Woocomerce vs Easy Digital Downloads

WooCommerce vs Easy Digital Downloads | Detailed comparison

WordPress is an open-source content management system, and you can build every possible website on it. When it comes to an e-commerce store, then there are two market leader plugins in WordPress that can confuse you, what to chose for your store.

In short, the Woocommerce Plugin is for your physical products store and Digital Free download is for digital products like e-books and Mp3s, etc. This means that Woocommerce is made for handling the physical products and you don’t have to make any changes to list the products on your store.

And on the other hand, Digital free download is capable of listing digital products efficiently. This is true, but there are several details that you should know before grabbing the plugin for your store.

Woocommerce Vs Easy Digital Downloads

We are going to discuss the two while keeping the following points into the considerations:

This article covers all the minor and vital information. So take out a pen and paper, and make of a list of the perks you need for your online store.

A Quick Comparison between Woocommerce and EDD

WooCommerce vs Easy Digital Downloads - Infographic
WooCommerce vs Easy Digital Downloads – Infographic

No doubt the Woocommerce is a giant in the eCommerce field and has a straight 22% of the market share of all the eCommerce sites online. And it is the most of the market share that any CMS ever possessed. Shopify is holding the 2nd position by having an 18% share.

The best part of the Woocommerce is that you can also use it on digital products based website, but for that, you should have a little bit of enthusiasm as it will require some time to understand the up and downs to handle different things on woocommerce, but at the end, you will achieve your goal.

Woocommerce
Woocommerce

 

Here are some over the edge specialties of Woocommerce that you may not be aware till now.

  • It is widespread, and because of that, it is the center of attention for the developers thus receive regular support and bug fixes on time.
  • Purchased by Automattic (A well know web development Giant) for $30 million in 2015.
  • Massive collection of Third-party extension that can glorify your eCommerce store.
  • Have a vast collection of free themes, and the number is increasing each day.

In comparison to that, Easy Digital download does not even come in the top 10. The primary reason for that it is not a multi-store supported plugin; it only handles the Digital products listing efficiently. It rules on only the 0.2% of the eCommerce site, but in the league of Digital service providers, it is quite popular and holds a good reputation because of its perks.

Easy Digital Downloads
Easy Digital Downloads

Following are some specialties of Easy digital download.

  • Freeware plugin like woocommerce.
  • It is primarily for digital products, as mentioned earlier. But most of the digital product stores use Woocommerce as this can provide the best and affordable CMS for the online store.
  • Easy digital download is not old, but it has a small team of support and assistance that can assist you when you need help regarding development or bugs.

Now let’s crackdown every detail about both plugins so that it becomes easy to choose the most relevant plugin for your online store.

Pros and Cons at a Glance

No time to read the minor details of both of the plugins? Don’t worry, have a glance and know what you want to know.

WooCommerce

These are the pros and cons of Woocommerce.

Pros:
  • It is Free and easy to manage for a simple store.
  • It has a massive collection of extensions and themes.
  • It can be integrated with the jet pack tools by Automattic.
  • It has a big community of developers, thus has excellent support.
  • It can be used for both physical and digital products.
Cons:
  • Not everything is free here. The built-in free extensions and themes are free, but they do not provide the value most of the time and you have through some money to have a better experience.
  • Woocommerce is simple to manage for a simple and basic online store. But if you want to build an extensive and big store, you must have enough experience. Big online stores made on woocommerce also need regular maintenance and security checkups from time to time.

Easy Digital Download

These are the perks and cons for easy digital download.

Pros:
  • EDD is pretty much ready-to-use plugin that gives you an instant and straightforward approach to make a digital product store in no time.
  • The extensions, themes, and products of EDD are cheaper, and you can avail good discounts on purchasing extensions in bulk.
  • Although the support team is not that big, they are all dedicated to giving you fast and practical support.
Cons:
  • The only available payment gateway for Easy digital download is PayPal. Unfortunately, you have to pay fees to add other gateways like stripe and 2checkout.
  • The support is excellent and helpful, but you have to wait a bit to get your answers as the team is not that big.

Add-on availability

Both of the plugins are enough to start a first online store, but there are a lot of possible services that we can add to our online store for better user experience.

The question here is what sort of the essential plugins we may require to build a dynamic online store?

We may require some of the plugins like for making deals, optimizing the page and adding custom Payment gateway, etc. Fortunately, all these essential extensions are available for both of the plugins. But woocommerce comes with way more extensions and third-party extensions support than Easy digital download.

 

Adding more payment options, enhancing check out experience and adding multiple monitoring options, that’s all, is possible using different extensions. Imagine, a random visitor comes to your store- he is not interested in the products by the way, but because of the presentation- he is so much impressed that, he makes a purchase. In short, user experience matters.

Woocommerce Extension
Woocommerce Extension

Off course, woocommerce is way more in business than the others so that it will have more extensions availability than EDD. Moreover, most of the add-ons and extensions that Woocommerce has, in addition to EDD, are mostly costly and not worth it most of the time.

So EDD has less extension?

Yes, but Easy digital download has all the crucial extensions to make a perfect digital’s products store. Moreover, you can have access to all the available extension on EDD with bundle offers. So there is no reason to shift on woocommerce based on the availability of extensions.

Themes Compatibility

Your online store must have an eye-catching theme design to hold the visitor on the page for a refreshing experience. If you can hire a developer, then any theme can be built for both of the plugins. But if that is not in your budget, woocommerce offers a vast collection of built-in themes for many types of products and store. For example, themes with different layouts are available for other kinds of products already like shoes, dresses, and watches, etc.

Unfortunately, Easy digital download lacks a variety of themes, but that is not necessary, though. Because you can find a good collection of themes for the digital products for Easy digital download as we are going to build a digital product store with Easy digital download.

Payment Gateways

Both of the plugins support the World’s leading payment gateways like PayPal, stripe, and 2checkout. But the EDD is a little bit harsh here. It charges an extra $89 for adding a stripe to the store. But if you are a developer, then you can easily add any Payment gateway for free.

Plugin management

One of the main thing you may want to know that what plugin is easy to use so that you can use that if you are not an expert or I can say quick picker.

To make it simpler, we have given a basic tutorial to start with both of the plugins. You may have a different opinion according to your experience, but in general, you will have the following experience.

Woocommerce:

Woocommerce comes with endless possibilities, so it is evident that it requires the right amount of skill sets.

When you step in the setup wizard, you came across all the critical thing you need to know about woocommerce so that you may not miss anything.

Once you have set up the necessary things, now you can start adding the products on your online store.

Creating your First Product with WooCommerce
Woocommerce - Add new Product
Woocommerce – Add new Product

Are you a blogger? Do you have some experience with WordPress? If so, then there is nothing new here. Adding products on woocommerce is same as a blog post or page.

So like the title of the post, you enter the Product name in the box above. And then write a short description of the product below that. After setting the price of the product and adding images, you can publish the post for public visibility. Before publishing the post, you can also add the dimensions and number of the products.

The above is the final look, you can have before publishing the product, and that’s it. So, you can now say how easy is this to make a simple product description using woocommerce.

Management using Woocommerce
Woocommerce Setup Wizard
Woocommerce Setup Wizard

Managing the dashboard for order competition and more stuff like online support is also pretty easy on Woocommerce.

You get a detail report of sales and checkouts in the form of graphs. In short, woocommerce is a complete package to monitor your online store.

Woocommerce Reports
Woocommerce Reports

With the available extensions, you can enhance the ability to manage a lot of things with different interference.

Easy Digital Download:

You don’t get a setup wizard at the start of Easy digital downloads. Instead, it is a tab-based setup that you have to configure it manually. After the basic and necessary settings, you can start selling your e-books.

Easy Digital Download Setup
Easy Digital Download Setup

Now comes, the step to add the digital product on your Easy digital download website.

Adding the Digital Product:
Easy Digital Downloads - Add New Product
Easy Digital Downloads – Add New Product

It is also same as woocommerce up to a certain level. The editor page is very much similar to the blog post of WordPress.

Add the file name, and add the short description for the product. Set the price for the product and publish for sale.

You can also make the number of downloads visible to the visitors.

EDD Products Number
EDD Products Number

You can not add the custom tags in the post or product description like woocommerce.

The final post will look like this after adding all the necessary details. Your post may look different from this because of the theme. This is the rough preview of digital product description in Easy Digital Downloads.

Easy Digital Downloads Product Final View
Easy Digital Downloads Product Final View
Managing Easy Digital Downloads:

From the dashboard, you can manage your product stats pretty easily. You can take a look at the sales report and many other things like graphs and the number of people who did check out but didn’t pay at the end.

Apps and integration section can also be found from the dashboard, from where you can install the required extensions to do the necessary modifications.

Which one is easy to Use?

Both of the plugins are pretty user-friendly, and you can master them with a little bit of practice. But woocommerce is an extensive plugin, so obviously it takes time to master each and everything about this plugin.

Easy digital downloads wins this battle as the process of adding the digital products on it is easy, and the same goes with using the extensions.

But that doesn’t mean that it will take ages to learn the woocommerce. If you are passionate to make an outstanding online store and have a love of creativity germs in you then with a little bit of effort, you will create a masterpiece using Woocommerce.

Performance comparison.

One of the main thing that Google loves about the website is fast loading speed, and prefer the sites with better speed on search engine results.

We have tested both of the plugins with maximum optimizations, and we came to know that Easy digital download is more oriented to the performance as this is much simpler and lighter than Woocommerce.

It doesn’t mean that the woocommerce is laggy and slow like a tortoise. With proper optimization, you can also achieve maximum speed on woocommerce.

Security

Let’s take a look at the woocommerce and digital download security comparison. Security of a blog depends on several factors. Both of the plugins have extensions for security checks and backups. You can use these extensions, but these all are highly expensive.

Can you risk your business?

Security should be your primary concern when it comes to an e-commerce store. Here are some tips to have a good grip on your safety.

  • Don’t use the cracked themes or plugins, most of them have backdoors, and you can lose your payments.
  • Don’t use cheap hosting, they can encounter DDoS attack, and that can cost you your thousands of dollars of business.
  • Take regular security checks to make sure that there is no backdoor to hack your store.

Pricing

This is important to know, as you have to tick mark every perk you needed for your online store, and pricing is one of them.

Well, the good news is that both of the plugins are free, and you don’t need a single penny to start a simple e-commerce store with any of these plugins. But you do have to invest some money on extensions and themes if you want some extra perks out of your online store.

More precisely, I must say woocommerce is a little bit cheaper as compared to Easy Digital Downloads.

Woocommerce comes with all the major payment gateways and adding a new gateway will cost you $79, but on the other hand, for Easy digital downloads, the cost for the installation of a new gateway is $89.

Software licensing will cost you $129 with Woocommerce and Easy digital download charge $199 for that.

But there is an offer by the easy digital download that woocommerce lacks- the bundle offer.

With only one time $499 you can use all the extension for the whole year on unlimited sites. So you can tell now how hard it is to give a verdict that one is cheaper from the other.

Pricing
Pricing

Final Thoughts – What to Choose Now?

The detailed article explains pretty clearly that what are the perks and cons of each plugin and what you can choose according to your needs.

In short, woocommerce is a full package for any e-commerce store, whether its a physical product store or any digital product store. Woocommerce provides the best experience, extensions and theme collection for the best online store possible.

Easy digital downloads, on the other hand, is the best plugin made solely for digital products.

If you are looking for an e-commerce store for digital products like e-books and mp3s, then easy digital downloads is the best solution for you. You can set up the downloads in a few clicks and can monitor your sales and downloads exactly and transparently.

There is another option here that we use to call Shopify. You should check this post for a complete comparison between 5 Best Ecommerce Platforms. This is also a great option to start an e-commerce store. But it is not free. It comes with a lot of builtin features, and it is currently being used in thousands of drop shipping stores online.

Here is a detailed comparison between Woocommerce and Easy Digital Downloads.Click To Tweet

If you want to develop an online store using Woocommerce. Easy Digital Downloads, or any other eCommerce platform, Contact us today to get the job done efficiently with a reasonable price.

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