Prestashop 1.4 or Magento 1.5 ?

[jetwong98]

Hi,

I'm now having a difficult decision making whether to choose Magento or Prestashop. I heard lots of cons about Magento as being slow, difficult in customization and blah blah.... However, Magento seems to be the preferred choice of most customers nowadays despite the cons.

As I may consider developing customized modules on the adopted ecommerce platform, hence I can only focus on 1 product, either Magento and Prestashop.

My preferred CMS is Joomla and JFusion had already supported Magento bridging with Joomla.

I'm truly amazed at the number of extensions available with Magento, 3,500. Since so many people complaint about Magento, why is it still having a large community supporters ? What make them stick with Magento ? Also, what're the major advantages of core Magento 1.5 which core Prestashop 1.4 still lacks ?

I hope to decide by this week and later learn thru the APIs of the platform chosen.

Thanks

[Paul C]

If I was being cynical then I would say that for customers the cost of ownership of Magento is higher, so if you're deciding which to work on as a developer/site designer/consultant, then you will make more money choosing Magento.

On a less cynical note, if you have a lot of experience with Zend framework then the learning curve will be shallower for Magento. Prestashop's weakness is its lack of developer documentation (certainly in English). If you have no experience of the Zend framework, then you'll have a lot to learn before extending Magento, whereas Prestashop in my opinion is easier to reverse engineer to work out how to do things (even without proper documentation).

Purely my personal opinion of course. Both can be used to design fantastic ecommerce sites.

Paul