OpenCart vs. X-Cart

OpenCart is great for web developers familiar with PHP who have clients who want very specific eCommerce functionalities. OpenCart is "open-source," meaning its source code is open to the public and downloadable and editable by anyone. This makes customizing its functionalities possible with nearly an infinite variety of possibilities. If you are not tech savvy and don't like to read documentation and configure advanced settings, then OpenCart is not the best solution for you.

Incentivized

X-cart uses Smarty Templates in a PHP environment which means there are many developers who could probably pick it up relatively quickly to provide new features. The smarty template engine is very robust and well documented, and the cost of x-cart is very low which makes it easy for anyone to get started with their e-commerce business. It is a really great e-commerce software and suitable for every business. I actually cannot find any serious objection to what it does. They regularly update it, add new features, fix flaws, offer support. The software itself offers many integrations for shipping and payments, everything you need for sales. Although it covers many things, there will always be something missing, because many things happen in between customer visit and final delivery. Therefore, if you plan to expand your business, also plan to expand your X-Cart - but do not worry, it won't be hard.

Incentivized

• OpenCart is open-source software, free to use. Free is always a plus for software.
• Good basic set of features that provides for a quick setup of a simple e-commerce website.
• Administration is fairly user-friendly and makes it easy for a non-technical user to find things.

Incentivized

• For everyone. From small to huge business you get everything out of box. Just setup company details, payment and shipping methods and you are ready to go.
• Upgradable. There are many plugins one can integrate with X-Cart. Over time, many of them became part of the software, and you are one click away to enable them.
• Well organized code. It uses Smarty template engine, which I find great, specially for debugging (famous Webmaster mode).

Incentivized

• Sometimes developer skill is required to work on admin module.
• Add-on modules are often necessary, and you need to purchase them separately
• Hard to update it to new versions, and it is constantly updating
• Though it is smooth to use, it works on a read-edit-delete system. Deleting data is very critical.

Incentivized

• Creating new plugins the way X-Cart wants is maybe not complicated, but hard to implement because there are no hooks. One has to manually change each file. This is similar to patching the core and therefore one has to know basics of web development.
• Even if you get everything styled correctly with base skin, there is a bunch of unused styles you have to cope with. Start skin should be much cleaner. You may find thousands excess lines of code.

Incentivized

Both platforms are feature-rich. I chose OpenCart because I found a theme that suits me. Plus there were many third-party extensions that I was interested in and they can be integrated with OpenCart.

• At the time of starting a business, OpenCart helped us with easy setup and catalog management. We have stared and deployed e-commerce sites very easily.
• The websites didn't look good at first (we modified later) and that impacted our business as our clients received a lot of orders.

Incentivized

• Flexibility in presentation as well as functionality
• Full open source software allows for unlimited possibilities with the store function, though some developers who create modules do encode their modules which have errors in their code which therefore can't be fixed
• A fully functional professional level application at a fraction of the cost of similar applications such as magento.

Incentivized