nopCommerce vs Magento

Hi,

Can someone with Magento experience tell me why I should choose nopCommerce instead of Magento?
Magento seems to have a lot of features and nopCommerce a lot better performance.

I'm a c# developer and should choose nopCommerce because of that but would like to find a solution without need of a developer.

Looking forward for your comments :)

Rgds,
Christian

well nopCommerce is an open source eCommerce solution and free for everybody, i dont know about Magento, is it free without any limitations ?

I have worked extensively with Magento and NOP. I can tell you that NOPCommerce is essentially trying to emulate Magento. It's doing a nice job, but it's still got a long way to go.

You would only choose NOP if you have .NET background/expertise. But if you have php experience, definitely go with Magento.

NOP is definitely one of the best .NET open source solution, but PHP by far has more mature solutions.

Hi,
Thanks for your reply!

I'm a c# developer, very lost with Magento when it struggles....

is Magento a free open source project like nopCommerce ?

Yes, they have an open source "community edition" that's free, and an enterprise version that is quite expensive.

this "community edition" version includes everything ? and is it possible to use this free version for commercial purpose like creating a live website ? i mean does it include all the necessary tools like nopCommerce ?

Yes, it's open source.  It's got more features than NOP, but at the same time it's a lot more complex of a system to build on.

Thanks for the information....i appreciate it...

Two major Magento caveats have been left out here:

Magento Community version:
1.  No provide support for server farms. I am not referring to technical support. You would need to come up with your own session management solution and then edit a signification amount of code to make the community version functional in a high availability environment.

2. What Magento refers to as "Compiled" code is simply consolidated code. The core classes and modules are combined into one giant single file. It is still running on PHP, no compiled modules.

There are more issues but they are far more subjective. The questions that qualify you for Magento vs Nopcommerce should be more geared towards the following:

1. Are you running a fairly low number of concurrent sessions and will you remain that way for the foreseeable future?

2. If you plan on having a High Availability site, do you have the annual budget to support Magento. Do your homework carefully here. Magento is more than happy to get you started, but once you commit your resources and time to setting up Magento it can be very hard to navigate your business into another system.

3. Is PCI compliance a must at start up, in the near future? If yes you will want to weigh the cost of getting your Nopcommerce site certified vs. the turn-key Magento.

4. What skills do you and or your developers currently offer.

The list goes on based on many other factors. But if you are setting up a Mom and Pop shop, simply choose the solution that is in keeping with your experience. PHP or C-Sharp.NET