Adobe Commerce Cloud (Earlier referred to as Magento Cloud Commerce) is an Paas solution. Lets understand the ecosystem before we dive deeper on Adobe Commerce Cloud. On a high level, with respect to the eCommerce platform Magento/Adobe has 3 variants to it
Open Source – Open source as the name suggests is an open source platform available free of cost(with limited functionalities for small businesses.
Commerce – This is a licenced version of Magento/Adobe with enterprise level features. However, the hosting is taken care of by the merchant
Commerce Cloud – This is similar to Commerce. However, the website will be on cloud and hence you don’t pay an additional server cost for the platform.
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A Complete guide to Adobe Commerce Cloud
The Commerce edition still exists as Magento Commerce. However, after the acquisition of Magento by Adobe, the key platform of interest of Adobe has been the Commerce Cloud variant and hence named as Adobe Commerce Cloud(which also gives us signals that this is going to be the future of Magento). This approach of Adobe also makes sense as the world is transforming towards the cloud direction(eliminating the burden on maintaining servers) and Magento has been losing a good chunk of its market share to Shopify, Salesforce Commerce and BigCommerce even though it has better capabilities in certain areas than these platforms.
Open Source Vs Magento Commerce Vs Adobe Commerce Cloud
Lets understand the difference between the Adobe/Magento solution variants
Lets understand the difference between the Adobe/Magento solution variants
Open source by itself is a powerful platform for smaller businesses who are short of cash with rich features which can help them to run businesses like Integrated Checkout, Payment, Shipping, Mobile Optimized Shopping, Global Selling, Catalog Management, Extended Functionality via App Marketplace, Instant Purchase and Site Search (Source: https://magento.com/compare-open-source-and-magento-commerce#). However, as your business grows, it might not be a scalable solution considering there could be potential bottlenecks even on the core Magento for which you will not be eligible for Magento support/onboarding. And there wouldn’t be access for some of the key features that Adobe Commerce Cloud has.
Below are the key features and the high level explanation of what the feature is about.
- Content Staging: This is a feature by which you can curate content/marketing activities in advance to prepare for an event.Magento will take care of getting all the marketing activities, Banners, website look and feel rolled out at the specified time and date.
- B2B Module: The B2B module comes with the following list of features
- Request for Quote: Here the customer can request for a quote and the admin can approve or send a revised quote and this could be multiple back and forth. Once both parties agree, the customer can place the order from the cart with the revised pricing
- Shared Catalog: In case of access to multiple catalogs to different customers based on their customer group, this is pretty helpful. This feature also helps with setting customer specific pricing alongside with the regular pricing rules.
- Company Structure: This feature gives the merchant offer complete control over setting up company hierarchy and approval workflows. There is also complete control over which companies have what payment options.
- Requisition List: This is pretty helpful for frequently ordered items to be created as a list
- Quick Order: With most B2B businesses, the end customer will have the list of SKUs and their quantities and place an order directly rather than having to add them one by one from the respective product detail pages.
- Visual Merchandiser: This is a feature whereby the merchant will be able to specify the order in which a product needs to be displayed on a product list page.
- Shared Database(Scalability): This is a concept by which different entities can be part of a separate database thus reducing the load on individual tables. For instance the products could be on a seperate database as opposed to orders
- Customer Segmentation: This is a concept which is sometimes misunderstood for the customer groups available on open source. This feature helps with dynamically forming segments of customers in real time on multiple attributes. For example, you may pull all female customers who are in the age range of 18 and 40 and then target specific promotions or mailers
- Rewards: There are a bunch of features available here as well on the Adobe Commerce Cloud platform.
- Return Management(RMA): This is pretty useful for returns management.
- Other add-ons you get: Temando for Shipping, BI Tools, Signifyd for fraud protection, APIs for B2B additional payment methods like Cybersource, WorldPay and eWay.
Apart from the above list, in comparison to the Magento Commerce variant, the Adobe Commerce Cloud platform gets you hosting and the tools associated with the hosting, monitoring and maintenance.
On the flipside, Adobe Commerce Cloud is a completely constrained environment which is good and bad. It’s good because unintended changes to the core files etc are minimized and it’s bad because in case there are issues with the core, you are completely dependent on Magento with your system integrator not having much of a control here.
Also, Progressive Web App (PWA) has been one of the big initiatives where you get an app like experience on a browser. However, it’s still getting matured and eventually this should get better.
Hope, this should have given a good understanding of the Magento/Adobe ecosystem, their products and make an educated decision on choosing between these platforms.
Adobe Commerce Cloud Vs Shopify Plus vs BigCommerce Enterprise
Now, let’s look at some of the comparable solutions in the market. I am taking Shopify Plus and BigCommerce Enterprise(rather than the lower variants of Shopify and BigCommerce) to make sure that we are making an apples to apples comparison. The intent of the below comparison is not to go in detail but to compare the platforms on a high level to make an educated decision.
| Features | Adobe Commerce Cloud | Shopify Plus | BigCommerce Enterprise |
| Customizations | High | Low | Moderate |
| Multiple websites in single instance | Yes | No | No |
| Extensions/Apps | High | Medium | Medium |
| Community | High | Medium | Low |
| B2B functionalities | High | Low | Medium |
| Intuitive interface | Medium | High | High |
| Page Builder | Medium | High | High |
| Content Staging | Yes | No | No |
| Developer Dependency | Medium | Low | Low |
| Advanced Reporting(BI) | Yes | No | No |
| APIs | High | Medium | High |
| Payment Gateways Supported | Medium | High | High |
| Security | High(Need developer support for applying patches though) | High | High |
| Performance | High(However, this can be customized to really high or little low based on the business needs) | High | High |
| Customer Support | Medium | High | High |
| Pricing | $20,000 to $125,000 | $24,000 or 1% of revenue through website whichever is higher | $6,000 to $50,000 |
Adobe Commerce cloud overall is a great platform which has a lot of pros and the ecosystem gives it an edge over other platforms.
Source:
https://magento.com/compare-open-source-and-magento-commerce#
