BigCommerce Vs. Magento – How Do They Stack Up?

For many years, Magento has been the go to e-commerce platform when it comes to retail e-commerce. As an agency, we’ve recently made the switch to BigCommerce as our preferred e-commerce platfrom from Magento 2. As many of our clients have come to know and love Magento 1, we’ve put together this comparison between the two platforms to help them understand why.

Upfront & Ongoing Website Costs

BigCommerce covers the large majority of all of your needed e-commerce functionality right out-of-the-box. With Magento, you would need to install a number of third party extensions just to get all of the same tools and services. Best of all when it comes to hosting, management, ongoing support and any other third party costs, BigCommerce is typically about one-third of the price of Magento.

In addition, Magento development is generally more costly from a time and price standpoint. This means greater up-front cost for website owners, as well as higher monthly management and support costs. Magento websites are also self-hosted, which means you can be anywhere from $400 and up each month for a dedicated server at a managed hosting provider. With BigCommerce the annual commit model makes forecasting easy. Your monthly costs are fixed, and the tiers are based on your stores income. Starting at only $29 per month, the BigCommerce subscription is affordable and provides an unmatched level of service and support to website owners.

Support & Security

One of the biggest complaints that our clients typically have about Magento is that Magento does not have a support phone number that they can call and speak to someone about their store. They need to hire a private web development company to manage and monitor the store, a hosting company or system administrator to manage and monitor the server, and any number of potential 3rd party vendors to handle software specific integrations like SalesForce. With BigCommerce, this is not the case.

BigCommerce provides account managers and support for all of their stores, and with certain accounts will also act as your point of contact with any approved 3rd party vendors your site may use. This means, in addition to any creative or marketing teams you may retain for ongoing website services, you also have account management and support through BigCommerce for anything and everything you may run in to.

In addition, BigCommerce enjoys a 99.99% average uptime, and they also contractually guarantee 99.9% uptime with service credit remedies for anything less. The SLA is guaranteed for uptime to your infrastructure, database and application levels. This is a peace-of-mind commitment Magneto and the 3rd party hosting providers that support it cannot offer.

Website Scalability & Updates

Since BigCommerce is a SaaS solution and not self-hosted, this ensures unlimited traffic scalability, premium website performance, constantly monitored security that is 100% PCI compliant and automated safe platform upgrades with new features to better enable customers to sell more in a constantly innovating commerce industry. In addition to PCI other forms of compliance, BigCommerce websites are also perfectly suited for unexpected spikes in website traffic, easily able to scale for any amount of concurrent website users, a guarantee that Magento cannot make.

Magento, on the other hand, is an on-premise solution, requiring you to hire any number of 3rd party professionals to use, maintain and update the platform, which costs you hundreds, if not thousands of dollars each time. And aside from any security that your website hosting provider offers and patch releases, you do not receive any constant security monitoring or services from Magento directly. With BigCommerce, security patches and updates are rolled out without any fuss and the security of your website is a top priority for BigCommerce.

Robust Partner Ecosystem

BigCommerce’s design and software solution partner ecosystem is robust, well-curated, and open to all developers. BigCommerce remains vendor-agnostic — this means it is neutral to which partners it’s customers choose, but they will not allow partners in who are not experienced and highly qualified.

In addition, BigCommerce offers a great framework for designing world-class e-commerce stores – Stencil. Stencil is flexible, provides local staging environments, command-line tools for faster development, and easily integrates with a number of frontend frameworks and languages.

Proper Noun is an experienced BigCommerce web design company and a certified BigCommerce partner. As an e-commerce content marketing agency, we provide a full range of BigCommerce marketing and development services for BigCommerce websites. If you’re interested in launching a new BigCommerce store or just want to learn more about making the move from Magneto to BigCommerce, schedule a strategy session today.