Magento Connect Vs. Magento Marketplace: Who wins the battle in 2022?

In this post, you can find an in-depth comparison between Magento Connect and Magento Marketplace, the huge official Magento extension stores: Having an in-depth choice of extensions could be an essential element of the open-source platform. Access to thousands of extensions for nearly each business case is one of the best advantages of the Magento 2 eCommerce platform— it makes it less expensive and quicker for online retailers to make practicality that isn’t out there in Magento out of the box.

MAGENTO CONNECT VS MAGENTO MARKETPLACE

MAGENTO CONNECT

According to Magento Inc., Magento Connect is the largest eCommerce application marketplace within the world to choose an extension. Magento Connect exists from the terrible youth of Magento. It grew in terms of the variety of the extensions offered together with the Magento 2 platform and at the instant accounts for 9500+ solutions from third-party developers.

The extensions at Magento Connect are split into the next categories:

• Themes or sets of front-end templates
• Customer experience
• Site Management
• Integrations
• Marketing
• Utilities

Each category has sub-categories that help merchants to narrow the search. There is also a text search available that may help you find the extension you need.

From another point of view, all the extensions at Magento Connect can be classified as:

• Free — Merchants will install them free from charge, in theory, installation of such extension is feasible directly from Magento Connect, whereas in observe it’s higher to urge skilled facilitate to put in the extension as a result of if things get it wrong, your store will become not operational.
• Paid — These extensions are out there for purchase at the extension suppliers websites, purchase and transfer takes place outside of Magento Connect.
• SaaS connector — I believe that whereas they’re not separated in Magento Connect, this category of extensions desires a separate class. They allow you to connect your store with a third party resolution, sort of payment gateway or marketing automation platform. As a rule, the extensions are free (while there are some paid), however the service it connects you isn’t.

Magento Connect is similar to the Magento marketplace, it's free to use for each developer and merchant (as long as they don’t get paid extensions). Thus, even for paid extensions and SaaS, Magento doesn’t take a commission. In all probability, it’s one of all the reasons for the flourishing system of Magento extensions.

Need expert help with your Magento store? Contact eCommerce experts for a free initial consultation.

CRITIQUE OF MAGENTO CONNECT

While Magento Connect could be a cornerstone of Magento’s success, it absolutely was criticized for too low barriers to entry, resulting in low-quality extensions flooding the system. Some merchants, particularly those that lack development expertise had serious issues putting in those low-quality extensions.

Magento provides minimal quality control of the extensions listed on Magento Connect, a lot of hopping on self-regulation — users who install extensions rate (from 1 to 5 stars) and supply feedback to them, thus serving to alternative merchants to form the decision.

Another problem of Magento Connect was the hacked quality score: some not extremely nice extension vendors cheating the system to inflate the recognition score of their product.

MAGENTO MARKETPLACE

To address these problems and apparently to urge a share of financial flows when obtaining a private equity firm, Magento Inc, Magento Marketplace in 2016.

Magento 2 Marketplace at the instant lists Magento’s 2 extensions and simply a couple of Magento 1 extensions, however, it’s expected to utterly replace Magento Connect within the future.

Prime differences between Magento connect and Magento marketplace

• Much more rigorous extension choice process: each from technical and business perspective — Magento INC. tries to avoid the case of getting too several extensions doing the same job, creating it arduous for merchants to decide on.
• Magento INC. takes a commission of 30% from developers selling the extensions on Magento Marketplace
• Merchants dealing with Magento INC get beaked by Magento Marketplace, not the individual vendor

MAGENTO CONNECT OR MAGENTO MARKETPLACE?

Where must you rummage around for extensions as a merchant?

Our recommendation is next:

If you run Magento 1 store — move to Magento Connect.

If you run Magento 2 store — begin from Magento multi-vendor marketplace. So if you fail to seek out what you wish — simply google for the extension, there’s an enormous chance that it exists, however still an ex-directory on Magento Marketplace is available similar to Magento connect.

And you can always contact the expert marketplace consultant for professional advice or if you need to develop a custom extension.