CS-Cart Multi-Vendor vs Ecommerce-CodeIgniter-Bootstrap
CS-Cart Multi-Vendor and Ecommerce-CodeIgniter-Bootstrap are both marketplace platform software. CS-Cart Multi-Vendor is a commercial product from CS-Cart. Ecommerce-CodeIgniter-Bootstrap is open source under MIT, with 1.4k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick CS-Cart Multi-Vendor when
- A small team wants to own and host a multi-vendor marketplace on a budget and has PHP skills to customise it.
- Pick Ecommerce-CodeIgniter-Bootstrap when
- A developer wants a simple, readable PHP shop to adapt for a small store.
Side by side
Self-hosted PHP marketplace software with vendor storefronts, commissions, split payments and admin panels, sold under a one-time licence.
A PHP online store with multi-vendor, multi-language, virtual products, admin panel, blog and PayPal payments, built on a patched CodeIgniter 3.
You carry hosting, security patching and add-on compatibility yourself.
Runs on CodeIgniter 3 and Bootstrap 3, both long past their prime, with no releases.
Production-ready
Usable
Self-hosted server and cloud service
Self-hosted server
PHP and MySQL
PHP, CodeIgniter, Bootstrap and MySQL
Closed source, sold by CS-Cart
Open source, MIT (permissive)
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.
No Wikipedia article of its own
1.4k GitHub stars
Not known
Established: started 10 years ago, no tagged release yet.
Other comparisons
More multi-vendor marketplace platforms
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.