The most important differences between Shopware and OpenCart
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Choosing the right e-commerce platform can be challenging and very difficult. Nowadays the market has hundreds of different options, which makes the selection very difficult. To increase the return on of your store and to attract more customers, you need to select a suitable platform that meets your current needs. It also has to provide the necessary functionality to adapt and respond to developments in the future.
To simplify matters, we compare the two popular e-commerce solutions: Shopware and OpenCart.
OpenCart
Opencart is a free open source e-commerce platform and is an ideal match for medium-sized and small businesses. The software is compatible with PHP; every entrepreneur who is familiar with PHP will greatly benefit from this feature. Since OpenCart uses a model with ‘core extension’, you need to install some applications if you need more functionality.
The good news is that OpenCart has a huge variety of extensions, nearly 14,000. Because it runs on AJAX technology, the platform is exeptionnally fast. OpenCart has all the basic functions that online retailers need for their e-commerce platform. In addition, OpenCart has a multi-store feature that allows users to track and manage multiple online stores from one administration panel.
Easy to use
OpenCart is a simple and user-friendly e-commerce platform with an intuitive, effective and well-designed interface. It is easier compared to Shopware. Thanks to the quick installation and the interface, Opencart is a very simple tool for many non-technical users. You can easily make changes within OpenCart and add them with little technical knowledge.
Free
The word free can be a little misleading when it comes to open source platforms. OpenCart is completely free to download, upgrade and use, but that does not mean that you manage the online store free of charge.
Keep in mind that you have to pay the security and hosting costs. A few basic expenses that you have to make are the costs for hosting, domain name and your SSL certificate. Moreover, you may have to spend a significant amount on the purchase of various extensions.
SEO
In terms of SEO, OpenCart is a pretty good platform, but it’s not the best. It contains all the essential SEO functions that you can expect from a solid e-commerce platform. It can easily get your products or services in one of the best SERPs.
You can assign meta descriptions and keywords to all category and product pages, along with header and title tags. In addition, OpenCart is doing well when it comes to developing excellent SEO URLs.
E-commerce designs and templates
OpenCart has a variety of responsive and professionally designed themes. You will find thousands of free and fee-based themes that can give your online store a good look.
However, you need basic knowledge of CSS, HTML and JavaScript to apply the designs and themes to your online store. This often makes it more complicated to manage templates in OpenCart, compared to Shopware.
Customer support
Unlike many other open source e-commerce platforms, OpenCart does offer customer support. Opencart has recently started offering special commercial support.
Fortunately, there are also enough Opencart forums active. Here you can easily find a representative or developer who can answer your questions for free.
Shopware
Just like OpenCart, Shopware is an open source e-commerce platform that works with the latest edition of PHP. The most important advantage of the compatibility of Shopware with PHP Seven is the incredible increase in performance. According to the latest tests, Shopware is almost twice as fast in many areas, which gives an advantage over Opencart.
This is particularly reflected in the ‘Theme Cache’, with which you can develop a theme very quickly. Shopware uses the latest and most innovative technologies to offer customers proper security.
Intuitive and easy to use
Shopware has an intuitive and simple interface, making it easy to use. This allows you to spend your time and effort on the most important aspects of the online business. The backend is specially designed to save time and simplify your work.
Adjustability
Shopware is very easy to adjust due to the open template design. You can easily make numerous adjustments via the backend without touching a single line of code. This gives the e-commerce platform an advantage over OpenCart.
Flexible user support
Shopware customers can choose between different service and support options. Some of these options are available for free. For a little more extensive user support, you can choose from a variety of Shopware subscriptions tailored to your needs. Simply choose the subscription option that best suits your business model.
Costs
Shopware has four rates, which are divided into categories. These are community, professional, professional plus and enterprise. The community plan is free and offers community support. The professional package costs 1295 € and the professional Plus package 5995 € per year. The Enterprise package is available on request, there is no fixed price. This price includes the manufacturer’s support, product streams, a storytelling feature, customer streams and much more.
SEO
Shopware provides important and reliable options to provide the most relevant search engine content for search engines to Google. In addition, the responsive and dynamic template formats ensure that Google’s Ajax crawler optimally captures all the content that is embedded in your business environment, and gets the best out of it, and all this in a way that is relevant to SEO.
All responsive topic pages have been optimized to be relevant to SEO. In addition, non-SEO-related and excessive tags have been removed. The platform is also optimized for mobile devices.
This was a comparison between Shopware and OpenCart, focusing on the differences between the two e-commerce platforms.