ubercart VS drupal commerce VS Magento

Question

Drupal + UC

VS

http://www.drupalcommerce.org (still in dev)

VS

Magento

anyone running all 3 and have opinions?

Answer 1

I had only lightly evaluated Magento and Ubercart for a canceled project about a year ago. So what I'm going to write is not based on experience of running an actual website.

Magento is a full featured web shop solution with separated backend, multiple front-end and almost no CMS features. It comes out of the box with everything you need to build a web shop, including payments processing, order management, billing, inventory management, etc. Magento seems easy to setup for a basic functional install. But it will probably become harder to administer when more features are used and need to be configured. Doing anything else than a web sop (or multiple web shops with a shared backend) with Magento doesn't look like a good idea.

Ubercart (UC) builds on Drupal and doesn't try to provide as much as Magento to avoid overlapping with Drupal core and existing separated modules features. It focus on basic features for a web shop: product catalog, payment and (simple) order processing. As with many Drupal based solution, it means it may be harder if you don't already have a Drupal background. But if you have some Drupal knowledge, it will certainly be easy to set up a simple web shot, if only for the known theming engine and administration UI. And if you need more features and customization, it will certainly be easier too because of the large community and the many modules already available not only for UC but also for Drupal itself (Views, CCK, etc.).

I don't know about Drupal Commerce (DC) but as stated in the question, it is still in-development so probably not an option. Unless your site's schedule is compatible with DC's road map (if any). Hoewever, DC is announced as the successor of UC so upgrade from the later to the former should be available once it's stable and released. The other promises on DC's home page are engaging and it looks like a very interesting project.

Answer 2

This argument has been hashed out a thousand times. Each has features that the others don't, each will have its own implementation difficulties.

If you have staff already who know one system or its underlying technologies (Zend Framework for Magento, for instance), you may want to move that way just for easier implementation.

Thanks,

Joe

Answer 3

I've worked extensively with Magento the last seven months, and I can say that as soon as you deviate from the out-of-the-box look and feel, the difficulty rises tremendously (unfortunately, we deviated a lot). As flexible as it is claimed to be, it is so complex, and has so many layers of abstraction, that any significant customization will become a serious engineering endeavor, with a very steep learning curve and (still) almost no documentation, in or out of code. On top of this, the resources required to run it are immense - we were using shared hosting during dev, and with just three of us touching the installation, we were regularly going over our cpu limits. So unless you're building a vanilla, skinned site, and have the resources for at least a semi-dedicated server and a lot of performance tuning, I can't recommend it.