branko ajzele, senior developer / project manager
Almost a year of everyday Magento development is behind me now. In that time, Todayt is the first day I took few hours to surf the web for alternative web shops. Sounds silly, I know. Anyhow, here is a little graphical overview of Oxid EShop that caught my attention.
Hope this screenshots serve as a short overview of Oxid shop.
I am planning on doing a bit of testing on speed and general features of both shops sometime soon.
Cheers.
My name is Branko Ajzele. I'm currently working full time as Project Manager / Senior Developer at Inchoo (in partnership with Surgeworks). My special interest and expertise evolve mainly around Magento, trough my everyday work on this eCommerce platform. As a result, I am skilled with Zend Framework, Doctrine ORM, general PHP programming patterns, etc. Besides standard server/client web apps, I am also involved in Google Android mobile application development with an emphasize on mobile eCommerce apps.
From a functional and visual standpoint, is there really a comparison to Oxid and Magento?
Hi Frank,
If a client runs an shop that uses no multisite capabilities and most of its product are of “simple type” is there a reason why use Magento? Don’t get me wrong, we specialize at Magento development but sometimes its hard to justify much more development time needed to develop some feature in Magento and in simpler PHP systems. Not to mentioned the rigor you get during each update. In its latest Magento versions they added the “Compiler” module. It makes my head spin seeing the current over bloated state of Magento and the way they are trying to solve the performance issues of shops with large number of products by using flat tables (which massively duplicates tables in database). I wrote an article on “Escape from EAV, the Magento way” that you can read on Inchoo.net.
What good is having 128 (made up number) features if your client need 20 of which you need to develop 5-6 yourself?
I am not saying that Magento sucks I am just saying I am checking out simpler, but for the given occasion and specific client, better solutions that Magento.
Hi Branko,
Have you looked at Prestashop? It is considered a light weight and faster alternative to Magento.
What is your opinion on it?
Thanks,
Rick
Hi,
you might also be interested on
http://www.slideshare.net/mayflowergmbh/magento-oxid-xtcommerce-evaluation-guide-for-enterprises
Best, Björn.
Oxid looks OK I hope to play around with it over the weekend and make a decent comment.
I’m interested in the tests Frank, hope you get the time soon.
Branko…. These are my thoughts…
I would choose X-Cart for a simple shop. Very nice out of the box and simple to theme. Easy for client to manage and the cost of script can be built into the quote. In the long run the investment in the script is a time saver.
You can do a nice shop quickly.
For Magento I wouldn’t even consider unless the client has over $3k budget to start plus a healthy monthly budget for decent vps or dedicated hosting and lots of management/tinkering time. Although free and great community Magento eats up time and time is money.
If the client has big goals and long term vision with constant development, prepared for the additional costs etc then Mangento is perfect.
Or alternatively you can use Oscommerce with STS (simple template system mod) and a nice template then customize from there but that can take time too getting used to the file structure of osc. But really it’s a good engine and very stable.
Sorry I could you Frank ooops
please edit
Interesting. I wrote a similar article on OXID for Sitepoint.com: http://www.sitepoint.com/article/six-steps-start-selling-online/ It guides new merchants through quickly getting up and running with an OXID-based eshop.
Nice to see so many feedback on this topic. I will try to separate some free time and write a bit more detailed overview and comparison of the two. Cheers…
Oxid is not a serious alternative. A comparison would be interesting, but I am afraid the results are known in advcance.
The only enterprise grade open source solution is Magento.
J
@James I agree on the “enterprise grade open source solution”… the thing is that there are lot of small business clients who desperately wish to switch to Magento but have no budget to cover the “overflow” of development time for Magento. Maybe I should have titled this post “Is Magento good for small business clients”? … But then again, Magento’s performance is not so impressive in shops with over 20 000, 30 000 products so … how good is it for Enterprize? LOL… I would say this is spinning in circle… In the next month or so I am planning on doing some detailed tests on relatively large set of products. Hope we all get the clearer picture on Magento’s performance then
hello branko,
I wrote a similar article about how Magento is more for medium- to big-sized businesses than for small-sized. Good to see that developers share the same opinion
Beside all the hype about Magento you have to be objective and judge the system by what your customer really needs.
http://www.it-media.at/article.php?articleid=2151
Branko, how is performance bad with large # of SKUs? With the Flat Catalog/Product options, at least SQL is as about fast as it can get. Or am I missing something?
Tried getting into the OXID online admin demo and it just didn’t work! Very impressive!
@Thomas Your comment is also very impressive!
-I am really tired of explaining the point of this post!
I don’t hate Magento (just sometimes), I am not saying Oxid is THE alternative. After all, I specialize in Magento dev every day. I am saying… use the right tool for the right job. Magento sucks when it comes to SMALL shops, with SMALL requirements! Point of the store is to sell, sell, sell… Not patch, dev, dev a bit more, upgrade, fix… So if you have overblown budget to waste on irrelevant patching and extended development time, go ahead! Once again, this goes for small shops, with small budget, with no need for fancy “customer groups, transactional emails, multistores” features. THE END!
Hell, I even like Shopp for WordPress.
@Nightfly Last “big” shop I was working on had around 35 000 products. Shop broke after upgrade from 1.2 to 1.3. PHP platform with setup that client had could not handle the “copy to flat” action so shop ended with invisible attributes on front. I had to re-save every product via custom code to make the thing right. My general impression is that Flat product/catalog feature should run some PHP/MySQL settings check before running the code. Otherwise it will most likely break and leave you with corrupted database?! Anyhow, my re-save and rebuild action did not get much in terms of speed. Important thing to keep in mind is that this store was “specific”. It had just few configurable products where each conf.product held 2000 – 4000 simple products. Nightmare
Time to load the product view page… 3-8minutes… the weak spot was the foreach loop that generated product objects, not the database :/
Hey Branko, apologies for the negative comment there.
Right now, I’m having a tough time with e-commerce stores. We currently use the nightmarish Zen Cart for our clients in the studio. It’s been ok for us, but we really need to move forward.
We were all pumped about Magento… that was until we installed it and saw how slow it was! Various reviews of it didn’t help either!
It’s a shame, cause on paper, Magento was the absolute perfect solution for us, but we rely on shared hosting and having 20+ magento stores all running at the same time will cause mega issues!
I’m going to download oxid and give it a whirl. Perhaps it might be just what we need.
I’ll keep an eye on your blog for performance updates
Thanks again!
Magento is not yet code ready, a lot of bugs, slow, upgrade is pain in the ass, code is a mess, no docs, support is overpriced. Magento is generally for small businesses and startups often too costly, too complex and too difficult to implement.
Oxid is mature, easy to follow and they are more than 10 years on the field. You don’t need to think twice to choose.
Varien company is just marketing than good coding and will be long way before will be Magento ready.
Magento is so massively riddled with bugs, it’s not even funny. The fact that they are offering an “Enterprise Edition” and that anyone would even consider it “Enterprise” quality software is beyond me. While an excellent system on many levels, Magento is far from Enterprise class. They can’t even get their taxing to work properly and their coupon promotion logic continually breaks with every new release. Since taxes and promotional logic are two of the most important aspects of ecommerce, how can anyone consider Magento enterprise ready.
I would not recommend Magento to anyone looking for a serious ecommerce platform unless they have a specific need that cannot be delivered by any other platform. On top of that, I can least plenty of features not available in Magento. Perhaps the biggest is the lack of support for recurring billing.
That being said, I don’t think Oxid is a legitimate alternative to Magento.
What are your thoughts on Interchange (www.icdevgroup.com) we are currently using x-cart v4 and waiting on v5 as well as evaluating Magento and Oxid.
OXID is a viable alternative to Magento.
There.
For one thing OXID handles variants (configurable products) so much better. It also allows you to manage inventory per product variant.
Product and option setup is also a breeze – you are not stuck with having to install patches and hacks just to change where your product belongs or what type of product it is. Magento is truly byzantine in that way – heaven forbid if your business grows or changes, or you’ll have to spend a week redoing everything.
There are no bundle products in OXID, but due to the severe inventory management defficiency in Magento, bundled products are not that useful.
And the last and possibly the most important thing why OXID is better than Magento is that I spent 30 minutes administering the installation. 30 minutes. Magento literally takes months to set up and work out a reliable maintenance and update procedure.
Magento is alluring due to its complexity and seeming power, but at the moment it is deeply flawed by its nearly impossible to manage templates, huge resource footprint and missing features that negate many of the promisses of the, in some ways more powerful Magento shop.
In contrast, template editing and expansion in OXID is ridiculously simple. The Smarty tags are simply awesome.
I will of course keep working on and following Magento – perhaps the v1.4 has some real improvements.
And one last and really important thing… OXID is fast. really fast.
Hi branko, thank you very much for these articles. I have been researching magento since yesterday and I have to say that the amount of negative feedback has me worried a little about investing time to learn it.
I’m curious as if you’ve tried to play with Agent-Ohm and if yes, what do you think of it?
Hi guys,
I'm just wondering, since so much time has passed, what you think of this Oxid or any other open-source ecart as a replacement for Magento? How about PrestaShop?
Cheers