Adobe Commerce vs Commercetools: Choosing the Right eCommerce Platform for Scalable Success

Whether you’re launching a new store or migrating an existing one, the right eCommerce platform fuels growth, while the wrong one costs time, money, and progress. As online e-commerce sales continue to grow, with expected global sales to exceed $6 trillion in 2024, there is a greater necessity to adopt scalable, flexible, and future-proof technology solutions.
Two notable platforms in this space - Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento) and Commercetools have become SaaS solutions that can serve enterprise-grade commerce needs. Adobe Commerce has historically been the primary choice for many online merchants and now supports over 100,000 live websites worldwide. The platform is a monolithic application with deep customisation and an established ecosystem.

Adobe Commerce faces increasing competition, specifically from next-gen platforms like commercetools, now being adopted by leading brands seeking agility and modularity.

Commercetools expands in the enterprise space, especially among digital-first companies, as it delivers a modern commerce architecture enabling brands to innovate quickly, scale globally, and customise without platform constraints.
As the demand for customer expectations continues to rise and omnichannel experiences become commonplace, businesses are re-evaluating their commerce strategies. Choosing between Adobe Commerce and Commercetools is no longer only about the features. It's also about flexibility, speed, scalability, and long-term total cost of ownership.

In this comparison, we analyze Commercetools vs Magento to help you choose which platform suits your business goals. Let's compare their architecture, customization, scalability, performance, and ecosystem, so you can make a confident decision that will future-proof your business.

Commercetools is a contemporary, next-generation eCommerce platform with an enterprise-grade experience. It primarily operates as a cloud-native, microservices-based platform having a headless, API-first architecture.

Traditional eCommerce solutions use a monolithic architecture that tightly couples the user experience with the commerce logic. Commercetools acts as a commerce logic layer, giving your business maximum flexibility to build custom experiences across web, mobile, social, and IoT devices — independent of the front-end tech stack.

It is built for a cloud world and offers all of your commerce logic within a microservices-based architecture, allowing brands to scale individual microservices separately from one another. Micro business logic allows faster development, and it becomes easy to integrate with your existing services or custom APIs, offering greater flexibility. This flexibility permits you to test ideas quickly with minimal risk and adapt to the future of commerce on your terms and timeline.

Since the Commercetools ecosystem is fully API-first, you can compose, pick, and choose smart set tools regardless of purchases, search, analytics, personalization, etc. You can use industry-leading solutions directly from the vendor and integrate them via your APIs without relying on providers who claim to support headless architecture but don’t meet your specific needs, saving you time on unnecessary implementations.

The tools within the Commercetools platform allow teams to build custom, high-performance digital experiences without being locked into a single vendor’s ecosystem. This flexibility is especially valuable for global enterprises aiming to innovate rapidly and adapt to changing consumer expectations.

Adobe Commerce is a powerful, all-in-one eCommerce platform with several built-in features and the Adobe ecosystem of marketing, content, and data analytics products. 

Specifically marketed as a robust, scalable platform for mid-market and enterprise companies, Adobe Commerce emphasizes delivering rich, personalized customer experiences and offers a broad range of out-of-the-box features.
Adobe Commerce's architecture is more monolithic than headless platforms like Commercetools, although Adobe Commerce offers support for headless elements via its API layer. Adobe Commerce is more appropriate for companies looking for a tightly integrated solution where product catalogue management, checkout, orders, and promotions all work together in one system.

Why does Adobe Commerce stand out as a leader in the e-commerce space? 
Adobe Commerce includes the Adobe Experience Cloud, which provides more than personalization, AI product recommendations, and content management. Adobe Commerce gives companies a platform to sell products and deliver a meaningful and dynamic shopping journey to different customer segments.

While Adobe Commerce may not be as flexible as a fully composable system, it reduces time to market for companies wanting to deploy faster with ready-made functionality and enterprise support, rather than building from scratch.

Determining whether Adobe Commerce or Magento is the right choice is a vital decision, considering how each platform aligns with your organization's operational goals and technical landscape.          
Below is a side-by-side comparison across several key dimensions that matter most to decision-makers.

1. Architecture

Commercetools provides the flexibility and scalability for teams to separate the front end from the back end and fully define digital experiences across any device or channel. This architecture creates opportunities for faster deployment cycles and easier integrations with third-party services.           

On the other hand, Adobe Commerce has a monolithic architecture, although it has some headless capabilities with GraphQL and REST APIs.           

Even though Adobe Commerce allows for a more tightly integrated system, it may lack the same flexibility when adapting to new architectures or channels.          

Verdict: Commercetools wins for its modern, scalable, composable architecture.

2. Pricing

Commercetools offers a usage-based pricing model, so businesses pay for the services and resources used. Therefore, it remains cost-effective for larger organizations with unpredictable traffic and varying order volumes, although estimating a monthly charge can be difficult.        

Adobe Commerce has a fixed license fee based on the Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) and Average Order Value (AOV), which helps with budgeting. However, the total cost of ownership can be more expensive when considering hosting costs, support, and upgrade costs.        

Verdict: Commercetools is the winner for its flexibility and pay-as-you-grow pricing strategy. This is the ideal choice for any fast-scaling business.

3. Ease of Use

Adobe Commerce provides a feature-rich admin panel with built-in functionality, making it easy for non-technical users to administrate their catalogs, promotions, and customer information. The native tools offered via Adobe Commerce reduce the technical effort needed to engage with the platform throughout an organization's day-to-day operations.

Commercetools, on the other hand, is API-first, meaning more technical knowledge is necessary to build the frontend, including more features. There is a steep learning curve for new teams in headless commerce, even though Commercetools provides unparalleled flexibility.       

Verdict: Adobe Commerce is the winner because, for management and administration of accounts by non-technical users, Adobe Commerce is user-friendly, while Commercetools is not.

4. Marketing and SEO

Adobe Commerce has strong native SEO and marketing capabilities, including URL rewrites, metadata management, and product recommendations with the help of Adobe Sensei. Integrations with Adobe Marketing Cloud allow for robust personalization and campaign automation capabilities.       

Commercetools offers basic marketing tools, but any advanced SEO and campaign features should be built or customized through third-party tools, which takes more time and increases costs.       

Verdict: Adobe Commerce wins with its advanced marketing and SEO capabilities out of the box.

5. Security

Both platforms are at an enterprise-grade level and have high levels of security.      
Adobe Commerce provides PCI compliance, role-based access control, and security patches. Conversely, a merchant should manage and update vulnerabilities for on-premise or self-hosted platforms.      

Since Commercetools is a SaaS and cloud-native platform, all security updates are handled automatically for merchants. Furthermore, Commercetools provides high availability and redundancy, and follows global security standards such as ISO/IEC 27001.      

Verdict: Commercetools wins with its automated, cloud-native security model. 

6. Performance & Scalability

Commercetools operates on a cloud-native model using microservices that allows organisations to scale individual services independently, thus maintaining performance stability under heavy load. Allows organisations with global enterprises to serve millions of users simultaneously.     

Adobe Commerce can scale; however, it typically requires manual effort (i.e., management) and constant infrastructure optimization, and the potential to become resource-intensive as the business continues to grow.     

Verdict: Commercetools wins on effortless scalability with proven performance stability under load.

7. Product Management

Adobe Commerce has advanced product management capabilities, like configurable products, bundling, virtual/downloadable products, and bulk imports. It's designed for complex product catalogs and used in multiple store views.   

Commercetools offers a modular approach to product data modeling, but requires developers to configure everything from scratch. Even with its deep flexibility, you still have to build everything from the bottom.    

Verdict: Adobe Commerce wins for product management, because it's comprehensive and ready to go.

8. Customizations 

Commercetools gives very extreme flexibility with APIs. Businesses can build and customize each digital experience to fit their needs. This flexibility allows for innovation but requires more development time.  

Adobe Commerce still allows for theme and module-based customization. It doesn't give as much flexibility as a fully composable model, although this customization is still structured.  

Verdict: Commercetools wins based on deeper and wider customization ability. 

9. Developers’ Community  

Adobe Commerce has a massive, mature, and active developer community based on the historical significance of this platform. With thousands of extensions, tutorials, and agencies offering support around the globe, Adobe Commerce can provide support in almost any case. For example, if you are stuck on a development problem for Adobe Commerce, there is someone, somewhere, you can contact for help.    

Commercetools has a growing but smaller developer ecosystem. It has a dedicated community of developers, but it does not have as extensive or as mature community support as Adobe Commerce.    

Verdict: Adobe Commerce wins for community support and available resources for development.

10. Payment Gateways & Fees

   
Adobe Commerce also integrates with hundreds of payment gateways like PayPal, Stripe, and Authorize.net to popular region-specific solutions. As an additional benefit, Adobe offers Adobe Payment Services consolidated with Adobe Commerce, which means your management will be streamlined and there will be less friction for your integration. 

Commercetools will need custom integration with your payment provider of choice, which could be time-consuming and incur additional installation fees. 

Verdict: Adobe Commerce wins for ease of payment integrations and out-of-the-box support.

Deciding between Commercetools and Adobe Commerce depends on the business model, digital maturity, and long-term goals for eCommerce. Each platform has strengths and weaknesses, so making the right investment requires aligning its advantages with your particular use case.

Commercetools is the best option if your business values flexibility, speed, and innovation, especially when operating in a fast-moving, omnichannel setting. It is often preferred by enterprises looking to move away from monolithic platforms and build customised digital commerce ecosystems.

Here are some key situations that would characterise the use case for commercetools:

1. Omnichannel Retail and Unified Commerce

If your brand sells across multiple channels (web, mobile, IoT, in-store), Commercetools supports each channel with seamless integration and seamless user experiences, regardless of the channel touched. It offers frontend flexibility for consumer interaction across devices without back-end limitations.

2. Rapid Scaling and Global Expansion

Businesses with plans for aggressive global expansion can leverage the cloud-native, scalable nature of Commercetools. Its independent, scalable service architecture can handle the load of extreme traffic spikes, peak sale periods, and international launches.

3. Complicated and Modular Business Models

For those managing multiple brands across different regions and many B2B/B2C hybrids, Commercetools provides a forward-thinking data model to support numerous catalogs and collections, pricing rules, tax logic, and checkout flows, without the rigidity of a traditional platform.

4. Full Control of Frontend Experience

When experience is a differentiator for a brand, Commercetools gives full control to the frontend development teams.  
Companies that require performance-driven UX/UI can use React, Vue, or other frameworks as they see fit, without being limited by backend limitations.

5. Technical Organizations with Strong Development Teams

Commercetools is a developer-friendly platform suited for organizations with their technical resources or access to experienced commerce architects. There is a bigger learning curve, but in the end, you're paying for that flexibility to scale and be ready for the next changes.

6. Composable Commerce Strategy

If your digital vision centers on selecting best-in-class solutions (CMS, PIM, CRM, Checkout) and using them to build a unified commerce stack, Commercetools' composable architecture is purpose-built for this. 

Verdict: Choose Commercetools if you're building a new omnichannel commerce environment that is modern, API-based, and has the technical resources to do so.

Adobe Commerce is the best platform for businesses seeking an all-in-one solution featuring built-in features and quick time-to-market. It is a strong fit for organizations looking for a powerful, integrated eCommerce ecosystem and do not want to rely on constant customizations or engage in complicated development processes. 

Adobe Commerce is strong in providing businesses out-of-the-box capabilities that can support large product catalogs, operate globally, and deal with complex business logic. 

Below are some relevant scenarios where Adobe Commerce is a good fit:

1. Businesses in Need of a Fully Integrated Platform

Adobe Commerce provides a fully integrated solution with a complete suite of eCommerce features, such as inventory management, customer accounts, payment processing, and order management — available immediately upon deployment.

2. Mid to Large Enterprises

Rapidly scaling companies will have to consider Adobe Commerce given its potential for out-of-the-box functionality. Adobe Commerce can support enterprises with multi-store functionality, enabling businesses to manage different brands, regions, and categories in one place.

3. Strong B2C and B2B Requirements

If your business model has complex customer groups, bulk pricing, or you wish to provide personalized (B2B!) experiences to specific customers, Adobe Commerce excels in the B2C and B2B. You will have a set of pre-built tools and features built into Adobe Commerce to customize for your requirements.

4. Businesses That Rely on SEO and the Marketing Channel

If your business heavily relies on SEO and the digital marketing channel, that’s one consideration. And if you are searching for supporting marketing features, Adobe Commerce provides good marketing functions and features. These include product recommendations, promotions, and the content management built into Adobe Experience Cloud. This makes it good for customers to drive traffic and conversions.

5. Limited on the Technical Side

For smaller in-house development teams or agencies focused on e-commerce, the administrative panel and prebuilt features of Adobe Commerce can help reduce the amount of custom functionality you would have to build. There is a huge developer community surrounding Adobe Commerce, making it easy for businesses to take advantage of the extensions and plugins available to add new functionality to the platform without diving deep into the technical side.

6. Time to Market Is Important

If your business is looking to get online quickly without an extensive development timeline, Adobe Commerce has the largest collection of features and integrations fully featured in one platform, straight out of the box. Companies looking to build an online presence for the first time stand to benefit greatly from the capability to add additional features without the lengthy timelines required by custom functionality.

Verdict: Choose Adobe Commerce if you are looking for an advantageous, feature-rich eCommerce platform that can get deployed quickly with extensive out-of-the-box capability, with limited development resources. It is a great option for businesses that prioritize stability, user-friendliness, and built-in tools more than a fully customizable solution.

Moving to a new eCommerce architecture can be an involved process, requiring businesses to consider migration strategies to smooth the journey and reduce distractions. For both Commercetools and Adobe Commerce, companies will need to consider migration planning to transition from legacy systems, move inventory without losing integrity, and ensure a seamless experience for users. Below are suggested migration strategies for both platforms.

Moving to Commercetools opens opportunities for flexibility, scalability, and future-proofing your eCommerce stack. Nevertheless, moving requires careful consideration for companies leaving traditional monolithic platforms and moving to a more modular and separated stack.

Steps to Transition from Monolithic to Headless Commerce:

1. Establishing Business Objectives

Determine your motivations for migrating to headless commerce and state your business objectives. This could be to improve speed, flexibility, or multi-channel scalability, but whatever it is, establishing clear objectives will guide the migration journey.

2. Investigate Your Existing System

Conduct a full review of the existing platform (monolithic) as well as its limitations. Identify what features, processes, and integrations need to be replicated or re-engineered when you migrate to the new system.

3. Select Your Frontend Stack

Since Commercetools is headless by design, you are free to select your frontend technology, whatever makes sense to your business. It could be React, Angular, or Vue; it can be whatever modern framework extends and integrates well with the API-based backend.

4. Prepare Your Data

One of the most important components of migration is data, which includes product information, customer profiles, and order history. To maintain consistency and integrity, the data should be cleaned, validated, and mapped to the new system structure.

5. Develop a Migration Plan

Plan the migration process for implementation. Each stage should be considered, from planning and designing your system architecture to migrating your data, integrating 3rd party systems, and testing system components. A phased migration plan could lower risk and ensure a seamless delivery.

6. Test and Validate

Before going live, follow the standard deployment process. Start testing with the development environment, move to the staging environment for final testing, and then deploy to the live environment. Focus on testing the APIs, integrations, and performance of the frontend and user experience.

7. Go Live and Monitor

Go live by launching your headless system after completing the migration. Then, track performance and address any issues that arise post-launch to ensure smooth operation. 

Best Practices to Ensure Data Integrity and Minimal Downtime:

1. Regularly Back Up Data

Before performing any migration work, you should ensure you have a full backup of your system. This serves as plan B if any issues arise during the migration. 

2. Use Data Migration Tool with APIs

Commercetools has data to help migrate your data through APIs. These APIs may help to keep track of your data migration, and you will know it is being transferred accurately and consistently.

3. Use Staging Environment

Your staging environment should resemble your production system as closely as possible. It is helpful to migrate and fix any issues before you go live.

4. Check Third-Party Integrations

Think about you using third-party payment integration, inventory management, customer relationship management, etc., with your current solution. You want to make sure these systems are integrated with your new headless commerce solution. If there are delays or issues with integrations, this can create downtime.

5. Migration as a Process

If you have a large catalog, use a migration process, and you can achieve a lot by moving data and systems in phases, where data may be migrated in smaller and more manageable chunks to reduce risk and to allow for more testing and validation in smaller steps.

When migrating to Magento, it can be difficult, even more so when migrating from Magento 1 or 2. But Adobe Commerce has a proven migration framework that minimizes the complexity for businesses and provides a way to migrate to a hosted cloud solution or stay in your environment. So, it’s good to approach a company that offers Adobe Commerce development services for easy migration. 

Strategies for Upgrading from Magento 1 or 2:

1. Evaluate the Existing System

This is particularly critical when you're upgrading from Magento 1 to Adobe Commerce (Magento 2). You should evaluate what your existing store consists of, customizations, extensions, and integration, etc., and arrange to continue these functions in the new version.

2. Select the Correct Version of Adobe Commerce

There are a few different versions of Magento 2 available: open-source, commerce cloud, and on-premise, and you should choose the version that best fits your business needs. Adobe Commerce Cloud is recommended for businesses with complex infrastructures or looking for more advanced levels of scalability.

3. Transfer Data Correctly

You will want to ensure all customer, product, and order data is transferred correctly. A Magento development company can provide tools built in for this migration, such as the Data Migration Tool, to help you migrate data from Magento 1 to Magento 2. You can do data mapping to make sure there is no data loss, missing data, or corruption in the data.

4. Update or Rebuild Custom Extensions

You will also need to be aware that the custom extensions built for Magento 1 may not be compatible with Magento 2. You can do one of two things: upgrade the custom extensions to work in Magento 2, or find new modules that are supported to replicate the function in Adobe Commerce with the application of extensions.

5. Recreate Your Store’s Custom Features

The custom features built on Magento 1 often need to be rebuilt or rewritten for Magento 2 due to its different code structure and architecture. Professional Magento development services can help replicate and optimize these features for the new platform efficiently.

6. Test and Validate

Just like any migration, thorough testing is essential. You want to test your new system in a 'staging' environment, validating everything from product pages to checkout workflows, payment gateways, and customer data migration.

7. Going Live and Support

After you've tested thoroughly and are satisfied with your new system, go live with the new system. After you've gone live, monitor performance, user experience, any potential problems, etc. Adobe Commerce is a fluent cloud-based application that can exponentially scale with your store and is designed so that you can easily handle traffic surges and future growth. 

Considerations for On-Premise vs Cloud-Based Deployments:

1. On-Premise Deployment

The use of an on-premise installation of Adobe Commerce gives businesses more control over their hosting environment and server setup. This deployment type is advantageous for businesses that have secure data compliance needs and a high level of IT resources available.

2. Cloud-Based Deployment

Adobe Commerce Cloud is a managed service that provides automatic updates, scalability, and security improvements. This is beneficial for businesses with little infrastructure experience that want to spend more time growing. With cloud-based deployments, you'll have better disaster recovery mechanisms and more redundancy within your available resources.

Selecting the proper eCommerce platform is an important decision that will influence your digital commerce journey for years to come. Whether it’s Commercetools or Adobe Commerce, both platforms have distinct features and benefits that suit specific business needs.

For businesses looking to build highly customizable, scalable eCommerce solutions with a headless architecture, Commercetools is the optimal platform. The platform is unmatched when it comes to flexibility and allows businesses to create seamless experiences across multiple channels, and can deliver the latest and best capabilities via APIs.

On the other hand, Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento) is the ideal choice for those utilizing a complete and structured solution. It has comprehensive functionality out of the box and is great for businesses looking to have everything on one simple platform, and it is easy to use. It has sufficient power and integrations for companies with retail at their core, which is why we feel it is the most optimized way to expand your digital presence in today’s fast-moving marketplace.

We recommend Adobe Commerce as a preferred platform for organizations wanting to accelerate their digital journey without these complex technical customizations from scratch. As an experienced Adobe Commerce agency, Webandcrafts (WAC) specializes in helping businesses leverage this platform to its full potential.

Webandcrafts (WAC) also helps businesses transition to Commercetools with a seamless transition, customized development, and ongoing support. Our experts provide end-to-end solutions to enable businesses to survive and thrive today. Whether your choice is Commercetools with its flexibility or Adobe Commerce with its robust out-of-the-box features designed for rapid development, we've got you covered!