OpenCart vs Prestashop
OpenCart and PrestaShop are both great systems, both are free and open source and come with pretty much all of the features you'd need to get your ecommerce business off the ground and it would only be the biggest online shops with very complex requirements that start to outgrow them (we're talking requirements as bespoke as Amazon, eBay and Play.com).
There are lots of platforms in the free and open source ecommerce space, but these two come out on top again and again over many different metrics. So we put them head-to-head on a comparison of some of the most important ecommerce features.
| Feature | OpenCart [1] (free) |
PrestaShop [2] (free) |
|
Multiple Stores |
Yes | Yes |
|
Multi-language |
Yes | Yes |
|
Multi-currency |
Yes | Yes |
| Search Engine Friendly | Yes | Yes |
|
Product Configurations |
Yes | Yes |
|
Mobile Commerce |
Yes | Yes |
|
Web Services API |
Yes | |
|
Strong Data Encryption |
Yes | Yes |
|
PCI Compliant |
Yes | Yes |
|
Customer Groups |
Yes | Yes |
|
Reward Points & Store Credit |
Free Extension [3] | Yes |
|
Content Management System |
1 Level [4] | Yes |
|
Site Access Permissions |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Full Page Caching |
Yes | Yes |
|
Online Demo |
Yes | Yes |
|
opensourcecms.com Rating |
4.30 | 3.22 |
| Consulting Services | Yes [5] | Just 1 UK Agency |
|
Multiple Licenses |
Yes | Yes |
| Total | 20.30 | 19.72 |
Conclusion
The final scores show that it's close between these two great platforms. In PrestaShop's favour it has slightly better support for product variations out of the box (although the OpenStock extension for OpenCart matches this). Another plus point for PrestaShop is the WebService API which I couldn't find documented but is present in the source code.
Overall though, OpenCart leads by around 1 point, helped by a much higher rating from opensourcecms.com, a far bigger list of commercial support developers and points in other areas. Another big win for OpenCart which isn't listed on this table is the clean and efficient nature of the source code. While PrestaShop's is good too, and both are in a different league from Magento.
[1] OpenCart features listed here:
http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route=feature/feature
[2] PrestaShop version features listed here:
http://www.prestashop.com/en/features
[3] This extension, developed by one of the main OpenCart team, provides store credit:
http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route=extension/extension/info&extension_id=5049
[4] OpenCart CMS extensions are relatively low cost:
http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route=extension/extension&filter_search=cms
[5] We are one of many companies that provide this service, click here for more.
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