WooCommerce vs Easy Digital Downloads: Comparison Between Them

When it comes to creating eCommerce websites on WordPress, WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads are the two plugins that instantly come to our consideration. Yes, you can create eCommerce sites with any of them, but both of them have distinguishable differences in many features and functionalities.

Unless you know them well, you’ll fall into a dilemma to choose the right one for your website. And if you make a wrong choice, you’ll suffer in the long run. This is why you must have a clear idea of WooCommerce vs Easy Digital Downloads.

In this blog post, we’ll cover various details on WooCommerce vs Easy Digital Downloads. Be with us till the end.

WooCommerce vs Easy Digital Downloads: Definition

Before getting into the main part, it’s better to start this discussion by covering their short definitions. Read them below.

What Is WooCommerce?

WooCommerce is a free, flexible, and feature-rich eCommerce builder plugin for WordPress. It was developed and maintained by Automattic, the same company that developed WordPress. WooCommerce is the most popular eCommerce builder among all the CMSs available.

Currently, it is used in over 7 million websites, which is 8% of all eCommerce websites globally. It was initially built to handle physical products. But as it started gaining popularity, the plugin started handling digital products as well. The plugin regularly receives updates to fix any security issues.

What Is Easy Digital Downloads?

Easy Digital Downloads is another eCommerce builder plugin for WordPress that is designed to handle and sell digital products. The plugin is popularly known for its short form EDD. This one is also a free plugin but is not as popular as WooCommerce. It currently has 50,000+ active installations.

However, it features a full-fledged shopping cart to make it easy to manage online stores and sell digital products. Although not as popular as WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads is still a commendable plugin for managing and selling digital products.

WooCommerce vs Easy Digital Downloads: Differences

Now, we’ll cover the differences between WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads in detail in this section, according to some key points. Hopefully, this part will be both informative and enjoyable for you.

1. Dashboard and Ease of Use

Since both these plugins are built for WordPress, their dashboards will be equally easy if you have a good understanding of the WordPress ecosystem and interface. After installing them, you’ll get a quick setup wizard for each of them. Even with minimum knowledge, you can easily set up them.

Yet, WooCommerce might be kinda overwhelming. Since you can handle both physical and digital products with WooCommerce, this tool will naturally have more options, which may overwhelm newbie users.

If you only want to handle digital products, Easy Digital Downloads may be more helpful. It has fewer options that are developed only for digital products.

2. Types of Products You Can Sell

With WooCommerce, you can sell a wide range of products, both physical and digital. We have already discussed it briefly in the above point. Physical products you can manage with WooCommerce are shoes, clothing, electronics, furniture, etc. Alongside digital products that you can handle with the same plugin are eBooks, software, and music.

With the Easy Digital Downloads plugin, you can sell only digital products such as ebooks, MP3s, video content, software, academic classes, etc. The plugin has an addon that allows you to sell physical products. But its functionalities are very basic compared to WooCommerce.

3. Core Key Features

Both WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads have numerous exciting features. We’ll list the most standout of them below.

Core key features of WooCommerce:

• Customizable framework
• Shipping services
• Inventory management system
• Analytics and reporting
• Product categories, tags, and attributes management
• Customer reviews and ratings
• Tax calculation and management
• Coupon and discount code management
• Support for subscription-based products

Core key features of Easy Digital Downloads:

• Selling various types of digital products
• Customizable shopping cart
• Support for software licenses
• Refund and order management
• Product bundles
• Membership and recurring payments
• Powerful reporting features

4. Compatible Themes and Templates

You’ll find a vast collection of free and premium themes compatible with the WooCommerce plugin. Since building eCommerce sites has become a trendy topic, almost any theme that is developed now is made WooCommerce compatible. Even in WordPress.org alone, you’ll find 8,000+ themes compatible with the WooCommerce plugin.

For Easy Digital Downloads, you will find a comparatively smaller number of compatible themes. Although not sure how many you will get in total, you will get at least 30 themes that are compatible with Easy Digital Downloads.

5. Addons/Extensions

Since WooCommerce has a larger user base, you’ll easily find its thousands of add-ons and extensions, both free and pro, in various plugin repositories. Even WooCommerce itself has an extension library where you’ll find around 850 extensions (as of today, when we are writing this post). This number may keep going up over time. Explore the WooCommerce extension library.

Easy Digital Downloads also offers you an extension library. But its collection is comparatively limited compared to WooCommerce’s library. You’ll find 75+ extensions of the plugin in the library. Let’s explore the extension library of Easy Digital Downloads.

6. Payment Gateways

Like all the other points, WooCommerce is the winner here again. WooCommerce supports 75+ payment gateways. You will get extensions for each payment gateway. Some of the popular payment gateways for WooCommerce are WooPayments, Stripe, Paypal, Square, Amazon Pay,

On the flip side, Easy Digital Downloads comes with three built-in payment gateways for free users. They are PayPal, Stripe, and Store Gateway. Besides, by installing its available payment extensions, you can also use some other payment gateways, like Authorize.net, 2Checkout, and more.

7. Customer Support

There is no live or ticket support for the core WooCommerce plugin. But if you are a subscriber of any WooCommerce extension, you’ll be able to reach out to the authority through the ticket system in the case of any customer support.

If you have any problems with the core WooCommerce, you can publish it on the WooCommerce forum. WooCommerce developers or any active member in the community will reply with a viable solution under the post.

Easy Digital Downloads have a free and premium version. Naturally, there is no real-time support for the free version. You may email them if you have any problems with the free features. As a premium user, you can ask them for support through the ticket system.

Apart from all these, both these plugins offer comprehensive documentation so you can set up and solve the minimal problems yourself. Explore the documentation of WooCommerce and the documentation of Easy Digital Downloads.

8. Market Share, Downloads, and Ratings

WooCommerce

• Holds a 23.3% market share in the entire eCommerce industry (Statista)
• Active installations 7+ million (WordPress.org)
• Rating 4.5+ (total reviews 4,322)

Easy Digital Downloads

• Holds a 0.15% market share in the eCommerce industry (builtwith.com)
• Active installations 50,000+ million (WordPress.org)
• Rating 4.5+ (total reviews 532)

9. Pricing

WooCommerce is a free plugin. It doesn’t have any premium version. This means that you can create as many websites as you want with the plugin.

Easy Digital Downloads have a free and a premium version. The free version allows you to access a minimum number of features. Its premium version has four pricing plans. They are:

• Personal – $99.50/year
• Extended – $199.50/year
• Professional – $299.50/year
• All Access Pass – $499.50/year

Integrate Appsero with WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads to Manage Your Product Licenses

WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads actually help you create comprehensive eCommerce platforms for selling respecting types of products on your website. They provide features like customizable shopping carts, order management, customer relationship management, reporting tools, and integration with various payment gateways.

But if you want to sell themes and plugins from your website, you need to manage their licenses as well, alongside having an eCommerce platform, which is really a complicated task. With Appsero, you can handle these tasks quite easily.

Integrate WooCommerce with Appsero

By default, WordPress isn’t built to sell WordPress themes and plugins. Your site can do this by integrating with Appsero. Appsero will take only a few minutes to integrate with your WooCommerce site. Follow the steps explained below to do this.

• Please install the Appsero Helper plugin on your WordPress site to overcome license issues.
• Make sure WooCommerce is also on the site. Appsero will sync your existing licenses and automatically sync your new licenses via the app manager’s WooCommerce API.
• Next, create new licenses from Appsero.
• Control the entire user experience, users view license info from your website
• Connect to the Appsero API for license checks and usage statistics

Integrate Easy Digital Downloads with Appsero

Integrating Easy Digital Downloads is almost similar to the process described above. Follow the steps listed below.

• Install the Appser Helper plugin. It acts as a medium between the Appsero service and your website.
• Appsero will allow you to generate licenses directly from the Easy Digital Downloads plugin.
• Integrate the Appsero API to check licenses and usage insights.

Conclusion

Hopefully, all the information we have presented above is enough to select a plugin suitable for your site. We do not want any bias to influence your decision. However, based on various user and expert opinions found online, if you want to deal with physical goods, there is no alternative to WooCommerce.

But if you want to work with downloadable digital products, Easy Digital Downloads is a better option than WooCommerce. Also, if you want to sell WordPress products like themes and plugins, you should definitely use a robust license management tool.

Although there are many other tools online for license management, Appsero is one of the best, and you must consider it on your checklist.