Magento Mega Menu Extension Comparison

Magento’s default top menu is rather static and not customisable at all. It simply shows all the categories defined in the administration area. Many shop owners of course want to customise the top menu by themselves: They want to change the hierarchy of the menu entries; they want to add links to specific category pages where filters are activated; they want to feature certain products directly in the menu; they want to add a contact form to it etc. If your customer wants something like this and you are searching for a suitable menu extension for Magento, read on.

Magento ships with a simple top menu showing all the categories. If your customer wants to have a simple vertical menu instead of a top menu, there is a free and good extension for it: RicoNeitzel_VertNav. Since Magento 1.7, it is also possible to customise the top menu programmatically with an event, but this is only for developers – shop owners cannot customise it by default. However, there are of course a lot of extensions out there which let you customise and style the top menu in various ways. The term „mega menu“ is the right Google keyword to look for.

Since one of my customers needed such a Magento mega menu extension, I decided to compare a lot of them and share the results with you. I compared 14 extensions in total and compared them in 11 categories. These categories are requirements like responsiveness, multiple columns, possibility to add a contact form etc. They should be rather self-explanatory. You find them in the comparison PDF which is linked below. I only want to explain one of the requirements in more detail. What do I mean with „mix multiple link types“? The problem of many extensions is that you can have one menu item where you link categories, another menu item where you link products, another menu item where you have a custom link etc. But it is often not possible to mix them, so that you can have a dropdown menu with e.g. the following links:

• category link
• product link
• custom link
• category link

So if there is a tick in this column, a structure like the one above should be possible.

Many of the extensions have frontend and some of them also have backend demos on their extension page. The ones which do not have a live demo were sometimes difficult to rate, but I tried my best to spot which features they support.

You are now probably keen on the results, right? So here you go, here are the results:

1. [11 / 11] EM Drag & Drop Mega Menu
1. [11 / 11] Magebay Menu Creator Pro
3. [10 / 11] TheExtensionLab MegaMenu
4. [9 / 11] Magestore Mega Menu
4. [9 / 11] OnlineBiz Mage Menu
6. [8 / 11] AHT Ultimate MegaMenu
6. [8 / 11] BSS Mega Menu
6. [8 / 11] Cmsmart Mega Menu
6. [8 / 11] MageSolution Mega Menu
6. [8 / 11] MageWorld Mega Menu
6. [8 / 11] PlazaThemes Mega Menu
6. [8 / 11] Web-Experiment Responsive Custom Menu
13. [7 / 11] Brandammo ProNav
14. [3 / 11] aheadWorks Advanced Menu

Last update: 21.10.2015

You can of course download the comparison table as a PDF where all results are documented in full detail:

Magento Mega Menu Extension Comparison (4312 Downloads )

 

Information in the table is not correct any more or you want to be added? Please contact me or leave a comment.

By the way I finally decided to use Magebay Menu Creator Pro and was very happy with it.