nopCommerce Blog Magento or nopCommerce: what to choose for your project and when

"For small businesses, both nopCommerce and Magento are good options. But when someone says, he needs customizations and integrations, or have the plans to expand the business, we strongly suggest nopCommerce," - explains Raisul Kabir, co-founder & CEO of Brain Station 23. Read further to know the reasons why. Since Magento is a well-known eCommerce solution, clients often come to us with a request to build a store on it. In this case, we try to understand the clients' requirements for the project. We interview them and then suggest the best platform. Here's kind of my rule of thumb:If you want to make something big, something strong and long-game, with lots of integrations, then nopCommerce is for you.If you want to make a humble, small thing and have no intention of making it big later, then Magento might be good for you. In such situations we don't spend efforts to convince the client, we simply do not take such projects.We are nopStation (a project of Brain Station 23 Ltd) one of the top 5 gold partners of nopCommerce and I'm sharing our story how we decide our projects.Why we choose nopCommerce for big projects?You may want to have a humble start, but you know you have the intention to make it really big, then we strongly suggest nopCommerce. Because nopCommerce is a lot easier to customize to the highest extent compared to Magento. To put things in perspective, let me give some examples.Clear architecture - nopCommerce has around 5,383 files while Magento has around 97,625 files as of August 2019. It's very heavy and very complex.Less number of tables - nopCommerce has 117 tables while Magento has 391 tables. So, it becomes quite difficult for the development team to keep track of everything. Things are too modularized and too much complicated.Out of the box faster - Since Magento works on PHP, interpreting language, out of the box it's little bit slower than nopCommerce, as it works on C#, as DLL running in memory (PHP out of the box works like, the files stay in filesystem, then every time when called, it goes to memory, processes and goes back to file system, so little bit slower. C#, on the other hand, is compiled into less number of files, on the first call loads in memory, delivers and then stays in memory until the pool is stopped. So, subsequent calls become a lot faster).For small projects: nopCommerce or Magento?Since Magento has been used by so many people a lot of things are already there. Someone can run a small Magento site in a day, very beautiful and advanced.Both nopCommerce and Magento have a lot of plugins in the marketplace. Though Magento is ahead of nopCommerce in the number of integrations with local services. Therefore, when starting a small local store, it is necessary to determine in advance which integrations will be needed and their availability on the marketplace.But with Magento, the store owner may face some difficulties with further integrations and customizations because of its complex architecture mentioned above.It's not like we in Brain Station don't build websites on Magento. We do Magento work if the client already has a large site on Magento and needs customization, then we have Magento experts in our team to do that. But for the new projects, generally, we don't suggest it, because we know it's very cumbersome. Like, Pickaboo mobile app was done by us and when we went to do that, we were horrified by the way the integrations are done and we see that from outside it looks OK, but from inside all the calculations are done very redundant way and extremely difficult to manage. So, lots of difficult bugs start getting produced. So, for small businesses, nopCommerce and Magento are both good options. But when someone says, he needs customizations and integrations, or have the plans to expand the business, we strongly suggest nopCommerce.With this, we have been able to deliver a lot of eCommerce sites, as a couple of top eCommerce sites of Bangladesh are made by us in nopCommerce, they are priyoshop.com, othoba.com, and many others. To learn more about the differences between nopCommerce and Magento and the specific features of the platforms read this review.