SuiteCommerce vs Magento? Which one is the best e-commerce platform for your needs?

As you probably already know, these solutions enable you to focus on the core of your business and avoid both huge investments and time dedicated to managing your operational systems. 

However, deciding on which one best suits your business needs is not always as easy as it sounds! 

We have created this article to explore the differences between NetSuite and Magento in full detail to provide you with all the key information you need to know in order to decide which software solution is better for your business.

Also, if you already have Magento 1.0 and you are feeling confused about this whole Magento 2.0 ‘upgrade’ we strongly advise you to read this from beginning to end to make a better decision! 

What is Magento?

Magento is the chosen e-commerce solution for almost 20 percent of online shops worldwide, with more than 260,000 customers and 150 million dollars in revenue every year. 

This positions Magento as the first e-commerce solution in the world, moreover, it was recently acquired by Adobe for 1.68 billion dollars. 

Magento offers a wide amount of options for online stores regarding management, like order fulfillment, shopping cart management, website management and catalogs. 

It also provides additional capabilities such as online marketing, content management, shipping and SEO adjusting. 

Magento 2.0 is the company’s latest launch, and its main difference with Magento 1.0 consists of the ability to function on the newest versions of PHP.

In addition, Magento 2.0 provides streamlined checkouts and in-site PayPal payments. 

Magento 2.0 is also meant to improve web performance and to implement a brand new tech stack.

However, Magento 2.0 real value is enhancing Magento 1.0 malfunctions, such as table locking, limitations in terms of searching and unnecessary reloads. 

That being said, migrating from Magento 1.0 to Magento 2.0 supposes a lot of trouble due to hard differences between the two of them.

This means that upgrading from Magento 1.0 to Magento 2.0 can be misleading, since Magento migration can result as hard as migration to a whole different e-commerce solution. 

Consequently, given that Magento is focusing on improving its 2.0 version, customer support and maintenance for 1.0 will be left aside, along with a bunch of users that do not intend to migrate.

What is NetSuite?

NetSuite is an online software that provides solutions for businesses’ key activities, which also hosts SuiteCommerce.

In other words, NetSuite centralizes data to offer online business assistance, including e-commerce processes.

As the name suggests, SuiteCommerce (along with its sibling solution: SuiteCommerce Advanced with further customization capabilities) is an e-commerce platform that takes care of the main operational processes such as financials, customer support, inventory and order management.

SuiteCommerce, as well as NetSuite’s whole suite of solutions, enables businesses to unify their selling process, since it deals with both online shopping and in-store point of sale (POS) applications.

Furthermore, NetSuite integrates inventory and warehouse management to improve flows, focus and to provide an omnichannel experience for each consumer.

NetSuite unifies many languages, countries and currencies in one single platform simplifying businesses’ processes and provide unique solutions for every market need. 

Therefore, if your business already runs on NetSuite, incorporating SuiteCommerce for your e-commerce systems is, without any doubt, the right choice.

It will avoid significant investments and make it easier for you to have control over your operations.

At Broken Rubik we strongly recommend this solution and we have created an entire post dedicated to explaining why.

Do you want to know more about NetSuite? Check this resource.

SuiteCommerce vs Magento: Which is the best?

Do not forget to check it out to learn everything you need to know when deciding whether or not to integrate NetSuite or Magento to your business. 

We’ve tested several items to truly understand which platform is the best for your needs.

1. User Experience

User experience is one of the main differences that need to be taken into consideration when deciding between Magento and SuiteCommerce.

While Magento is the result of many solutions put together (and you can totally tell!), NetSuite’s main differential value is that it is an integral solution.

This means that NetSuite was designed from the start to take care of every task at the core of your business and that is why we love it so much!

You are probably wondering why this is so important, so let’s get to that.

On the one hand, Magento’s patchwork does not provide a consistent user experience, since each one of its different solutions is not meant to work as a unit. 

As a result of that, Magento’s integrations require a deep knowledge of PHP and MySQL to deal with bugs and updates.

So unless your in-house team includes a skilled developer who knows how to manage Magento and make the most out of the wide variety of plugins available, you probably should just cross it off your list.

On the other hand, NetSuite delivers a full user experience optimized for each consumer and for each device they are using. In other words, NetSuite’s integral solution has your business totally covered!

What’s more, any NetSuite update that might pop up is compatible with the ones you had before, so there is no need for you to re-configure your code every time an update comes out. 

Summing it up, NetSuite’s integral solution takes care of every process at the core of your business and does not require updates configuration. All of this results in a better and unified user experience which, as you know, should be one of your main goals!

2. Scalability

Before we start with this point, a little heads up about scalability: it is not only about website traffic growth. 

Anyway, concerning this, let’s state that both Magento and SuiteCommerce are capable of supporting high traffic websites, but this is not what you need to know about scalability. 

What really matters in terms of scalability is that systems need not only to support front-end online business growth but also back-end online business growth.

This means that your solution needs to be able to manage and support every activity that comes along with an e-commerce website. For instance: returns, exponentially growing transactions, inventory adjustments, fulfillments and payment processing.

You need to be aware of this since the increase of order volume will probably lead to changes in these and many other processes your business requires. 

So, as you have probably concluded on your own by now, it is always better to have an unified platform that does not need to integrate any other system to work, instead of having many systems that need connectors to integrate with each other. 

For you to be able to focus on order processing and management, you need to find a solution that will not be a continuous headache! 

In addition, scalability also needs to be addressed in terms of flexibility.

This means that your solution needs to be flexible enough to add new business structures as your business starts to grow and expand. 

Most businesses start as something small and then, if they are lucky enough, evolve into a much complex structure that demands many things that were not taken into consideration before.

For example, if your business expands to other countries, you might need a system that supports multiple-languages and multiple-currencies.

Even if your growth is not towards other markets but towards product or service development, your business is going to need to add new areas, better financial reports, an improved supply chain and multi-locations.

Your software scalability and flexibility is key to trust your real-time data to make fast decisions and to make changes depending on new market’s challenges and scenarios. 

3. Integrations and addons

Magento was not originally built for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).

In consequence, the combination of these features and many more will necessarily require third-party extensions, as well as help from a skilled developer in PHP or MySQL.

Of course, as we mentioned before, if you have an in-house developer dedicated to unify your integrations and connections, it is possible to merge every feature you need in one platform. 

However, given that Magento owns a really important market share, there are a lot of third-party modules, extensions and themes available for it. 

The real question then is if it is worth it to dedicate your resources to this task while you could use a different software solution that does not require it, such as SuiteCommerce and many other applications from NetSuite. 

4. Deployment and implementations

While every NetSuite product, including SuiteCommerce, is cloud-based, Magento gives clients the possibility to have both on-premise and cloud deployment.

However, Magento’s clients have to manage web hosting themselves, adding a layer of complexity to the maintenance and development of each site.

In addition, Magento is not able to support multi-tenant hosting. 

Moreover, Magento’s PHP architecture needs you to have three crucial skills: a front-end web developer, infrastructure engineers as well as database administrators to control its system. 

In contrast, SuiteCommerce, as well as the rest of NetSuite products, takes care of these tasks to let you and your team focus your energy and time on your business. 

Furthermore, SuiteCommerce has a single page architecture which was made on open source AJAX and JavaScript standards.

Magento vs SuiteCommerce: Pricing

As we established, Magento requires many third-party integrations and IT support, so getting to know the real investment it takes to use Magento’s software can be tricky.

Magento has competitive licensing prices and a Magento Open Source freemium plan.

Magento Community is a free Magento solution. However, technical support, faster speed, Solr search, scalability, cross sell and many other functionalities are not available. 

If you want them (which you probably will!) you need to pay for the Enterprise edition according to your online revenue.

In spite of that, all the resources in terms of money, time and effort you need to get a Magento solution on the run are way more expensive than SuiteCommerce pricing. 

In fact, it is quite normal that Magento deployments cost up to three times what SuiteCommerce costs. SuiteCommerce list price is $2,500+/month.

Keep in mind that, as we have already said, the increase in Magento’s price does not come along with a better solution. 

So…which ecommerce solution is the best?

We have made it pretty clear by now that SuiteCommerce is a much better solution in terms of e-commerce software and managing operational systems. 

Also, since Magento 1.0 support will only be available for the rest of this year, most users are soon going to have to deal with the decision of whether or not to upgrade to 2.0.

If this is your scenario, our point of view is that Magento migration to its 2.0 version takes too much effort.

In fact, just as much effort as migrating to a new software solution.

In addition, some Magento 1.0 extensions will not be available on Magento 2.0, so sticking to Magento is probably not the smartest choice.

When looking for a Magento alternative, SuiteCommerce is your best option!

Why move from Magento to SuiteCommerce?

Owners of e-commerce businesses in 2020 should concentrate on selling rather than managing and administering their systems. 

Unless you love dedicating your time to integrations and extensions or you are happily paying for an in-house team of developers to take care of your Magento solution and the many missfunctions it has, you will probably want to switch to a more friendly software solution. 

Migrate from Magento to SuiteCommerce to get the solution you need and forget about the headaches you could live without!