Adobe Commerce vs. Magento Open Source vs. Optimizely Commerce Connect

Primarily B2C focused, I think that the B2B features are increasing but the core focus of the platform (and Magento) is really consumer-based. That said, if you are looking for the fastest time to market with minimal investment option then Adobe Commerce is likely not the option that 9 out of 10 people would opt for nowadays.

Incentivized

Magento Open Source is an excellent choice for businesses that need a highly customizable and scalable solution and (most of all) have the technical resources to support it. It's ideal for mid-to-large-sized businesses with complex product catalogs that require complete ownership and control, particularly those with complexities such as multi-country/multi-currency stores.

Incentivized

Our experience may be unique because we opted for an Optimizely team to implement our website/console set-up and connection to our PIM and ERP. The experience may have been different with a 3rd party or it may not have. That said, we have been live with our primary website for almost 2 years and I still do not consider it was ever "done". We have been going back and forth on functionality issues and bugs since launch. I have low confidence that changes made the previous day will 100% be online the next - so my team rechecks the work they did the previous day to ensure everything is online. The addition of a second channel and enhancement requests have compounded the issues. I feel this product would work fine with singular or less complex market SKU offerings.

Incentivized

• The ease of use with page builder requiring no developer skills to maintain most of our pages.
• The catalog is straightforward and easy to use and having the ability to update pricing and other key pieces based on customer group is very helpful.
• Many of the extensions Adobe Commerce has help us to do what we need to do more quickly without a great deal of development efforts and cost.

Incentivized

• It is very good when it comes to search engine optimization as it makes a good use of keywords and tags to improve the SEO score. It increases the chances of ranking up of the eCommerce store in the search engine rankings.
• It makes the store in a very optimized way and despite being a very advanced system it is still very lightweight when it comes to website speed. The pages have a comparatively low loading time and a good speed.
• It provides a lot more advance reporting features which are very helpful for businesses to do their planning.

Incentivized

• Episerver has a robust discount engine. This engine, combined with "visitor groups" allow our marketing department to categorize customers and offer a variety of discounts to targeted customers at specific times.
• Episerver has a full-featured, storefront experience that can handle everything you might want for an e-commerce website.
• Episerver offers A/B testing that can be helpful for trying out new content ideas and tracking the results.

Incentivized

• Magento Commerce Cloud can be complicated to develop for. In our field, it has been a struggle at times to find qualified developers.
• Our merchandising team sees performance issues from time to time. Updating a product and waiting for the change to clear the queue can take up to an hour in some situations.
• Because of the incredible amount of features that Magento Commerce Cloud offers, training new employees to use Magento takes a long time.

Incentivized

• Magento is not easy for a layman who is not tech-savvy to manage the website.
• Magento is one of the only modern shopping carts in which one must manually clear the cache and "reindex".
• Magneto has a lot of technical glitches - more than most of the other shopping carts we work with. Most are minor.

Incentivized

• Support. Episerver used to have direct support and access to the tech team to discuss and resolve issues. The new support portal is not enough for developer needs.
• Quality Assurance. We find issues in the Episerver code that should have been resolved in QA before release.
• Sales. Episervers sells the framework as a solution while showing Alloy. While it helps Episerver sell more, it puts the implementation partner into trouble as the client thinks they bought the solution. Episerver does not provide a solution. It provides a framework that you can build a solution on.

Incentivized

It has the best overall price point. It is super cheap and the connection between our ERP system is unmatched by any other Ecommerce sites we have talked with. We honestly can't get this level of complex customization without having to spend a fortune somewhere else. It is able to do everything we need it to do for the right price.

Incentivized

It's the dominant force in the SMB open source market. With the continued support of eBay/PayPal, Magento will continue to evolve and should be a market leader for some time.

Really want to be able to spend more time and resources on rolling out new things with Episerver but at the moment we seem to be fixing alot of issues and pain points with the way our system was setup.

Incentivized

Being unable to store quotes for later was annoying. People called up expecting to pay there and then, and having to place them on hold whilst you added items to the basket and input all their customer information in was annoying for them and us, making us look unprofessional.

Incentivized

Magento has a relly step learning curve. This means that you need to find experienced developers who can lead junior ones, otherwise the overall development process can be a disaster. However, once you are comfortable in developing on the platform, the customization capability are basically limitless and you can adapt the platform to any use case you can imagine. Also, there are many alredy developed marketplace modules that can solve, out of the box, many problems you may face.

Incentivized

The administrative interface is largely intuitive and relatively easy to use. The complexity of business needs and ability to customize can affect this (i.e. you have to set up and develop with the user in mind), but the basic structure is largely solid. There are some areas of redundancy (such as Commerce Manager overlapping with other administrative areas) that can sometimes cause confusion or offer some functions in one place, whereas other related functions are managed on a completely different page.

Incentivized

The technical service was impeccable. They were on point and were very knowledgeable.

We had an incredible team at Episerver Supporting us with the go live, reviewing our integration, and pushing our integration partner to deliver a quality product

Incentivized

Great value for an flexible, open source platform.

Fully understand what is OOTB feature of the platform before proceeding to develop. Then implement a customization of key features once you can prove they are working as OOTB to make them more user friendly and productive for the business. Eg pre order and e gift card

Incentivized

Magento Commerce was previously put into place and used right when I came onboard. We used it for quite some time, but ultimately the need for our company's specific customizations became too difficult to manage during core updates. We specifically needed a more specialized way of calculating shipping, connecting with our 3PL's inventory API, managing specialized discounts and codes, and even the way we showcased information on the product pages.

Incentivized

In looking at a different platform to migrate to from Magento 1, we looked primarily at Big Commerce, Shopify and Shopify Plus. Our host was very negative about Magento 2, but we determined after a couple years it was due to the fact it had even more complexity (and very different) than Magento 1. Shopify Plus was attractive, but the cost factor for two sites led us back to Magento 2.

Incentivized

Optimizely Commerce Connect offers a very wide range of features for admin users. There is less a need for an IT specialist or programmer to be involved when changes need to be made.

Incentivized

• Great for SEO. We have been able to build out a huge number of highly targeted pages on the site that have propelled our SEO to the next level
• Magento plugs in with many third party tools including ERP's, CRM's, shipping tools. It is a core part of our tech stacks and has allowed us to improve our capabilities as a business.
• Has enabled us to provide a best in class web experience for our customers. We are constantly expanding the capabilities of Magento and to improve sales and grow our business.

Incentivized

• Better Total Cost of Ownership than bespoke e-commerce solutions due to being open source and the wide range of free/commercial extensions available to extend the platform.
• Often more extensive to set up and maintain than other open source alternatives, such as WooCommerce.

• Positive: We have a usable website - better than what we had before and we are seeing a constant increase in adoption.
• Positive: Counter associates are using the website to help customers.
• Negative: Too much time being spent QCing previous work.

Incentivized