Open Source e-Commerce Applications Awards

Packt has announced that PrestaShop has won the Open Source E-Commerce Applications category. Being a jury member I used SOS Open Source tools to learn more about all finalists - namely Magento, nopCommerce, OpenCart, PrestaShop, TomatoCart – and I want to share here some findings.

PrestaShop got the highest marks from both the jury and the public, let’s have a deeper look at it. Together with nopCommerce, PrestaShop counts over five active developers, while the other finalists are all developed by very small teams.

While Magento is the most effective in terms of outreach (followed by PrestaShop) and channel program, both Magento and PrestaShop have consistent QA processes in place.

Maintainability and Evolvability. Magento is the only one making available tools to create extensions, and Magento marketplace is a success. All finalists are written mostly in PHP, but nopCommerce that is written in C# (and very well commented, and the same thing can be said of Magento).

Procedures to ask for modifications are available for Magento, Opencart and Prestashop, but the process is not well defined.

Talking about future directions, TomatoCart has published a detailed roadmap, and are all licensed with a weak or strong copyleft license.

Beyond the winner, both Magento and nopCommerce worth a look. Magento is still the best choice for system integrators, considering the amount of existing developers documentation and the variety of books.

NopCommerce code base is growing at a fast peace, but not yet as fast to close bugs, though. nopCommerce is distributed and supported by many international partners, but its architecture of participation is still in its infancy.

[2010-11-19 Update: Wikipedia has an interesting page comparing shopping cart software.]

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