WooCommerce vs Easy Digital Downloads: The Ultimate Comparison

On your way to creating your online e-commerce store but confused between two of the most popular WordPress plugins, WooCommerce, and Easy Digital Downloads? Well, you’re in the right place!

WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads are two of the most popular platforms that allow you to quickly create an e-commerce store.

While WooCommerce promotes physical and digital goods, Easy Digital Downloads’ core plugin focuses primarily on digital products.

However, with the right extensions, you can still sell physical products with Easy Digital Downloads. While creating your store, these two plugins are likely to leave you confused with their cutthroat excellency.

Therefore, we’ve decided to clear up the confusion and help you find the ideal solution.

In this article, we compare WooCommerce vs Easy Digital Downloads on crucial parameters such as ease of use, add-ons, features, and more. At the end of this article, we declare our winner, so you might want to continue reading till the end!

Quick Navigation:

Basic Overview
Key Features
Performance
Which Platform is Easier to Use
Which Payment Gateways Are Supported
Add-ons, Extensions, and Themes Comparison
Support and Documentation
Pricing Battle
Final Thoughts

So let’s dive into the details.

WooCommerce vs Easy Digital Downloads: Basic Overview

We have an in-depth comparison between the two ahead. However, let’s start with a basic overview of WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads.

WooCommerce Overview

WooCommerce is one of the largest digital platforms that lets you easily set up your ecommerce store. It is an entirely customizable platform designed for small to large merchants and allows you to sell physical and digital products.

With millions of websites using WooCommerce to create their store, it has emerged as a leading and exceptionally beginner-friendly e-commerce platform.

Also, there is plenty of dedicated WooCommerce hosting which enables you to create an eCommerce store with ease.

Additionally, the platform gives you hundreds of extensions and WooCommerce plugins to expand the flexibility and create the store you need with maximum ease of use.

Easy Digital Downloads Overview

easy digital downloads plugin for wordpress

If you are looking to sell digital products online minimum hassles, Easy Digital Downloads is the best platform. Entirely designed for WordPress sites, the platform powers thousands of web stores globally.

It comes with excellent features and lets you set up a store quickly to sell digital products. The robust platform also comes with various extensions that expand the flexibility of your store.

Undoubtedly, it is one of the easiest platforms to sell digital products with good support at your disposal.

WooCommerce vs Easy Digital Downloads: Key Features

WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads come with excellent features to get your store going in minutes. Although listing all the features is impossible, here are some key features of both platforms.

WooCommerce Key Features

WooCommerce is a fully-customizable platform that lets you design the store the way you want with thousands of extensions.
WooCommerce is exceptionally user friendly. It is a perfect platform that lets you start your store within a few minutes.
The platform is scalable and developer-friendly and is built with REST API.
WooCommerce has a community of millions of users and over 80+ meetups to help you learn more about WooCommerce and grow your business more.
WooCommerce provides you a choice of over 100 payment gateways which are safe and completely secure for your users and your store.
WooCommerce comes with an intuitive dashboard that enables you to manage orders on the go.
You can sell anything you want, from physical products to digital products, with the utmost flexibility.
With its complete extensions, you can market your store with excellent tools, sell the products worldwide with its multilingual capabilities, and create a secure site using JetPack.
WooCommerce provides a 30-day money-back guarantee, which means if you are not happy with the service, you can get a refund within 30 days.

Easy Digital Downloads Key Features

Easy Digital Downloads comes with maximum flexibility and enables you to sell digital products without any hassles.
The platform gives you complete control over your shopping cart and enables you to customize it according to your needs.
With the customer management feature, you can maintain a record of each customer, track activity, create a customer account page, and more.
It lets you add discount codes by giving you a wide range of options to generate more sales and encourage your customers.
You get a data reporting feature that lets you view earnings, filter reports, monitor sales, and more.
It supports various popular and local payment gateways with all the security methods.
The platform is beginner-friendly and developer-friendly. With filters, actions, and coding, the platform is hugely developer-friendly.
For many users, the WordPress media library is not sufficient for product files. Therefore, it supports various content delivery tools.
It is entirely supported by AffiliateWP so that you can enjoy the limitless nature of digital products and affiliate marketing.

WooCommerce vs Easy Digital Downloads: Performance

On another important note, performance plays a crucial role in your site. When you own an e-commerce store, you want people to be able to view the products immediately and have a good experience.

However, if your site takes minutes to load, your customer will switch to another store, which can lead to a substantial decrease in your sales and a fall in your SEO performance.

WooCommerce is an all-in-one platform, making it load a little slower than Easy Digital Downloads which is more geared towards digital products. Easy Digital Downloads is lightweight and practical.

However, both platforms can run super fast depending on how you optimize them.

Additionally, performance is also determined by the hosting provider you pick. Various dedicated WooCommerce hosts give you plenty of features to boost performance, including built-in caching.

We recommend choosing a host for your e-commerce store that offers a lot of performance-boosting features.

Winner: Although we said that both of them can load quickly depending on optimization, the WooCommerce vs Easy Digital Downloads performance battle is won by Easy Digital Downloads due to its lightweight and blazing-fast speed.

Easy Digital Downloads vs WooCommerce: Which Platform is Easier to Use?

WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads come with all the great functionalities. Besides their excellent features, one of the most crucial aspects is understanding which platform is easier to use.

The platform you pick must come to be user friendly and eliminate all the complex setup procedures to avoid wasting your time and leaving you feeling drained. Therefore, let’s have a look at both platforms’ ease of use.

WooCommerce Ease of Use

Getting started with WooCommerce is straightforward. Once you download the plugin, the setup wizard helps you complete the series of forms to configure your e-commerce aspects.

During the setup process, WooCommerce ensures that you know about all the features and payment options and that you do not miss any crucial steps.

After setup, you can create or import products easily. Creating products on WooCommerce is similar to creating a blog post in WordPress.

The panel gives you various options to enter product details, including the pricing and description. Once a product is ready, you can quickly view it or publish it.

The WooCommerce dashboard is built on WordPress, which means you can configure and manage your orders from the WordPress dashboard.

The dashboard comes with automated tax calculations, live shipping rates, options to print labels from home, and more. Creating your e-commerce shop with WooCommerce is easy and straightforward.

You do not need any coding experience or technical know-how to set up your e-commerce shop; the setup wizard does all the work for you.

Easy Digital Downloads Ease of Use

Easy Digital Downloads, unlike WooCommerce, does not have a setup wizard. This means, once you have installed the plugin, you need to configure your store yourself through the settings page.

To ensure that you do not miss any crucial settings while configuring your store, the tabbed system allows you to have all the options on the screen.

The platform specializes in digital products, but you can still sell physical products with the right extensions. However, we will focus on digital products here.

The process of creating products is more straightforward than with WooCommerce since the products are digital. The user interface of this plugin also fits into WordPress, making it easier to publish downloadable content.

From all the options available on the screen, you can easily create digital products. However, unlike WooCommerce, it does not give you the option to add an image gallery or further product description.

Once a product is ready, you can publish it. However, the appearance is not as eye appealing as WooCommerce.

The platform lets you manage your e-commerce store without any trouble. You can view reports and manage your customers in one place.

Winner: WooCommerce takes the lead here because of its utmost user-friendly and more straightforward process. Although neither platform has complex procedures, you will be able to set up your store more quickly with WooCommerce.

Which Payment Gateways Are Supported?

It is evident that when you set up your e-commerce store, you will need to receive and accept payments from customers for their orders.

Most of the time, the platform you pick determines the accepted payment methods, and if a particular payment method is set as a default without the option of adding more payment methods, you can lose out on sales.

For example, suppose you accept payments through a specific payment application that works all over the USA, but your customer lives in another country.

In this case, they are likely to abandon their cart and switch to another store with the payment option that works best for them.

Therefore, your e-commerce platform must have all the popular payment methods for a fast and flexible user experience.

WooCommerce Payment Gateways

WooCommerce comes with more than 100 secure gateways that can be embedded in your store. WooCommerce provides PayPal and Stripe and comes with a free primary payment gateway.

For other payment methods, you will have to purchase extensions. WooCommerce supports all the popular gateways such as Stripe, 2Checkout, Authorize.net, and more.

Related Reading: Best WooCommerce Payment Gateway Plugins

Easy Digital Downloads Payment Gateways

Easy Digital Downloads also provides PayPal as a free payment gateway for all users. The platform supports all the popular gateways like Stripe, Authorize.net, 2Checkout, and more.

However, while WooCommerce provides the Stripe extension for free, you will have to pay an additional fee to get a Stripe extension.

Another difference between the two platforms is that the list of payment extensions for Easy Digital Downloads is way smaller than for WooCommerce.

Winner: Both platforms integrate with common and popular payment gateways. However, WooCommerce has extensive free gateway options and supports multiple local payment options, too. Therefore, WooCommerce wins the round.

Add-ons, Extensions, and Themes Comparison

Both platforms come with exceptional features to increase the platforms’ functionality so you can create your store the way you want. Having various extensions will boost your store in areas ranging from performance to marketing.

Your theme plays a crucial role in attracting your ideal customers. No matter how well your store may function, an ugly theme can cause users to abandon your site and switch to other stores without a second thought.

Therefore, your e-commerce site must be able to integrate with third-party extensions and appealing themes to keep your site running.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce comes with an extensive library of both free and paid extensions. The platform takes care of all your marketing, technical, and logistical needs by giving you thousands of plugins and extensions to add to your WordPress online store.

What’s more, WooCommerce enables you to use WooCommerce plugins to help create, grow and scale your e-commerce store with ease.

WooCommerce also curates a collection of extensions to get you started. These extensions range in price and are divided into various parts depending upon your needs.

Some essential extensions from WooCommerce include JetPack, Google Analytics, WooCommerce shipping, MailChimp, and more.

While WooCommerce has multiple extensions from WooCommerce itself such as WooCommerce bookings, WooCommerce payments, WooCommerce subscriptions, and more, you can also take advantage of its thousands of third-party add-ons to get the best of both worlds.

Additionally, the platform also lets you connect social media platforms to your e-commerce store for marketing purposes.

Due to WooCommerce’s popularity, more and more themes are available every day. You can get plenty of high-quality and robust WooCommerce themes dedicated to WooCommerce.

You can find various free and paid themes for WooCommerce with the best features and performance.

Easy Digital Downloads

This platform also comes with thousands of plugins and add-ons for your e-commerce store.

While there are fewer plugins available for Easy Digital Downloads compared to WooCommerce, this does not mean you will not have a fully functional online store with this robust platform.

Like WooCommerce, you get various built-in plugins made by the team as well as third-party plugins to boost your marketing, allow for easy shipping, and more.

The platform also sells extension bundles if you are not a fan of purchasing add-ons individually. The add-on bundles consist of everything you need including all the essential plugins and add-ons.

Easy Digital Downloads also comes with high-quality, eye-catching themes. However, you get fewer choices of themes compared to WooCommerce.

You don’t need thousands of plugins for your site, but having the right sets of plugins is crucial, and Easy Digital Downloads comes with all the necessary extensions and plugins.

The basic idea in this section is to highlight that you get more choices for plugins and add-ons with WooCommerce compared to Easy Digital Downloads due to its popularity.

The platform comes with excellent options and premium themes to make your online store stand out from others on the internet and significantly boost your store’s functionality and sales.

Winner: WooCommerce takes the lead for this round due to its vast choices of plugins and add-ons.

WooCommerce vs Easy Digital Downloads: Support and Documentation

It comes as no surprise that everyone needs support, even if you are a developer or an experienced user. No matter where you get stuck or face trouble, a good support team or community can help you resolve your issues immediately.

With that, let’s see the community and support available for WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads.

WooCommerce Support & Documentation

With millions of WooCommerce users worldwide, its community is robust and helpful. The community has passionate WordPress users and developers that can help you find a solution right away.

You can get various useful articles and solutions from WooCommerce experts.

Additionally, meetups in various locations can help you increase your WooCommerce knowledge and learn how to use the platform to generate more sales and grow your business.

Moreover, with WooCommerce’s popularity, the internet is flooded with various tutorials, guides, and blogs to help you out.

Easy Digital Downloads Support & Documentation

This plugin also provides excellent customer support. They have extensive documentation that solves all the common issues one might face. The platform also gives you priority support.

If the documentation does not help you find the right solution, you can raise a ticket and get a personal answer from the Easy Digital Downloads experts.

However, the guides and documentation for this plugin are limited compared to those of WooCommerce. Hence, if you are a beginner, you might not be satisfied with this platform’s documentation.

Winner: Both platforms provide good customer support and documentation. However, WooCommerce takes the lead due to its more in-depth guides and tutorials compared with Easy Digital Downloads.

Which One is More Affordable? (Pricing Battle)

Finally, the last but not the least parameter is pricing. Although the core plugin is free, the price depends on the extensions you need to expand the platform’s flexibility.

In this section, it’s tough to pick a winner and label one platform as more affordable than the other because the core platform is free for all users.

Asking which platform is more affordable is like asking which color car looks the best. This is an individual choice depending on your personal requirements.

However, WooCommerce extensions either cost less than those of Easy Digital Downloads or are equally priced.

Easy Digital Downloads also sells extension bundles that help you save tons of money and allow you to use various extensions on unlimited sites.

The extensions’ pricing ranges from $99 per year to $499 with all the extensions included and unlimited website usage.

If you are a beginner, you can pick the individual extensions you need rather than buy the bundle or you can buy the cheapest bundle with all the essential extensions.

No matter which platform you select, the cost of managing and setting up your store depends on the extensions you pick. However, all the extensions are affordable, so you won’t have to worry about your store leaving your wallet empty.

On a more careful note, Easy Digital Downloads’ bundles give you a greater advantage than WooCommerce as they come with all the necessary essentials without any limits.

You can also use WooCommerce’s individual extensions, but you will have to resource them individually, which can be time-consuming and draining.

Final Thoughts: WooCommerce vs Easy Digital Downloads

And that ends our WooCommerce vs Easy Digital Downloads battle. It is no surprise that both are excellent platforms with exceptional functionalities and performance.

With the cutthroat comparison between the platforms, it is clear that there are no significant differences in the functionalities of the platforms. Since it all depends on your needs, there is no perfect or right platform.

No matter which plugin you pick, you can quickly create your online store with thousands of extensions and at affordable price. However, we recommend picking WooCommerce if you are a beginner or if you primarily sell physical products.

WooCommerce does an excellent job at handling online stores with physical products and digital products so that you can rely on WooCommerce.

Similarly, if most of your products are digital and you are tech-savvy, we recommend picking Easy Digital Downloads. However, unless you are a developer or have prior experience, we would suggest choosing WooCommerce.

We suggest you analyze your needs and then make the best decision for you since you will be the one running your online store.

We hope this comparison has helped you understand the difference between the two and that you were able to pick the right platform for your store.

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