Bandzoogle vs Volusion: Comprehensive comparison guide for 2024

Final verdict

Bandzoogle and Volusion cater to different audiences with their specialized features and functionalities.

• 
  Bandzoogle (Overall Grade: 5.9/10)
  
  is tailored specifically for musicians and bands, offering a range of music-specific tools such as a built-in music player, commission-free sales, and fan management features. It excels in providing a user-friendly interface and design flexibility for artists looking to create a professional online presence. However, it lacks the advanced ecommerce capabilities and integrations that Volusion offers, making it less suitable for larger-scale online stores.
• 
  Volusion (Overall Grade: 6.6/10)
  
  is a comprehensive ecommerce platform designed to help businesses build, manage, and expand their online stores. It offers a variety of customizable templates, secure payment processing, and robust analytics and reporting tools. Volusion stands out with its extensive ecommerce features and integrations, making it a strong choice for businesses aiming to grow their online presence. However, it may require a steeper learning curve and lacks some of the niche-specific tools that Bandzoogle provides for musicians.

Best for ecommerce

Verdict

: Bandzoogle is tailored for musicians with unique ecommerce needs, while Volusion offers a more traditional and comprehensive ecommerce solution.

• 
  Bandzoogle
  
  : Designed specifically for musicians, Bandzoogle excels in features like selling subscriptions, crowdfunding, and commission-free sales. It supports various product types and offers direct-to-fan sales tools. However, it lacks some advanced ecommerce functionalities and POS capabilities, making it less suitable for traditional online stores. Best For Ecommerce score: 6.7
• 
  Volusion
  
  : As a comprehensive ecommerce platform, Volusion provides robust features such as multiple payment gateways, SEO tools, and social media integration. It also supports a wide range of product listings and customization options, making it ideal for businesses looking to expand their online presence. Best For Ecommerce score: 7.1

Best for informational & business websites

Verdict

: Bandzoogle slightly edges out Volusion for informational and business websites, thanks to its user-friendly interface and music-specific features, making it ideal for musicians and bands. However, Volusion remains a strong contender with its comprehensive ecommerce tools and customization options.

• 
  Bandzoogle
  
  : Bandzoogle is tailored for musicians and bands, offering a range of music-specific features such as a built-in music player, commission-free sales of music and merchandise, and tools for managing fan subscriptions and crowdfunding campaigns. Its user-friendly interface and specialized functionalities make it an excellent choice for artists looking to build and manage their online presence.
• 
  Volusion
  
  : Volusion is an all-in-one ecommerce solution that helps businesses build, manage, and expand their online stores. It offers customizable templates, secure payment processing, and tools for marketing and SEO. While it excels in ecommerce, it also provides robust features for creating and managing informational websites, making it a versatile option for various business needs.

Detailed comparison

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Winner: Bandzoogle.

If you’re looking for a platform that offers more creative control and a wide array of design features, Bandzoogle is the preferred choice.

Bandzoogle offers a diverse range of design templates for musicians, bands, and DJs, ensuring artists can create a professional and engaging online presence without needing extensive web design knowledge. These templates are responsive, customizable, and can be switched freely without affecting the user’s content, allowing for a tailored look that matches the artist’s style.

Bandzoogle Themes

Compared to Bandzoogle, Volusion offers a variety of design templates tailored to meet the diverse needs of online stores and businesses. The platform provides users with over 30 professionally designed, responsive templates. These templates are crafted to cater to a wide range of industries, ensuring that businesses of all types can find a design that aligns with their brand identity and goals.

Volusion Themes

🏆 Winner: Bandzoogle

. With a score of 8.1, Bandzoogle is designed specifically for musicians and bands, offering a user-friendly interface and a range of music-specific tools. On the other hand, Volusion, scoring 6.9, provides a reliable platform for building online stores but may require a steeper learning curve for more advanced functionalities.

Learning Resources

🏆 Winner: Volusion

. Both platforms offer a variety of learning resources, but Volusion provides a more comprehensive suite of resources, including detailed guides, video tutorials, and a dedicated support center. Bandzoogle also offers a variety of resources, but they are more specific to musicians and music teachers.

When it comes to ecommerce, both Bandzoogle and Volusion offer unique features tailored to their target audiences. Bandzoogle, designed specifically for musicians, offers unique features such as the ability to sell subscriptions, support for crowdfunding, a virtual tip jar, and commission-free sales. On the other hand, Volusion is a comprehensive ecommerce platform with features like product listings, multiple payment gateways, support for multiple currencies, shipping options, SEO tools, and social media integration.

Bandzoogle ecommerce features:

• Sell Subscriptions
• Crowdfunding
• Product Bundling and Upselling
• Payment Integrations

Volusion ecommerce features:

• Ecommerce Product listings
• Payment Gateways
• Multiple Currencies support
• Shipping options
• SEO tools
• Social Media Integration

Ecommerce themes & templates

Bandzoogle doesn’t offer specialized ecommerce templates, but all its existing templates can be enhanced to include ecommerce features. This allows users to sell subscriptions, merchandise, and more. On the other hand, Volusion offers a selection of ecommerce-specific templates designed to cater to various store aesthetics and needs. They provide 14 free themes and 38 paid themes, each costing $180. These templates are mobile responsive, ensuring that your online store is accessible and user-friendly across all devices.

Product page customization

Bandzoogle platform enables users on Standard and Pro plans to sell a wide range of physical merchandise directly from their websites without commission fees, though it doesn’t handle distribution or fulfillment. It supports various product types, including CDs, vinyl, apparel, digital files, and more, with customizable options for product variations, shipping, and sales tax. On the other hand, Volusion offers a range of ecommerce product page customization options to enhance the shopping experience. Users can modify product descriptions, images, and videos to showcase their items effectively. The platform allows for the customization of options and variants, such as size and color, to provide a more detailed and user-friendly product selection process.

Payment processing

Bandzoogle supports a variety of payment methods including major credit and debit cards, but does not support PayPal, cash, or money orders for transactions. The platform emphasizes direct-to-fan sales tools, such as merchandising through Printful integration, and does not charge commissions on sales, allowing artists to retain all revenue generated through their websites. On the other hand, Volusion offers a comprehensive eCommerce platform that supports various payment gateways, including PayPal, Stripe, and its own solution, Volusion Payments, tailored for U.S.-based merchants. The platform is distinctive for its low transaction fees, which vary based on the subscription plan. Additionally, Volusion provides POS capabilities, enabling seamless sales both online and in physical locations.

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Winner: Bandzoogle

. Bandzoogle, with a score of 7.4, offers a website builder tailored for musicians, featuring a variety of tools for design, sales, promotion, and technical management without requiring coding knowledge. It provides responsive templates, integration with music services, and capabilities to sell music, merch, and tickets directly to fans commission-free. Additionally, it supports artist promotion through mailing lists, SEO, and social media integration, backed by live chat and email support.

Volusion’s website builder editor, scoring 7.1, is designed for ease of use, catering to both beginners and experienced users. It offers a drag-and-drop interface, allowing users to easily add, remove, or modify elements on their website without needing to code. Users can customize their site’s layout, adjust colors, fonts, and images, and even integrate various functionalities like social media links, shopping carts, and payment gateways. Additionally, Volusion provides a range of templates and themes to kickstart the design process, making it straightforward to create a professional-looking online store or website.

Mobile editor/app

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Winner: Bandzoogle

. Both Bandzoogle and Volusion do not have a dedicated mobile editor app. However, they allow users to manage and edit their websites using the mobile browser version of the editor. Despite this, the mobile editing experience might not be optimal due to the smaller screen size, and navigating through the admin dashboard could be difficult.

Despite these limitations, Bandzoogle scores slightly higher than Volusion in the mobile editor category, making it the winner in this comparison.

Overall Result

:

Bandzoogle wins

. Bandzoogle scores 8.6 in product testing options, while Volusion scores 7.6. Bandzoogle offers a longer trial period of 30 days compared to Volusion’s 14 days. Both platforms allow testing of premium features during the trial period. However, neither of them offers a money-back guarantee or a free version.

Bandzoogle offers more affordable options, but Volusion’s features are more refined, especially for larger-scale ecommerce operations.

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Winner: Volusion

Both Bandzoogle and Volusion offer hosting with unlimited bandwidth and storage. However, Volusion stands out with a 99.9% uptime guarantee. Unfortunately, neither platform discloses the locations of their data centers.

🏆 Winner: Volusion

Both Bandzoogle and Volusion prioritize website performance and page speed, but Volusion takes a more comprehensive approach to speed optimization, giving it the edge in this category.

Volusion’s approach to enhancing site speed includes a comprehensive strategy of CDN, image optimization, code minification, regular monitoring and updates, and SEO optimization. This approach leverages Volusion’s infrastructure to boost load speed and improve website performance. Volusion also focuses on improving Core Web Vitals through various performance optimization techniques.

On the other hand, Bandzoogle’s approach to speed optimization is more focused on mobile-optimized design. However, Bandzoogle does not provide any specific information on their Core Web Vitals improvements or the range of their Page Speed scores. The load times vary depending on optimization and website complexity.

🏆 Winner: Volusion.

With a score of 6.8, Volusion offers a marketplace with a variety of integrations to enhance its ecommerce platform. It includes tools and services across categories such as Accounting, Business Resources, Channel Management, Customer & Relationship Management, Design, Domain Registration, Email Marketing, Fulfillment, International, Live Chat, Marketing, Mobile, Order Management, Payment Processing, Security, Shipping, and Shopping Feeds. In total, there are 82 integrations available to help complete your ecommerce business needs.

On the other hand, Bandzoogle, with a score of 0.0, does not offer any plugins or extensions. It is an all-in-one solution specifically designed for musicians and bands, and does not provide the option to add extra plugins or extensions.

Volusion Applications

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Overall Winner: Bandzoogle

. Bandzoogle stands out for its more advanced marketing tools, especially in email marketing and social media integration. Volusion is strong in SEO and analytics, ideal for ecommerce strategies.

🏆 Winner: Volusion

. Comparing Bandzoogle vs Volusion, Volusion takes the lead in this category with its comprehensive support options. Volusion offers 24/7 chat support through the Merchant Center dashboard and phone support during business hours for users on their Business and Prime Plans. Additionally, enterprise-level customers benefit from priority support and a dedicated client success manager, ensuring timely and effective assistance.

Bandzoogle provides customer support through email and live chat, with specific hours of availability. While their support team is recognized for delivering award-winning service, the limited hours of live chat and email support may not be as convenient for users needing immediate assistance outside of these times. Nonetheless, Bandzoogle’s support is tailored to meet the needs of musicians and bands, offering specialized help for their unique requirements.

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Winner: Volusion

. Volusion’s security measures are more comprehensive, with a higher security score of 8.7 compared to Bandzoogle’s 7.7. Volusion employs data encryption techniques, two-factor authentication, SSL certificates, PCI DSS compliance, firewalls, regular security audits, and DDoS protection to ensure the security of its users’ websites and data.

Bandzoogle, while offering security measures such as GDPR compliance, data protection measures, and automatic redirection from HTTP to HTTPS, does not provide as extensive a range of security features as Volusion.

Neither Bandzoogle nor Volusion offer AI capabilities. Both platforms focus on providing a user-friendly interface and a range of features for building and managing online presence or ecommerce stores, but they do not incorporate AI tools or features in their platforms.

Therefore, if you are looking for a website builder with AI capabilities, neither Bandzoogle nor Volusion would be suitable options.

🏆 Winner: Volusion

. The user management capabilities of Bandzoogle and Volusion are quite different.

• Bandzoogle allows only one user to edit and manage a website, which might be limiting for larger teams or projects.
• Volusion, on the other hand, offers customizable user account management with various roles and permissions tailored for efficient online store operation. These roles, including Administrator, Editor/Manager, Customer Service, and Marketing, provide different access levels for tasks like site design, order processing, and analytics. Subscription plans determine the number of staff accounts available: 1 in the Personal Plan, 5 in the Professional Plan, 15 in the Business Plan, and unlimited in the Prime Plan. This range ensures scalability and flexibility to meet the needs of businesses of all sizes, enabling effective management and operation of eCommerce teams across different business scales.

Unfortunately, there are no user roles and access levels tables available for both platforms.

Additional Features

User Feedback

The user feedback on Bandzoogle highlights its strengths in providing customizable and professional website layouts, ease of use, and specialized features tailored for musicians, such as pre-made themes, mobile-friendliness, and various tools for managing tours and engaging with audiences. Users appreciate the platform’s assistance in creating an online presence, saving time, and directly engaging with fans. However, critiques include a desire for more theme variety and customization options, concerns about pricing for beginners, occasional interface clumsiness or system latency, and the lack of a fully free version. Despite these drawbacks, Bandzoogle is valued for its niche focus, helping artists efficiently promote their music and interact with their fan base online.

Users generally appreciate Volusion’s affordability compared to competitors like Shopify, finding its simplified user interface suitable for non-tech users. However, there are concerns about its limited integrations and frequent technical issues, such as crashes and slow support responses. Some users feel that Volusion lacks the advanced features and customization options offered by competitors like Shopify, making it less competitive in the market. Despite these drawbacks, Volusion remains a feasible option for small to medium-sized businesses seeking a budget-friendly solution for establishing an online store.

FAQ