commercetools vs Adobe Commerce, Which Better?

About commercetools

commercetools is an advanced cloud-based ecommerce platform specifically designed to help accelerate fast-growing businesses. It stands out and impresses with its agility, flexibility and remarkable scalability, creating a solid foundation for businesses to thrive in the digital landscape.

Key features

commercetools possesses a unique key features system, capable of enhancing the activities of growing businesses:

• Headless architecture: the headless approach is the way commercetools uses to maximize support for the diverse activities of your business. This way, commercetools separates the user interface from all the backend commerce functions. This flexible approach helps seamlessly streamline the customer experience, personalizing a variety of digital touchpoints from web to IoT devices to mobile.
• Microservices architecture: commercetools divides commerce functions into independent modules, while still ensuring the blocks work together. Microservices-based architecture creates a great environment, helping businesses using commercetools to easily decompose and manage, promote agility, and facilitate rapid innovation.
• API-first: moving towards an API-first architecture, commercetools allows you to seamlessly integrate existing systems with 3rd party applications if needed, quickly and easily. This process dispels all the worries of business owners like you if you want to install and apply a new technology or an emerging trend in the market. That’s extremely important, you understand, in a market that fluctuates every second like ecommerce.
• Integrated ecosystem: diverse applications, software from payment gateways, shipping support methods or technology solution providers are all easily integrated into the commercetools ecosystem. All operational processes will thus be seamless, adapting to evolving market trends and providing exceptional customer experiences.

About Adobe Commerce

Adobe Commerce (formerly known as Magento Commerce) is a prominent name in the ecommerce platform market. Adobe Commerce is best suited for rapidly growing businesses that want to use a comprehensive and powerful platform to further accelerate their growth.

Featuring exceptional flexibility, a rich feature set, and extensibility rooted in open source innovation, Adobe Commerce is committed to empowering business owners to tailor their stores. You will not need to depend on any third party during the process of creating and managing the store.

Key features

Some typical and outstanding features of Adobe Commerce when comparing between commercetools vs Adobe Commerce include:

• Unifying ecommerce platforms: Adobe Commerce enables seamless integration of all essential ecommerce store functions on one all-in-one platform, including: catalog management, order processing, customer service management. A comprehensive approach enhances the customer experience, aligns touchpoints, and streamlines all operations across multiple channels.
• Easy customization and extensibility: Adobe Commerce, with its open source architecture, offers unparalleled flexibility and scalability that is rare to find. For example, when using Adobe Commerce, you can easily customize your storefront, or integrate with third-party applications such as accounting or warehouse. You are not bound by anything!
• Infrastructure customization: this is key, especially for businesses that have sudden increases in visitors during peak seasons or changes in new markets. Adobe Commerce leverages cloud-native architecture, helping business owners quickly modify and expand infrastructure to accommodate unusually large store traffic.
• Comprehensive and detailed analytics: from real-time sales data, inventory tracking to customer conversion behavior analysis, you can get up-to-the-minute insights from Adobe’s thorough analysis of commerce. From there, business strategies or operational optimization plans are built based on your business’s own data, bringing the best results.

Pricing

Commercetools

Commercetools’s pricing depends on the business’s subscription services. Not fixed in price like many traditional ecommerce platforms, commercetools’ pricing is based on actual subscription services depending on your needs at each time, such as placing API calls, controlling user behavior or integration. This can help you better control costs, and adjust prices according to your revenue ratio and specific desires at each time.

However, it should be noted that your costs will increase or decrease fluctuating depending on the size and complexity of your business operations.

Adobe Commerce

Adobe Commerce also offers a variety of pricing options to suit businesses of different sizes and needs. The special thing is that all are priced based on order value or business revenue level. Normally, there will be 3 options for pricing plans for you when using Adobe Commerce:

• Open source: free to download, however additional costs related to domain name, hosting, maintenance, extensions, etc.
• Adobe Commerce Enterprise: includes the cost of all the above services, plus an annual license fee based on additional features
• Adobe Commerce Cloud: is the most expensive option, including the cost of hosting services

The cost of using Adobe Commerce will typically range from $22,000 to $125,000. However, this is only a reference cost and you need to consult carefully from Adobe Commerce to get the exact price.

Verdict

commercetools is the winner when comparing the price between commercetools vs Adobe Commerce. With a subscription-based cost model, this platform allows your business to best manage revenue and expenditure and choose the services that best suit your current finances.

User-friendly platform

Commercetools

commercetools is proud to provide a functional system that is relatively friendly and easy to use for business owners. The platform has a quite clear, modern interface, comes with a comprehensive collection of documents and support tools, ensuring you can quickly get acquainted and operate on the platform.

Besides, commercetools’ headless architecture also allows businesses to be flexible in developing user interfaces. Of course, some editing items to match the brand’s unique personality, such as templates, colors, attaching signatures or logos, still require some specific technical knowledge. However, commercetools strives to minimize complexity for users to accelerate time-to-market and business growth.

Adobe Commerce

In contrast to commercetools, although it provides powerful functionality and outstanding scalability, Adobe Commerce makes it difficult for users in the beginning, especially if you do not have a solid technical foundation.

Setting up and controlling every element of Adobe Commerce, for example, extending access, modifying customer communication systems, etc., requires a level of technical proficiency and understanding from the developer about the platform.

That is also the reason why, in order not to have to wallow in difficulties, business owners using Adobe Commerce often work with a dedicated ecommerce team or consulting companies to shorten the time to complete the store.

Verdict

When comparing the user-friendliness of commercetools vs Adobe Commerce, commercetools is the winner. Easy to use and easy to apply with comprehensive support, this platform offers users the opportunity to quickly access and become familiar with the ecommerce operating system.

Community and Support

commercetools

commercetools has a huge community ecosystem with many collaborating partners and developers. Not only does it provide many integrations and extensions to enhance the functionality and performance of the platform, it also provides extensive support to users with a variety of innovative and advice expertise to each experienced business.

Although the partner and support community is not really much compared to Adobe Commerce (because commercetools itself is still a fairly new platform), the open tools and resources and friendly developers are key factors to affirming the sure success of this platform in the near future.

Adobe Commerce

Adobe Commerce users certainly benefit greatly from a global community of developers, agencies, and partners. This vast ecosystem provides you with many resources, support options, and extensions. At the same time, you will also find advice and solutions to common challenges, as well as upgrade technical knowledge and expertise from relationships built in the community.

Verdict

In terms of community support, Adobe Commerce has the upper hand when comparing commercetools vs Adobe Commerce. With the support of many partners, developers, and experts around the world who are already using the platform, you will certainly have easy access to countless resources and support for your own needs.

Scalability and Flexibility

commercetools

commercetools attracts attention for its flexibility based on its cloud-native architecture, which includes MACH (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native and Headless) principles. Applying microservices architecture, commercetools allows users to easily scale each independent component based on the unique needs of the customer file, helping to adapt quickly without having to perform too extensive restructuring.

Besides, ensuring performance and promptly detecting technical errors in each individual service block has also become easier than ever with commercetools’ current operating model.

Adobe Commerce

Adobe Commerce certainly offers diverse and superior scalability options, but you need to be especially aware of infrastructure management requirements and manual procedures. More traditional in its architecture, Adobe Commerce has its own challenges when it comes to scaling operations yourself, especially during times of traffic spikes that require you to improvise a manual process.

While there is room for improvement in page load times and page update speeds, Adobe Commerce may not yet be able to scale components to the same level as other tools on ecommerce platforms. This limitation, when comparing commercetools vs Adobe Commerce, can reduce flexibility in automatic updates and workload management.

Verdict

commercetools is the ultimate winner in commercetools vs Adobe Commerce in terms of scalability and flexibility. With flexible scalability based on modern architectural blocks, and the ability to respond well to customer experience, commercetools is believed to successfully promote rapidly growing ecommerce businesses.

Payment Gateways Options

commercetools

commercetools allows integration with a series of available payment gateways such as Adyen, Bold Checkout or Checkout.com. However, for now, you should specify in advance that commercetools only allows integration with existing applications and does not have an additional direct integration port from a third party.

Of course, commercetools remains committed to providing a seamless payment experience with available applications, ensuring businesses can leverage trusted payment solutions to enhance customer experience and satisfaction from clients.

Adobe Commerce

Adobe Commerce provides extensive integration support for third-party payment gateways through its massive ecosystem. As an ecommerce business owner and understanding the importance of the ecommerce checkout process, you can completely flexibly integrate additional payment solutions that best suit the needs of your target customer base. 

Integration time is extremely quick and easy, because as you know, Adobe Commerce promotes proactiveness and empowers businesses to flexibly operate, change, and integrate.

Verdict

When comparing commercetools vs Adobe Commerce, Adobe Commerce has the advantage in payment gateway options. Facilitating third-party expansion workflows, the platform offers industry-leading flexibility to quickly and seamlessly integrate additional payment solutions into your ecommerce business.

B2B Features

commercetools

commercetools has features specifically suited to B2B activities such as complex pricing structures, customization in the order approval process, seamlessly integrated with ERP and CRM systems, etc. Ecommerce is inherently complex, and especially if your business operates in a B2B direction, this will definitely be a difficult problem if it is not to have companions and support tools from the beginning.

commercetools is guaranteed to accompany and meet the key scenarios commonly used in your B2B structure.

Adobe Commerce

Similarly when comparing commercetools, Adobe Commerce also provides advanced solutions for businesses such as pricing functions, quotes, or setting up diverse payment methods for customers. Not only that, the platform also allows you to streamline expansion or growth operations by providing a native B2B module. That is the reason this platform receives a lot of trust from B2B customers.

Verdict

Adobe Commerce is the winner of this round between commercetools vs Adobe Commerce. The out-of-the-box B2B feature set and native B2B modules leverage Adobe Commerce’s impressive power and compatibility for B2B businesses.

Security

commercetools

commercetools prioritizes security measures so businesses and customers can transact with confidence. The platform regularly releases security updates to promptly address any security vulnerabilities, if any, while maintaining the integrity of the platform. In addition, common standards in the ecommerce industry are also met seriously and professionally with commercetools.

Adobe Commerce

Adobe Commerce pays special attention to security factors. In addition to regularly updating the software to improve security features, this platform also provides optional features such as Recaptcha or 2-Factor Authentication (2FA), helping to increase the effectiveness of website and data protection. This is also a necessary and sufficient condition to prevent fraudulent activities and unauthorized access, ensuring businesses can feel secure in operating on digital platforms.

Verdict

Adobe Commerce shows more potential in terms of Security capabilities when comparing commercetools vs Adobe Commerce. With comprehensive, specialized advanced features, and many options to further enhance protection, this is the ideal choice for businesses to have absolute peace of mind about safety in digital environments. 

commercetools is best for

commercetools is the right choice if your ecommerce business is growing steadily and is looking for a modern and flexible platform.

With a cloud-native architecture, headless approach and microservices-based architecture, commercetools focuses on innovation, seamless integration and a comprehensive partner ecosystem. Every operation of an ecommerce business is guaranteed to be seamless with many different touchpoints on the digital platform.

Adobe Commerce is best for

Adobe Commerce is suitable for ecommerce businesses that focus on customization, scalability, and rich features. Adobe Commerce’s deep flexibility is reflected in its wide range of extensions, themes, and integrations. Of course, you need to ensure that you and your team have a solid technical foundation to be able to accompany your Adobe Commerce business. If not, consider partnering with ecommerce developers to ensure the sustainable success of your digital store.