How to Find Good Quality OpenCart Extensions

Posted by Paul on February 21, 2020

We love OpenCart, it's a great platform and has a thriving and active community who support users on the forums and develop great extensions ... most of the time. OpenCart has always welcomed extension and theme developers and has a very low bar to entry - if you can create an extension you can create an account, upload it and either sell it or release it for free.

Unfortunately, because it's so easy, not all extensions are created equal and the rating system/number of sales/comments isn't always the best guide to extension quality for 2 main reasons:

1. Fake reviews and ratings are rife all over the Internet.
   
   
2. People rate a theme or extension as 5* if it looks good and seems to work, even if the code is an absolute mess. This actually matters more than most people realise because it's more likely to conflict with other extensions and cause problems down the line if it's badly coded.

So we've come up with a short list of extension developers that we have come to trust after working with OpenCart since around 2011.

• Antropy (main account)
• These are extensions we developed ourselves in-house.

• Antropy (other account)
• These are extensions we bought the rights to after extensively verifying good code quality.

• Clear Thinking
• Johnathan who runs ClearThinking is one of the most respected OpenCart developers and provides some of the best customer support I've ever seen anywhere. You can guarantee that any extension you buy from here will be great.

• Bull5-i
• Always provides helpful support and the code is very clean. We espcially recommend the Similar Products extension.

• MarketinSG
• Singapore based developers who produce great quality extensions.

• UKSB
• We like the code from this developer, especially their Google Merchant Shopping Feeds extension.

• JNeuhoff
• Jeff wrote some of the earliest and most downloaded free extensions and is active and helpful in the forums.

• JAY6390
• Jay Gilford is a great developer who produces great extensions and provides great support.

• qphoria
• Qphoria is one of the core OpenCart developers who produces great extensions and has built many of the built-in payment gateways that come with OpenCart.

• iSense
• These guys were probably the biggest OpenCart agency in the world and their extension quality was very good but more recently they seem to have made a few questionable decisions like doing more Shopify work and withdrawing their Nitropack Cache extension in favour of a subscription model and their support has suffered a little too. Their extensions can be complex but they are often still good.
• We will add more as we come across them, please comment below or email us if you'd like to suggest one.

Notes
We have not been influenced or paid in any way for the recommendations and links above (although we list ours first of course), we have recommended them purely because we have had good experiences with the extensions and their support. We cannot of course take any responsibility if you have any issues although we're always willing to help out on a commercial basis.

How to Select a Good Extension

Try and stick to the developers listed above, but sometimes that's just not possible. In that case, try to make sure:

1. The extension has lots of sales.
2. The extension has a good rating.
3. Comments are replied to quickly on the extension page and are mostly positive.
4. The filesize is small and the number of files are small - there are loads of technical checks a developer can make once you've bought the extension, but in most cases (depending on what it does) if the extension is over about half a megabyte or contains more than 50 files it could well be bloated and cause problems.

How to Get Good Extension Support

If you do have an issue with an extension you've bought, after making sure you followed the installation instructions to the letter, it is best to contact the developer via the OpenCart Support Contact Form here:
https://www.opencart.com/index.php?route=support/contact

This is because OpenCart have a team dedicated to making sure that customers get great support and they will usually provide a full refund if there really is an issue with the extension you bought.

Finally, if you think we've missed any great developers let us know in the comments or by email, but we'll only list a developer if we have worked with their extensions and/or sampled their support ourselves and we believe them to be extremely good!