Advice on Hikashop vs. Virtuemart

Hello.

I hope this is the right forum for this kind of question. I am looking for as many responses as I can get.

I have installed hikashop in my joomla and i have noticed that many of the requests in the forums about automatic account creation, etc. involve people using virtuemart.

I am using the free version of hika. Before I get started with more configurations, I have a couple of questions:

1) Is virtuemart more reliable than hikashop for selling and automation from Joomla to Moodle?

2) Is the setup in virtuemart easier or harder than in hikashop?

3) I am trying to keep costs down right now, so are there any issues/problems with the free versions that I should know about?

In the meantime, I will keep checking things out in the forums. Thanks again for any help/advice you can provide. I would really appreciate responses from the community.

Sorry, I forgot:

I am using Joomla 2.5.9 with Joomdle 0.9, Moodle 2.0.10 with Joomdle 0.7 (the 0.7 version is the only one I can find for Moodle) and Hikashop Starter version 2.1.0.

I'm using Hikashop with recurring payment setup and have found it to be an excellent product:

Excellent free forum where questions are answered with in 24 hrs.

Support REALLY knows the product.

It works with Joomdle very well.

Very good price point.

It works!

I don't anything about virtuemart.
I have tried Tienda and found it difficult to setup and they are slow to respond to changes in Joomla.

My thoughts:

1) They are the same. In fact, VM may present more problems in multi-lang sites.

2) The same

3) No, free is fine