop 100 percent if they get rid of smarty and implement a simpler templating system such as a main html file with includes that you can just embed PHP template tags into.

Answer 5

I am not a programmer, so I am confined to noob-like needs. At first I tried Magento, and found it to be difficult. It also "crashed" (not sure what word to use) a couple times, the last time beyond something I could figure out. I began to wonder if the entire thing was created just to get me to get in so deep that I'd need pro support to fix it when in a pinch.

So as I searched the internet looking for a decent alternative, I stumbled upon PrestaShop. I gave it a shot, since my Magento site was still RIP. Found it to be much easier to use, and I had a shop up and running (STILL up and running) in a day.

So I'm not sure what it all means, but hands down I liked PrestaShop better. I did like the options to create multiple shopping experiences within Magento, but I figure I can just use multiple PrestaShop installs to accomplish the same thing. Either way I'd have to customize 'em, anyway.

So that's my two cents, for what it's worth. Hope it helps someone.

Answer 6

Magento is a very complex solution for large shops that require good hardware base to handle more than 500 products. Although even though there is a lot of resources to start with Magento.
I have personally found out that building themes is really easy once you find your way around few annoying things like XML layout dependencies (there is barely anything documented on XML, which is the base for making good themes for Magento) and objects in PHP (some functions and data is not accessible from certain parts of the template just because).

I'm very comfortable with working and writing my own apps in OO PHP but stuff that Magento pulls off sometimes is really annoying and also directory structure and the way themes are being handled is awkward...

On the other hand, PrestaShop is fast (after few tweaks), but still requires some work in the back-end. I am developing a lot of back-end modules to help people get the most out of this system as it's worth it. Plus the community is growing and developers are fixing everything they can.

One more thing: writing both, back-end and front-end modules for Prestashop is incredibly easy, plus using SMARTY for templates is a good choice.

Edit: Magento is very easy to break during or after deployment (especially between localhost and a hosted space) and maintenance in SVN might be a pain for inexperienced devs.