Kibo eCommerce vs. Magento Open Source

Mozu is currently not suited for use at any company, small or large. The bugs and lack of features and integrations make it too difficult to use.

It's well suited for large eCommerce stores as it requires much effort to set up and the development cost for setting it up is high. It's less appropriate to use Magento where you are looking for quick development and launch of the store. Also, it is required to have a developer or sometimes the entire tech team to manage an e-commerce store, so you may need to hire a few PHP developers.

Incentivized

• Single admin tool for multiple sites is a huge plus. Eliminates much duplication of labor and a shared code base is also much simpler.
• Native responsive design in the latest version is great.
• Dynamic product categories is a big win.

Incentivized

• Magento is perfect if our web design client likes a specific pre-made template and wants a fast solution.
• Magento allows us to customize its open-source code to create additional features and functionality.
• Magento saves small businesses time and money if they only need a simple solution.

Incentivized

• Prebuilt Integration - There is not currently a large number of preexisting integrations, but custom integrations are fairly quick
• Time to Deploy - Don't get me wrong, We have deployed in the timeline we expected, but if you are trying to get something off the ground fast, Kibo might not be right for you. It is a robust platform that take some time to get up and running.
• Complicated Shipping - if you have a complicated shipped process, you might want to look for a tool to help, Kibo does not have very robust out of the box shipping capabilities.

• Magento 2 community is full of known and new bugs with long-pending pull requests and the community is on the hook for changes. Submit an very obvious issue to the github repo, and you will likely be met with a "this is open source and you use at your own risk." I counter this poor attitude with the fact that open source community has standards, and we do not label a "release" until those standards are met. Otherwise it's just a alpha, beta or numbered build. We don't release obviously bad software until it's fully working.
• Magento is expensive to maintain. You will need a well-paid php developer with apache and hosting knowledge, or you will have to hire an external firm. Either option will turn your website into an additional $100k/yr cost center, so you'd better be ready to ramp up sales. Every feature update or bugfix in the past year has uncovered more bugs, which my devs fix, but at the cost of timelines and billed hours way outside of my budget and target dates.

Incentivized

It's the dominant force in the SMB open source market. With the continued support of eBay/PayPal, Magento will continue to evolve and should be a market leader for some time.

Magento has a relly step learning curve. This means that you need to find experienced developers who can lead junior ones, otherwise the overall development process can be a disaster. However, once you are comfortable in developing on the platform, the customization capability are basically limitless and you can adapt the platform to any use case you can imagine. Also, there are many alredy developed marketplace modules that can solve, out of the box, many problems you may face.

Incentivized

One positive note is that I have always been able to get someone on the phone in support whenever I have called, even at 1 AM. Getting someone on the phone is only half the battle though. In the first few months of using Mozu it often seemed that support didn’t know anymore about Mozu than we did. This has slowly started to change, but as a daily user you are likely to be on par with support in terms of knowing what to do when you encounter a problem. The support phone number is really most useful for having them put in a support ticket for you rather than typing it all out yourself and emailing it. It is very rare that the support reps are actually empowered to solve the problem at hand. Unless the issue you are having is user error, they will just take your information and pass it on the proper department. Your request or problem will then be ignored for months on end. Some day, it might actually get fixed but you are unlikely to be notified that this has happened. Most of these issues are assigned an internal ID that they use for tracking. Support is more than happy to pass this ID along, but it is useless. There is no way to actually see where the issue lies in the endless queue of similar issues.

At the time of our implementation Mozu did not have any processes or procedures set up around going live. We basically were forced to just wing it and hope for the best

We had a custom, in-house ecommerce website before moving to Kibo. It was brittle, slow, and wasn't going to scale nearly well enough or fast enough to keep up with our requirements

Incentivized

Shopify is a closed ecosystem; the moment a client has a complex, custom workflow or needs to integrate with a legacy ERP system, Shopify’s app-based model falls short. WooCommerce just does not scale like Magento, and its architecture is not made for enterprise-scale e-commerce. SAP Commerce Cloud is a very close competitor, but it comes with licensing costs and sometimes can be overkill. It's, however, perfect if the customer already has something SAP in their ecosystem.

Incentivized

• Kibo has always delivered rapid & exceptional support to our organization
• Kibo has been cost-competitive when considering other vendors
• The platform continues to add value without requiring substantial additional investments

• Better Total Cost of Ownership than bespoke e-commerce solutions due to being open source and the wide range of free/commercial extensions available to extend the platform.
• Often more extensive to set up and maintain than other open source alternatives, such as WooCommerce.