Magento is the better platform, since it provides merchants with granular control, advanced ecommerce features, and unlimited support for products, customers, orders, and transactions for free. Volusion, in turn, provides its users with ease of use and powerful site editing tools, but lags behind Magento in terms of functionality and performance.
Magento or Volusion: which to choose?
Cost
Magento 2 Open Source is free to use and distribute, making it accessible for merchants globally and helping them adopt the platform for their ecommerce businesses easily. The cost of self-hosting a Magento store usually starts at around $20 to $40 per month or more, depending on its size, catalog, and website traffic.
Volusion is a SaaS offering that merchants can license for three fixed price tiers of $29, $79, and $299 per month based on the gross merchandise value. With each tier, they offer additional functionality allowing their users to choose higher price tiers based on their requirements.
Ease of use
If you’re using Magento 2 Open Source, you need to host the application as well. Hosting and managing a Magento 2 installation requires familiarity with Linux-based systems. Furthermore, customizing a Magento website design or functionality requires proficiency with JavaScript, PHP, HTML, and CSS. This is a limiting factor for those who aren’t tech-savvy.
Volusion offers a built-in page builder that provides its users with better control over the appearance of their stores. As a SaaS platform, Volusion handles the hosting for its users, making it easy for those without any technical backgrounds to set up and run an ecommerce business.
Functionality
Magento offers advanced ecommerce functionality out of the box. Its built-in API provides merchants with the ability to integrate with virtually any third-party application or service. With Magento, the number of products that a store can host is only limited by its hosting environment and not by the application allowing merchants to support large catalogs with ease.
Volusion limits the number of products, integrations with third-party services, and the API access for a store for some of their plans. These essential features are limited to those subscribed to their top-tier plans starting from $299 per month.
Performance
Magento stores provide merchants with high-performance websites by leveraging powerful caching technology such as Varnish and Redis. Often, hosting is the only limiting factor in a store’s performance, making it easy for merchants to provide additional resources to boost their page load speed.
Volusion stores are hosted by the company. Hence, retailers have limited control over the performance of their stores. When Volusion users struggle with slow websites, their options are limited to steps like rebuilding the site’s search index and refreshing the store cache.
Customizability
Magento store users have complete control over the design and functionality of their stores. They can easily customize every aspect using custom extensions and integrate with third-party services using its powerful API without any limitations.
Volusion stores can only be customized in terms of their appearance as their backend code is black-boxed. This means that its users are limited to the functionality offered by default with each plan and cannot add custom functionality.
SEO
Magento provides its users with the tools necessary to optimize their stores for search engines. It supports custom meta-data and includes data markup based on Schema.org standards with its default product template. Although it lacks in-built blogging functionality, merchants can add it to the platform using free extensions such as the Magefan blog.
Volusion provides essential control over the SEO of a store with support for customizing product metadata and a store’s robots.txt file. It cannot support a blog by default, and users seeking to add blogging functionality to their stores are required to host their blogs externally on a subdomain before linking it to the store.
Security
Magento employs several security measures to safeguard the platform from known vulnerabilities and exploits. As of Magento 2.4, all stores come with two-factor authentication enabled by default and a strict content security module that protects stores from clickjacking and data injection exploits.
Volusion handles the security of the platform and its website on behalf of its clients. Although they employ significant security measures to secure the platform, they have been plagued by common card skimming exploits from time to time.
The verdict
Volusion provides its user with an easy-to-start platform that offers an in-built page builder for easy design customization.
In all other aspects such as cost, functionality, performance, customizability, SEO, and security, Magento proves to be a far superior platform. It offers better features and control over the platform as compared to Volusion without a hefty price tag.
