Choosing the right shopping cart software is the most significant factor for the success of any company. The right style and layout of an eCommerce website with appealing UI/UX is what one needs to get the website to take off the ground.
Many eCommerce beginners are confused about which software to pick for designing the shopping cart out of WooCommerce or PrestaShop.
Though both the software have proven to be equally successful in helping a large number of business owners successfully launch an eCommerce website, the basic difference between the both lies in the base of their frameworks itself:
PrestaShop is a freemium eCommerce platform, written in the PHP programming language and registered under Open Software License and uses MySQL as the database management system. On the other hand, WooCommerce is an open source WordPress plugin for eCommerce that helps in building medium to large size online shopping websites using WordPress.
With the basic difference clarified, I will now give you an overview of PrestaShop vs. WooCommerce for various parameters:
The principle:
PrestaShop is a platform for designing eCommerce websites where one can install a plugin for adding CMS functionality and WooCommerce is a plugin adding eCommerce functionality to a CMS platform. With both, the final result satisfies the same objective but in different ways.
Themes available:
PrestaShop has a library of over 1200 themes to choose from on its official website and several other third-party templates. There is a limited library of WordPress themes of about 500 templates that are compatible with WooCommerce. While most of the WordPress themes can be modified to work with WooCommerce, it needs a high amount of designing to get it to work for an eCommerce website.
Security handling:
WooCommerce, being a WordPress plugin, has security requirements similar to that of WordPress. So, one who is familiar with all the security measures needed on a WordPress platform can easily handle the security of the website. PrestaShop, on the other hand, needs specific security measures that only PrestaShop development experts can handle. If proper measures are taken at the development stage, a PrestaShop based website can offer high-level security but the same can be achieved on a WordPress based eCommerce website with lesser efforts.
Stock management:
WooCommerce can support at most 10 thousand products. If you go beyond that, the admin side server will make it almost impossible to manage product list sorting. PrestaShop can support over tens of thousands of products and are easily manageable from the admin side server.
Costs:
Though both the software belong to the freemium category, the cost involved in making a PrestaShop eCommerce website is more than the one made using a WooCommerce. There are no free templates available in PrestaShop and you also need to get product filter plugin for the frontend. But all the costs involved make the complete website more customisable.
So, which software wins?
Though each has its own pros and cons, both emerge winners in their own variant way. While PrestaShop offers more versatility, WooCommerce offers easy backend handling and while WooCommerce offers more autonomy, PrestaShop has too good eCommerce features.
In short, WooCommerce web development solution is a good choice for small to medium scale businesses while PrestaShop web development is preferable for large-scale businesses.