I think I would probably start with a shopping cart and strip out the commerce portions of the template. All you would need to do would be get rid of the buy buttons, view cart links and so on at the presentation level. Whereas with a CMS you would have to add in all the comparison features at the logic level.

Hi ergophobe,

Thank you. I think you are right. Maybe that's best solution.

Yeah, I think if you find one with a fairly simple templating system, it should be just a few hours work to strip out links to the shopping cart and then if you really worry about people accidentally ending up there, you could use some Rewrites to send them somewhere else.

Good luck

VirtueMart for Joomla has a checkbox to run the shopping cart as a product catalog. It has a separate product comparison extension.

Nice suggestion. Thanks.

Thanks.

Shopping cart is a great solution if I do not want too much custom work. However, I do not think that's true: I will need quite a few custom work. Maybe I will go with Drupal + CCK (free) or ExpressionEngine (commercial)

If you go drupal, check out the ecommerce module collection. I've never used it, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's some product comparison feature in there.

If you use CCK, check out the Contemplate module, which allows you to build templates for your CCK data relatively easily. I don't know of any CMS that offers what you get in drupal with CCK + Contemplate + Views + Panels. If you don't need it, that's a lot of overhead (especially Views I think), but if you do and you use fairly aggressive caching, it makes development so much easier.