Confronto PrestaShop vs OpenCart – Quale piattaforma dovresti scegliere? (Parte 2)

Welcome back to my top trending e-commerce platforms review series. After a battle between PrestaShop vs Shopify, now I’m going to introduce you to a new candidate for the best e-commerce platform titled – OpenCart. In this article, we will learn more about OpenCart and compare PrestaShop vs OpenCart so you can decide which one is best for your store. To do that, I’ll break them down using several criteria, including:

• User-friendliness
• Price and extra costs
• SEO optimized
• E-commerce templates and design
• Customer support
• Trending

With all this information, picking the best e-commerce platform should be simple. Let’s jump right into PrestaShop vs OpenCart!

An Introduction to PrestaShop and OpenCart

PrestaShop is a self-hosted platform published under Open Source License. It provides online, antecedent, and mobile-compatible solutions for SME businesses. OpenCart, on the other hand, was released in 2009 and is an open-source e-commerce management system that can also provide on-premise, online and mobile solutions for SMEs. It is published under the General Public License. Both platforms have their own advantages and disadvantages. It all relies upon what you are trying to develop, your financial plan, and how big your shopping cart is. They do have their own similarities, like the programming language for example, where both platforms run on PHP with MySQL Database.

User-friendliness

OpenCart is clearly easy to use and effective platform that comes with a highly intuitive, well-designed interface. Quick OpenCart setup along with a responsive interface makes OpenCart a simple tool for non-tech savvy users and store owners. Indeed, even with limited technical knowledge, you can easily add, adjust or edit within OpenCart with no headaches. OpenCart is a user-friendly platform that offers an intuitive, well-designed interface, which is more difficult to configure than PrestaShop. You will need some knowledge of HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript in order to create a professional e-commerce site with OpenCart.

PrestaShop offers the benefit of being extremely easy to use. It may be characterized by two main features: a customizable front office and a back office that’s easy to manage. This makes the tool very intuitive. Also, internal store features can be consistently enhanced, thanks to a wide variety of modules available in Prestashop modules. PrestaShop has an easy-to-learn dashboard that offers quick access to all the information, settings, and performance of your e-commerce site. It is a good option for anyone with basic or limited technical understanding.

Price and extra costs

With regard to open-source platforms, the word ‘free’ sounds dubious. Obviously, OpenCart is free to download, use and even upgrade, however, it doesn’t mean that you will run your store without any charges. Considering that you are in charge of your hosting and security, essential costs will include the domain name, hosting, and SSL certificate. There is no doubt that you will have to spend a considerable sum of money buying various extensions. PrestaShop is completely free to download and use since it also is an open-source platform. As the other open-source platforms, it requires paid web hosting. Hosting fees can vary, for example, PrestaShop promoted hosting partners 1&1, charge from $7.99 to $14.99 per month.

SEO optimized

PrestaShop has an incredible and flexible set of SEO features. You can adjust each page, add high-ranking meta tags and even create SEO-friendly URLs, that will help your products to be easily recognized by search engines. PrestaShop enables you to take advantage of URL rewrites, Google sitemaps, canonical URLs and redirects, and many other SEO features.

When it comes to SEO, OpenCart has all the basic SEO features you'd expect from a high-end e-commerce solution and is capable of getting your products to the top of SERP pretty easily. Meta keywords and descriptions can be set to all product and category pages, as well as title and header tags. Moreover, OpenCart works well on creating friendly SEO URLs.

E-commerce templates and design

OpenCart provides plenty of professionally designed & responsive themes. There are tons of them available, both free and paid, capable of giving your store an exceptionally appealing look. Besides the official OpenCart template store, there are plenty of them available on third-party resources, such as Theme Forest, Template Monster, etc. If not sure which one to pick, I recommend you spend time playing with demo themes before purchasing any. For PrestaShop store owners, on the PrestaShop Official Marketplace, there are over 1,500 templates. It has a huge selection of customizable e-commerce themes. You can select whichever is suitable for your store.

Customer support

Unlike other open-source shopping platforms, OpenCart has a dedicated support service. It even provides free community and commercial support. It’s easy to find an answer to your questions. Commercial support offers two options: One-time purchase and Monthly payment. Both cost $99. PrestaShop provides store owners with various support plans with different levels of support options. Overall, the support fee is quite expensive. PrestaShop also offers migration/update service, support tickets and a starter pack.

Trending

According to Google Trends, PrestaShop has been more popular than OpenCart. The number of times PrestaShop was searched nearly doubles that of OpenCart.