It's important to understand that in this article we are referring to Magento Community Edition; not Magento Go, and not Magento Enterprise Edition. 

In that respect BigCommerce and Magento Community Edition represent two different styles of solution. We recommend the two as good choices because they both provide practical alternatives when deciding to get your online store up and running. This article aims to help you decide which solution you should choose to take your online store to market, and why.

Simply put, a BigCommerce website is like a pre-packaged solution, over the top of which you'll place your own design. Magento is built more from the ground up and you have more options in the layout and operation of your store. A Magento solution therefore tends to be the more involved and expensive of the two.

About Design and Appearance

Generally, you won’t be restricted by the quality of the design in either solution. With the right graphic design both solutions can look stunning and make your brand shine. What you may find, however, is that BigCommerce can place restrictions on where things are placed and how. The end result can still look wonderful, but the original vision may have to be compromised to match the facilities that BigCommerce provides (rather than the idea you had). BigCommerce allows the store owner to select from a range of pre-designed templates, however, if you're after a professional result, a custom design implemented by a web designer is recommended.

About BigCommerce

BigCommerce generally allows your online business to be setup more quickly. You might say that BigCommerce provides a quicker route to market - an easier way to get from the conception of your website to actually operating an online store. It does this by grouping the most commonly used eCommerce features into a package. The features are arranged in a way so that they fit the most common eCommerce scenarios. However, BigCommece stores can be customised very well with the aid of a web developer your store can look unique and professional. This availability of common eCommerce features, together with custom design and setup (by a web designer), provides a great path by which businesses can reach their online market - achieving a professionally branded and successful online store. The down side is that in its quest to make the common features more accessible to business owners, BigCommerce provides less flexibility in the way that its website operates. There is more about this below, but for now let’s look at the characteristics of a Magento store.

About Magento

Magento is considered to be the most robust of the open source eCommerce solutions.  Its rich feature set and ability to be customised can inspire you to evolve your store into a unique, layered selling channel. Its ability to be customised can also be a shortcoming - it takes more effort to deliver a completed Magento solution. More time is required to get your store customised and operating. The upside is that there are less limits in regards to how your Magento store can be customised. If you’re looking to expand, Magento will allow you to make changes that are unique and effective. If you can allocate a higher budget and would appreciate greater flexibility, our recommendation is to opt for Magento.

More About the Two

You might say that Magento provides a more flexible platform from which to present your products and your brand. BigCommerce will tend to provide you with facilities that best match the requirements of most stores. For example, the product image-viewer in BigCommerce can’t be customised. The image-viewer is excellent, but  it can’t be changed a great deal. With Magento, it is possible to make changes or improve the way your product images are shown.

If your product range and customer base grows, a Magento store will provide you with more leverage to implement creative ideas and to increase customer retention and online sales. It provides you with the flexibility to do this, because it is less rigid in its structure than BigCommerce. With respect to BigCommerce, however, the group that runs BigCommerce provide updates that are easy to adopt - you may not even need a web developer to gain the benefits of BigCommerce version upgrade: just click a button to schedule the update and the BigCommerce servers can take care of the rest (it’s advisable be advise-able to have a developer on stand-by just in case). Magento on the other hand may take a bit more preparation and technical expertise in implmenting new updates.

In terms of support, if you’re unable to track down a BigCommerce developer, the BigCommerce team offers support and advice for some website issues. If paid work is required they can assist you with finding BigCommerce developers. The Magento (community edition) team does not provide assistance for website issues.

Editing and Administration Abilities

Both solutions provide flexible ways to manage your products, content and customers. Magento does provide more control over your products and your product features, with a greater ability to customise product attributes and setup. It can also be setup to provide more flexible ways of editing content, or custom features that your store has been setup with.  BigCommerce focuses on a more standard feature set for products.

The Magento website provides an immediately accessible demo for their administration area, which can be accessed at: http://demo-admin.magentocommerce.com/index.php/admin/. This provides a great overview of the Magento administration area.

You can do the same at BigCommerce, but a Free Trial is required to be setup.

Hosting and Maintenence

There is a difference in the way that these two solutions are hosted and maintained, and while it is worthwhile having a basic understanding of the difference, it shouldn’t affect your decision in choosing between the two.

BigCommerce is a hosted solution. This idea is similar to leasing software, and in some respects it could be considered “software as a service” - a popular movement in today’s software. What it means is that BigCommerce takes care of your files and the environment in which they reside. The benefits include hardware and monitoring being taken care of, and generally it is easier to take advantage of updates. Currently all BigCommerce sites are hosted in America, which may be a disadvantage if you're based in another country, but overall that has not proven to be a great problem in our experience, particularly for those with international audiences.

A Magento website is hosted in the traditional way. A hosting company is chosen, generally in the same country as the business owner and the base files are deployed to a 3rd party hosting service which is paid for with a standard monthly fee. Much of the responsibility of the operation of the site falls back to the owner and/or website developer.

The maintenance cost of a BigCommerce store may be around $80 per month for a typically busy store. Magento may be around $40 a month to be hosted independently. However, the savings on Magento hosting may be negated by the fact that Magento customisations or updates may take more time. In the end the difference between the two scenarios is minimal.

The Buzz Around The Two Solutions

Both solutions have great community support. BigCommerce will continue to grow and improve focusing accessible packaged solutions while expanding the range of customisation options.

Magento will also focus on simplifying some processes, but it is a brand that is driven by innovation. It hosts regular conferences and forums across the world, inviting store owners, website designers, service providers, and leading minds in eCommerce to collaborate and work together on ideas for improvement. There are few groups as dedicated to the movement of online commerce than the team at Magento. Together with a team of market leaders like eBay and Paypal, they are developing a platform for online commerce which may be unrivalled.

BigCommerce Limitations Examples

It was made mention above of some of the limitations associated with BigCommerce layout and functionality. A few examples of this in real terms are included below:

• The main menus aren’t that flexible if they need to be customised. Any degree of customising the items that appear in the menu may require a new menu to be hard-coded, which means that the menu won’t update with new categories or pages.
• Footers can’t be made dynamically (similar to menus above)
• Accessing individual product lists or category lists is difficult
• Limited options for displaying sub-categories. Sub category tiles cannot be display on product pages.
• Photo display for products is not easy to change
• The checkout process is good but rigid
• General features like extra photo galleries or blogs cannot be added as extensions to your store

In the End...

If you can allocate a higher budget and you want to maintain flexibility and take advantage of creativity and unique approaches, Magento may be your ideal solution.  If you have a limited budget, are happy with a standard features set, and want a faster route to market for your online store, a BigCommerce store would be ideal.