If you still haven’t decided on which platform to choose for the development of your ecommerce business then you are at loss. Are you confused between Magento and Drupal for which one is more beneficial for the growth of your online store or suitable for your business requirements?
No need to worry anymore, we will help you compare the options, weigh the pros and cons and then make an informed decision to pick a platform that is right for your business. So let’s get started now, shall we?
Magento Vs Drupal – Key Difference to Know
- Magento Vs Drupal: Overview
- What is Magento?
- What is Drupal?
- Magento Vs Drupal Commerce Comparison
- Scalability
- Features And Functionalities
- Content Management
- Learning Curve
- SEO
- Pricing
- Support
- Magento Vs Drupal Ecommerce: Different Target Market
Magento Vs Drupal: Overview
What is Magento?
Many top brands and leading companies like Ford, Christian Louboutin, Coca-Cola, Land Rover, and more prefer to extend hands with Magento experts for ecommerce app development and other related products. It is an open-source platform using the PHP programming language to build ecommerce stores. This platform was launched in 2008 by Varien and is now powering more than 250,000 ecommerce websites. It is indeed one of the most popular and widely used ecommerce platforms. Magento is available in two different versions:
The first one is the community edition of Magento which is open source. So it’s a free plan and yet it comes with all the basic features necessary for ecommerce development. You can easily download the program code or you can also customise it to satisfy the specific requirements of the store owners.
Another version of Magento is the enterprise edition which is also known as Magento Commerce. It comes with a premium plan which includes official support and advanced ecommerce functionalities.
What is Drupal?
Drupal is also built using PHP and it is also an open-source platform. But unlike Magento, it is a content management system like WordPress. So you can use Drupal to not only create ecommerce websites but other types of sites too. The most popular versions of Drupal that are going to be continuously maintained and supported in the upcoming years are Drupal 7 and Drupal 8.
So in this article when we are going to weigh our options against each other, we are going to compare Magento vs Drupal commerce. The latter is the set of modules that provides functionalities for ecommerce development. There are approximately 56,000 projects in the world that are empowered by Drupal commerce. Drupal Commerce comes in two versions as follows:
- Drupal Commerce 1x: for Drupal 7
- Drupal Commerce 2x: for Drupal 8
Many top companies like Artellite, Fooda, Obermeyer, and more use Drupal commerce for their products.
Now, both of these platforms are popular and are preferred by many developers in the community. Then how can we decide upon which platform to choose for your ecommerce store? The following comparison will help you through:
Magento Vs Drupal Commerce Comparison
Scalability
The scalability of a website indicates how well your store will perform under critical conditions like high traffic, product management, and large inventory. In terms of scalability, both platforms Drupal and Magento are highly scalable.
For business owners who had goals of building an ecommerce site that can manage massive traffic with a lot of variety in the product categories then it is recommended that you pick Magento. It is a robust platform and it can easily cope with almost 50,000 visits per hour. Magento 2 is built with a layer-type architecture that consists of 4 tiers. If you optimise them well, you can get better performance and scalability. The tiers are as follows:
- The client
- The page cache
- The application
- The database
Magento 2 is better at interacting with browsers in comparison to its predecessor. It also compacts the datasets sent by the server for the rendering of web pages. All of these leads to better performance and Magento can provide a much better vantage point to help you build a fast ecommerce site.
Now, the ecommerce capabilities of Drupal are not any less than Magento. You can easily scale your Drupal site as per your business requirements among your online spaces. This is one of the top reasons why many companies prefer Drupal commerce to build and run their online store. Tesla is the best example of a Drupal website with high traffic. The only limitation while using Drupal commerce is that it doesn’t categorize the products as deeply as Magento.
Features And Functionalities
When it comes to usability, Magento has always proved its mettle. It is indeed considered as one of the best ecommerce platforms in such aspects only. This platform is packed with a variety of powerful and robust features which you can use for your online store to provide an enhanced customer experience across every point of the customer journey. Magento comes with basic as well as advanced e-commerce development features.
The Magento commerce edition comes with a wide range of premium in-built functionalities that will be helpful to both B2B and B2C business owners. Using Magento to create an eCommerce website with premium features will automatically reduce the need of adding any extra modules. This will save a lot of time and effort for you and your team which you can leverage to integrate your website with a viable ecommerce solution that matters.
- Customer segmentation
- Events & Private sales
- Rewards & Loyalty
- Quick order (B2B)
- Quotes (B2B)
- Company account & Sales rep (B2B)
- Gift registries
- Rule-based related products
- Visual merchandiser
- Company credit (B2B)
- Requisition list (B2B)
- Shared catalog (B2B)
Drupal commerce comes with all the core functionalities that you would need for your online stores like order processing pages, shipping features, payment processing, order tracking, and more. Apart from that, it also offers some useful features like dynamic product display, calculating fees and ADS, customized attributes of product pages, APIs for common payment gateways, discount pricing, and so on.
Content Management
If we were talking about content-driven ecommerce sites then Drupal will be listed as one of the top enterprise CMS. So a Drupal CMS will enable the admins of the site to create various types of ecommerce content flexibly using different attributes and custom fields. If you need to create a content-heavy ecommerce solution then opting for the Drupal commerce module is much more preferable in comparison to Magento commerce.
Now it is not that the latter option is completely useless in this scenario. Magento commerce is indeed equipped with a fundamental content management system. But it only allows you to add pages and very little content to several categories of them. You can also use it to add attributes to the products. But if you need to deliver more content than Magento allows you to, then you have no choice but to enter into its custom domain. This is where the costs go higher but you also get increased ongoing support.
All in all, Drupal commerce is a way better option when it comes to content management for your e-commerce websites.
Learning Curve
If you are coming from a technological background then using the Magento ecommerce platform will be easy for you because it demands advanced PHP skills. So if you are not an expert or have any coding experience then it is highly recommended to you that you find a suitable development partner or hire a dedicated team to create and customize your ecommerce site.
Once you get the technical personnel to manage all the coding-related aspects of ecommerce development then it will be much easier for you to manage all the other aspects of your online store using an intuitive admin interface.
On the contrary, working with drupal commerce is very easy. You get started right away even if you don’t have any coding experience. It comes with a very easy-to-use interface which is the need of both admins and visitors.
So in short, we can say that the learning curve of Magento is high as it demands advanced PHP programming skills whereas the learning curve of Drupal is low as you don’t need to have any expertise to get started with it.
SEO
From the perspective of Search engine optimization or popularly known as SEO, both ecommerce platforms Drupal Commerce vs Magento are equally great. However, the Magento platform comes in with different types of SEO tools by default. On the other hand, you have to put in some effort customizing Drupal commerce to make it more SEO-friendly.
But if we are discussing SEO friendliness then Magento is the best e-commerce platform available in the market. It offers every type of SEO feature ranging from basic ones to some out-of-the-box features like sitemap, 301 redirects, meta tags, canonical tag, and more. You can leverage the features of this platform to optimize the visibility and rankings of your site on different search engines.
Apart from the in-built SEO features, a business owner can also use some extensions provided through third-party integrations to boost the SEO of your site. BSS Commerce provides a Magento module called Magento 2 SEO suite that consists of the 12 most advanced SEO features that can significantly improve the SEO performance of your e-commerce site in every aspect.
Now, SEO is not a problem in Drupal either. The platform ensures that the admins have complete control over every single element of the web page using built-in SEO tools available on the Drupal commerce platform.
Pricing
Now, as we already discussed, Magento is an open-source platform so the download, installation, and use will be free. However, the store owners have to pay the hosting charges.
Additionally, Magento commerce also demands annual payments depending on the gross revenue your business made in that year. I know this seems expensive but investing in Magento would not disappoint you because of all the advanced features you get to use to boost your revenues by using the premium edition.
Magento commerce consists of some exclusive functionalities that you need to use additional modules for while working with other ecommerce platforms. So every dime spent on Magento is worth it as it helps bring you an increased ROI. so if you have a good budget and have some high requirements for your ecommerce store then you should consider using Magento. However, to get an exact estimate for your project, you have to contact a software development agency that works in magneto development.
Now, on the other hand, Drupal is also an open-source platform. It doesn’t matter if it’s with or without Drupal commerce, both editions are developer-oriented propositions with no entry fee. But to conduct development and maintenance tasks, you might have to prepare a budget of tens of thousands of dollars. However, the technical cost of your project highly depends upon the type of functionalities used for the website and more importantly the scale of your site.
Development is very far, even if you want to work on the maintenance of your Drupal commerce site, you need to get certified and experienced developers. Because they are the ones who will know their way around every update of the platform and critical development paths in either the open-source roadmap of the framework or the specific ecommerce implementation. The expert developers will be proficient in keeping your system secure as well as preparing for any necessary updates that might compromise the core code of the site or third-party modules’ ecommerce functionality or integrity.
Support
The level of support depends on the pricing plans in Magento. Publications such as Magento DevDocs, Magento Forums, Stack Overflow, Magento help Center, or sometimes certified developers and Magento partners help directly to the users of the Magento community edition for any kind of technical guidance. Meanwhile, email and live support is offered officially to the users of the Magento enterprise edition.
The Slack support channel, forum, and Dedicated Drupal Stack Exchange community offers online support to the users of Drupal commerce through a form of questions. They have established a queued ticketing system and they; so advise users on how to get the best advantage of it. Drupal commerce crosses discreetly with Drupal. On Stack Overflow, that tag has nearly 206 questions whereas in comparison to that, Drupal has around 20,000 questions for it.
However, many business owners working in the B2B sector get more confused when the other B2B platform options are given to choose from like Shopify and BigCommerce along with Magento. It’s true that in B2B, these three are more popular but still, Magento is a clear winner when we compare the resources provided by Magento to build a powerful ecommerce store.
Magento Vs Drupal Ecommerce: Different Target Market
To conclude the entire blog in a few lines, I would say that you need to rethink before making your decision. Is Magento or drupal a suitable platform for your online business store?
Know that drupal is one of the major CMS platforms whereas you need to modify Magento with a dedicated CMS module because it is a more ecommerce driven platform.
So if you want to build a large online store with a seamless user experience and smooth site performance then without any hesitation go for Magento. But if you want to create an ecommerce website that is rich with content and your business doesn’t necessarily require any use of premium ecommerce features then you should opt for Drupal for your project.
