Prestashop vs WooCommerce: Which Should You Choose?

Get the Right eCommerce Website Builder

If you are looking to set up an online store, it is extremely important for you to select the right eCommerce platform and get in touch with some of the best ecommerce developers. This decision will go on to play a critical role with regard to the features that you can access.

Making a decision in the PrestaShop vs WooCommerce debate can be daunting. This is true, especially if you are not well familiar with today’s leading eCommerce platforms. Getting to know the difference between the platforms will have a direct effect on your ability to make the right selection.

There are a host of things that you need to consider when doing the PrestaShop vs WooCommerce comparison. This point has been acknowledged by today’s leading ecommerce development solution providers.

Some of these things are ease of usability, pricing, and overall support and features. This is where this blog comes to your immense aid, as it will do the PrestaShop vs WooCommerce analysis for you.

After reading this blog, you should be able to make the right call regarding which is the right platform option for you:

PrestaShop

Let’s look at the top features:

Top Features

A Dedicated eCommerce Platform: This platform is created especially for today’s online stores. It presents a comprehensive set of features that will allow you to manage orders, customers, and products effectively and straight out of the box.

The Usability Factor: PrestaShop’s interface is very user-friendly. This means that it is easy to both setup and manage your store, and you don’t require any in-depth coding knowledge to do this.

Built-in Features: PrestaShop has a wide range of built-in features compared to WooCommerce. This includes multi-language support, SEO tools, and abandoned cart recovery.

If you need an in-depth analysis of PrestaShop’s top features and how they can benefit you, contact FuturByte. They are a reputed webapp development agency that would love to listen to you.

Drawbacks

Small Community: PrestaShop’s community is limited in numbers, especially when compared with WooCommerce. This could pose challenges when troubleshooting issues or finding support.

Limited Customisation: There are a host of themes available, but PrestaShop presents a lesser degree of customisation flexibility than WooCommerce.

Cost of Add-Ons: There are a host of PrestaShop advanced features that require maid modules. This can potentially add up over time.

WooCommerce

Let’s look at the top features first:

Top Features

Huge Community: You can benefit from a huge and active WordPress community that will offer a great deal of support, tutorials, and resources.

Extensive Customisation: WooCommerce presents a massive selection of paid and free themes and plugins. This will allow a deeply customised feature set and storefront. For more information on customisation, feel free to contact a reputed WooCommerce development company.

WordPress Integration: The platform can leverage the familiarity and power of WordPress. This makes it a wonderful choice for those who are comfortable with it.

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Drawbacks

Limited Built-in Features: By itself, WooCommerce has a rather basic feature set that requires additional plugins to attain the same functionality as PrestaShop.

Possible Plugin Conflicts: Since there are a great number of available plugins, there could be conflicts that may negatively affect a store’s functions.

Steeper Learning Curve: If you want to set up and manage a WooCommerce store, this could demand a good deal of technical knowledge from you compared with PrestaShop. This is because of the dependency on WordPress plugins.

Prestashop vs WooCommerce: The Comparison

Let’s look at the pricing factor first:

Pricing

WooCommerce, as well as PrestaShop are open-source software. This means that you have the option of downloading any of these platforms and then install on the server of your selection.

This accessibility makes both PrestaShop and WooCommerce wonderful options for anyone who cares to start an eCommerce store on a rather limited budget.

Installation

You can install WooCommerce and PrestaShop in a host of ways. The first and the most obvious of these is that you can download any of them from their website. Then, upload them on your server and begin with the manual installation.

Do not feel intimidated by the installation process, especially if you haven’t installed any software on a server before.

Many debaters of the Prestashop vs WooCommerce topic have noted that these platforms are immensely favoured choices for new eCommerce stores.

This also hints at the fact that the majority of web hosts will present streamlined installation options just to ease up the store setup process.

Ease of Usability

It has been established that installing both PrestaShop and WooCommerce is an easy process. However, it is important to state the ease related to the configuration of both these platforms and to utilise them to publish items of choice.

WooCommerce and PrestaShop offer easy platform use via startup wizards. When we look at PrestaShop, its wizard walks you through the process of making your initial product, store customisation, and configuration.

If you are looking to publish a given product via PrestaShop, you can use an editor that lets you customise all aspects of the specific item. You have the option of adding product features, variations, descriptions, images, and more.

Let’s look at WooCommerce now. It is also known to present a very effective product editor. Somehow, if you have familiarity with the WordPress Classic Editor, the good news for you is that creating WooCommerce products should be rather easy:

PrestaShopandWooCommerceletyouconfigureproductsinaverythoroughmanner.Thekeydifferencebetweentheproducteditorsisassociatedwiththeirinterfaces.

PrestaShop makes it easy for you to find individual settings for your shop via the very beneficial store configuration. The majority of the setting categories are present in the PrestaShop main navigation menu:

When we look at WooCommerce, we see that the store settings are not hidden. At the same time, they aren’t easily accessible too. On your behalf, you have to go to the dashboard and access WooCommerce, and then go to the Settings page.

At this point, you will come across individual tabs for every set of configuration options. 

It is observed that WooCommerce has more configuration options than PrestaShop. Now, it is important to state here that you can make use of plugins and modules to extend both PrestaShop and WooCommerce’s functionality.

All in all, if this is the first time that you are making use of an eCommerce platform, you will be required to check the documentation for either PrestaShop or WooCommerce.

The good news here is that both options are usually very user-friendly. Still, there are a host of settings and features that you may waste time attempting to figure out everything by yourself.

Scalability and Performance

It is well-understood by today’s leading eCommerce experts as well as top companies that offer search engine optimisation services that if an eCommerce store needs to be successful, being fast is a huge prerequisite.

This translates to the fact that pages across the shop need to load very fast. Also, the software should not give a slow feel whenever changes are made to the site.

Both WooCommerce and PrestaShop are open source. This means that the performance attained by any user will immensely depend on the hosting platform.

Of course, if you are making use of shared hosting for a store that has a great amount of traffic and hundreds (if not thousands) of products, you will get a below-par performance.

There are a host of manual methods that allow you to optimise performance for PrestaShop and WooCommerce stores. For instance, since WooCommerce and PrestaShop require PHP, updating your PHP version will have an immense impact on the store’s overall performance.

When we look through the scalability lens, both WooCommerce and PrestaShop can potentially tackle thousands of products. But, it is pertinent to state here that the expansion is possible via the right hosting configuration and backbone. 

Security

If you intend to run an online store, you may be required to go to many lengths to safeguard customer data stored on your site. True, both PrestaShop and WooCommerce are immensely popular. This is why they are very likely to be the target of big attacks.

A very important aspect of security is update frequency. Here, outdated software is much more prone to attacks than updated ones.

Thankfully, this is where both WooCommerce and PrestaShop get almost flawless marks. Both of these platforms are known to release patches and updates on a rather frequent note.

It is also important to highlight here that if you plan to utilise add-ons, templates, themes, and extensions, then these should be updated too.

Extensibility

WooCommerce and PrestaShop are fully capable of standing on their own with regard to their respective features. With each of them, it is the base software that allows any potential user to make a fully-featured online store that may host hundreds of items.

If you prefer additional features, you have the option of turning to add-ons and extensions. WooCommerce extensions are WordPress plugins, too. At the same time, they are regarded as extensions for eCommerce software.

There are more than 700 options in the official WooCommerce extension catalogue.

Similarly, when we look at PrestaShop, there are more than 4,000 premium and free PrestaShop modules.

Many online store operators are of the opinion that WooCommerce has the edge when it comes to the extension process. Still, PrestaShop is considered to be the likely winner as it offers a massive number of options.

However, if you take into account the WordPress plugins in general, the conclusion is that there are many more WooCommerce customising options.

Marketing and SEO

As compared to WooCommerce, PrestaShop presents more options for eCommerce SEO. The product editor lets you add custom meta descriptions and titles for every product. Additionally, you can configure product redirections.

You can add a likewise functionality to WooCommerce via a WordPress SEO plugin. The good news here is that the most reputed SEO plugins are compatible with WooCommerce.

With regards to marketing, both WooCommerce and PrestaShop allow you to seek the promotion of your choice.

PrestaShop promotes a host of add-ons that can make it easy to advertise products on social media and search engines. 

There are a host of similar tools for WooCommerce, but the platform does not support a good number of particular add-ons.

Support

Both PrestaShop and WooCommerce are reputed open-source platforms. This means that they have a good amount of documentation. You can find troubleshooting-related online guides on any issue.

Additionally, most dedicated support options for PrestaShop and WooCommerce are expensive for small stores.

Concluding Remarks

It can be safely deduced that both WooCommerce and PrestaShop are special in their own manner. This point is often noted by many who engage in the Prestashop vs WooCommerce debate. True, both WooCommerce and PrestaShop are budget-friendly and immensely extensible options for both large and small stores alike. Also, it is unfortunate that neither of the platforms offers dedicated support. 

Some online store owners are of the opinion that WooCommerce is better than PrestaShop. This is because it offers a great amount of themes and plugins to customise your store. However, this is a debatable issue, and there are lots of contrary opinions on this as well. 

Lastly, if you think that you are having trouble deciding which one to go with, then here is some hugely beneficial advice for you –  contact FuturByte today. They come as a globally recognised custom website design and development company that will give you highly beneficial and free advice on the matter.