Magento VS Prestashop

Magento VS Prestashop

In this days of Open source ecommerce, After the power Magento, I got to know of another opensource ecommerce shopping cart software which seemed to inline with Magento’s principles of offering a top-notch ecommerce software for free and I have had the pleasure to test drive – and install in production environment – Prestashop, a simpler alternative, that serves ecommerce with a nice ajax animated shopping cart and various interesting features.

1)      Prestashop and Magento both e-commerce solutions are available under Open Software License (OSL).

2)      Prestashop Installation requirements are Depends on GD library of PHP. For magento installation need a lot of extensions like PDO, CURL etc…

3)      As per as functionality concern functional features like Customer groups ,Wish list, product comparison, RSS feed, TAG in magento e-commerce. Multiple store control is also a powerful feature of magento.  On the other hand statistics and membership these two functional features are available in prestashop e-commerce. For more functionality and features you can also hire magento programmer.

4)      There are not proper shipping and payment modules or any label printing option in prestashop. Magento contain all these features.

5)      Prestashop adopt smarty template engine based on PHP 5. If you see the code of prestashop you can find the code is much more, for it adopts smarty template, and increase the workload of extending development. Magento adopt Zend framework, not smarty template engine. For the programmer who is making extending development, they not only need to master PHP, but also need to handle Zend framework.

6)      Prestashop’s create impressive effect on search.  The search on their frontend appears faster than magento and is based on score to bring in relevance of search.

7)      Magento is much SEO friendly than prestashop.

8)      In the prestashop the upgrade strategy is not clearly defined.  The upgrade impact on existing customizations is unsure in prestashop. On the other hand Magento’s customization scheme depends on the excellent OOP concept of subclasses and method. And this is extensively useful in keeping the customizations apart from Magento’s main releases.

9)      As mention above prestashop uses a smarty template system and javascript based on Jquery so the complete OOP coding offers a lot of flexibility for design. Magento’s design seems to be difficult than prestashop so don’t bother much with magento design.

10)   Flip side, the back office of Magento is less intuitive and technical structure it required more specialized skills for any adjustment.

11)   Magento Community have 130,000 members, Prestashop have 30000 members Community. Some approaches like magento team involvement, video tutorial, screen casts are work behind the wonderful magento community.