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Magento vs Spree: What are the differences?
# Introduction
In the world of e-commerce, Magento and Spree are two popular platforms that offer various features and functionalities for online businesses. Understanding the key differences between Magento and Spree can help businesses make an informed decision on which platform suits their needs best.
1. **Technology Stack**: Magento is built on PHP and has a monolithic architecture, making it robust but often slower to customize. On the other hand, Spree is built on Ruby on Rails and follows a modular architecture, which allows for quick and easy customization with smaller components.
2. **Community Support**: Magento has a larger community of developers and users, offering a wide range of resources and extensions. Spree, while having a smaller community, is known for its strong developer support and active contributors that focus on maintaining the platform's code quality.
3. **Flexibility and Scalability**: Magento is known for its flexibility and scalability, making it suitable for large enterprises with complex needs. Spree, on the other hand, is more lightweight and designed for smaller to medium-sized businesses looking for a leaner e-commerce solution.
4. **Cost of Ownership**: Magento, being a more feature-rich platform, often comes with higher upfront costs for licensing, hosting, and maintenance. Spree, being open-source and lighter, typically has lower total cost of ownership, making it more budget-friendly for smaller businesses.
5. **Customization and Extensions**: Magento offers a wide range of out-of-the-box features and extensions, but customization can be complex and require skilled developers. Spree, while offering fewer default features, is built with a focus on ease of customization and extensibility, allowing for quicker development and deployment.
6. **Ease of Use**: Magento, with its extensive features and functionalities, has a steeper learning curve and can be overwhelming for beginners. Spree, with its simple and intuitive interface, is easier to learn and navigate, making it an ideal choice for businesses looking for a user-friendly e-commerce solution.
In Summary, understanding the key differences between Magento and Spree in terms of technology stack, community support, flexibility, cost of ownership, customization, and ease of use can help businesses choose the right e-commerce platform that aligns with their specific needs and goals.
I am consulting for a company that wants to move its current CubeCart e-commerce site to another PHP based platform like PrestaShop or Magento. I was interested in alternatives that utilize Node.js as the primary platform. I currently don't know PHP, but I have done full stack dev with Java, Spring, Thymeleaf, etc.. I am just unsure that learning a set of technologies not commonly used makes sense. For example, in PrestaShop, I would need to work with JavaScript better and learn PHP, Twig, and Bootstrap. It seems more cumbersome than a Node JS system, where the language syntax stays the same for the full stack. I am looking for thoughts and advice on the relevance of PHP skillset into the future AND whether the Node based e-commerce open source options can compete with Magento or Prestashop.
Where im confused is why you think PHP isn't commonly used. It powers the grand majority of the internet, and as a language designed entirely around making websites (as opposed to general purpose languages like Java that have crammed in an http server to make it work for websites too), its a language that's incredibly easy to jump into, and offers a lot of flexibility and versatility on how to navigate web facing challenges.
Also don't kid yourself about the node "one language" ecosystem. You will find yourself often visually confused as you jump between editor tabs which .js is aimed at the browser, and which .js is aimed at the server, and gets even weirder when using js based templating engines. (This is why in my node projects with a front-end, I use Angular, which uses TypeScript),). JS was never intended to run outside of a browser based VM context, its just yet another language we've jimmyrigged an http compatible socket listener into and given filesystem access.
If you're worried about wasting your time jumping into bed with PHP, don't be. Its not only extremely widely used, but after 20 years its still incredibly relevant, high performing (you will be shocked to see how fast php7 actually is), high paying (yes, six figures), and the language itself has evolved leaps and bounds into a multi-paradigm beast of a toolkit bespoke to solving web challenges.
If you liked Spring, check out Symfony sometime. Its a PHP7 web framework that takes a LOT of inspiration from Spring, and pairs up with Doctrine, a PHP7 ORM that takes a great deal of inspiration from Hibernate. The company that makes Symfony, is also the same people behind Twig, which is so ridiculously good and popular, its been ported to pretty much every language including Java and node.
As for free packaged out of the box storefronts, Magento is a total beast of a package, and isn't for the feint of heart. But it is also THE most complete and ridiculously configurable self hostable e-commerce system you'll ever come across. Many web professionals have made entire careers completely around Magento. I am not one of them, but I have used Magento, PrestaShop, and several others, and I keep coming back to Magento. Outside of hosted shops like Shopify, Magento is, as far as I'm concerned, where you wanna be for a totally custom, plug-in based shop front for a website. The only time I'd recommend different, is if a customers website is powered by WordPress, then WooCommerce is where you wanna be.
I prefer to use Magneto because it open source and has a lot of extensions in it so it's so faster for building a website
I am out of my league here due to my limited technical knowledge compared to most people on stackshare. I am learning so I will contribute my thoughts in return plus stackshare asks me to add something that I have learned. I owned a good sized Internet candy distributor five years ago and about 8 years ago moved from Bigcommerce because they raised their price from $80.00 to something like $750 with only 2 months advanced notice to pay or leave. The price is fair but I should have been given maybe 6 months notice. I spent a month analyzing and testing other ecommerce solutions then another month finding a developer to help me move.
First, only choose a platform that's complicated like Magento if you can afford a developer to fix bugs and update security. I experienced some horrible developers but in the end found a great honest small shop to help me. Secondly, don't install a new version (in my case Magento 2.0) and stick with the time tester older version (Magento 1.X) until most big bugs are fixed. I know this information is old but not the lesson I learned which is timeless. My guess is Magento still needs to be updated constantly so stick with something like Shopify until your company grows larger.
The interoperability and reliability of Shopify is simply unmatched on the market. Having been a web developer for a few years, I cannot imagine going with any other solutions because of the level of development that would need to go into each and every tweak requested by stakeholders.
Shopify makes it easy to use apps off the shelf to test an idea, after which you can replace it with a custom solution or build on top of it.
Using their robust API, array of webhooks, Shopify Flow and Shopify Scripts, with a little know-how anything you want to do is just a few clicks or lines of code away from reality. The community is also pretty robust, so if you ever need help, you're not alone.
Full disclosure: I've been invested since 2015, but it's because they really are the best on the market.
We were about to migrate our older PHP 7.0 + Symfony 2.8 + Sylius 0.17 based E-commerce site to a more recent PHP stack. We were leaning towards Laravel as that has become our primary Framework in the recent years.
We chose Vanilo because it is so modular that it let us do the migration step by step and we could add the components we needed on the run. In total it took us 9 months to migrate everything from the old PHP 7.0 Symfony codebase to PHP 7.4/Laravel/Vanilo. We could also copy the old Admin theme to Vanilo thus the Admin users don't see any difference.
We devised SwiftERM to generate additional income from existing consumers on ecommerce websites. Available for those using Shopify, Magento, Woocommerce or Opencart, it runs in alongside (not instead of) existing email marketing software like Mailchimp, Drupal or Emarsys. It is 100% automatic so needs zero additional staff. It uses predictive analytics to identify imminent consumer purchases. The average additional turnover achieved is 10.5%. It is the only software in the world authorised to send Trustpilot to send product ratings in outbound emails. Developers and ecommerce retailers are invited to try to it for free, to establish viability this predictive analytics system is. SwiftERM is a certified Microsoft Partner MPN ID 6197468.