Easy Digital Downloads vs WooCommerce: Which one is best?
Still can’t decide if Easy Digital Downloads or WooCommerce is the better fit for your digital store?
While it’s clear that Easy Digital Downloads is a tailored option and WooCommerce is more flexible, selecting between the two isn’t always a clear-cut decision. It comes down to your store’s needs and how you plan to run things behind the scenes.
This article will walk you through an in-depth comparison of Easy Digital Downloads and WooCommerce. Based on our testing, we highlight each platform’s strengths to help you decide which one best meets your needs.
Easy Digital Downloads vs WooCommerce overview
Both WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads are popular WordPress ecommerce plugins. The key difference is that WooCommerce supports a wide variety of product types, whereas Easy Digital Downloads is geared towards selling digital products.
For instance, WooCommerce would be more fitting for selling both physical books and ebooks, while an author selling just ebooks might prefer Easy Digital Downloads for its simplicity.
To make their differences clearer, here’s a side-by-side comparison of the two plugins:
| Easy Digital Downloads | WooCommerce | |
| Best for | Selling digital products | Selling multiple product types |
| Ease of use | Simpler setup and easier to navigate, with the focus on digital products only | May take a longer time to master the extensive features and options |
| Built-in features | Optimized for downloadable digital products, including customer management and an analytics dashboard | Richer support for physical products through features like inventory management, shipping, and product variations |
| Add-ons | 80+ options focused on digital product management and automation needs | 1000+ are available to customize and scale your online store |
| Payment gateways | Built-in support for PayPal and Stripe, with more options available through premium extensions | Plenty of free and premium extensions for integrating popular payment gateways and country-specific ones |
| Design customization options | Compatible with many WordPress themes, but fewer are specifically designed for Easy Digital Downloads | Plenty of free and premium WooCommerce themes are optimized for online selling |
| Scalability | Scales well for building WordPress digital stores | Highly scalable and flexible, suitable for both small shops and large, complex ecommerce operations |
| Support and community | Provides email support and solid documentation, but has a smaller user community | No direct support, but backed by a large global community and comprehensive documentation |
| Pricing | Freemium, with premium plans starting at $99.50/year | The core plugin is completely free, with add-ons ranging from free to $299/year |
Now that you have a general overview of WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads, let’s take a closer look at their feature comparison to see how they can fulfill your online store needs.
Easy Digital Downloads vs WooCommerce: What can you sell?
Picking between Easy Digital Downloads and WooCommerce comes down to how you want to grow your business. Since each plugin shines in different ways, we’ll explore how they can handle your online selling needs.
Easy Digital Downloads
As its name suggests, Easy Digital Downloads makes it easy to sell digital products in WordPress. It’s ideal for downloadable items like ebooks, software, learning videos, music, and more.
You can add recurring payments, software licensing, and booking features by installing extensions. And in case you were wondering, Easy Digital Downloads can handle physical products as well, using the Simple Shipping add-on.
So technically, this plugin also lets you sell items like custom prints, CDs, or handcrafted goods. Just note that it’s not built to manage complex products with multiple variations or advanced shipping needs.
With this in mind, Easy Digital Downloads has enough features to support your expansion, only if you plan to grow a business around digital products.
To give you a better sense of what the plugin can do, take a look at Envira Gallery, Cozmoslabs, or LogoMood, which are built with Easy Digital Downloads.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce comes with extensive features for selling physical items, like product variations (think sizes and colors), inventory tracking, and flexible shipping options.
That said, there are built-in features for selling digital downloads with WooCommerce. Even better, it’s compatible with a huge number of plugins and themes in the WordPress ecosystem.
Thanks to these perks, you can sell pretty much anything with WooCommerce, whether it’s physical products, digital files, software, services, or even properties.
So, whether you’re starting small or planning to expand a successful business, WooCommerce provides the tools to make it happen.
To see how businesses use WooCommerce to build their ecommerce website, check out Nalgene, Color Duels, or Premier Guitar.
Verdict
WooCommerce is a versatile ecommerce solution for selling any type of product. If you want to fully focus on building a WordPress digital store, Easy Digital Downloads is an ideal option, as WooCommerce’s extensive features might bloat your site.
Easy Digital Downloads vs WooCommerce: Ease of use
A simple online store setup can help you get off the ground faster, especially when you’re kickstarting it yourself. In this section, we’ll explore each plugin’s setup process and what it’s like to manage your store from the dashboard.
Easy Digital Downloads
After installing the plugin on your WordPress site, the Easy Digital Downloads Setup page will appear.
Completing the initial setup wizard helps you configure the essentials of your store operations, like setting up your business profile, connecting a payment gateway, configuring default emails for file delivery, and adding your first digital product.