Adobe Commerce (Magento) Vs SAP Hybris

Adobe Commerce (Formerly known as Magento) and SAP Hybris are both two leading eCommerce platforms. When it comes to deciding which is most suitable for your business, there are a number of factors which should be considered. Some key questions that may need to be considered when deciding are “What is your budget for the development of the site?”, “Are you running a B2C, B2B company, or both?”, “Are you developing the website in-house or via an Agency?”. Below we go into some detail about each of the options available. 

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 SAP Hybris?

Like Magento, Hybris has been around for quite some time. Hybris was first introduced as ‘Hybris’ by a german eCommerce company in 1997. It had since been acquired by SAP in 2013, were they decided to rebrand as ‘SAP Hybris’. SAP Hybris is an Omni-channel and PCM (Product Content Management) software written based from the Java language.

Some popular features of the platform include:

  • Omni-channel fulfilment
  • Simple to support
  • High Capabilities of pulling and analysing data from different sources.
  • Product Content Management made easy
  • Provides some great business solutions such as CRM, ERP, CSV and ImpEx.

Adobe Commerce Vs SAP Hybris

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.

When it comes to pricing, Adobe Commerce is a clear winner here; even Adobe Commerce’s enterprise edition with the additional paid features will work out much cheaper. SAP Hybris has a licensing cost of $50k per year. It’s important to mention here though that the target users for SAP Hybris is for very large enterprises, where Adobe Commerce may be better suited for medium to large enterprises.

Customisation

When it comes to customisation, Adobe Commerce has much more to offer. Adobe Commerce is fully customisable, allowing developers to customise every aspect* of the store. Adobe Commerce also have many 3rd party extension providers who actively develop and maintain modules to work with Adobe Commerce. Most of these come at a cost, although these provide a nice way to add additional features to the website to help drive more sales.

Themes

Both the platforms allow full customisation over how the website looks, with the ability to create new themes from scratch. Out the box they come shipped with some basic looking themes, or there are also themes available which can be purchased and installed.

Additional Features

Both the platforms have a number of additional features such as B2B features, marketing tools and sale management. When it comes to B2B however, Adobe Commerce have much more features to offer, with things such as providing 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

Both the platforms offer a high level of security to ensure customers can safely purchase from any stores using the platform. Adobe Commerce releases frequent security updates every year. If a vulnerability has been discovered, Adobe Commerce offers a way to ‘patch’ known security issues.

Support

Unless you are registered for the Adobe Commerce Cloud Plan, Adobe Commerce 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. When it comes to development and hosting, Adobe Commerce is known to be more difficult to support, whilst SAP Hybris is much easier to support due to it using the Java language which is much more developer friendly. That being said, 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.

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 SAP Hybris is unknown although you can expect it to cover all the major countries and currencies with it being one of the main selling points for the platform.

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. SAP Hybris on the other hand looks to have much fewer options available out the box. Again, SAP Hybris 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 the platforms have proven to be very robust and powerful. Magento is clearly the market favourite with over 400k+ live sites, compared to SAP Hybris which has only 11k. That being said, both the platforms have some very well known brands using them; for example Coca-Cola, Nike, Ford, Land Rover, Paul Smith, Liverpool FC using Magento and Samsung, Audi, The Body Shop and Carlsberg using SAP Hybris. The major factor leading to a discuss would be based on the size of the online store. Magento is considered to be best for a target of Medium to Large enterprise, whilst SAP Hybris is known to be better for very large enterprises.