BigCommerce vs WooCommerce

Over the last few years, companies are shifting from traditional marketing to digital media marketing as it is more effective in gaining new customers. Companies are establishing their digital presence on different platforms including social media, blogging sites etc. Each and every company has created their own websites to provide information to potential customers, or to sell products through e-commerce stores, making websites or web applications is a complex and time-consuming task which requires coding skills. Hence to solve this problem, many organizations have provided website building and content management platforms which make it easy to create web applications. Two such platforms are BigCommerce and WooCommerce which provides different services to build websites, web applications and e-commerce stores.

BigCommerce is an e-commerce platform which provides different services to its users like creating online stores, hosting websites and web applications, search engine optimization etc. It is listed in the NASDAQ platform list. It was founded by Eddie Machaalani and Mitchell Harper in 2009 for the online selling of products. It became one of the top companies in Australia for providing software as a service.

Advantages of BigCommerce

• It provides drag and drop features to build websites easily.
• It supports multiple currencies to buy and sell goods.
• It provides PayPal integration for payment options.
• It gives AMP (Accelerated mobile pages) the ability to make it responsive for mobile platforms.  

Disadvantages of BigCommerce

• It puts a limit on sales according to the plan chosen by the customer.
• It does not have multi-lingual capabilities.

WooCommerce is defined as an online platform for e-commerce activities, it is designed on WordPress and provides highly customized features. It is an open-source platform and the company credited for the development of this platform is  Automattic. It was first launched in 2011 and its stable version was released in 2022. The authors of this platform are  Mike Jolley and James Koster.

Advantages of WooCommerce

• It is completely free which makes it the first choice for the customers who do not have enough budget.
• It provides a large number of pre-built store designs which can be easily customized.
• It has better response time on the front end as well as on the back end.
• It allows the user to have complete control of the flow of data and its features.

Disadvantages of WooCommerce

• It does not work with platforms other than hosted by WordPress.
• It requires payment for advanced features like using your own payment gateway.

Below is a table of differentiation between BigCommerce and WooCommerce:

	BigCommerce	WooCommerce
1.	It can be understood as a SaaS platform which is used for creating online stores, SEO, marketing facilities etc	It can be understood as an e-commerce plugin which provides e-commerce store building functionalities.
2.	It was founded by Eddie Machaalani and Mitchell Harper.	It was founded by Mike Jolley and James Koster.
3.	It is not an open-source platform.	It is an open-source platform.
4.	It provides analytic tools for tracking website performance.	It does not have any data analysis tools.
5.	Its standard plan costs $29.95 per month.	It provides free services to its customers.
6.	It comes with advanced SEO features to increase website ranking.	It does not have SEO functionality to increase online visibility.
7.	It provides only 12 free themes.	It provides thousands of free store designs.
8.	It provides a trial of 15 days for its customers.	It provides a trial of 30 days for its customers.