Free shopping cart vs Commercial

[altteam]

Hello!

Many companies who develop shopping cart platforms have both editions - free edition and commercial edition which one should buy a license for. And there is an opinion that one should choose a free shopping cart only if he doesn't have money to purchase a commercial one. And the reasons here: free shopping cart has less features then commercial platforms, that's why it requires more custom development, free shopping carts have paid tech support,  free shopping carts are the best choice for people with programming knowledge only, etc. Do you agree? Does anybody use a free open-source shopping cart and completely satisfied with it?

Best regards, Alt-team

[Baa]

I don't think there is an application paid or free that I am totally happy with. Neither will have exactly what I want and most only just cover the bare minimum of needs and that includes a lot of paid for carts as well.

IMO the choice of cart should be centred around what is right for the individual business and not on whether it is a paid or free programme. Having said that the cost of a website is an issue for many business owners and most of us end up cutting the coat to suit the cloth and it's part of the choice until we all become big businesses and can have a bespoke website that costs thousands 

[seamus]

people tend to assume that a commercial cart will have more functions and better security that an open source cart.
Not so, quite alot of commercial carts are built by quite a small team and usually dont include many functions (if any at all) that you wont find in an open source cart.

The main, well known open source carts, have quite large teams of developers behind them, so it is arguable that quite a few open source carts are of a higher quality that most of the paid for cart options around.

Just because you need to pay for somthing does not mean it is of better quality, perfect example, windows operating system versus Linux