Magento vs. OXID: Which E-commerce Solution To Choose?

Agiliway continues familiarising current and prospective website owners with various e-commerce platforms so that they make a good and well-informed choice, which will have an ultimate effect on their businesses. We have already presented the comparison of different popular solutions for e-shops such as Magento, Woo-Commerce, Shopify, Aimeos, Opencart, E-Commerce module of Odoo ERP in our previous articles. Now, when Agiliway has developed a new e-commerce competency – OXID, we would like to share our insights into the platform comparing it with Magento.

It should be noted that while OXID has only 0,2% of the global e-commerce platforms market share comparing to Magento’s 10,8%, it is a very popular e-commerce platform in Germany, its “home country”, where Magento and OXID are the two market leaders. This might be due to the lack of English documentation and support, which prevents OXID from becoming better known in other countries. Despite the low market share, the two systems are definitely worth attention.

Magento and OXID have free open source Community and paid Enterprise editions. The Enterprise Edition of Magento would cost you a bit more than OXID’s (18,000 Euro vs 15,000 Euro respectively), but the support will be included into the price, while OXID will additionally charge 270 Euros per month for this service. What is more, the interface and each new tenant in the OXID EE will cost you additional 3,000 Euros. B2B functions within the Enterprise Edition of OXID are also optional and cost extra money.

Let us have a closer look at the two e-commerce platforms comparing them against the following characteristics:

1. 1. Functionality.Both Magento and OXID have great functional depth and are highly customisable. Both platforms integrate ERP, CRM and social media and suggest a wide variety of promotional and marketing tools. Both platforms are good for creating multilingual websites with the support of multiple payment options. However, while the ability to create multiple stores and advanced individual customisation options via templates is available in Magento already in the community version, you will have to buy an Oxid Enterprise Edition to benefit from these features. The responsive templates and ability to distribute rights and roles, which are basic features of Magento, are also not available in OXID’s free edition too.
2. 2. E-commerce. It is important that Magento and OXID allow creating an omnichannel customer experience, linking on-sight and online means of interaction with the customer in particular. In addition, Magento allows instant purchases for recurring buyers and has a number of features designed specifically for B2B business (advanced workflow promoting quote responsiveness, permission to edit company accounts and track quotes history, ability to assign custom catalogues and pricing to a particular customer, etc.), which has made the platform the leader of B2B commerce in 2017. OXID has been serving B2B since 2015 too, but one has to buy a special Enterprise edition for B2B marketing.
3. 3. Customization and development. Both platforms are highly customisable and use object-oriented programming (OOP), the great benefit of which is encapsulation allowing work on different objects simultaneously and easier troubleshooting. However, Magento has a steep learning curve and is generally considered more difficult to program, so inexperienced users with limited tech knowledge will have to spend much time learning to configure and customise the platform. OXID, on the other hand, is considered less difficult to learn. In addition, our experts point to the platforms’ use of the Smarty template engine, used for the creation of unique front-end designs. The latter feature, which Magento lacks, considerably facilitates and speeds up the creation of templates. The recent OXID decision to work with Symphony, a popular PHP framework, further contributes to faster and easier coding experience. Still, Magento is very well-documented and have a very large online community to help the programmer learn, while mastering OXID resembles collecting tiny bits of information from various sources. The lower popularity of the platform also translates into fewer cases considered on the net, which programmers can make use of. And… of course, there is no way of coming to grips with OXID speaking no German, as OXID’s documentation, support and community is almost all German-speaking.
4. 4. Support. In Magento, support is fast and free, although users often emphasise that any related question seem to have been already answered and available on the net. As it has already been mentioned, the OXID’s support is mainly German-speaking. In addition, it is not free even in an enterprise version.
5. 5. Cost of Hosting. Being a high-performance platform, Magento requires a good hosting solution, which may drive the hosting cost up. In particular, Magento servers must run modern Linux kernel, Apache or Nginx web daemon, and PHP versions. Comparing to Magento, OXID is more lightweight and easier to host. For one e-shop with a few thousand articles, a shared hosting will suffice.

Conclusion

Magento and OXID are two great e-commerce solutions in terms of functionality and marketing solutions. When choosing what platform to work with, you should remember that Magento has bigger learning curve and higher hosting demands, but a much bigger community and a reliable free support. On the other hand, OXID is easier to host and to program, but has no structured documentation and little information about the platform is provided in English. If your organisation lacks skilled professionals or knowledge of German, do not give up on your prefered choice – you may refer to our team, having strong expertise in both Magento and OXID to help you install and customize your ecommerce platform, as well as add custom extensions addressing specific needs of your business.

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