Adobe Commerce (Magento) Vs Salesforce Commerce

Adobe Commerce (Formerly known as Magento) and Salesforce Commerce are two of the biggest eCommerce platforms available for the sale of goods/services online. The major distinction between these two platforms is how they are hosted. Adobe Commerce is typically hosted locally, whilst Salesforce Commerce uses a cloud based solution. Both of the platforms are well suited to medium to large enterprises; when it comes to deciding which is most suitable for your business, there are a number of factors which should be considered, which will be detailed in this article. 

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 and product 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 Salesforce Commerce?

Salesforce Commerce (Formerly called Demandware) is one of the leading SaaS (Software as a Service) eCommerce platforms for transforming online shopping experiences for any channel or device. With the use of it’s own Artificial Intelligence (AI) software, it offers a seamless and positive customer experience which helps to personalise the shopping experience for each of it’s users. The AI software is website specific, therefore it will first need to accumulate some shoppers data before it can really make a real impact. The platform has great merchandising and catalog management, supporting a wide range of different product types. The platform allows for task scheduling in order to give instructions when particular changes need to be added and removed.

Some popular features of the platform include:

  • Artificial Intelligence software
  • Customer data integration
  • Seamless, positive user experience
  • Powerful marketing tools
  • Product/Content management

Adobe Commerce Vs Salesforce Commerce

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.

Salesforce Commerce have recently made changes to their pricing strategy, offering different packages based off a percentage of gross merchandise value. This could become very costly for enterprises with large gross merchandise. The different pricing packages can be explored on the salesforce website – Pricing webpage.

Set-up

When comparing the two platforms, Adobe Commerce is considered to be more difficult difficult to get setup and will require experience developers.

Customisation / Themes

Whilst Adobe Commerce operates as a PaaS (Platform as a Service), versus Salesforce Commerce operating as a SaaS (Software as a service), this gives clear indication that Adobe Commerce has much more customisation. This gives Adobe Commerce developers extensibility, flexibility and customisability to make any changes required, whilst Salesforce Commerce will be slightly limited here due to the complexity of having to modify the underlying infrastructure to make certain changes.

Additional Features

One of the key features which may be important to your business model may be the requirement for B2B. Currently, out of the two platforms, only Adobe Commerce offers such features, meaning Salesforce Commerce may not be the most viable option. Of course, you could create a B2C website with Salesforce, but then you would then need to look into an additional eCommerce solution for your B2B requirements, which isn’t recommended as you would also need to spend additional time and money on a separate solution. When it comes to B2B, Adobe Commerce provides a fully personalised shopping experience. Adobe Commerce encompasses all actions a typical B2B customer will go through when doing a transaction from the first order to repeated ordering.

Security

Unlike Adobe Commerce, since Salesforce Commerce is a paid for package, their team do handle all security upgrades and patches for you, ensuring that your store and customers are always protected.

Support / Community

When it comes to development, Adobe Commerce has a much bigger community. Adobe Commerce has much more solution partners, tech partners and a huge community of developers. Salesforce Commerce on the other hand, although they have a big community of developers, this is typically more focused on there CRM rather than their eCommerce platform. When it comes to more general support however, Salesforce Commerce offer 24/7 support for all of it’s customers.

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.

Multilingual & Currency Support

Both of the platforms offer Multiple language support and multiple currency support to allow you to sell internationally. Whilst Adobe Commerce supports currencies from 200+ countries worldwide; The exact figure for Salesforce Commerce is unknown although you can expect it to cover all the major countries and currencies.

Payment Gateway Options

Out the box, Adobe Commerce has support for a limited amount of payment options, although there are a number of 3rd party extension providers which have provided support for numerous other payment gateways, allowing you to make use of any additional payment gateways which have been developed as 3rd party solutions. Salesforce Commerce on the other hand looks to have much fewer options available out the box. Again, Salesforce Commerce allows for custom integrations with payment gateways, although unlike Adobe Commerce, there doesn’t look to be as many 3rd party providers who have already created these so it would require additional developer time to get these integrations setup.

Summary

Above we have highlighted some of the key aspects which are worth considering when choosing between the two platforms. As previously mentioned it’s important to first determine the main purpose and goals you want to achieve from having an online store. Both of the platforms have very powerful features. If your business is looking for a website with ease of setup, Salesforce Commerce may be viable, although it’s worth considering that it doesn’t offer as much customisation that Adobe Commerce has to offer with it being a SaaS product. Also if your business needs B2B features, Adobe Commerce is a clear winner here as Saleforce Commerce don’t currently provide such features.