PrestaShop & OpenCart – Fundamental Differences

Planning to create an e-commerce site…rather looking for a perfect CMS that addresses your needs and would also proclaim to the world about your online presence.  The answer is PrestaShop with simple features that allow you to design and customize your store with little technical knowledge.  On the other hand, OpenCart has features that are complex and need technical skills.

Features

PrestaShop has the capability to present amazing features that appropriately fits your needs in creating your E-commerce site.  Incidentally, for each release, the features and plug-ins of PrestaShop are designed to easily customize your site and run instantly. Adding new features get added to each new version like a multilingual site or the possibility of drop shipping through different modules. Taking the whole thing to the next level, PrestaShop prompts you to take advantage of attributes to go global; right-to-left support so that your store gets adapted to any language that reads both ways. These advantages are absent in OpenCart features.

Customization

Based on the things you wish for customizing your online store could become more problematical than your original plan.  This could slow down your progress for want of specific technical expertise. Lo and behold, PrestaShop makes customizing your Ecommerce site a breeze.  With varied customization modules, your site gets the perfect look. Over 2,000 themes on the PrestaShop Add-ons marketplace and high-quality responsive templates make it optimized for conversion. OpenCart, on the other hand, offers several free and paid themes making your site fascinating in terms of visual quality. In order to apply them, you require technical expertise since the features are difficult to implement.

User-Friendly

PrestaShop provides the advantage of being user-friendly and easy-to-learn dashboard which makes users’ project progress besides offering access to information, settings.  With PrestaShop, you can achieve your objectives by creating an online store, develop all your projects, and increase the performance of your E-commerce site. Two main features of PrestaShop are Customizable front office and a manageable back office; an instinctive tool.  Moreover, with the help of a range of modules available in the Add-ons marketplace, internal store features can be upgraded regularly.

OpenCart offers a well-designed interface which is a user-friendly platform much ahead of Magento in terms of being intuitive. However, a drawback; it is complex to configure than PrestaShop. For creating a professional eCommerce site with OpenCart, knowledge of HTML, JavaScript, PHP, CSS is essential.

Community

PrestaShop which is still evolving daily has a 1,000,000 member strong community presence. It has a global serving of 270,000 stores and operating in 195 countries.

Open Cart which is still undeveloped has a 120,000 member community loyalty. For the records, the open source community of PrestaShop is one of the largest in the world which bears significance on the PrestaShop translations and forum.