Which E-Commerce Platform is best? Magento or ZenCart

Use of ecommerce for online store development has become very common these days. There are number of ecommerce solutions out there in the market to set-up impressive and powerful online shops. Amid all ecommerce platforms, Magento and ZenCart are the two most commonly used ecommerce shopping cart software. But, genuinely it is very hard to elect which one is better for online store development. One of the best solutions to get out from this tough situation is simply to know the features of both the ecommerce software.

About Magento
Magento is the prominent open source ecommerce shopping cart application designed to manage, customize, set-up and run an online store. It provides maximum degree of scalability, flexibility and control as well. The coding of Magento ecommerce is based on most recent PHP5 object oriented coding standards, so that you can have an easy platform to work with. Magento is feature-rich ecommerce platform leverage the power of its broad feature list that helps in developing a completely scalable online shop.

Benefits of Magento ecommerce development

1)Marketing promotions and tools
2)Multi-store functionality
3)Site management
4)Flexible Coupon
5)Analytics and Reporting feature
6)Great template system
7)International Support
8)Catalog Management
9)Allow to create, edit and manage orders in admin
10)Multiple payment options supported
11)Easy integration of additional layouts and Add-ons
12)Feature-rich Customer Accounts
13)Built-in Product Image Zoom Capability
14)Search engine friendly (SEF) URL structure and SEO tools
15)Efficient one-page checkout process
16)M-Commerce with mobile-optimized versions and
17)Support multiple languages

About ZenCart
A free, user-friendly PHP written Zen Cart is an open source ecommerce solution. With Zen Cart ecommerce software you can easily establish a user-friendly online store backed by multiple ad banner controller, shipping and payment options, customer modes, XHTML1.0 compliant template system, robust newsletter manager, support multiple languages and currencies and many more.

Benefits of Zen Cart

1)Easy installation
2)Available on GNU General Public License (GPL)
3)More secure
4)Easy to use
5)Understandable template and PHP structure
6)Highly customizable
7)Intuitive interface
8)Unlimited category depth
9)Unlimited extra pages
10)Discount coupons
11)Quantity discounts
12)Featured products

Both Magento and Zen Cart help you in setting up a powerful ecommerce store with minimum amount of effort. However, in the market of ecommerce web development, Magento played a role of real challenger for ZenCart software. So, for choosing the best between both ecommerce platforms, we have compared Magento with Zen Cart on different parameters. As they both are open source but their requirements are somewhat different such as Magento requires MySQL4.1.20+, CURL, PHP5.2 and Zen Cart requires PHP 4.0+, MySQL4.1.14+. They both are easy to install but ZenCart is easy to use as compared to Magento. With Zen Cart you need Add-ons for Google Sitemap, Meta Tags and also for One Page Checkout but these functionalities are inbuilt in Magento software.

Above mentioned points help you in making a decision that which ecommerce platform is the better option for developing an online store. The final decision totally depends on your requirements and the kind of website you are looking for.

We at PixelCrayons have qualified magento developers for custom magento website design and development, eCommerce store and magento ecommerce and magento customization services.