Comparing Umbraco E-commerce Packages

For a recent article in Skrift magazine, Gareth and Paul spent time, comparing and contrasting the different Umbraco ecommerce packages for version 8.

Traditionally on Umbraco 7 brands have been left to integrate Umbraco with an off-platform solution such as Shopify, or to use one of three third-party Umbraco packages, Tea Commerce, UCommerce and Merchello. There are substantial differences between each of them, but chiefly Tea Commerce and UCommerce were paid-for proprietary systems and Merchello open source.

With the launch of Umbraco 8 and it’s substantially rewritten API, a lot of work was required by most package vendors to enable their packages to keep up.  UCommerce, with its strong commercial team, was quick to port their package to Umbraco 8.  Indeed until the last couple of weeks, it was the only Ecommerce package available on Umbraco 8.  That is, until the release of Vendr.

Available Ecommerce Packages for Umbraco 8 

If you want to integrate ecommerce into Umbraco 8, your choices really are limited to Vendr and UCommerce.

We’ve produced a feature by feature comparison of the two products on Google Sheets.  There are significant differences between the two products, not least that Vendr has a single version, and UCommerce offers a free, Pro and Enterprise edition.

From Outfield’s point of view, the key points of differentiation between Vendr and UCommerce:

“... is that we use Umbraco nodes for products. It does come with its limits, but I think for many people, the benefits will far outweigh the negatives. By using Umbraco nodes we integrate much deeper allowing you to use all of your favorite property editors and to structure your store exactly as you need it, meaning things just fit the end customer much better. Using Umbraco nodes also has the added benefit that we work well with other commercial packages OOTB including popular packages such as Translation Manager and uMarketingSuite.”

Vendr has a single pricing model, €1,500 for a perpetual license per site (excluding VAT) which includes 12 months of updates.  

UCommerce, which has a three level pricing model including a free tier, or either €2,999 or €4,999 for a single server, one year term license.

It’s difficult to compare prices across such different model, but broadly simple sites with no requirement for discounting could be free on UCommerce, but more complex sites that require multi-lingual or load-balancing or Umbraco Cloud support will be substantially cheaper on Vendr.

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