Adobe Commerce (Magento) Vs CommerceTools

Adobe Commerce (Formerly known as Magento) and CommerceTools are two big eCommerce platforms. When it comes to deciding which is most suitable for your business, there are a number of factors which should be considered.

What is Adobe Commerce?

Adobe Commerce is one of the world’s leading digital commerce solutions for merchants and brands. Magento had a rebrand in April 2021, where Adobe decided to rebrand the platform to Adobe Commerce. Although the rebrand took place in 2021, Adobe had already been running the platform for a few years prior to this, were they acquired Magento in May 2018. Magento was initially released in March 31 (2008); In June 2020, Magento 1 reached end of life, were Adobe had officially announced they will no longer support the software. Prior to this date, they had been providing quality fixes and security patches for the platform, giving merchants plenty of time to upgrade to Magento 2, which was released in November, 2015. Magento 2 was introduced in order to provide significant performance and security improvements, as well as other feature-rich enhancements.

This featured-rich, highly advanced eCommerce platform is intended for businesses that want to expand their growth and deliver an extraordinary customer buying experience. It has multiple features for providing a seamless customer experience. It has become an omni-channel solution for Business-To-Consumer (B2C) and Business-To-Business (B2B) merchants looking for an enterprise edition.

Some popular features of the platform include:

  • Order management
  • Content management made easy with Pagebuilder
  • Marketing Tools
  • Business intelligence dashboards
  • Customer segmentation
  • Unlimited customisation
  • Ability to integrate many 3rd party payment solutions
  • Customer loyalty tools
  • Related products, Upsell and Cross-sell functionality
  • B2B features and many more

What is CommerceTools?

Like Magento, CommerceTools has also been around for many years. CommerceTools was first launched in 2006, being in the eCommerce world a similar length of time. Arguably, CommerceTools isn’t as well known as some of the other eCommerce Platforms available, although it shouldn’t be disregarded as an opinion given some of the benefits the platform can provide. CommerceTools is a cloud-based headless commerce platform, designed for large business by providing APIs to power e-commerce sales taking the headless approach.

Some popular features of the platform include:

  • Fully API enabled platform
  • Cloud solution
  • Product/Inventory Management
  • Tax calculations
  • International shipping
  • B2B features and more

Adobe Commerce Vs CommerceTools

Both platforms are leading eCommerce platforms which both offer B2C and B2B solutions for online sales. When deciding between the two platforms, it’s important to take some of the below factors into consideration.

Pricing

When it comes to pricing, Adobe Commerce has three options:

Open Source – This doesn’t require a monthly subscription; it’s completely free to download, install and setup. The only costs involved in this will be for the domain, domain name, SSL certificate, development time and extensions (optional).

Adobe Commerce Enterprise – This includes the cost of everything mentioned above in the open source option, although a yearly license fee is also acquired. The license cost depends on which additional features are included.

Adobe Commerce Cloud – As the name suggests, this is a cloud based package, which is the more pricey option of the three. This package makes use of all Adobe Commerce Enterprise features, but also benefits from Adobe’s cloud-hosted deployment model, meaning that you won’t have to look elsewhere for hosting as this is provided.

Unless you’ve chosen to go with Adobe Commerce Cloud, due to the scaleability of Adobe Commerce, it’s recommended to purchase a good hosting package to ensure the website has sufficient resources in order to get the best performance possible.

CommerceTools don’t appear to have pricing plans available publicly, and these prices vary depending on enquiry depending on the package needed. Based on some feedback from CommerceTool’s customers*, you can expect similar costs in regards to implementation and resources required, although the platform does also require a license paid yearly, which may make it the more pricey option out of the two.

Set-up / Ease of Use

When comparing the two platforms, Adobe Commerce is considered to be more difficult to get setup and will require experience developers. Adobe Commerce admin area will also be a bit of a learning curve, especially for someone with a non-technical background, although the customisation possibilities here make it worthwhile.

Customisation / Themes

Both the platforms have some free and paid for off-the-shelf themes, although they are quite limited. Magento however has a number of companies and individuals who sell custom themes.  Magento also allows you to create custom themes completely from scratch (Requires development experience).

When it comes to additional customisation of features, Magento is much more extensible, allowing full control over what additional features can be added to the store by adding additional modules. Magento also have many 3rd party extension providers who actively develop and maintain modules. Most of these extensions do come at an additional cost, although they are designed in such a way for relatively quick installation and setup.

Security

Both the options provide security updates to ensure customers can safely purchase from any stores using the platform. Magento and CommerceTools both release frequent security updates every year. However, Magento has an edge over CommerceTools here, offering more advanced security features, dedicated patches to close any vulnerabilities that arise, as well as additional optional features such as Recaptcha and Two-Factor-Authentication (2FA).

Support

Since CommerceTools is a paid for package, it offers dedicated help and support via phone, email and live chat. Adobe Commerce on the other hand (Unless you are registered for the Adobe Commerce Cloud Plan) doesn’t have any dedicated support contact of such, although with the platform being open source, it has an excellent user community via online forums. Typically Adobe Commerce solutions would be developed by an experience team of developers or hosted with an experience hosting service who could also offer great support if any issues crop up.

SEO

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) allows you to optimise your website ranking. SEO plays an important role within the website as this will be one of the leading factors to getting customers onto your website. Both of the platforms offer similar solutions, allowing you to easily edit each web page title, description etc.

Additional Features

When it comes to other additional features, Magento has the edge over CommerceTools here. Since Magento has a number of 3rd party extension providers, they are constantly releasing new extensions and features, as well as actively maintaining existing features to ensure they are working with the latest version of Magento software.

Both Magento and CommerceTools have the capabilities of product and inventory management with there own product management systems. Magento however is significantly more powerful, including full support for a number of different product types (e.g. simple, configurable, virtual, grouped and bundle). Magento also has the ability to utilise PIM software in order to make this management even easier.

Multilingual & Currency Support

Both of the platforms offer Multiple language support and multiple currency support to allow you to sell internationally.

Payment Gateway Options

CommerceTools has a major edge over Magento here when it comes to the number of out-the-box payment gateways it supports; However, there are a number of 3rd party extension providers which have provided support for numerous other payment gateways which can easily be integrated with Magento. CommerceTools nonetheless forces you to choose one of the available options it has built-in; Magento quite the opposite, allowing you to make use of any additional payment gateways which have been developed as 3rd party solutions.

Summary

Above we have highlighted some of the key aspects which are worth considering when choosing between the two options. It’s important to first determine the main purpose and goals you want to achieve from having an online store; this can then greatly steer you down the correct path to choose. Both the platforms offer very similar benefits and limitations, although we believe Magento is the more viable option given the number of extensions, integrations available, extensibility and customisability it has to offer.