Magento Commerce, Shopify, WooCommerce, OpenCart, and BigCommerce are the leading platforms based on the number of sites they power. If you are evaluating the best eCommerce platform for your store, whether it’s a new eCommerce store development or migrating to a better alternative, it begins with comparing the top five platforms in the market to choose the best for your business today and in future. In this blog, we are going to take on ‘BigCommerce vs. Magento 2’. We have already compared these top platforms in our previous blogs Magento vs Shopify, Magento vs OpenCart, Magento vs WooCommerce.
This blog will explore ‘BigCommerce vs. Magento 2’ in the following areas:
- Pricing
- Scalability
- Security
- Omnichannel support
- Marketing / SEO
- Extensions and built-in tools
- Customization and flexibility
- Questions to ask yourself before deciding
Magento Commerce vs BigCommerce Comparison – Pricing
BigCommerce Pricing
| BigCommerce Plan | Cost Per Month | Sales Threshold |
|---|---|---|
| Standard | $29.95 | $50K |
| Plus | $79.95 | $180K |
| Pro | $299.95 | $400K |
| Enterprise | Must call for a quote | Call for Info |
Standard Plan: BigCommerce’ basic plan, ‘Standard,’ starts at $29.95 per month. It has all the basic commerce and administrative features required for a brand to go to market quickly and start selling.
Although the starting price seems nominal, there’s a catch: all of the BigCommerce pricing plans have a sales threshold for your annual revenue. If your annual revenue exceeds your current plan’s threshold, you’ll automatically move up.
Plus Plan – In addition to the features of Standard plan, the Plus plan includes limited marketing features to improve conversions. The annual revenue threshold for this plan is $180,000.
Pro Plan – The Pro includes all the features in the Plus plan and offers additional capabilities such as scalability, user reviews, product filters, and so on. The annual revenue limit is $400,000. However, the pricing works differently here if you exceed the threshold. For every additional $200,000 sales revenue you earn above the threshold will cost you an additional $150 each month.
Enterprise plan – There’s no mention of pricing for BigCommerce’s Enterprise plan on its site. You have to contact the sales team to get a custom quote, which will be provided based on your sales revenue and other requirements. The most important features you’ll need (e.g. a development environment, custom filters for large catalogs, and dedicated support to help you grow and resolve issues faster) are available only in the Enterprise plan.
Magento Pricing
Magento is available in three versions: Magento Open Source, Magento Commerce (now Adobe Commerce), and Magento Commerce Cloud (Adobe Commerce Cloud).
Magento Open Source doesn’t cost you a penny. However, to customize Magento to suit your business requirements you’ll need to hire a development firm that understands eCommerce and can customize the platform to your customers and market. You will also need to include hosting ($10–50/month) and domain ($10–400/year) to your costs.
Now, let’s look at the premium versions of Magento – Magento Commerce and Magento Commerce Cloud.
The table above shows the annual revenue-based license fee of Magento Commerce and Magento Commerce Cloud (the latter of which includes AWS hosting).
Note: As per Magento, the license fee is negotiable for merchants who prefer the hosted Enterprise version. As a result, your Magento store setup cost will differ based on your requirements.
As mentioned earlier, areas such as customization, extensions development, custom themes (if you prefer) will add to your overall costs.
When we look at Magento vs. BigCommerce in terms of pricing, BigCommerce can be a quick launchpad for small businesses looking to go live faster within a low budget. Although Magento’s costs seem higher, the platform’s omnichannel capabilities, scalability, high security, and a long list of out-of-the-box features justify it.
Magento vs BigCommerce Comparison – Scalability
BigCommerce – Scalability
BigCommerce offers enough scalability, but options are limited with the basic plan. If you are planning for aggressive growth, opt for the ‘Enterprise’ plan.
The platform’s Open API enables you to build unique customer experiences. The Storefront API can be used to manage cart and checkout using JavaScript. Order API allows you to add shipping quotes, taxes and more.As it needs some technical know-how, you can find a BigCommerce partner who can help you build your store.
However, you need technical knowledge to get it done, or you’ll have to spend on developers to do the job for you.
Magento – Scalability
As we’ll see in a bit, Magento provides robust scalability, enabling you to cater to your site to your existing and future needs. For instance, if you plan to expand your product portfolio, sell across borders, or add differentiated Magento will handle your needs seamless.
Magento has improved its scalability further in its 2.x version. Magento 2 can process 117% more orders and accommodate 2.1 million page views per hour. On the operations front, Magento can accommodate more simultaneous admin users than Magento 1.
However, this limitless scalability doesn’t come at the expense of performance, as Adobe including numerous performance improvements of Magento 2 over Magento 1:
- 38% faster checkout for customers
- 51% faster checkout for guests
- 66% faster add-to-cart response time
Additionally, it provides ElasticSearch, a fully integrated search engine that can be customized to provide accurate search results faster.
With more scalability and better performance, your customers can enjoy a seamless site experience, and you’ll enjoy a better conversion rate.
Magento vs BigCommerce Comparison – Security
BigCommerce Security
BigCommerce comes with powerful security against hacking. Being a hosted platform, BigCommerce provides PCI compliance and is ISO/IEC 27001 certified, the gold standard for protecting customer data. Additionally, BigCommerce provides security features such as firewalls software to detect intrusion and much more.
Magento Security
Magento is PHP 7 compliant and comes with a suite of robust security options. Magento provides SHA-256 (Secure Hash Algorithm 256) for passwords that fortify your store against dictionary attacks. Other security options include Signifyd (fraud protection system), Composer, Zend Framework, and SSL Certification.
Magento to update its security features and releases security patches for older versions. This helps the entire user base of Magento to stay secure.
Another significant feature of Magento is its built-in Security Scan Tool. Advantages of Magento’s Security Scan tool include:
- Security status check-in real-time
- Security fixes for resolving issues faster
- Track historical reports and monitor progress
- Merchants can run over 21,000 security tests
- Report on failed tests along with recommended actions
Magento vs BigCommerce – Customization and flexibility
BigCommerce – Customization and flexibility
As a hosted platform, BigCommerce offers less opportunity to customize your store to meet unique needs. Tweaking the core code to accommodate your specific business functionalities is difficult. Though the number of third-party apps it’s compatible with is limited compared to Magento, BigCommerce offers many essential integrations like marketplaces and POS.
Magento – Customization and flexibility
Magento’s customization and flexibility are second to none in the market. The platform is 100% customizable, which helps you build additional features and tune the core code to suit your business logic, admin requirements, as well as create bespoke customer experiences.
Integrating third-party systems is a breeze with Magento. ERP, CRM, payment gateways, custom-built extensions, PIM systems, marketing automation systems – everything integrates seamlessly with the Magento backend. This enables the store owners to enjoy the capabilities of both Magento and their preferred third-party system to the fullest.
Magento vs BigCommerce – SEO and Marketing
BigCommerce – SEO and Marketing
BigCommerce offers enough marketing features to steer visitors to your online store. Some of the capabilities include in-built SEO tools, social sharing, customer loyalty programs, customer segmentation, and more. You can also plan for branding and conversion-focused email campaigns. There are third-party BigCommerce SEO apps that you can integrate into your store as well.
Magento – SEO and Marketing
Magento offers several SEO features out of the box. Magento enables you to customize page titles for home, category, and cart pages. You can also customize anchor text for navigation links and use the canonical URLs feature to avoid content duplication.
Magento Page Builder is an interesting feature that allows developers to build custom-made pages to attract customers. Features such as rich snippets and XML sitemap enable store owners to earn zero position in search engine results pages (SERPs) and inform search engines about the site’s contents.
You can easily integrate key Google marketing and tracking systems with your Magento store, including Google Analytics, Privacy Setting, Content Experiments, and Tag Manager with Magento admin.
Magento’s PWA Studio allows for the development of mobile web applications that load in less than 3 seconds, thereby increasing your search engine rankings for mobile.
Product recommendations, customer segmentation, ability to create, manage and improvise email, digital, social media, and SMS campaigns – all add to the marketing capabilities of Magento.
If you are a B2B merchant, you can leverage marketing automation tools such Marketo, a technology partner of Magento.
Magento vs BigCommerce – Extensions and built-in tools
BigCommerce – Extensions and built-in tools
BigCommerce provides free and premium extensions in its marketplace to extend your store’s capabilities on the technical, management, and customer experience front. You can choose from 600 apps available in its marketplace.
Magento – Extensions and built-in tools
Magento beats BigCommerce hands down in terms of the number of extensions it provides. Magento provides over 5,800+ free and paid extensions in its marketplace for marketing, checkout, fulfillment, inventory, and order management, PIM, and so on. Magento also provides clear technical documentation to install and configure these extensions.
Now, let’s take a look at the built-in tools that Magento provides to Open Source sites:
- OMS – Order Management system to manage and track inventory.
- MBI (Magento Business Intelligence) – Advanced analytics tool to extract insightful data from digital interactions to devise well-targeted marketing plans.
- ElasticSearch – Built-in search engine that can be customized based on your products for accuracy and faster search results.
- Multi-source Inventory – Multi-warehouse management system.
- Adobe Payment Services – Integrated payment gateway for Magento users (available with the latest version of Magento, 2.4.3).
Magento vs BigCommerce – Omnichannel
Both Magento and BigCommerce provide omnichannel support. From POS (offline) to marketplace support, both platforms offer built-in integration capabilities for other digital sales channels.
With Magento, you can integrate your eCommerce store with marketplaces such as Amazon and eBay. For brands focusing on mobile as a digital sales channel, Magento offers easy integration of native mobile apps with the Magento backend.
Magento goes a step further in improving your mobile experience. Magento’s in-house developed PWA (Progressive Web App) SDK, ‘PWA Studio’, helps you build mobile websites with native-app-like interface and experience (check out our blog advantages of PWA for eCommerce brands for more discussion).
Business Considerations
We have discussed the key factors that every business looks for while comparing platforms, such as Magento and BigCommerce. We want to part with one last point that’s crucial in your decision-making – business considerations.
By saying business considerations, we mean your market segment (B2C/B2B), maturity level, growth plans, etc. Here’s a table that segments various business considerations to look keenly into while choosing your platform.
| Question to Ask Yourself | Why It’s Important |
|---|---|
| What is your eCommerce maturity level? |
BigCommerce is an all-in-one package that allows you to go live quickly. The flip side is that you won’t get a highly customized “dream” site. Magento Commerce is a robust, highly customizable platform more suitable to companies with a mature eCommerce practice. |
| Are you a pure B2B player? |
BigCommerce has a more limited B2B feature set than Magento Commerce 2, although third-party developers have built extensions to enable more features. |
| Do you anticipate substantial growth in sales? |
BigCommerce charges by sales thresholds: $50k, $150k, and $400k in yearly sales. Once reached, the company automatically bumps you up into the next tier. You’ll need to accommodate the higher cost of success as you plan your eCommerce expenses. |
| Table stake features |
BigCommerce’s popular Standard plan lacks features many eCommerce teams deem table stakes: product filtering, customer segmentation, and abandoned cart recovery. |
| Open Source vs Out of Box |
Magento is an open-source platform, which means you’ll have endless creative freedom when designing and configuring your website. BigCommerce is an out-of-the-box solution. They take care of setting up and hosting your website, but you must choose from a pre-built theme. |
| Do you have a large product catalog? |
If you have a vast product catalog, Magento 2 is your best choice. The platform can easily handle 200k SKUs. |
We hope you found this brief comparison useful. If you need further assistance in evaluating the two platforms or making the final decision.
Frequently asked questions
BigCommerce, being a SaaS-based platform, stands out with its support, ease of use, and ability to enable merchants to go to market faster. On the other hand, Magento is known for its scalability, top-notch security features, ultimate liberty in customization, integration with third-party systems, built-in marketing, and SEO features.
While both have their own set of advantages, it is better to look at your key business considerations like – eCommerce maturity, B2B or B2C, growth plans, how vital out-of-the-box features are, and so on.
No. BigCommerce’s basic plan, ‘Standard,’ starts from $29.95 per month. Here’s the BigCommerce pricing plan table you can refer to.
| BigCommerce Plan | Cost Per Month | Sales Threshold |
|---|---|---|
| Standard | $29.95 | $50K |
| Plus | $79.95 | $180K |
| Pro | $299.95 | $400K |
| Enterprise | Must call for a quote | Call for Info |
‘Standard’ Plan : Standard plan has all the basic eCommerce features for you to go live quickly.
‘Plus’ Plan : Plus plan includes all the features in Standard plan and also bundles limited marketing features.
‘Pro’ Plan : Pro plan includes all the features of Plus plan and additionally provides better scalability and features like user reviews, product filters.
‘Enterprise’ plan : If you need a custom-made plan, Enterprise is the go to plan for you. You’ll have to get in touch with the sales team to get a custom quote tailor-made to your business requirements.
Note : BigCommerce pricing plans have a sales threshold tied up to your annual revenue. If your annual revenue is more than the threshold of the current plan you are in, you’ll automatically be leveled up and the pricing of the next level plan will be applied.
Yes. Magento’s distinctive features are scalability, sturdy infrastructure, and an easily customizable code base. The platform has segmented its offering specifically for B2C and B2C merchants. The platform is also good enough for D2C players (manufacturers looking at selling directly to end consumers).
Magento’s Commerce or Commerce Cloud offering would do great for larger-size businesses with vast product catalogs, multiple sub-brands or stores, cross-border selling, multiple warehouses, and aggressive growth plans. While Magento Commerce is the premium version with advanced capabilities than Magento Open Source, Magento Commerce Cloud is a hosted solution that provides dedicated support, advanced performance-enhancing features, and so on.
Feel free to check out our eBook Magento Open Source vs Magento Commerce comparison for more details.
