Salmon - Magento comparison

Magento is an excellent product. From our perspective, it is a very good choice for eCommerce web sites. We have successfully used Magento on many projects. Salmon brings additional performance and unleashes new possibilities. Salmon can be used for more than just eCommerce web sites.

Operational Costs and Delay

Magento comes in two flavors - a free community edition and an expensive (~$12K/year) enterprise edition. Magento comes with a large community of developers and a broad range of extensions (most of which are not free). However, many people find that when using Magento, the amount of specialized developer hours needed to make minor changes or modifying features to your specific needs can become an increasing burden on your budget and time to market.

Salmon does not have a free license but you can avoid licensing costs by using our hosted Salmon service as SaaS, saving you installation, maintenance, upgrade costs as well. Plus, you immediately benefit from the latest features. Salmon modern code architecture makes it simple and fast for developers from any horizon to develop a large, complex project. Thus, you can go further with your budget.

Practical Speed

Magento uses an EAV model, which has recently started to show its limits. To address this, Magento chose to adopt flat tables for some operations. Still, minor operations often involve considerable code dependencies and redundant code execution which significantly decreases Magento's speed. Additionally, Magento's approach to increasing content delivery speed is primarily focused on an over-extensive cache system, wich sometime does not fully serves its purposes.

Salmon was built from the ground up with content delivery optimization algorithms and mechanisms, including but not only caches, resulting in extremely faster code execution and content delivery speed. Salmon also integrates very well with modern frameworks such as Angular, Backbone, Bootstrap to deliver enhanced user experience.

Effective Life-Cycle

Though Magento has made some effort in this regard, each new Magento version introduces complex compatibility issues. Unfortunately, you will likely need to rebuild your site from scratch with each new Magento version, or at least to undertake considerable maintenance. Unless the creators of the extensions that you use deliver updated versions, you will encounter potentially serious issues with Magento upgrades.

Salmon uses a cross-version model which means that you won't have to make any changes to your web site and extensions with a new Salmon release. Simply add and enjoy the new features you want.

Even More...

Here are some points of further interest: