Magento Open-Source vs Adobe Commerce: Know the Difference Between These Two. 

Magento Open Source vs. Adobe Commerce: What’s the Difference? 

Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce are two different sides of the same coin when it concerns the eCommerce platform. Each offers its unique benefit to those who need it, depending on the size of the organisation and its requirements. Both share a similar core in the Magento platform. However, the difference lies in their pricing, features, scalability, and opportunities for support. Let’s discuss some of those differences at length. 

Here’s a comparison table between Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce:

Pricing 

The main differentiation between Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce is the commercial aspect. Magento Open Source is free to use, while hosting, security, and custom development are user responsibilities. The benefit of this open-source option is full customization, but it requires technical knowledge or developer help.

Adobe Commerce, however, operates on a paid service basis, and its fees may greatly vary depending on the size and complexity of your business. Adobe Commerce pricing is generally dependent on gross merchandise volume (GMV) and user count. It suits larger organizations or those scaling fast, offering advanced features not in Magento Open Source. Though costly, it’s worth it for businesses needing enterprise-level support.

Features and Functionality 

Although Magento Open Source lays a solid foundation for creating an eCommerce site, it does not include some advanced features available in Adobe Commerce. Magento Open Source consists only of the essential core eCommerce functionalities: product catalogue management, order management, and customer account management. Advanced features like customer segmentation, reporting, and B2B capabilities are not included in the core product by default. 

Whereas Adobe Commerce comes with loads of advanced features right out of the box. These features are for larger or more complex businesses that need extra utility. Some of the key features included in Adobe Commerce are: 

• Advanced Personalisation: Customised shopping for customers with individualised content, offers, and recommendations.  

• B2B Functional: B2B sales management tools such as custom catalogues, quote management, and corporate accounts come built-in with the solution.  

• Advanced Reporting and Analytics: It includes top reporting and analytics tools in Adobe Commerce to track real-time sales, customer activity, and performance.

• Multi-store Management: Encompasses businesses’ ability to have different storefronts under one central hub. 

These extra features make Adobe Commerce better suited for large businesses with complex ecommerce requirements. Magento Open Source is more suitable for small to medium-sized businesses with a simpler set of requirements.

Customisation and Flexibility 

With Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce, you have a high level of customisation at different stages. Magento Open Source allows full customization, including code modifications, third-party extensions, and system integrations. Magento Open Source offers exceptional customization, making it ideal for businesses with unique needs or personalized client experiences.

Considerably, Adobe Commerce offers customisation features, enriched not just by the number of outgoing tools and features. You can refer to the Adobe Commerce platform as quite ready-to-go because it packages many advanced capabilities. However, companies may still have to hire developers to build and integrate features for custom functionality. Luckily, that can streamline a process with the tools and features included. 

Scalability 

With respect to larger businesses, scalability is yet another area where Adobe Commerce generally surpasses Magento Open Source. Magento Open Source can scale for large businesses, but it requires more technical expertise and resources as your store grows. Maintaining Magento Open Source as your business grows may become challenging due to the need for development and IT infrastructure investments.

As an enterprise solution, Adobe Commerce is built to scale efficiently. It can manage large volumes of traffic, huge product catalogues, and complicated customer workflows without any compromise on performance. Adobe Commerce also provides cloud hosting via Adobe Commerce Cloud, which gives you extra performance, security, and scalability as your business scales. Adobe Commerce is a great option for businesses expecting rapid growth or needing a powerful solution from the start.

Support and Maintenance  

Magento Open-Source users do their own support and maintenance, while there are more than enough resourceful online communities with developers and users working to solve problems. However, Magento doesn’t provide any formal support. Magento Open-Source users need internal technical skills or third-party developers to ensure smooth operation and maintenance.

On the other hand, Adobe Commerce features professional maintenance and support as part of the subscription. Adobe Commerce provides access to 24/7 customer support, training, and dedicated account management. This service benefits businesses with urgent issues needing resolution or professional guidance on optimizing and improving the platform’s performance. Adobe support teams assist businesses with updates, security patches, and troubleshooting, easing the burden on internal IT staff.

Security 

Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce present great solid security feature, yet the level of security management and support varies among them. Users of Magento Open Source need to manage all security patches and updates by themselves. Security updates are offered regularly by Magento instead, as it is on the store owner or developer to ensure that these updates are implemented promptly. 

Adobe Commerce security is more advanced, with regular updates and patches that come as part of the service. The company has various other security options, such as better data encryption, highly secured fraud protection, and compliance with industry standards such as PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard). For those companies that can afford to ensure the best protection, Adobe Commerce is more integrated for that purpose. 

Hosting 

Magento Open Source operates as a self-hosted platform known as Magento cloud where the user is responsible for finding and managing his own hosting environments. This may offer greater flexibility, yet it simultaneously demands higher technical capacity and resources. Based on the requirements, users can choose their own hosting providers and configurations out of various options. 

Adobe Commerce provides its hosted cloud space with Adobe Commerce Cloud. This managed hosting typically offers better performance, security, and scalability features for businesses that need high uptime and delivery speed. Adobe Commerce Cloud also integrates easily with other Adobe products, which can simplify the workflow and improve the user experience. 

User Experience 

While both platforms are user-friendly, Adobe Commerce is more refined in its layout and usage-friendliness, giving it an upper hand. The built-in features of Adobe Commerce simplify the task of having a massive site in place, with an even unskilled user running it without any glitches. There are features for marketing, sales, and customer management, all of which are well integrated, making it convenient and attractive to businesses requiring such an extensive solution. 

A better flexible option with the opportunity to integrate multiple additional plugins and extensions is Magento Open Source; thereby, requiring itself to establish the same level of user experience (UX) when compared to Adobe Commerce. The user experience is more simple, therefore less appropriate for users who are foreign to eCommerce or require those additional advanced features. 

Conclusion 

Both Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce possess their very own pros and cons. Ecommerce solution providers would find Magento Open Source well-suited to medium to small businesses that want customised solutions but have minimum budget capacity to do it within. Adobe Commerce is, on the contrary, more appropriate for large businesses where the business operations are more complex. It also has advanced features that are enabled along with enterprise-level support, scalability, and much more. However, the main difference that will very likely be found in the two platforms will be from the site’s business requirements and their potential growth in resources.