Pricing
Magento has two options, Magento Commerce 1 (formerly known as Enterprise Edition) and For Magento Open Source 1 (formerly known as Community Edition) with the Magento Open Source being very similar to nopCommerce being open-source and free.
Magento Commerce is a heavy duty but paid option consisting of two main versions, Magento 1 and Magento 2. The pricing greatly varies between the two, Magento 1 is based on Per-Server model, with pricing starting at £14,500 per year.
Magneto 2 delivers superior cloud-hosted performance at scale. It is running as a Revenue Model, with the license starting at £17,500 but can rise to circa £60,000 a year.
NopCommerce and Magento Open Source 1 don’t have any upfront subscription fees some expansions such as hosting and some extensions as well as purchasing additional plugins will all incur an additional cost. However, it’s very unlikely that the cost of such expenditures and plugins will have a higher total that the cost of the Magento Enterprise edition.
Features
Both platforms are full of features, such as product and catalogue management, SEO features, inbuilt analytics, multi-store and multi-vendor features. They also have various payment and shipping integrations available straight out of the box.
However, the features within Magento Open Source and Magento Commerce differ greatly also there’s a lot of differences between Magento 1 and Magento 2 as the first version had a lot less features but with Magento 2 it seemed like the company decided to invest in adding features and supporting only the Commerce (paid) version of this product.
These extra features include customer loyalty tools, used to help improve shopper engagement and stimulate repeat purchased. Magento 2 also adds some other marketing tools such as flexible pricing rules, coupons, promotions targeted by customer segment, up-sells and cross-sells, and more.
NopCommerce offers similar to Magento Commerce marketing options and most of the rest features upfront, but more importantly completely free.
Customisation
There’s plenty of inbuilt features in both platforms. But as they are both open sources, they can also be customised to meet any specific requirement.
Both platforms allow using APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to interact with software, databases, Google merchant and product feeds, and more.
What can be considered as the only downside is that both platforms are rather advanced for the general user and would therefore require a professional developer to do complication customisation
Security
One of the largest differences between nopCommerce and Magento is their language. NopCommerce is written in Microsoft's ASP.NET whereas Magento is on PHP, a community driven language.
Its commonly considered that Windows + ASP.NET + MS SQL Server is the most productive environment, and the ASP.NET Core always for a much faster service. This higher productivity allows for fewer resources required and cheaper hosting.
NopCommerce is also considered to be a lot more secure. It has only ever had one security patch since launch which related to an external component. Whereas Magneto releases security patches in each version upgrades and sometimes in between. However, these are only valid for the Magento Commerce version. Unfortunately, Magento Open Source doesn’t get the same regular security updates.
Due to the more secure nature of nopCommerece it means you don’t have to constantly upgrade to the newest version. As for Magento, you need to constantly keep on top of updates, if not your store will be vulnerable to security breaches, errors and malicious attacks.
Additionally, Magento Open Source isn’t filly PCI compliant. In short, this means that credit cards cannot be processed securely, therefore you won’t be able to use payment gateways.
To overcome this issue the Magento Commerce version includes the Magento Secure Payment Bridge, an application that helps merchants achieve PCI compliant.
Support
nopCommerce and Magento Open Source offer product documentation that gives basic knowledge. They both also have online forums where community members help one another.
However, as forum support doesn’t always get you the answer you need, nopCommerce premium support services cost $299 for 3 months or $799 for the year. Magento Open Source only offers support with online community forums with the Commerce version including a 24/7 professional technical support, offered through a ticketing system or by phone.
Conclusion
In summary, both platforms look very similar as they both offer rich functionality and offer great opportunities for scaling your business.
With over 120,000 sites powered by Magento Commerce 1 in comparison to around 40,000 powered by NopCommerce is clear to see which is more popular at the moment. However, nopCommerce is a fast-growing solution with greater security and offers more features at no added cost.
But, the choice of nopCommerce vs Magento is down to the individual, it comes down to which features you feel your business will benefit from. It may be best to analyse your requirements and then choose the software that will work best for you.