Magento vs Laravel: Which is best for eCommerce Websites

Magento vs Laravel

E-commerce solutions can open doors to countless business opportunities, which is why more and more businesses are jumping on the bandwagon to reap the numerous benefits of eCommerce. However, most businesses are ready to cut corners and opt for ready-to-use e-commerce solutions available on the market rather than a custom-designed e-commerce platform. The only problem is that these one-size-fits-all solutions don’t always check all the boxes.

What you need is a suitable framework for your E-Commerce Website, and if you ask a web developer which framework is best, chances are they will vacillate between Magento and Laravel; two most popular options. To ease your confusion, we took it upon ourselves to do an honest comparison of Magento and Laravel for e-commerce website development and see which one is right for your next eCommerce project.

What is Magento?

Magento is an open source shopping cart platform built on the Laminas and Symphony PHP framework. One of the most robust and trusted e-commerce solutions, with a suite of stellar eCommerce features and tools, Magento provides businesses with unparalleled flexibility when it comes to setting up and taking total control of the look, functionality, and content of their stores. Magento has been around for over a decade and currently boasts more than 250,000 stores.

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Magento offers hundreds of extensions that let you add to the functionality of your store, offer smart product recommendations and discounts, address abandoned carts, integrate your shopping cart with payment gateways, manage returns and stock levels, promote your products to the right audience, and offer multi-lingual and multi-currency support.

Magento comes equipped with a wide array of digital marketing tools to facilitate cross-selling and up-selling, gathering product reviews and testimonials, catalog-management, and targeted promotions. With its well-integrated content management system, you can effortlessly create and publish compelling content pieces and deliver best-in-class shopping experiences without the need for developer support.

What is Laravel?

Laravel is a free and open-source shopping cart solution that uses the modern principles of object-oriented programming (OOP) and the model-view-controller (MVC) pattern to help businesses build, manage, and grow their online business. Laravel eCommerce offers unparalleled level of freedom in creating absolutely unique e-commerce websites, helping brands showcase their brand and products, attract more buyers, and generate quality leads.

Designing PHP code-based web applications are a breeze with ready-made templates, designs, and presets that can be customized without any restrictions.

The best thing about Laravel is that it provides an Omni channel eCommerce experience, where you can seamlessly integrate all physical and digital stores. Laravel offers cutting-edge tools for inventory management, supporting multiple storefronts, payment gateway integrations, marketing and SEO, performance analytics, content management, and mobile commerce.

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Not to mention, Laravel is becoming quite popular due to its trailblazing performance and easy third-party integrations. Seeing that 680.000 live websites currently use Laravel, we can safely vouch to say that Laravel is a formidable competitor of Magento.

Magento vs Laravel: Code Complexity

Magento is over a decade old, which means that it has been subjected to numerous updates, tweaks, and rectifications. All these modifications have made its code increasingly more complex and sluggish. This is why, it is a challenge for developers to read, decode, and troubleshoot code. Even though Magento is extremely user-friendly, its code complexity has put a damper on its popularity.

On the other hand, Laravel has ditched the traditional intricate SQL scripting used by Magento, and works on a PHP-based syntax with ORM-based coding, that makes code extremely structured and comprehensible. Thanks to the MVC framework, any Laravel developer can easily read and debug the code written by other developers in a timely manner without investing much effort.

Hence, it is the best-preferred platform throughout the industry. When it comes to ease of maintaining code, Laravel takes the limelight!

Magento vs Laravel: Integration

When we talk about extensions and integrations, Magento is an undisputed winner. Magento marketplace is a treasure trove of at least 3.800 extensions and integrations developed by Magento’s partners. Each new integration lets you add another functionality to your eCommerce store.

You can integrate your Magento store with Facebook, Twitter, ePay, GoMage, Searchanize, Open ERP, Bcash, ingenico, DHL, Social, MailChimo, MageMonkey, Mandrill, BeeTailor, SOFORT, Zopim Live chat, PayOne, CashOnDelivery, Embedded ERP, MigraShop, AddThis, Fontis Australia, DebitPayment, Interprise Suite ERP, BankPayment, and eBay to name a few. Hire Magento integration services to extend the functionality of your Magento site with all the pertinent integrations.

On the other hand, Laravel offers limited integrations but there are some available extensions from some third parties. A few notable Laravel integrations include Dusk: Browser testing and automation, Echo: Real-time events, Telescope: Debug assistant, and Envoyer: Zero downtime deployment.

Magento vs Laravel: Features

Both Magento and Laravel offer a host of robust features to create an eCommerce website in any business field. When we talk about Magento, the platform offers stellar catalogue management, content management, order, customer, and store management, and an intelligent checkout process.

Magento offers a hub of marketing and promotional opportunities with intelligent related products, recommendation, up-sells and cross-sells. You can even generate a set of unique coupon codes for each promotion and export the list of codes for offline distribution, email, newsletters and more.

Magento offers a modern, drag-and-drop tool to let you create and launch new compelling content in a matter of minutes, and deliver best-in-class shopping experiences without the need for developer support. Support for One-page checkout, Integration with multiple PayPal gateways, and Shipping integration with label printing – view, edit, print labels for all major carriers contribute to the popularity of Magento.

Advanced business Intelligence helps drive better business insights and results through data aggregation, analysis, and visualization. Besides these basic features, there are many supporting features and additional features provided by enormous extensions, as mentioned above.

Similarly, Laravel is well-endowed with stellar functionality that allows writing fewer codes that minimize the risk for error. Laravel comes with stunning inbuilt templates that help you create amazing layouts using dynamic content seeding. Even if you are new to PHP, you will definitely learn to appreciate the thorough dependency injection, an expressive database abstraction layer, queues and scheduled jobs, unit and integration testing, and more.

Whether you are looking to create a responsible website, integrate ratings and reviews, personalize user interactions with product filters, multi-level categories and product recommendations, or garner a SEO friendly content management system, Laravel is all that and more. When comparing the usability of Laravel and Magento, It is a clear tie.

Magento vs Laravel: Developer Support

Magento is a decade old PHP development platform. Combined with its wider acceptance among programmers and enterprises, it doesn’t come as a surprise that Magento sees a higher support from community. With millions of developers and many Magento B2B Development Company establishing large communities and contributing to public forums, Magento community supports sees you through all issues and problems you may face during development. You will never find it a challenge to seek help when you are working with Magento.

On the other hand, Laravel is still carving out a niche and has less penetration among the masses. Fewer contributors and its young age hinder Laravel from getting the much-needed support. Unless you are a Laravel expert, it will be a difficult task to get community support, guidance, and advice if you face any issues. So, as far as the community support is concerned, Magento scores higher!

Magento vs Laravel: Content Management

Magento offers some of the best content creation tools in the market that enable merchants to create best-in-class shopping experiences without relying on developers or coding experts. Magento allows you to incorporate a blend of media content on your website, such as images, videos, and banners – and offer your customers with a flow of fresh content with an intuitive drag-and-drop content management interface.

Magento’s intuitive Page Builder helps you create page designs according to your preferred layout, create content updates, preview them live, and schedule publication without dependencies on other teams. With Magento, you get total control of your website.

There are numerous companies offering Magento development services to make the task even easier for you. On the other hand, coding in Laravel is not easy and requires technical expertise to develop an optimized eCommerce store. Hence you need expert Laravel developers to design your website and keep the content updated.

Magento vs Laravel: Pricing

Magento offers two enterprise pricing packages. The Magento Commerce Starter package starts at $2,000/month and includes capabilities for Promotions and Pricing, Search Engine Optimization, Site and Content Management, Catalog Management, Catalog Browsing, Product Browsing, Checkout and Payments, Shipping, Order Management and Customer Service, Customer Loyalty, Customer Accounts, Support for Global Sites, Analytics and Reporting, Layout and Theming, Cloud hosting & deployment, 24×7 email support, and Business Intelligence.

The Magento Commerce Pro will cost you around $3,417/month, and includes a lot of additional features such as dedicated hardware and launch manager, always-on servers, increased inventory visibility across retail outlets, as well as integrated B2B functionality.

As for Laravel, the basic package – Laravel Lite – starts at $499 and includes unlimited number of products and categories, product filters, online payment gateways, responsive website, single-page checkout, coupons and discounts, product ratings and reviews, SEO-friendly content management system, android mobile apps, 1-month free technical support, blog, multi-level categories, product comparison, bulk email / newsletter, cashback wallet, and cross-selling facilities.

You can upgrade your package to Laravel smart and pay $1299 for additional functionalities such as unlimited number of stores, front-end store, and separate admin panel for vendors and iOS mobile app.

It’s pretty evident that both Laravel and Magento have different pricing plans for different clients, respective to their store scale, niche, and more. However, you also need to consider the development costs of Shopify website design company or Magento store designers because every design company charges differently. So, before you make a decision, consider the design company’s rates as well.

Conclusion

Now that you are aware of the merits and weaknesses of both platforms, you must be wondering, which platform is better for your next eCommerce development project. The answer, however, isn’t so simple. Both platforms boast a set of amazing features and the choice of platform depends on the demands, business size, type, and field.

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One the one hand, we have Magento’s robust features, a strong community and developers’ support, easy and hassle-free hosting, and premium capabilities, which are best suited for medium to large-size enterprises that boast a huge inventory and unlimited budget.

On the other hand, we have ORM-based data, simple coding style, MVC architecture of Laravel, which is more suited to small and medium enterprises that may not have a huge budget but are looking for a good enough framework for their eCommerce sites.

We have endeavored to drill you in the ins and outs of both platforms to make the choice easier for you.

FAQs:

1) Is Magento cheaper than Laravel?

Yes, Magento does come with a smaller price tag, which is why it is more suited to small and medium enterprises that may not have a huge budget but are looking for a good enough framework for their eCommerce sites.

2) How is Magento better than Laravel?

For general quality and performance, Magento scored 9.0, while Laravel eCommerce scored 8.0. Magento has a larger community of developers, which means that you will never find it a challenge to seek help when you are working with Magento. Magento also boasts an amazing page builder that makes it a breeze to keep your site updated with the latest content without any developer support.

Magento marketplace is a treasure trove of at least 3.800 extensions and integrations that helps you extend the functionality of your online store. In comparison, Laravel has few integration options and has a smaller community.

3) What is the cost of Magento Store development in UAE?

If you’re someone who’s looking to build a generic Magento website, then basic Magento is the best option for you. Individuals and small businesses prefer basic Magento because it helps them set up a store and get things running fairly quickly. The cost for a basic Magento website starts at $20,000. This could go up to $40,000.

4) How to find Magento professionals in Canada?

Folio3 has dedicated certified Magento developer’s team, you can Hire Magento developers from us.

5) Is Magento affordable for small businesses?

Yes, Magento is best suited for small and medium businesses including large-size enterprises that boast a huge inventory and unlimited budget.

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