Best open source shopping cart?

[loyalrogue]

With so many options out there finding the right shopping cart is like finding a needle in a haystack.

I'm hoping a few members can chime in with their experiences and maybe narrow down the field for those of us that are looking.

Which open source shopping cart have you found the best experience with considering ease of use, ease to template, ease to mod, number of features, overall processing speed, number of mods available, etc.?
Pros, cons?

Also which carts would you warn against and why?

[Elite]

Been a while, but I had good results with zencart

[loyalrogue]

Well after playing around with several carts I stumbled across what I believe is the clear winner, OpenCart.

The current version (1.4.9.5) is available for install thru Softaculous and so far it has been a joy to work with.
Good, active support forum, lots of free templates and mods, easy to customize without needing to know a lot of php, fast loading, and anything I've needed that isn't free I've been able to find as cheap ($10-$25) commercial mods.

The next version (1.5.0) is due out soon and is available now as an RC1 release for testing, and it has a ton of the current commercial mods built-in, like customer file uploads, global product options, and an affiliate program.
I am almost as happy with finding OpenCart as I am with finding Dathorn... and that says a lot.

[brownswo]

Thanks for sharing your experience here. Based on my own research and your feedback, I'm going to test it to see if it's going to work for me.

Best regards,
Tom

[SaraAnn]

I have used both Magento and CS-Cart.
Effective multiple store management is Magento considerable advantage, though CS-Cart Ultimate has also this feature.
Concerning CS-Cart, it has some benefits in terms of easy installation, as it's quite lightweight in comparison to Magento.
If you are planning little business without rapid development in the near future, CS-Cart will be quite enough for you.
Magento is really demanding in terms of hosting, investment, efforts, so it better suits large size stores.