Yireo - Extensions, tutorials and blog for Magento and Joomla!

50.000 products is peanuts

Which Joomla! e-commerce extension is the best? Everybody of course has it's own opinion, and we gladly point users to our competitors VirtueMart and Tienda if they meet the requirements. Of course we are a fan of Magento, and you can merge the entire Magento system in Joomla! using our MageBridge extension. But does this answer the question? Not really.

What do you need and how much money do you have?

It really depends on what you need: If you are starting up a simple webshop, tools like VirtueMart and Tienda give great value. And if you don't want to spend too much money on hosting costs, most likely the heavy requirements of Magento will force you away from MageBridge anyway.

But if you are thinking about big business - let's say 50.000 products, than you need to optimize things: Think about clustering, database optimization, PHP compilation. In those circumstances you will notice that VirtueMart and Tienda have trouble keeping up with you, while Magento is already fit. Take for example clustering: Magento allows you to spread the load over multiple database servers that are configured in a MySQL master/slave cluster.

1 product or 1 million products?

Also regarding functionality, the architecture of Magento is flexible enough to grow with your demands. It's actually the very same reason why Magento performs poorly on badly configured environments. It focuses more on flexibility than keeping the costs low.

So using Magento (and MageBridge with it) for a one-product webshop is like shooting a fly with a bazooka. If you like Magento, MageBridge makes setting up such a simple shop certainly much easier. But if you have trouble choosing between Magento and Tienda, probably Tienda is the best option.

But if you are serving 1 million products, Magento is most likely the better choice.